In New English Review Dalrymple reviews Red Love: the Story of an East German Family, which illuminates the challenge of navigating the changing totalitarian regimes in 20th Century Europe during the heyday of communism:

The author conveys very well the mental contortions required to live in East Germany (or in any such regime): the mixture of belief, cynicism, indifference, calculation, compromise, wilful ignorance, opportunism, bravery, effrontery and all the many shades and interactions between them. The author does not make himself out a hero, quite the reverse: he is an ordinary, intelligent likeable person who just wants a ‘normal’ life and would prefer to live without overt political interference.

The moral reprehensibility and degradation of the regime was obvious both from the outside and in retrospect: but from within and at the time, matters were often more equivocal. Perhaps the hardest words in the book are reserved for those in the west who admired the GDR…

Going through his old notebooks, Dalrymple concludes that memories are suspect, as he encounters long-forgotten patient notes, old descriptions of his travels, and even his transcription of his mother’s last words:

Dear Family,
I enjoyed being able to spend time with you and appreciate your kindness and understanding.
I am sorry to have to leave you.
With my love.

I have lately been waiting for Dalrymple to address the recently invented, comically stupid notions of “triggering” and “trigger warnings” that have spread through academia like only an absurdity can, a task for which he seems perfectly situated. This piece in City Journal is short but doesn’t disappoint, as he coins a new phrase that perfectly encapsulates what is going on:

In the first place, it might have been worth mentioning that, whatever the validity of PTSD as a diagnosis, most people who experience a traumatic event in life do not suffer from it. As is to be expected of a creature as protean as Man, people respond differently to their experiences. They do not forget the trauma, but its memory does not affect their subsequent lives in any pathological way….The development of PTSD does not follow from trauma as the night does the day, but depends on many things—no doubt the culture of the traumatized among them.

In any case, PTSD is largely irrelevant to what Heer is writing about. He isn’t writing about post-traumatic stress disorder at all, but rather, a new diagnosis of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

Dalrymple indicts the Church of England after a recent visit to Winchester cathedral:

The interior of the cathedral was festooned with several dreadful modern artworks. There were stacks of horrible steel chairs and other things one expects to find in a furniture warehouse. There were many garish, brightly-coloured notices. There was even a large cardboard cutout of a dinosaur, as if the Church were making its peace with Darwin. There was a prominent notice warning people watch their step at the entrance to a side-chapel: faith, hope and watching your step being the commandments of the new religion, watching your step being the greatest of these.

Note: When Dalrymple’s long-running BMJ column ended in 2012, he had a backlog of around 50 or 60 unpublished pieces, and he kindly gave them to us to post here at Skeptical Doctor. We are posting one each Wednesday to coincide with the schedule of his old BMJ column. We hope you enjoy them.

One of the principal questions to be asked about heroes is how long it will take before they are shown to have feet of clay. In the case of Major Claude Eatherly, it did not take long to show that it was not his feet alone that were of clay: but in the meantime, philosophers such as Gunther Anders and Bertrand Russell swallowed the myth in its entirety.

Eatherly was a major in the US Air Force who flew the B29 bomber that checked that the weather was clear for the bombing of Hiroshima. He neither dropped the bomb nor saw the explosion, nor did he take part in the mission to bomb Nagasaki.

After the war, he flew a mission to Bikini to measure the radioactivity in the atmosphere. After that, he was disappointed not to be commissioned permanently as a pilot; and because of his misconduct he was lucky to escape dishonourable discharge. The evidence is that he was disappointed not to have been selected for the actual bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Bikini; he was bitterly disappointed not to be commissioned.

Once he left the Air Force, he drifted; he was unfaithful to his wife and was neglectful of his children; he began to drink; in 1947 he involved himself in illegal gun-running to Cuba, whose capital, Havana, he agreed to bomb preparatory to a coup d’etat for a fee of $100,000 (he and his associates were arrested before any of this could take place); he passed forged cheques and finally indulged in armed robbery.

