We should do well in the Conservative Party to take extremely seriously the phenomenon of university disorder... The essential ingredient of the succ… - Enoch Powell

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We should do well in the Conservative Party to take extremely seriously the phenomenon of university disorder... The essential ingredient of the success of anarchy in its new form is the enslavement of the majority by a tiny minority... The object of this minority is the destruction of authority, of the institutions of society and of society itself—not, as in the classical revolutionary movements, for the purpose of substituting a different order and better institutions, but in order to destroy for destruction's sake. The great discovery has been how to turn authority, institutions and society against themselves, and to use the majority which accepts and approves them as a battering ram to smash them down. The method is essentially simple; but in its simplicity lies its subtlety and its efficacy. The secret weapon is the assumption that violence and disorder imply grievance. From this it follows that the grievance must be removed in order to stop the violence and disorder. It also follows that the real blame lies not with the violent and disorderly but with those responsible for the assumed grievance, namely with authority and society itself. The burden of accusation and condemnation is thus automatically diverted from the guilty on to the innocent, from the attacker on to the attacked, from the plotter on to his intended victims. The majority of members of the institution under attack, the organs of vocal opinion, and at last the general public itself, are so mesmerised by this technique that they become the instruments of its success. They take up and re-echo the taunts and complaints of the attackers, until the terrified holders of authority, finding themselves apparently surrounded by accusers on all sides, abandon their posts and buy off the aggressors.

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About Enoch Powell

John Enoch Powell (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).

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Alternative Names: J. Enoch Powell John Enoch Powell
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Additional quotes by Enoch Powell

It will be seen that all these difficulties attach to those aspects of trade unionism which involve restriction and coercion... I would hope and believe that it will not be impossible to disentangle the coercive and restrictive activities of trade unionism from all the rest of its long tradition, so closely entwined with our economic and social history. I can only say this: once the basic question is posed...as to the justification of private force in the pursuit of ends whether private or public, real or imaginary, that question has to be answered openly and fearlessly... If the conclusion is that no such justification can be shown to exist, either generally or in our own society and times, then sooner or late, however long and wearisome the process, however many inquiries and Royal Commissions we must live through, the law of this land will have to be brought into accord with what can be defended by its people as right and just.

There is no doubt that the contrast is patent between what we call, with too gross a classification, the developed and the undeveloped countries... Why is there this difference, this divergence, this bifurcation? ... [I]t is not due to any difference in intellectual capacity, human ability or insight. It is an absurd notion that the European is intellectually superior to vast millions of the human race in Asia and elsewhere. The subtlety, the insight, the power of reflection and of argument to be found in India and elsewhere are equal to anything which is within our conception or grasp. As for character and human ability, it would be ludicrous, and a confession of total and boorish ignorance, to say that it is difference in those respects which accounts for these differences of experience. In case I be misunderstood, may I say at once that I do not believe that the IQ method of analysing the human race produces useful results for this purpose. I doubt whether many of the characteristics which we regard as typically and transcendentally European are purely intellectual. I think they have in them very much of the moral and very much of the social.

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Once got within the walls, physical and liturgical, of the Church of England, I was proud enough and English enough to see that it was a goodly inheritance from which, like a prodigal son, I had so long deliberately exiled myself. However, like someone who returns after long absence to an ancestral home, I looked at the half-familiar scenes with new eyes. Here was yet another kind of truth which I had not suspected. For all the wonders of the national church and its mother tongue, there was no stopping-place there, no rest for the soles of the feet. I discovered that whoever entered the south door of a parish church had stepped inside the Church Universal. The more he laboured to understand and to render intelligible the inheritance of his own church, the more plainly he would confront the fact of the Catholic Church: that the truth of the Gospel and the truth of the Church, the existence of the Gospel and the existence of the Church, the knowledge of the Gospel and the knowledge of the Church, are indivisible, and the one unthinkable without the other. I had been compelled to acknowledge a truth that is corporate, and when I had done so, I noticed that the loyalties I had lived with in war and peace had been corporate too.

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