This month’s New English Review essay discusses the arguments of historian Jan Tomasz Gross in his book Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust. Gross argues that Polish collaboration with the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews was widespread, and as Dalrymple has often done, he relies on anecdotal evidence that he says is representative of the larger society:

Assuming that [Gross’s anecdote] is not wholly false and is substantially true… it points to a moral attitude that could not possibly have been that of one person or a few persons alone: it must have been shared by a substantial number and proportion of the population, though it would be impossible to be dogmatic about how large that number or proportion must have been. In effect, the grossest criminal behaviour was now deemed normal, acceptable and as conferring rights on those who indulge in it. Here indeed was a transvaluation of all values.

Gross insists that such anecdotal evidence, assuming it is not made up of whole cloth, is of as of [sic] great importance as more abstract statistical evidence would be, and I too have taken this view in my own work.

Read the piece here

The latest post at Dalrymple’s Hilarious Pessimist blog reads like one of his old Spectator columns: insights gleamed from his daily life…

The manuscript of the first novel by one of the most famous of all doctor-authors, Arthur Conan Doyle, was lost in the post on its way to the publishers: a disaster for an author in the days before computers, photocopiers, typewriters, or even carbon paper. But Conan Doyle was nothing if not plucky, to use a slightly old fashioned term for an old fashioned virtue: he tried to reconstitute the novel by writing it out again, only to realise halfway through that it would never do…

…

On one of his visits, [protagonist] Dr Turner, who enjoys a good intellectual discussion with his patient and appears to have time for it, outlines the future of medicine as he (and the author) sees it:

The infectious diseases depend, each and all of them, upon the presence in the blood of these minute creatures [the bacteria], and their varying symptoms are due to the different malignancy of the microbes, or to their preference for this or that part of the body. In time we shall have the attenuated virus of every one of these diseases, and by mixing them together will be able, by a single inoculation, to fortify the constitution against them. Zymotic disease, sir, will be stamped out. Typhus. Typhoid, cholera, malaria, hydrophobia, scarlatina, diphtheria, measles and probably consumption will cease to exist . . .

This is remarkable, considering that it was written in 1883. And just as remarkable is his contrast of the medical and legal professions:

Who ever heard of a congress of lawyers for the purpose of simplifying the law and discouraging litigation? Unhealthy times mean good times for the medics. If they were to follow no higher dictates than those of their own interests, we should have the British Medical Association setting a fund on foot for the impeding of drainage and stopping up of sewers. Of the 30 000 physicians and surgeons of the British Islands, the vast majority are practical philanthropists of the highest order.

Do students still sit up till three in the morning, arguing passionately but inconsequentially about whether human existence is free or determined? In my time, I took the side of determinism, the fierceness of my defence a cover for my doubts; and my defence notwithstanding, I demanded the greatest possible freedom for myself.

I argued, with striking unoriginality, that a human being (save for myself, of course) was the vector of the forces of heredity, environment, and circumstance. What else, after all, could a human be? A causeless cause, like God?

….

In the book, Dr [Josef] Mengele wants to resuscitate the Third Reich and to this end clones Adolf Hitler…In the event, the Hitler clones show some of Hitler’s traits, such as an early artistic ambition, but do not turn out to be like Hitler in any other sense…

This conclusion is hardly surprising. Each person’s environment is unique and hence each person is unique. But if this is so, how can we ever be sure that each person is what I once said they must be—the mere vector of their heredity, environment, and circumstance? Hitler is one of those people about whom we wish to know every last detail in an attempt to understand him; but, however much we learn, we seem no nearer that understanding. In The Boys from Brazil, Mengele wants to reduce Hitler to his genes and a few childhood factors, and fails utterly in the attempt. But are our explanations of people any better?