It was then, thanks to a story written in Newsweek in 1957, that a myth emerged and rang round the world: Major Eatherly had committed his crimes because of something his psychiatrist called a ‘guilt complex;’ Eatherly had so bitterly repented bombing Hiroshima that he committed crimes in order to be caught and punished for his role in the killing of tens of thousands. The Austrian philosopher, Gunther Anders, wrote to him and their correspondence was published in many languages. Eatherly became almost a sainted figure, a martyr to the cause of world peace.

The inaccuracy of the myth was brilliantly exposed by an American journalist and novelist called William Bradford Huie (1910 – 1986). The unwitting originator of it was Dr Oleinick Pavlovitch Constantine (1908 – 1983), a psychiatrist with the Veterans’ Administration in Waco, Texas, who knew practically nothing of Eatherly’s previous history, and believed the highly selective, dramatised and exaggerated account that Eatherly gave him in 1956. It was he who relayed the theory of the guilt complex to a law court, from which it spread round the world.

Dr Constantine was not Eatherly’s first psychiatrist. When Eatherly was arrested for his various crimes, he often (and successfully) tried to get himself admitted to psychiatric hospital to avoid imprisonment. There is no evidence, though, that he was ever mad or even highly disturbed; nevertheless, he was on one occasion given a great deal of insulin coma therapy. He was also an early recipient of chlorpromazine, given illogically in conjunction with methylphenidate.

The world believed Dr Constantine’s theory because it wanted to do so; it paid no attention to the opinion of another psychiatrist, Dr Ross, who knew Eatherly much better than Constantine:

This patient has no moral feelings toward his wife or children, or toward any human being that he comes in contact with. He has no feeling or responsibility or moral obligation to an individual or group or to society as a whole.

If you read only one Dalrymple column this week or month, make it this one.

Having sought help from a social worker for someone he considered particularly deserving, the good doctor was rebuffed on the principle that, to quote Clint Eastwood’s film Unforgiven, deserve’s got nothing to do with it:

…the elimination of desert as a criterion of allocation of resources destroys both compassion and empathy. Need can be measured by checklist (and often is), but the assessment of desert cannot. It requires judgment, both moral and practical. To regard everyone as equally in need of compassion is the same as regarding no one as in need of compassion, for it is not humanly possible to sympathize equally with the unfortunate and the villainous. The demand for equal compassion is the demand for no compassion.

Dalrymple recently attended the murder trial of Filipino nurse Victorino Chua, who poisoned 21 patients, and has high praise for the officials involved:

Not everyone likes lawyers, and some people hate them, but I have a great deal of respect for them, at least for those in the higher reaches of the profession. Their ability, seemingly effortless, to master technical matters to which they may never have given a moment’s attention before, as well as thousands of pages of documents, is admirable and even astonishing; and anyone who thinks that a court sitting of six hours a day is indicative of an easy life can never have sat through such a day.

Chua’s trial took three months, so complex was the evidence. Anybody who saw the prosecutor, Mr Peter Wright QC, in action would have wanted him as his defence counsel in the event of need. The judge’s mastery was evident.

Does the current level of personal indebtedness bespeak a change in character?

Governments are under political pressure to indebt themselves; ordinary people are under some other type of pressure or compulsion that is internal to them and resistible but not resisted. They judge themselves and others by their modes and quantities of consumption, which give meaning to life in the absence of any other meaning. Spending, whether or not they can afford it, is affirmation that their life has a purpose.

Seen in this light, indebtedness is an existential problem. Spendthrifts hope, if they give any thought to the matter at all, that the economics will take care of themselves. Sufficient unto the day is the credit thereof. At least until the next credit crunch.

Dalrymple commences a discussion on the connection between British housing policy and mobility with this observation:

There is one consolation in the election results for the former leader of the Labour Party, Mr Miliband, and his journalistic acolytes such as Polly Toynbee: they won’t have to pay mansion tax in the near future.