There is no approach to the issue of marijuana legalization that is obviously correct, says Dalrymple, but consider some of the potential harms that many, like Nick Clegg and Richard Branson in their recent public campaign, are ignoring:

…according to the latest research in Britain, the consumption of cannabis early in life is associated with a greatly increased risk of developing schizophrenia, and not even Messrs Clegg and Branson suggest legalising its sale to, and consumption by, such young people. Cheated by legalisation of a black market among older people, it is at least conceivable that dealers then turn their attention even more than they already do to a young population to maintain their sales and profits – and this at a time when levels of consumption are, luckily, falling among youngsters.

Read the piece in the Telegraph

After the recent centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth, Dalrymple considers the life and work of the man he calls “one of the last thoroughgoing bohemians”. Was he a scoundrel, a grifter, a liar and a cheat? Yes to all. But make no mistake: he was truly a literary genius:

…few are the twentieth-century English poets who wrote lines that not only were memorable but that also make the soul vibrate. Thomas was one of them.

A recent visit to Cheltenham gave Dalrymple all too many reasons to decry modern Britain, and the humor in his description in The New Criterion does not reduce its seriousness. But his visit to an art museum in the town was also cause for him to celebrate the work of a modern artist over that of the nineteenth-century painter William Charles Thomas Dobson, which I found noteworthy:

..the painting that most moved me was by Craigie Aitchison (1928–2009), painted in the year before his death. It was a crucifixion on a ground of scarlet, the figure of Christ being small, alone, and half-insinuated rather than fully depicted. It achieved an emotional and pictorial intensity that I do not associate with the current age, with its horror of both religious sentiment and genuine self-revelation that so easily invites the mockery of the sophistical. The likes of Dobson (of whom there were many) not only painted bad pictures but also did lasting damage to our artistic tradition, making the avoidance of their kitschy sentiment and sickly “beauty” almost the first duty of any artist, especially the second-rate; there is no trace of this neurosis in Aitchison.

The full piece is in the New Criterion and does not appear to require a subscription as it typically does.

A glimpse into the inner circle of Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who killed a policewoman and four hostages in Paris. Although French, his associates sound exactly like Dalrymple’s former clientele in Britain.

I know some are irritated by what they perceive as Dalrymple’s constant complaints about modern life, but as this piece in Taki’s Magazine demonstrates, they sure can be fun. Here he adopts the format of the late Charlie Hebdo writer Stephane Charbonnier in his recently-published A Little Treatise of Intolerance:

Then there are those people who walk about with headphones—great big ones in the case of hip-hoppers, small and more discreet ones in the case of people with an IQ of over 100. They are in their own little world, impervious to all that goes on around them. They are hermits, but without spirituality. Moreover, in trains and elsewhere you hear the irritating tish-ter-tish that emanates from their supposedly private little world…

When deafness comes they will claim public assistance to obtain the best possible hearing aids and other forms of subvention. It will be made illegal to discriminate against the self-inflictedly deaf, and children’s books will have to include deaf characters to prevent hearing-ism. I think you will agree with me: those who walk around with earphones should be locked in a room in which Schoenberg is relayed at maximum volume without pause for 10 years.

Then there are the automated telephone messages, telling you that your call is very important to us, followed by a decision tree that makes the average oak look like a telegraph pole, then ghastly music interspersed with lying, prerecorded apologies for the delay in getting through to one of “us.” When finally one does get through, as often as not, it is to the wrong department, so that the whole process has to start again while the call is redirected. One expresses one’s irritation and then feels bad, because the person to whom one has expressed it is not the person responsible, and is only a poorly-paid and no doubt bored cipher of his or her employer. One vows never to lose one’s temper again with such unfortunates, and keeps the vow until the next time.

In this piece in New English Review, which we are scandalously late in posting, Dalrymple considers the ironies, outrages, paradoxes and moral compromises of the Algerian War for independence from France: that “the French won militarily but lost politically (happily for them)”, that the future French president Francois Mitterand oversaw the executions of hundreds of Algerians but would later abolish the death penalty in France, and that the war’s ultimate outcomes were so much the opposite of its progenitors’ stated aims:

Nowhere has the whirligig of time brought in its revenges with a more acute sense of irony than in this case. The first fruit of a war fought in the name of a struggle against racial injustice and discrimination was de facto ethnic cleansing, that is to say of the million French residents of Algeria, 11 per cent of the population, including Jews, practically all of whom left Algeria in the few months after the signing of the Evian Accords in 1962. And, as the subsequent history of the country has proved, the so-called freedom fighters turned out to have been fighting not so much for freedom as for power. They were power-fighters rather than freedom-fighters, for once they were installed in power they instituted nothing that any political philosopher would recognise as a regime of freedom. The only sense in which the new regime was freer than the old had been was freedom from the old oppressor. The new oppressor (who immediately killed 15-30 thousand of his fellow countrymen who had fought on the old oppressor’s side) was, however, of the same ethnic, cultural and religious origin as the population it oppressed. How much of an advance was this, and was it worth the lives of half a million people to make it?

The placement of a paranoid circular in Dalrymple’s letter box causes him to think about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists:

The great psychological advantage of conspiracy theories is that they explain the most disparate phenomena effortlessly and indubitably. They thus satisfy man’s intellectual longing to understand the world, but also, as importantly, man’s desire to be superior in his understanding to his fellows.

In New English Review Dalrymple shares his reactions to a recent visit, far from his first, to Pere Lachaise:

I prefer to wander at random among the 65,000 graves than seek out anyone in particular. When I was a child, the advertising slogan of the vulgar British Sunday newspaper, the News of the World (though of course it was not in those days nearly as vulgar as it was to become under the ownership of Mr Murdoch) was ‘All human life is there,’ and the same might be said, figuratively speaking, of Père-Lachaise. So inexhaustible is it, the cemetery I mean, that it would almost be a pleasure to reside there permanently were it not for the rather stringent residence qualifications. At the least it must be some slight consolation for the dying to know that they are to be buried there.

As usual when writing about looseness of language, Dalrymple sets his sights on the Guardian, which recently accused Ed Milliband of tax avoidance (by which they apparently meant tax evasion):

The economic worldview being promoted by the deliberate conflation of tax avoidance and tax evasion is that the first call on anyone’s money is that of the state. Tax avoidance and tax evasion are in essence the same because everyone has a duty to pay as much tax as he can: the Earth is the state’s and the fulness thereof. Everyone has the right only to what the state thinks ought to be left to him after it has taken what it considers its share; all our money is, in effect, pocket money, doled out by the government-parent to the citizen-child. We are the wards, not the masters, of the state.

Terrorists are often not cowardly, but brave, says Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty. But is acknowledging that really to compliment them?

The reason we call terrorists cowardly is that bravery is generally considered a virtue, and we are reluctant to accord people whom we abhor any virtues at all. We want our enemies to be endowed only with detestable qualities, and we are only too aware that courage is the virtue without which other virtues cannot be exercised. If someone were to say “these brave terrorist attacks,” we should suspect him of sympathizing with them.

This is all based on a confusion about the nature of the virtuousness of bravery. Bravery is not a free-standing virtue, as it were, such that anybody who displays it is thereby virtuous. It is like originality in art or architecture: originality is not a virtue unless in the production of something worthwhile sub specie aeternitatis, that is to say judged by a criterion other than originality itself.