Dalrymple writes at Salisbury Review on a phrase he would like to ban:
It is obvious what those who use the words ‘European construction’ in a positive sense mean: namely, a European super-state that will, on account of its size and economic weight, be a super-power. How otherwise could a former Prime Minister of Luxembourg take his place in the sun of power?
Why are synthetic cannabinoids becoming more popular? What is their attraction? For a clue, let’s start with their names:
Some are merely antinomian: Voodoo Gold or Damnation, names to attract suburban Satanists. Others, such as Pandora’s Box, suggest the release of one’s inner demons, or perhaps of one’s talents and abilities… Space Cadet suggests either the exploration of that vast vacuum known as one’s inner space, or being spaced out.
But the names that most caught my attention were Exodus and Annihilation. From what captivity were the consumers of Exodus seeking escape? Who was their Moses (or their Charlton Heston)? To what Promised Land were they going to be led by this noid?
Perhaps the answer is to the land of Annihilation.
Dalrymple reports at Pajamas Media on a new anti-obesity drug that might actually work. But are the side-effects too great?
You would think Dalrymple would prefer “grand hotels with marble columns and bowing lift attendants” rather than “a standardised hotel (the same from China to Peru) with mass-produced pictures of puppies or poppies and showers the size, and often the shape, of a coffin”, but he actually prefers the latter. Read the piece at Salisbury Review to find out why.
At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple writes on the case of Dominique Cottrez, a French woman who has admitted to killing eight of her own children immediately after their birth. The case is of course shocking and disturbing, and it’s filled with various excuses and equivocations. The most surprising part of this piece is Dalrymple’s last line: “Deep inside me there beats a heart of mush.”
One of the strange psychological effects of multiculturalism as a doctrine or ideology is that it renders people peculiarly uninterested in or insensitive to the ideas or feelings of people of cultures other than their own… If we must respect others, others must respect us. And if our ‘culture’ happens to include [offensive behavior], others must just grin and bear it, otherwise they are being retrograde, primitive and (worst of all) intolerant.
I have been reading and re-reading Dalrymple’s latest book, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality, since its publication. I think it’s my personal favorite of all of his books.
In the following excerpt he follows a long discussion of what he calls “the doctrine of the Real Me” with the specific example of a man who recently murdered four people in the name of Islam.
The article’s headline was “The Multiple Lives of Mehdi Nemmouche.” It started:
Who knows the real Mehdi Nemmouche? Suspected of being the person responsible for the killing of four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on 24 May, he has several lives, without anyone knowing how exactly they are connected.
To help us understand and uncover the real Mehdi Nemmouche, now 29 years old, one of his childhood friends was quoted as saying that he was “a quiet boy, discreet, not at all aggressive, and who never had any problems with anybody.” Another school friend said, “He was a good pupil, he never had any fights, had friends, dressed normally in jeans and sneakers…” But for the criminal justice system he was a young man with a “solid history of delinquency,” with no fewer than seven convictions in ten years, many of them for robbery with violence. He spent five years between 2007 and 2012 in prison, in which he was “radicalized,” that is to say, he was given (and adopted) an ideological justification for his psychopathic behavior.
So who is the real Mehdi Nemmouche, the quiet, well-behaved boy or the delinquent young man who shot four people with callous and prideful indifference? Continue reading
As mentioned in the New English Review piece posted immediately below, Dalrymple visited East Timor during the brutal Indonesian occupation to participate in the making of a documentary about the atrocities committed there. Steve found the documentary here on YouTube yesterday and immediately recognized the anonymous doctor commenting in silhouette at the 37:10 mark.
Dalrymple’s ensuing 1994 piece describing the occupation in the Spectator, published under the pseudonym Edward Theberton, is available here (h/t Yakimi.) This powerful, intense article is well worth a read, as it gives a sense of what it is like to visit a totalitarian dictatorship:
Ten photographers, one with a video camera, took my picture before I reached the terminal building. Some foreign politicians were soon to arrive on an investigative mission, and the authorities wanted no troublemakers to interfere with their valiant (though in the event unavailing) efforts to mislead them about the monstrous injustice of Indonesian rule in East Timor…
No sooner had I walked out into the streets of Dili than a goon on a motorcycle followed me like a kerb-crawler in search of a prostitute. I stared into his dark glasses and turned to walk in the opposite direction. Disregarding the one-way system (there is very little traffic in Dili), he turned to follow me, making no effort to disguise the fact. I smiled at him, but his face remained blank; after a quarter of an hour, he left me, to return to my side at frequent intervals…
As in all totalitarian states, communication in East Timor is indirect, through gnomic hints, single statements blurted out as if by sudden irresistible impulse, and by brief but intense encounters. ‘It is not good here;’ My family was killed;’ My sister was raped by many soldiers;’ You must tell the world what we still suffer.’
The documentary states that two Australian teams of journalists were murdered there in 1975 for reporting on the invasion. Sometimes I think it is amazing that Dalrymple is still alive.
My favorite Dalrymple pieces are those that make interesting intellectual arguments (interesting because they seem true and are also new to me) while also revealing new details about the biography of the man himself, and one of this month’s pieces for New English Review is a good example. It reads in part like one of his travel adventures, as he gives more details about an experience we’ve highlighted before (that he was “surveilled by the Indonesian police in East Timor”):
I was there to help in the making of a clandestine film about the atrocities committed by the Indonesians with the blessing, and even the actual connivance, of western powers… One of my few appearances on the silver screen, then, has been as a voice asking questions in bad Portuguese.
It makes an eyebrow-raising claim about Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher:
…I think that I discovered the identity of one of the main characters in it. Not being any kind of scholar, let alone that of the life and works of RLS, I cannot be sure that my discovery was original rather than a rediscovery of what was already well-known: an overestimation of one’s originality being the occupational hazard of the unlearned.
And it opens with a beautiful insight into the experience of growing older:
Once you have reached a certain age and experienced the majority of all that you will ever experience, almost everything reminds you of something else. It is as if the world were full of double entendres in which nothing meant only what it appeared to mean. The association of ideas becomes so strong that the past becomes almost as real and living as the present: you experience two realities simultaneously. This is pleasurable and is one of the compensations of age. It deepens and enriches life.