Free Republic

Second opinion - Theodore Dalrymple MD Many of my non-medical friends complain of the pointlessness of their jobs. What they do has no meaning, they say, no intrinsic worth, apart from paying the bills. My friends feel like caged mice which run incessantly inside wheels: an expense of spirit in a waste of effort. ‘At least,’ they say, ‘your job is worthwhile.’ ‘In what sense?’ I ask. ‘You help people.’ If only they knew. Compared with the doctors in a hospital like mine, Sisyphus had it easy. Light recreation such as his would come as a relief to us. There...

The slaughter of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam, in broad daylight, by a young man of Moroccan origin bent on jihad, has at last dented Dutch confidence that unconditional tolerance can be on its own the unifying principle of a viable society. For tolerance to work, it must be reciprocal; tolerance appears to the intolerant jihadist mere weakness and lack of belief in anything. Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality. Like most people in...

The filmmaker focused on the shameful abuse of Muslim women by Muslim men in Europe. The slaughter of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam, in broad daylight, by a young man of Moroccan origin bent on jihad, has at last dented Dutch confidence that unconditional tolerance can be on its own the unifying principle of a viable society. For tolerance to work, it must be reciprocal; tolerance appears to the intolerant jihadist mere weakness and lack of belief in anything. Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps:...

Theodore Dalrymple The Sob Factor Quiet grief and private dignity are now things of the past.11 November 2004 Three British soldiers, members of a famous regiment called the Black Watch, died recently in a car-bomb explosion in Iraq—the first British soldiers to perish this way in the terror-plagued country. For a few days, the British press and broadcasting media treated the event as if nothing else in the world mattered. The reaction was little short of hysterical, no doubt to the encouragement and pleasure of future car-bombers.As is now usual whenever tragedy strikes, the press and broadcasters went straight to...

The French press has greeted the re-election of President Bush less than enthusiastically. On the morning after the result became known, the left-wing daily Liberation’s headline was L’EMPIRE EMPIRE: THE EMPIRE GETS WORSE. (The day before, it ran a picture of George Bush on its front page, with the headline, THE MAN TO BEAT.) The liberal Le Monde’s reporting was more measured, but its editorial began: “It goes without saying that the re-election of George Bush is bad news.” These are the only two newspapers that count for les intellos, the intellectuals, in a country with the lowest readership of...

Three British soldiers, members of a famous regiment called the Black Watch, died recently in a car-bomb explosion in Iraq—the first British soldiers to perish this way in the terror-plagued country. For a few days, the British press and broadcasting media treated the event as if nothing else in the world mattered. The reaction was little short of hysterical, no doubt to the encouragement and pleasure of future car-bombers. As is now usual whenever tragedy strikes, the press and broadcasters went straight to the relatives of the victims and asked them what they felt. Quiet grief and private dignity have...

When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off. It would be just as absurd for me to say, on my imminent retirement after 14...

If you think this one's bad you should have seen his uncle - By Anthony Daniels (Filed: 29/08/2004) There is no leader in the world who more deserves to be overthrown than Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the President of Equatorial Guinea for the last quarter of a century. By rights, his brutality, corruption and venality should not go unpunished; yet I doubt that the mercenaries who planned to overthrow him, and whom Sir Mark Thatcher is accused of having backed financially, were motivated by a burning ambition to bring democracy and clean government to the volcanoes of Fernando Poo and...

THERE IS enough truth in the devout Muslim’s criticism of the less attractive aspects of Western secular culture to lend plausibility to his call for a return to purity as the answer to the Muslim world’s woes. He sees in the West’s freedom nothing but promiscuity and licence, which is certainly there; but he does not see freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, a spiritual virtue as well as an ultimate source of strength. The devout Muslim fears, with good reason, that to give an inch is sooner or later to concede the whole territory. This fear must be all the...

