Two videos recently posted on YouTube show Dalrymple’s activity in the Netherlands: the production of a one-man play based on his book De Filantroop (entitled So Little Done in the English-speaking world) and a new book in Dutch called Profeten en Charlatans (about which we are trying to get more information). The videos include interviews with Dalrymple and the actor Genio de Groot.
In the Daily Mail, Dalrymple again criticizes the propagandistic practices of the NHS.
For decades now our skeptical doctor has detailed the absurdities of foreign aid programs, beginning with a first-hand account (in his second book) of the World Health Organization’s incompetent forays into the Gilbert Islands. Today he addresses Gordon Brown’s brave and generous offer to save Yemen. A withering putdown of foreign aid…
there isn’t a single Third World country that foreign aid has rescued from poverty
…and a clever characterization of Brown…
an insensate urge to do good combined with a lack of imagination or wide experience of life and a complacency about his own abilities, his disastrous record notwithstanding.
With ample blame for the financial crisis having been directed toward banks and Government (some of us would say a little too much toward the former and not enough toward the latter), Dalrymple, writing in The New English Review, points an accusatory finger at a culprit that has thus far mostly escaped any blame: all the rest of us. J’accuse!
He notes that “scores of millions” have “spent well beyond their means” and have borrowed as if “they could merely walk away” from their debts. To the extent that Government is to blame, not only for recklessly encouraging home ownership but also for nonstop budget deficits, I think we could also blame the general public, for clearly these weren’t policies that were foisted upon a resisting public.
Read the essay here
Theodore Dalrymple will be on the Phil Williams show on BBC Radio 5 on Tuesday sometime around 2:30pm GMT to discuss his new book Second Opinion. You can listen live here. It looks like they archive the last few shows here, in case you miss it. I don’t know anything about Phil Williams, but it is the BBC, so it should be interesting to see how Dalrymple is treated.
Hat tip to Dan Collins at Monday Books for the notice.