Thanks to reader Mike for alerting us to this piece in the Swedish magazine Axess, in which Dalrymple offers a couple of explanations for the left’s highly selective disgust at dictatorial abuses:

Here is the real puzzle: why they do not hate the members of the Argentinian junta as much as Pinochet? Why do they not respond emotionally to the junta as strongly as they do (or did) to Pinochet? The scale of the junta’s repression, after all, was very similar to his; in this respect, there was not much to choose between them. They don’t like the junta, but they hate Pinochet.

The youth-centrism and general informality of the modern Western world are undeniable, certainly to anyone who, like me, enjoys old films, fine art music or the TV show “Mad Men” (though we may not agree with the show’s denigration of the pre-counterculture 1960s). Dalrymple addressed this trend a few days ago in the Telegraph:

We are about to encounter the first generation of geriatric adolescents, or adolescent geriatrics: that is to say, those people who have never really put their youth behind them, refuse to acknowledge the ravages of time, and do not believe that it is ever time to put adolescent things away. Their tastes, especially in music, have hardly evolved, nor their mode of dress. They have never gone beyond the instinctive bad taste of youth.

Until now, we haven’t posted much of Dalrymple’s writing for The Salisbury Review, mostly because we didn’t realize how frequently he wrote for that journal, but the good folks there have been building out their website and making more of the content available online, and now that we’ve also purchased a print subscription, we see what we’ve been missing.

The new issue contains two Dalrymple pieces (actually, one Dalrymple and one Anthony Daniels), the first of which discusses one method by which European and New Labour bureaucrats hide their true intentions: the use of the word “project”. While the word implies “a definable end point”, these bureaucrats have no intention of ending their efforts once their goals have been reached.

And what are those goals? For the EU, it is “the creation of an empire… of former politicians on the one hand, tired with and bored by (for admittedly understandable reasons) the need to seek re-election, and unwilling to play the Cincinnatus, and of their apparatchik followers and dependants on the other.” For New Labour, it was “the permanent domination and control of the country by what was in effect a nomenklatura, for its own benefit.”

Depending on where you live, you can buy an annual print subscription to The Salisbury Review for between $30 and $42, an online annual subscription for $19, or the current issue for only $3. There are no links to individual articles, but you can buy an online subscription on the website and immediately download an electronic copy of the current issue.

Enjoy.

None of us should feel smug about the financial crisis affecting the Western world, but, writing in National Review, Dalrymple makes the case for Ireland as the worst offender:

Thanks to the banking crisis, the budget deficit this year will be 32 percent of GDP, probably a peacetime record for any state. The underlying problem of the “normal” government deficit, as well as private indebtedness, contracted with rising house prices as collateral, is even worse: An average Irish household of four is now committed to paying interest on debts of something like $800,000 before it consumes so much as a potato. It is not difficult to see what will happen if interest rates rise. In any case, Irish government borrowing is even now three times as costly in interest rates as German.

Read it here (payment required)

If you’re like me, you’ve been wondering how those French students could possibly oppose the slight raising of the national retirement age to 62, considering that the failure to do so would result in the eventual impoverishment (or at least a serious curtailment in the living standards of) the students themselves. Dalrymple offers an explanation in City Journal.

Please forgive our recent absence, as technical problems with the site have prevented us from posting lately. We’ll do some catching up now.

In the British Medical Journal (subscription required), Dalrymple describes the neurologist Walter Russell Brain’s book Tea with Walter de la Mare, a collection of his conversations with the poet. Noting Brain’s refusal to question de la Mare’s dying statement that he sensed ghostly presences, Dalrymple ends with, “Sometimes there are things more important than philosophical truth.” Such as indulging a dying friend.

I find this a good example of Dalrymple’s pragmatic, anti-ideological approach. It calls to mind his comment here that he refused to criticize the contradictory methodology of Alcoholics Anonymous (calling addiction a disease, but suggesting that it can be cured by “a kind of inspiration”) because “…it’s more important in my view that [alcoholics] should not drink than that they should be intellectually 100% consistent.”

Perhaps it would be fairer to say that Dr Saunders’s philosophy was as Maugham would have liked his own to be. Unlike Dr Saunders, Maugham was not a real cynic, unless a cynic be defined as a man who defends his person against disintegration caused by the strength of his passions by a conscious pose of amused indifference.

…..

The book ends with Dr Saunders saying what Maugham would like to have believed with his heart as well as with his head: “If the richest dreams the imagination offered came true, in the end it [life] remained nothing but illusion.” Maugham wanted to believe this to be true because his childhood had been so wretched that he never recovered from it: all happiness and success for him was illusory; only misery was real. Better to feel nothing at all.

Illness, or at least what sociologists used to call “illness behaviour,” is one way people have of controlling one another. For example, I once knew a woman who claimed to be allergic to practically everything. The only water that she could allow to touch her skin was from a certain spa in Germany, and so her husband had to buy huge quantities of it for her to bathe in. As they were living in a remote part of the African bush at the time, this kept him so busy—importation was far from easy—that he had little time or energy left over for the activities to which he was reputed to be inclined.