Freedom and justice needs active participation.

Let me start with an extract from the Henrik Hudson School District Library Media Centre:

Perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, victims: we can be clear about three of these categories. The bystander, however, is the fulcrum. If there are enough notable exceptions, then protest reaches a critical mass. We don’t usually think of history as being shaped by silence, but, as English philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’ (My source for this is here.)

So what has prompted this Post?

A few weeks ago, an email was sent to me with a link to a 7 minute video called Dangerous Demographics.  The video was about the stark difference in the birth rates between two groups of people and the implications that this carried.  Those two groups were white Christians and Muslims.  The message was that in a number of countries it was already too late to prevent the voting populations becoming majority Muslim and that, somehow, this would spell the end of whatever life ‘we’ presently enjoy.  (The video is on YouTube for those that wish to watch it.)

That this email was sent to me by a kind, thoughtful and warm-hearted person compounded the puzzlement that it caused and, to be frank, it’s been running through my mind for a couple of weeks as to whether this Post should even be written.

But the fundamental issues raised by this video and others of its type are simply too important to go unreported.

Gerard Tsonakwa, the Native American  storyteller, said last Saturday at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, “There is more that joins us than separates us.”  If a Native American can say that after all that their peoples had to contend with then any one of us can say that.

Luckily, there is some history available to support the notion that propaganda about changes in a population’s ethnicity is, well, nothing more than propaganda.  On April 20th, 1968 the British Conservative Member of Parliament

for Wolverhampton South West, Mr Enoch Powell, gave a speech that later became known as the Rivers of Blood speech. That, too, may be found on YouTube.

The essence of the speech was that the levels of immigration into the UK would sooner or later lead to bloodshed.

As WikiPedia puts it:

Powell recounted a conversation with one of his constituents, a middle-aged working man, a few weeks earlier. Powell said that man told him: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country… I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas.” The man finished by saying to Powell: “In this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Powell went on: Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

It is now over 40 years since that speech and when I left Britain just a year ago, racial harmony was excellent, as good as it has been in many, many years.  Britain is a multi-cultural community and all the better for it.

America now beckons as my new home and, as with Britain, the thought of these fine nations subsiding into some form of Venezuelan-type politics is unimaginable.

There are more than enough good men around.

By Paul Handover

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