Word of the Day: Execration

Whole lot of execration goin' on.

Enoch Powell, source: wikipedia

execration

noun

ex·​e·​cra·​tionˌ ek-sə-ˈkrā-shən

1: the act of cursing or denouncing

also : the curse so uttered

2: an object of curses : something detested

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Addressing a Conservative party audience in Birmingham, in the heart of the soot-stained industrial Midlands where most of Britain's 1 million colored immigrants are concentrated, [Enoch Powell, a former member of Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet] sailed directly into a whirlpool of racialism. In remarks so provocative that Tory leader Edward Heath felt obliged to fire him from the Conservative party Shadow Cabinet, Powell raised the specter of whole areas of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Britain becoming black if immigration were not stopped immediately and many colored people sent home. In 15 to 20 years, he claimed, if present trends continued, there would be 3.5 million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. We must be mad,” Powell rasped, “literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 immigrant dependents. . . . It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

In some areas of the country, he evocatively charged, Britons were already "strangers in their own land.” Their wives, he claimed, were unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighborhoods changed beyond recognition. At work, they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of native-born workers. "They began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted." He spoke of a white woman in his constituency of Wolverhampton, in the Midlands, being followed down the street by taunting “pickaninnies,” and of having "excreta" pushed through her letter box.

“As I look ahead,” he said, "I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." He spoke of his trip to the United States. "That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic, but which is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and neglect,” he told his audience, “indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century."

That this was no sudden emotional outburst but a calculated bid to break the all-party consensus to keep race out of British politics was made abundantly clear by Powell himself: “I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feeling? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so."

The execration came quickly: Nicholas Scott, a young middle-of-the-road Tory M.P., accused Powell of "assuming the mantle of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.” A former Conservative M.P., Humphry Berkeley, called Powell's talk "the most disgraceful public utterance since the days of Sir Oswald Mosley [Britain's pre-war Fascist leader]." The Times of London described it as “an evil speech."

| Frank Melville, in a New York Times editorial (December 15, 1968)

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