The February edition of New English Review showcases Dr. Dalrymple’s visit to his local doctor’s office, which leads him to consider the topics of gratitude, the notion of progress, and freedom.

Naturally, I didn’t feel grateful either, although I thanked the doctor as I left her consulting room. There is no reason, after all, to feel gratitude when things work as they should. There is thus an asymmetry between complaint and gratitude: one complains when things don’t work as they should, but one feels no gratitude when they do. There is a similar asymmetry where human rights are concerned: you complain when they are violated but are not grateful for receiving your due.

The dissenting doctor had the good fortune to review an excellent book for The European Conservative on the nefarious, cultural-marxist ideology of anti-racism.

As Professor Taguieff establishes beyond reasonable doubt, antiracism in the Western world has become simultaneously a religion, a totalitarian political movement, and a career opportunity for a class of intellectuals and bureaucrats of very modest attainments except for a sharp eye to the main chance.

…

The pursuit of so-called diversity, inclusion, and equity has become the pretext for a regime of fear and intimidation directed and manned by a small army of well-paid mediocrities. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party must be laughing at this further manifestation of Western dissolution and decadence.

Again in The Epoch Times, our skeptical doctor comments on the curious courtroom shenanigans of a failed Islamic terrorist in France.

The transfer of sympathy from the victims of crime to the criminal has been going on for a long time. This transfer is now taken as a sign of broadmindedness and moral generosity, marking out the intellectual from the general run of prejudiced, thoughtless or censorious persons.

In his Law & Liberty column, the good doctor considers the case for the retraction and withdrawal of Mrs. Ceaușescu’s bogus scientific papers and her laughable foreign honors.

There is something to be said for and against the withdrawal of the honours she received (for example, from the British Royal Institute of Chemistry): she clearly didn’t deserve them but they were awarded as a matter of historical fact. If honours can be withdrawn once it becomes politically expedient to do so, then not only are no honours permanent, but honours themselves become a permanent field for political dispute, since no one apart from saints has no blemish on his record to be discovered by the assiduous termites of research.

The critical doctor sets his sights on the Ardern government in New Zealand, as well as an increasingly Islamized town in northern France over at The Epoch Times.

The irony, however, is this: It was allegedly a shock, almost an outrage, that dolls were being sold in Roubaix without human visages because of Islamic prohibition of such representations (as well as children’s books with pictures without faces), when ideological manipulation or censorship of dolls and the illustrations in children’s books has been going on for a long time in the West.

Theodore Dalrymple is back at The Critic in anno Domini 2022 condemning more preposterous, politically-correct gibberish in his column aptly titled Everyday Lies.

Oddly enough in these times of multiculturalism, mere words provoke apoplexy, at least metaphorically, as never before. Euphemism, evasion and renaming flourish — supposedly in the name of tolerance, but really as exercises of power. 

In this week’s Takimag column, our favorite doctor reviews the highly successful book series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by his acquaintance, Alexander McCall Smith.

The only written words of mine that have ever had a practical effect on the world appeared in my review of Alexander McCall Smith’s book The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Mine was the first review in the national press, and I like to think that it paid some small part in catapulting this, and subsequent books in the series, into the international best-seller lists. At any rate, the words have been quoted hundreds of thousands of times since, on the back of the same number of books.

In the February edition of New Criterion, our cultured doctor has penned a lengthy essay on his visits to two strikingly different art collections in Paris.

The Marquis de Custine, in his great book Russia in 1839, remarks, in connection with the military parades of which Tsar Nicholas I was inordinately fond, that tyrannies command immense efforts to bring forth trifles. I confess that this remark was often uppermost in my mind as I toured the Pinault Collection in the restored Bourse de Commerce in Paris: not, of course, that billionaires such as M. Pinault can properly be called tyrants.

In his weekly Takimag column, our bibliophile doctor informs us of the disappearance of an entire archive related to terrorism at the University of Leicester’s library.

Book burning, which Heine warned led eventually to the incineration of people, is essentially futile, at least in the long run, for it is rarely that every last copy of any book can be burnt; the burnt book is able to take its revenge by reappearing at some time in the future. Far worse than book burning, then, is the loss of an archive that contains unique and original documents.