Frontpage Interview with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple: Our Culture, What’s Left Of It

Frontpage Mag ^ | August 31, 2005 | Jamie Glazov Interviews Dr. Theodore Dalrymple

[Tolik]

Very Interesting!

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[Voss]

Dalrymple ping.

[SMARTY]

"A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

The DNC in a nutshell and "Mr. No-Pants ex-President" is their king

[Monterrosa-24]

His comments about the disappearance of the dinner table in England reminds me of Booker T. Washington's perspective. In UP FROM SLAVERY he describes the informal nature of dining among sharecroppers and his desire to see Black families sit down at the table and eat together formally. Ceremonial dining was one of the values instilled at the early Tuskegee Institute. Washington would be so disappointed to see today's informal style and such a disappearance of the dinner table.

[neutrino]

Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Utterly and absolutely true. And the taint of political correctness has sunk deep into our world.

[agere_contra]

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Dalrymple just threw this out during an interview! Reading him is a humbling experience: he is lucid, profound, exact where many of us would be inarticulate and flabby. An amazing guy.

[Frank_2001]

Good article!

[Tolik]

Thanks for the interesting point.

It reminds me how somebody said that the lower classes used to strive to improve themselves by imitating the high society in good language, proper manners and chivalrous attitudes ("to have some class" - even the language itself notes this phenomenon). Now the so called high society speaks crass language and imitates crass attitudes. And everything evens out with the lowest common denominator.

[Tolik]

What a paragraph!

If he said nothing else, it was worth posting the whole article.

What a mind!

[ForGod'sSake]

Interesting that this paragraph has jumped out at several others(GMTA and all???):

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

His notion that propaganda is used primarily as a tool to humiliate could help explain the MSM's busybodies' persistence in riding their dying horse into the ground. The wilder the claim, the better. In addition to pointing out some other human foibles.....noteworhty.

FGS

[Mamzelle]

Well, this is a great article, but I'm disappointed to find that I've already read it...but here's bumping that those who haven't seen it will enjoy!

[Pessimist]

Excellent post. Thanks!

[Peter Libra]

Thank you for enabling us to read this interview. Curiously enough,after I had read it, my own reaction was to think of an old song - something like "A bright sunshiny day". It rang through my head after I perused the interview.

A classic example how to interview one's subject too. Dr. Dalrymple's clean and palpable hits have- to use a cliche- made my day. Once again he savages, in his own way, Orwell's enemy-Political Correctness. Orwell would have liked this gentleman.

[Barset]

Saving to read later. Thank you so much for posting this. I bought Dalrymple's "Our Culture..." ordered it before publication. Like his other work it continues to shine after many readings. His essay on Virginia Woolf was immensely satisfying to me personally, confirmiming as it does my own opinion that she was weak-minded and foolish and that the promotion of her and her work in academia seriously harms the character development of young women.

Thanks again.

[MattinNJ]

Thank you for the ping. The man is an intellectual giant.

[Billthedrill]

An absolutely outstanding post, and thanks for the ping. Every single answer should be the topic of a separate essay. His point about "unhappiness" versus "depression" is a cautionary note about an attitude that has resulted in the drugging of an entire society. Brave New World's "soma," only the battery of real antidepressants doesn't work as well as the fictional one.

But his insights on the Marxist/Leninist origins of Political Correctness are spot-on:

A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

It isn't actually about ideology or even thought control so much as it is about brute power. Although there are certain post-modernists for whom to speak is necessarily to think, the rest of the normal world does not think that way and must have its activities, not its thought, kept under control by coercion. Political Correctness - the very origin of the term is Stalinist - is nothing more than an exercise in coercion, and it is the act of coercion itself that is to be protected by it, and not the underlying ideology, which can change with the wind.

[Huber]

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

What an accurate, concise and quotable description of the crime of political correctness, and what a profound explanation of why it is so maddening!

[Badray]

Thanks for the ping.

Your description is also very accurate.

How are Tax Relief and the Deductions?

[deweyfrank]

later