In Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple explains the mindset of the lone-wolf Islamic terrorists responsible for recent attacks in Europe:

Armed at huge public expense with the worst education which could possibly be provided over the prolonged period of his childhood and adolescence (an adolescence from which he would never emerge into adulthood), made aware neither of the possibility or necessity of personal effort, his mind filled with ideas and values derived from debased products for consumption by proletarians manufactured by a cynical culture industry, neither obliged or able to earn a living, and aware of the disdain and contempt with which he would be viewed by anyone minimally successful, his mind a bubbling cauldron of inchoate resentment; how wonderful for him to have found a providential—and enjoyable—role and purpose in the world, namely to kill or injure people!

Arguing that “Twisting language is generally the easiest way to evade unpleasant truths”, Dalrymple takes the Guardian to task for an editorial on the murders by Islamists in Copenhagen.

In the latest installment of his Pajamas Media column, Dalrymple disagrees with the criticism medical researchers have received for publishing only their successes:

On reading the New England Journal of Medicine and other medical journals, I sometimes wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, in accentuating the negative. To read of so many bright ideas that did not work could act as a discouragement to others and even lead to that permanent temptation of ageing doctors, therapeutic nihilism. But the truth is the truth, and we must follow it wherever it leads.

There is much to be said about the problems in Greece, and Dalrymple has said much of it, but for now just consider the statements from the victorious Syriza party and the supportive media about the recent Greek elections. Syriza only won 36 percent of the vote, so is it really accurate to say they “swept into power”?

…in our political systems, minorities can pose as, and be taken for, majorities, while the leaders of those minorities comport themselves as if they were endowed with the divine right of kings to rule as they see fit just because they received more votes than anyone else. And this is in turn possible first because the state has now become so preponderant in our lives, and second because those who are duly elected according to the constitution have very little interior sense of personal limitation which might induce either caution or prudence.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

This review, in The New Criterion, of Michel Houellebecq’s new book Soumission (Submission) is a provocative introduction to the French author and his work, and also interesting in that it’s a review of a book about a profound topic, and one that Dalrymple often addresses himself:

Houellebecq is a writer with a single underlying theme: the emptiness of human existence in a consumer society devoid of religious belief, political project, or cultural continuity in which, moreover, thanks to material abundance and social security, there is no real struggle for existence that might give meaning to the life of millions…This tone is in a way worse than mere despair, which has at least the merit of strength and of posing a possible solution, namely suicide; the Houellebeckian mood is as chronic illness is to acute, an ache rather than a pain.

The novel itself sounds fascinating, profound and extraordinarily well-timed in its relevance to recent events in France:

The subtlety of Houellebecq’s book consists of demonstrating that the spiritual need of the protagonist can be made to coincide with his material interest. The universities are closed for a time after the accession of [France’s new Muslim president] Ben Abbes to power, but re-open sometime thereafter. Teachers such as the protagonist of Soumission are offered redundancy on full pension, which he at any rate is happy to take. The alternative is continuing in his post, at a salary three times greater than that before, the difference being paid for by subventions from Saudi Arabia and Qatar—subventions which, incidentally, allow the universities of Paris to escape from their dispiriting grunginess under French state finance to some semblance of the grandeur of the medieval Sorbonne. But the quid pro quo for receiving the higher salary and being permitted to teach at the university at all is conversion to Islam.

Note, however, that there is a major spoiler in the review.

Cash is nice, but nothing corrupts like a free lunch:

Yes, lunch conquers all, more than love. When, as happens occasionally, some politician’s corruption stands revealed in the press, what shocks me about it is often the trifling amount by which he has benefited and by which he had allowed himself to be corrupted. Just as it is the small insults, humiliations and acts of disdain that people have suffered rather than frightful injustices that move them to political anger and even violence, so it is small obligations that are more corrupting than large. Large sums of money transferred to a secret account are impersonal; lunch is a social event.

A photograph can say a lot, says Dalrymple, but it’s still a subjective look at one corner of a complex world. Take those old photos of Shanghai he recently saw. The city looked relatively prosperous.

Did the camera lie? Not in the sense that it produced an image of what was not there to be seen, or in the sense that something had been airbrushed out in Stalinist fashion. But of course no number of photographs could capture the whole of reality, and everyone who wields a camera has a point of view, something that he wants to convey to others, and many things that he does not want to convey to others. Even the framing of a photograph for purely aesthetic reasons excludes what disturbs a composition, an ugly building next to a beautiful one, for instance. The camera is susceptible to all the rhetorical tricks of speech.