To his surprise Dalrymple discovers a town in France as ugly as most in England:

The only hotel in the town was of such hideousness that it made me laugh. It was built in 1990, with elements of Las Vegas bolted onto a concrete construction of the Leonid Brezhnev school of architecture. Since it did not erect itself, someone must have designed it, a terrifying thought.

Well, that’s two pieces in a row. The Salisbury Review appears to have gone the subscriber-only route. (Good for them, I hope they make a mint.) I haven’t yet joined, so the entirety of this piece will also remain behind the paywall, but it’s obviously addressing the victim-as-saint mentality applied to Jo Cox:

Strictly speaking, her brutal death should not have affected the result in either direction: it left the arguments for and against leaving the European Union precisely where they had been before. But no one should dismiss out of hand the effect of candles and teddy bears on the political thought of a modern electorate.

A recent book convinces Dalrymple that there is a trend of Prometheanism in society, and that it is akin to the totalitarian impulse:

In [the author’s] opinion, the current fashion for transhumanism is the latest form of mad Prometheanism which underlay totalitarian regimes. Transhumanism is only another manifestation of the desire to make the New Man, the Old Man being so unsatisfactorily inclined to defects both of mind and body. All hitherto existing men have been but pale apologies for the glorious creatures of the future, who will be half biological and half electronic. Just as Marx thought that man would only become truly human once communism was achieved (such matters as private property and class conflict having deformed him and made him less than human), and as the Nazis dreamed of a perfect race of blond beasts uncontaminated by bad blood, so the transhumanists dream of creatures of eternal life whose powers will make Usain Bolt seem like a sea urchin and Einstein a child with severe mental handicap.

In the Salisbury Review Dalrymple describes an encouraging encounter with a taxi driver:

As to Brexit’s long term effect, he thought it would be good. ‘We,’ he said, ‘should go more with the old commonwealth. It will be good for us.’

I liked, and was even moved by, his use of ‘we’ and ‘us.’ It was not forced, it came to him naturally. It meant that he had some attachment to Britain other than as a cash cow. He was loyal to it and wanted to see it prosper. Moreover, his replies showed he had thought about it.

Two well-known recent British murderers, Raoul Moat and Mohammed Emwazi (aka “Jihadi John”), demonstrate the modern tendency to make excuses for even the most monstrous behavior:

…they resent strongly but incoherently; they blame their conduct on others; they use their frustrations to justify their most outrageous and vicious acts. They pity themselves to the exclusion of all others; they use their own minds as echo chambers for the wrongs, real or imagined, that they have suffered. Like Moat, they have a grossly inflated sense of their own importance.

A book on incompetent instances of taxidermy leads to pondering the meaning of life:

…I don’t need the vast majority of what I want, and therefore all the activity of the people required to supply me with it (and all that billions of people want but don’t need) is unnecessary. In other words, the vast majority of human effort is futile, and Ecclesiastes got it right: All is indeed vanity.

Nothing is more vital to the continuation of our system, therefore, than the willing acceptance of triviality and futility. They are what make the world go round. There is no getting off the treadmill, and taxidermy is a metaphor for our existence.

The success of Brexit produced an outpouring of ad hominem against its supposedly stupid supporters, but even if this weak argument were true…

It was educated people who initiated and carried out the Terror in the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution, and all the great joy that it brought to the Russian people, was the denouement of decades of propaganda and agitation by the educated elite. There was no shortage of educated people among the Nazi leadership. And the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were also relatively highly-educated, as it happens in France. The founder of Sendero Luminoso, who might have been the Pol Pot of Peru, was a professor of philosophy who wrote his doctoral thesis on Kant.

…but as for the question proposed in the title of this piece in the Library of Law and Liberty:

…the abuse and the complicity, the secretive rule by decree by career politico-bureaucrats without any real oversight, is not the consequences of the so-called European Project, it is the European Project.

In The Salisbury Review Dalrymple offers a slice of modern London:

As I passed Euston Square station, I paused to listen to a tall black man, with the seat of his grey flannel tracksuit perched half-way down his buttocks, talking loudly into his mobile phone and gesticulating wildly for emphasis…

I could hardly be accused of eavesdropping, since the young man was speaking so loudly in a public place. His tone was aggrieved, not that of injured innocence but of injured guilt, which of course is a very much stronger emotion.

‘They’re trying to say I hit this white bloke and he went down. They’re not looking at what led up to it. It must be on CCTV, but they’re just not looking.’

It must have been on CCTV because everything these days is on CCTV. He paced up and down in his agitation. Evidently he had attacked someone in a station.

[‘]My train was in three minutes! Three minutes! And they’re trying to say…’

Note that a slice indicates only one small portion of something.

Dalrymple notes, in The Salisbury Review, Jose Manuel Barroso’s progression “from revolutionary Maoist student to Prime Minister of Portugal to chief apparatchik of the European Union to vice-president of Goldman-Sachs with special responsibility for advising the bank on how to mitigate the effects of Brexit (for the bank, of course, not for Britain or Europe)” and concludes:

The attraction of the European Union for those who are prepared to endure its tedium and its requirement always to speak in langue de bois is evident. It offers a golden reward in exchange for the obliteration of personality, character and scruple. It plays Mephistopheles to a hundred minor Fausts.