In The Lamp, Dalrymple reviews Keith Michael Baker’s “magisterial” new biography of Jean-Paul Marat, the revolutionary driven by resentment, paranoia, and an insatiable thirst for glory who styled himself “the friend of the people” while advocating their enemies’ slaughter on an ever-expanding scale.

He may have been the friend of “the people,” but not of people. He conceived of the people not as they were but as he felt they ought to have been. Time and again he expressed his disdain for them because they failed to act as he thought they ought to have acted.

Read the full essay here.

Writing at The Epoch Times, Dalrymple examines the intractable dilemma of illegal immigration and labour, arguing that regularisation of illegal workers tends only to price them out of the market and create a vacuum that draws in the next wave, while the conceptually simple reforms that might break the cycle remain politically impossible.

The illegal immigrants do jobs that the local people do not want to do and do not have to do because they can choose to be unemployed instead, at no great loss of standard of living. If the currently illegal immigrants are regularized, then a vacuum will be created into which a further wave of illegal immigrants will be sucked in, and the cycle will begin again.

Read the full essay here.

In The Critic, Dalrymple examines the case of a frenzied knife attack in Marseille and the language used to describe its aftermath, arguing that the French press’s use of the euphemism “neutralised” to describe the police killing of the attacker is a small but telling instance of the semantic dehumanisation favoured by totalitarian regimes.

Much as he was to be reprehended, this man was still a man. He was killed, not neutralised. We ought not to indulge in semantic dehumanisation of the kind that totalitarian regimes indulge in.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple reflects on whether we can—or should—judge the mental fitness of our political leaders from a distance, noting that while psychiatric diagnosis at a remove is unreliable, common sense demands that citizens not remain indifferent to signs of incapacity in those who wield great power.

Power corrupts, said Lord Acton, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it also isolates. The powerful begin to live in an echo chamber, never hearing anything but what they say themselves, or what sycophants tell them. Such a chamber has an inevitable effect on the mental equilibrium of anyone who lives in it.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple argues that the real obstacle to immigrant assimilation is not hostility from the host country but the collision between clan-based social obligations and the impersonal trust on which modern welfare states depend.

Where diversity increases the basic loyalty to a system that makes it workable can no longer be assumed: the system becomes a resource to be looted, all the easier to do when control is weak, which it usually is.

Read the full essay here.

Writing at New English Review, Dalrymple examines the vexed question of capital punishment, arguing that while some crimes are so heinous that no other penalty seems adequate, the death penalty remains so brutal and error-prone that it resists easy justification.

On the matter of capital punishment, as on many other questions, I face in two directions at once. On the one hand, I think that there are some crimes so heinous that no other punishment is appropriate; on the other, that it is so brutal and dehumanising that it should never be employed.

Read the full essay here.

Writing at The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes the bankruptcy of a neighbour as the occasion for a characteristically wry meditation on schadenfreude, the parasitic industry of consultancy, and the universal human pleasure of investing malice with a semblance of moral outrage.

Only in a world of assumed incompetence can so much consultancy be thought necessary. No doubt it is sometimes true that a third party can see things that the people more directly involved cannot see. But there are now giant companies of consultants, which must surely have a vested interest in the inefficiency and incompetence of others, because inefficiency and incompetence are what makes consultancy necessary in the first place.

Read the full essay here.