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The Last Tory

Posted By Gregory Hood On June 16, 2012 @ 12:46 am In North American New Right | Comments

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[1]1,462 words

Enoch Powell never quite fits, even in some alternate history, as the

leader of a British nationalist movement. A faithful soldier of the

Empire, a creature of the Establishment, an idiosyncratic scholar of

the classics, an unpredictable and careful student of policy, Powell

was no right wing radical. He was a conservative to the core, in his

own words[2], born a Tory . . . a person who regards authority as

immanent in institutions. I had always been, as far back as I could

remember in my existence, a respecter of institutions, a respecter of

monarchy, a respecter of the deposit of history, a respecter of

everything in which authority was capable of being embodied, andthat must surely be what the Conservative Party was about, the

Conservative Party as the party of the maintenance of acknowledged

prescriptive authority.

Conservatism is a philosophy of pessimism, from Joseph de Maistre

to John Derbyshire. At its core, that is because it is a philosophy of

maintenance. The work of establishing institutions, nations, and

peoples has been done the task that remains is to hold the line.

The problem is that in the Kali Yuga, in the era of dissolution, any

Western institution, no matter how moderate, venerable, or long established, is suspect and

vulnerable to destruction. In fact, the longer something has been around and the more enmeshed in

a nations social life, the more frantically the culture distorters strive to subvert it or destroy it. Thejustifiable paranoia[3]of the enemy drives them to rip out everything that gives a Western nation

its identity, down to the last root and branch.

Most modern conservatives, having accepted the universalistic and liberal premises of their foes,

pose no obstacle. A few of the more reactionary specimens may dig in for a few years, even winning

temporary triumphs, but never seem to retake lost ground. There is a third type, which constantly

creates headlines familiar to us today. An established respectable figure will occasionally utter a

forbidden truth, at which point all the forces of democratic society will combine to destroy him. Yet,

for one brief shining moment, the very pillars of the system will tremble.

Its easy to mock establishment conservatives and console ourselves with the thought that we can

build an intellectual vanguard from the outside which will somehow root the Systems functionaries

out of their keeps. However, the hard truth is that all we are all too often talking to ourselves. Theoutside world only tends to take notice when some establishment politician or intellectual suddenly

breaks through into the territory of white racial advocacy and the possibility of a genuinely anti-

system movement emerges. The problem is that the very characteristics that allow a successful

politician to obtain a platform are the same ones that prevent him from following up at the critical

moment. When the time has come for revolutionary thought, the conservative, the politician,

remains trapped in the patterns of the past.

Powell is a case in point. He was an exemplar of a truly British identity. Born in England, he enlisted

in the British Army in World War II as an Australian. His great frustrated ambition was to be viceroy

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of India and he was fluent in Urdu. Even during World War II he identified the United States as

Britains terrible enemy and was a Cold War skeptic, believing (correctly) that the United States

wanted to dismantle the British Empire. The symbol of English patriotism ended his career as an MP

from Northern Ireland, representing the Ulster Unionists. Powell himself thought that his greatest

speech was given in 1953, when he spoke against the Royal Style and Titles Act which he believed

permitted the divisibility of the British Crown.

Like the National Front and British National Party, which grew at least partially out of the League of

Empire Loyalists, Powell was a product of the British Imperial past. He viewed with astonishment the

managed collapse of the Empire and the demographic besiegement of the home isles. While amember of the Mont Pelerin society, a staple of Anglo-American movement conservatism, Powell

never confused conservatism with classical liberalism, as both modern Republicans and Tories do

today. One is reminded of his comment that he would serve as a soldier for Britain even if it was

under a Communist government. He once rendered Margaret Thatcher speechless[4]with his

declaration that fighting for principle was nonsensical. To Powell, only the real existing country

with its real existing institutions mattered. In words oft quoted but less practiced by Anglo-American

conservatives, Powells conservatism was the negation of ideology.

This was true Toryism, and it was from this impulse to defend the concrete that Powells gave his

famous speech of Rivers of Blood. What is remarkable in retrospect is how simple and elegant the

language actually is. He states he does not have the right to ignore his constituents. He comments

that mass immigration, obviously, is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own

funeral pyre. He trembles with indignation and incredulous anger at what they are doing to his

Britain. Watching his delivery, we are hit with the shock that this is what all speeches would sound

like if politicians were trying to educate or persuade their audience, rather than deliberately mislead

and confuse them. The Rivers of Blood had the effect of an appeal to populism, but contains within

it the radical critique of democracy.

The results were predictable. Workers in class conscious Britain no less demonstrated

spontaneously in support of a Tory politician. Polls showed he was the most popular political figure in

the country. Needless to say, the Conservative Leader Ted Heath, whose name surely echoes in the

halls of Valhalla, swiftly dismissed him from the Shadow Cabinet. The Conservatives would continue

to flail and fail throughout the 70s until being rescued by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher borrowed

many of her economic ideas from Powell, and her electoral appeal derived in part from a supposed

hard line on immigration. Thatcher broke the unions, but as a good modern conservative, ignored

the national question. The result was when Tony Blairs New Labor took power, there was no

ideological force to stop its war on the indigenous inhabitants of the sceptered isle.

Powell went on to give noteworthy and prophetic speeches on the issues of the day, including

American foreign policy, European integration, and monetary policy. He was essentially right on all

of these questions. Where he failed was in thinking that the Britain he served still existed that it

was natural for all concerned to realize that the state should be ruled by a responsible elite and that

the political class cared about the interests of their country. What Powell didnt get was that the

political class didnt support non-white immigration because they lacked understanding of how it

hurt the country. They supported it precisely because they understood exactly how it hurt the

country.

Powell did not grasp[5]the singular importance of race. He rejected any association with the

National Front and could not conceive of a genuinely anti-system opposition. His mistake was that of

all conservatives he thought that established institutions and states had a life of their own, rather

than themselves existing as products of a particular ethnic group. While he correctly rejected the

role of abstract ideology, he didnt take the next necessary step. He thought that the British

Constitution, the British Crown, and the British state had a greater importance than the racial group

that gave it shape, content, and meaning.

In this, he exemplified the difference between a conservative and a Traditionalist. While

conservatives fight to hold on to products of tradition, Traditionalists serve the forces that first

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created them, that can carry them forward, and can hasten the upward development of the folk that

built them. While the conservative seeks to save the coldest of the cold monsters, Traditionalists

know it was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served

life.

Powell was a genius, a statesmen, and a patriot, but as he said himself, All political lives, unless

they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of

politics and of human affairs. This is only true if the mission of the politician is regarded as one of

static defense. The great lesson of Enoch Powell is that conservatism, no matter how faithful or

intelligent, can never triumph. Institutions cannot endure apart from the peoples that give themmeaning, and it is that root which must be defended, not a flag, a crown, or a constitution.

Enoch Powell wasnt just the last Tory. He was the last Briton. Enoch was Right. And he was wrong.

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URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/06/the-last-tory/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/enoch-

powell3.jpg

[2] in his own words: http://www.enochpowell.net/

[3] justifiable paranoia: http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-swastika-scandals/

[4] speechless: http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/euro-centric/the-iron-lady/

[5] did not grasp: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2158958/Enoch-Powell-A-

prophet-outcast.html

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