A recent visit to Cheltenham gave Dalrymple all too many reasons to decry modern Britain, and the humor in his description in The New Criterion does not reduce its seriousness. But his visit to an art museum in the town was also cause for him to celebrate the work of a modern artist over that of the nineteenth-century painter William Charles Thomas Dobson, which I found noteworthy:

..the painting that most moved me was by Craigie Aitchison (1928–2009), painted in the year before his death. It was a crucifixion on a ground of scarlet, the figure of Christ being small, alone, and half-insinuated rather than fully depicted. It achieved an emotional and pictorial intensity that I do not associate with the current age, with its horror of both religious sentiment and genuine self-revelation that so easily invites the mockery of the sophistical. The likes of Dobson (of whom there were many) not only painted bad pictures but also did lasting damage to our artistic tradition, making the avoidance of their kitschy sentiment and sickly “beauty” almost the first duty of any artist, especially the second-rate; there is no trace of this neurosis in Aitchison.

The full piece is in the New Criterion and does not appear to require a subscription as it typically does.

A glimpse into the inner circle of Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who killed a policewoman and four hostages in Paris. Although French, his associates sound exactly like Dalrymple’s former clientele in Britain.

There is much to be said about the problems in Greece, and Dalrymple has said much of it, but for now just consider the statements from the victorious Syriza party and the supportive media about the recent Greek elections. Syriza only won 36 percent of the vote, so is it really accurate to say they “swept into power”?

…in our political systems, minorities can pose as, and be taken for, majorities, while the leaders of those minorities comport themselves as if they were endowed with the divine right of kings to rule as they see fit just because they received more votes than anyone else. And this is in turn possible first because the state has now become so preponderant in our lives, and second because those who are duly elected according to the constitution have very little interior sense of personal limitation which might induce either caution or prudence.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

A photograph can say a lot, says Dalrymple, but it’s still a subjective look at one corner of a complex world. Take those old photos of Shanghai he recently saw. The city looked relatively prosperous.

Did the camera lie? Not in the sense that it produced an image of what was not there to be seen, or in the sense that something had been airbrushed out in Stalinist fashion. But of course no number of photographs could capture the whole of reality, and everyone who wields a camera has a point of view, something that he wants to convey to others, and many things that he does not want to convey to others. Even the framing of a photograph for purely aesthetic reasons excludes what disturbs a composition, an ugly building next to a beautiful one, for instance. The camera is susceptible to all the rhetorical tricks of speech.

A nightmare inspires some self-reflection:

I was polite even in my dream: or was it pusillanimous? I didn’t so much as raise my voice to him. Even asleep I wondered whether this was pusillanimity rather than politeness. I don’t in the least mind upsetting people by what I write, but when confronted by someone in person, even someone whom I dislike, with whom I disagree profoundly and to whose views I have a profound aversion, I suddenly become anodyne and emollient. I can pour scorn on any number of writers, but not upon a single individual in person. In a way this is not surprising: I have never had any problem with public speaking. It is speaking in private that I find difficult.

Recent exaggerations by terrorism expert Steven Emerson about the Muslim areas of France have provided a welcome distraction to those who want to deny what are in fact very real problems:

…the most worrying aspect of the situation is the attraction of jihadi ideology for young Muslims. It is impossible to gauge exactly the degree or strength of support for it: opinion surveys are all but useless. The least one can say, however, is that jihadism attracts both those with bright and dim futures, and according to official calculations, some 2,200 youthful jihadis from France, Britain, and Belgium alone have gone to Syria. This is a far more than sufficient pool of murderous religious ideologues to cause untold havoc in Europe.

Read the rest here

You know all those excuses liberals make for crime? Curious how they suddenly all get thrown out the window when the crime is rape. It’s a brutal crime, of course, and deserves serious punishment. But what about murder?

Read Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty

The streetlights in Dalrymple’s English town are now being switched off every night at midnight. This might at first seem like a fairly minor development, but I can’t help but think that his explanation for it uncovers what is in fact a major problem and one that explains much of what is wrong with the modern world.

Even if it provided no services at all, the council would still run at a deficit if it continued only with its essential business, which is to pay the salaries and pensions of those who work in it, and the various parasitical rent-seekers, like employment lawyers, who live at its expense. And so the bureaucracy (and its hangers-on) does not exist to serve the public, but the public exists to serve the bureaucracy. In the past, the council had reserves to meet its deficits, but these have been run into the ground, and it has therefore had to appeal to other, larger sources of public funds for help, which themselves run on the same great pyramid-principle as that of the town council. Indeed, the whole country, the whole continent, the whole hemisphere is run on that principle.

The root cause of it all? Fiat money. Read the whole piece here.

What is the proper amount of attention that free people in a democracy should give to politics? Forget it all, and avail oneself of society’s bread and circuses? Or read the newspapers every day and take seriously the wooden pronouncements of people like Francois Hollande? Indifference or obsession? Dalrymple would prefer the former, apparently, and yet…

The problem is that if you do not go to politics, politics will come to you.