Speaking in March 1971, Powell claimed that "for the past eighteen months a part of the United Kingdom has been under attack from an external enemy assisted by detachments operating inside... when one part of a nation is under attack, the whole is under attack". He claimed that the vocabulary used in the context concealed the truth of the situation: "vocabulary is one of the principal weapons in the enemy's armoury". Those who perpetrated acts of violence, Powell asserted, were not an "extremist" but a criminal and that if their motives were "detaching part of the territory of the United Kingdom and attaching it to a foreign country", they become an "enemy under arms".