Writing in The American Conservative magazine, Dalrymple notes an increasing divergence of political views in Europe. While intellectual elites and political leaders view policies like immigration through a prism of “various kinds of guilt, post-colonial and postwar”, everyday citizens make political judgements based on the national interest. But many of those citizens are still influenced by the views of the elite and therefore:

There is a tension between what people are supposed to think and what people do actually think—or, more importantly, what they are supposed to feel and what they actually feel.

By attributing all doubts about current immigration policy to racism alone, intellectual elites close off any sensible avenue of reform and unwittingly “prepare the road for a true fascist reaction”.

Read it here

Several minutes ago Dalrymple posted a comment on David Cameron’s recent speech in Luton on multiculturalism to National Review’s blog the Corner. While noting that “Much of what Mr. Cameron said was perfectly sensible, moderate, and self-evident”, he offers a few depressing facts the prime minister left out:

Britain has the highest crime rate in Western Europe, despite having a third of all the closed-circuit television cameras in the world to oversee the population, and despite having more or less abandoned a suspect’s right to silence. There are whole areas of the country in which the weight of the state in the economy is not far short of that of the state in Soviet Russia. Thanks to state-sponsored social pathology, more than a third of the population is entirely dependent on the state for its livelihood, and would starve without it. The last government created a new criminal offense every working day for ten years, such that no citizen can possibly know what is legal and what is not. Arbitrary and constantly changing regulation makes life a nightmare for anyone running a business or a service. While expenditure on education doubled between 2000 and 2007, the proportion of British children learning a foreign language declined by 75 percent. In short, the British state is a swamp of corruption, all the worse for being more intellectual and moral than straightforwardly financial.

Read the whole thing.

As an American I can tell you that almost no one in my country knows of the situation in Britain, a situation this recent story in Standpoint (h/t Gavin O.) makes infuriatingly clear. If they did know, many of them would mourn the decline of a dear friend.

On the always-excellent Social Affairs Unit website, Dalrymple concludes that “The British intelligentsia…is unable or unwilling to distinguish between cultural elitism and social exclusivity” and notes along the way that…

The often-remarked British obsession with class…has made the social engineering of supposed equality the aim of almost all public endeavour. Hospitals are not to treat ill people as best they can, but to close the gap between the healthiest and least healthy classes of society; schools are not to educate children, but to ensure that all children are educated, or at least miseducated, equally.

Needless to say, we are no nearer equality than ever we were…The conclusion to be drawn from this, however…is that more must be tried. You don’t take no for an answer, even when the no emanates from the nature of things.

Dalrymple’s February contribution to City Journal is a review of the new book Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit, on the hysteria that resulted from the study by Andrew Wakefield purporting to link vaccines with autism and other maladies. Dalrymple concludes that “Offit’s book is therefore not only an interesting scientific saga in itself, but a kind of cultural X-ray of our society.”

This statement presents a fact that in my opinion can be observed constantly throughout the Western world:

We are now so safe that all hazard appears anomalous to us, a deviation from nature’s normal course. It must be someone’s fault.

And the following has already been quoted at least once on the Web, and is destined for our page of Dalrymple’s very best quotes:

It is noise that makes the world go round as much as money, with truth coming in a poor third…

For the second time recently, Dalrymple writes of those Jews who hid, successfully or unsuccessfully, from the Nazis. (I’ve often thought it an interesting but unremarked biographical detail that according to Jewish tradition, Dalrymple would be considered Jewish.)

The subject of this particular piece is the artist Felix Nussbaum. And what a powerful piece it is, telling the story of a man whose fear of impending death drove him to a great artistic achievement (the visual depiction of his own foreboding), and who did then actually succumb to its evil source, perhaps giving greater weight and meaning to his work.

…his portraits of his parents and himself are stylistic hybrids of van Gogh and Christian Schad; in his townscapes, he shows the influence of Utrillo. He is clearly a young artist, gifted but not supremely gifted, looking for a style to call his own.

But then the subject matter took over, as it were, and the subject was history.

….

His two last canvases, The Damned and The Triumph of Death, achieved unmistakable greatness. He was the Breughel of his time, working with a palette of S.A. brown and S.S. black…The Triumph of Death is a Breughel-shaped and -sized work, though with fewer bodies and seen from closer-up. Nine skeletal figures, again with skulls over which is stretched parchment skin, like bodies resurrected from the dead without amelioration of their decomposition, play musical instruments among a few ruins of ruins…One of them bends over a drum, striking it with a humerus, another plays a violin with a broken string in a mockery of human art. An angel of death in black gown and with white wings touches the stops of a pipe without blowing through it. In the background is a crashed car in a gully, crumpled up like a piece of paper, a few stumps of trees denuded of their leaves and branches. In the foreground is the random detritus of civilization, symbolic of technical and artistic accomplishment and of the abandoned pleasures of life.

….

…there is a faint guilt in appreciating the aesthetics of this composition, surely among the most intensely felt that any human being has put his hand to. What one does not ask oneself in its presence are the kinds of questions that postmodernists have delighted to ask with such subversive intent. The Triumph of Death is also the triumph of art.

On Dr. Arthur C. Jacobson’s 1926 work Genius: Some Revaluation, in the current BMJ (subscription required):

Jacobson goes on to write that the great external midwives of genius, especially in its literary forms, are alcohol and tuberculosis…This is the famous “spes phthisica,” the euphoria of the dying tubercular patients, so well known to opera but not so well known, apparently, to doctors…In 1940 Jacobson was quoted in Time: “The decline in TB coincides with the decline in creative writing.” There could, of course, be other reasons for our literary impoverishment.

Last week Dalrymple wrote in the BMJ (subscription required) of the novella Comedy in a Minor Key by Dr. Hans Keilson, a German Jewish psychiatrist who escaped the Nazis by moving to the Netherlands and hiding in the home of a couple. The piece closes with this:

As it happens, an old woman in Paris whom I know quite well recounted to me how she was travelling in a bus there 60 years after the end of the occupation and started to speak to a woman of her own age. They became friendly, and the other woman asked the first where she lived. She gave firstly the address and then the number of the flat in that building. When she heard the answer, the second woman burst into tears. It was the very flat, opposite the local commander’s office, in which she had spent the whole of the occupation, hiding in terror, never appearing anywhere near a window.

Ghosts certainly come back to haunt us—if they ever really go away.