Was Enoch Powell Autistic?
This will only be interesting to Brits of a certain age, but was Enoch Powell autistic?
Well, not so much autistic, but on the autistic spectrum:
The truth is that Powell was so relentless in his pursuit of logic that he was either genuinely mystified or superciliously contemptuous of anyone who could not understand that, of course, he was not a racist. Therefore, he never felt any need to elaborate on the meaning of his speech. This - together with his aloofness and ‘unclubbability’ - all lends credibility to the assertion that Powell was afflicted by a form of Asperger’s Syndrome that rendered him incapable of appreciating the concerns of others, in particular about whether his words might have offered a cloak of respectability with which tattooed White Power knuckle-draggers might now justify their ‘Paki-bashing’.
I’d not thought of it this way before but yes, I can see the logic here. He did follow a logical train of thought to the extreme, he really was almost blind to what others might think of the conclusions he reached.
Of course, he also came from a generation where Asperger’s had never even been heard of, so it’s a little difficult to go back and diagnose him now. Still food for thought, eh?
March 17th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Yes, perhaps Powell was that kind of person - although he seemed very different from some of the other political figures named as Asperger’s (de Gaulle for instance).
Also Powell was extremely emotional in private (weeping etc.), according to a friend of mine who once interviewed him - admittedly this was in P.’s old age.
But ‘diagnosing’ him as Asperger’s doesn’t explain anything - does it? - it is simply a matter of very roughly summarizing his personality type in a single word.
Also, I don’t like the assumptions in this quote. I don’t see that Powell has a particular obligation to explain himself when he expressed himself very clearly in the first place; secondly he did explain himself anyway, but his opponents were not interested in listening or understanding - they *wanted* to demonize him and use him as ammunition against political enemies; and thirdly the ‘knuckle dragging’ white supremacists are less of a problem in the UK than almost anywhere else in the world, and I am suspicious of people who (then and now) try to make them out to be a major socio-political threat to law and order.
Having said all this, I didn’t much like Powell, and I disagree with his isolationist type of English nationalism; so I don’t have a particular axe to grind about his personality.