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.
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.
At his blog at Salisbury Review, Dalrymple quotes Keynes on the Treaty of Versailles negotiations and finds some broad historical similarities with the Greek bankruptcy talks:
“But the opportunity was missed… during the six months which followed the Armistice, and nothing we do now can repair the mischief wrought at the time. Great privation and great risks to society have become unavoidable. All that is now open to us is to re-direct, so far as lies within our power, the fundamental economic tendencies that promote the re-establishment of prosperity and order, instead of leading us deeper into misfortune.”
But is this not always the case? We are always where the last lot of fools led us, and not where we should have been if wiser counsels had prevailed. This is so even in our personal lives: who can say he is exactly where he ought to have been if wisdom had ruled?
After the recent Islamic terror attack on a beach in Tunisia that left 38 people dead, British Prime Minister David Cameron said something we Americans have heard President Obama say repeatedly: that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. Dalrymple says to think about it this way:
Supposing that, after the attack on the church in South Carolina by Dylann Roof, someone had said, “This had nothing to do with real racism; real racists are peace-loving people who would never dream of such an attack. All they want is a peaceful world in which whites rule and blacks know their place as racial dhimmis.” What would we think of such a person? What would we think of the implication that, even were it not for his racist ideology, Dylann Roof would still have attacked the church and killed nine people? It is indeed the case that most racists do not attack black churches—otherwise, such attacks would be far more numerous than they are. But to say that Dylann Roof was not motivated by his racism would be absurd.