Multiculturalism rests on the supposition—or better, the dishonest pretense—that all cultures are equal and that no fundamental conflict can arise between the customs, mores, and philosophical outlooks of two different cultures. The multiculturalist preaches that, in an age of mass migration, society can (and should) be a kind of salad bowl, a receptacle for wonderful exotic ingredients from around the world, the more the better, each bringing its special flavor to the cultural mix. For the salad to be delicious, no ingredient should predominate and impose its flavor on the others. Even as a culinary metaphor, this view is wrong:...

The high proportion of Muslim prisoners in France reflects a deeply divided society. Comparison is one of the ways by which we learn about the world; and yet how rarely do we make the kind of comparisons that would put our problems in a wider perspective. We prefer to live in a nationally solipsistic world, which is self-sufficient and flatters us into believing that it is unique: uniquely good or uniquely bad, as the case may be. Uniqueness is the quality that we value above all others, for it reassures us that we have a character or personality of our...

The idea that if someone is prepared to do something truly horrible, he must have a worthy cause remains attractive to liberal intellectuals, who perhaps envy those who take up arms against the sea of troubles that is human existence. Last week’s New Statesman, the British left-wing weekly (for which I also write), provided a fine example of this way of thinking in an article about Islamophobia by travel writer William Dalrymple (no relation). He pointed out that the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted, tortured, and then murdered in Pakistan in early 2002, was a...

A cash dispenser (such as the one in the village of Wooler in Northumberland) gives you twice as much as you asked for and is recorded on your receipt. What do you do? Do you meekly hand in the money to the bank next day, or do you come back for more as soon as possible? And do you tell all your friends to make hay while the sun shines? Needless to say, all Telegraph readers would not take advantage of the bank, because of their deep and fundamental commitment to honesty. But what would the readers of other, lesser...

As soon as I qualified as a doctor, I went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. In the next decade, I worked and traveled a great deal in Africa and couldn't help but reflect upon such matters as the clash of cultures, the legacy of colonialism, and the practical effects of good intentions unadulterated by any grasp of reality. I gradually came to the conclusion that the rich and powerful can indeed have an effect upon the poor and powerless--perhaps can even remake them--but not necessarily (in fact, necessarily not) in the...

My first contact with Islam was in Afghanistan. I had been through Iran overland to get there, but it was in the days of the Shah’s White Revolution, which had given rights to women and had secularized society (with the aid of a little detention, without trial, and torture). In my naive, historicist way, I assumed that secularization was an irreversible process, like the breaking of eggs: that once people had seen the glory of life without compulsory obeisance to the men of God, they would never turn back to them as the sole guides to their lives and politics....

This year is the centenary year of the Entente Cordiale, and I intend to celebrate it by buying a house in France (the acte authentique, the final signing, takes place later this month) and, in the not very distant future, by living there. Whether this will improve Anglo–French relations remains to be seen. France is no terrestrial paradise, but I know from experience of living abroad that other country’s blemishes do not affect you in the same way as your own country’s blemishes, which weigh heavily on your soul. You can observe the failings of foreign politicians with amusement and...

According to the psychiatrist, Heinrich Wilmer, the German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who killed Bernd Brandes and then ate at least 44 pounds of his flesh, is suffering from “emotional problems.” We might say the same, I suppose, of Brandes, who answered Meiwes’s Internet advertisement for “a young, well-built man who wants to be eaten”—though his problems are now past curing. Brandes also had a slightly offbeat sense of humor. On discovering that both he and Meiwes were smokers, he reportedly said, “Good, smoked meat lasts longer.” The case raises interesting questions of principle, even for those who take the thoroughly...

Reasons To Be Cheerful Theodore Dalrymple on the joy of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary — in gooseberries, for example, even in human beingsIn my line of work, it is rather hard to think of reasons to be cheerful. On the contrary, it requires quite a lot of concentrated intellectual effort: one has the sensation of scraping the bottom of one’s skull for thoughts that just aren’t there. Of course, since lamentation about the state of the world is one of life’s unfailing pleasures, the world is a greater source of satisfaction than ever. Another consolation is that most...

In a matter of only a few decades, counselling has replaced fortitude as our culturally approved way of confronting misfortune. A large number of my patients ascribe their current unhappiness to the fact that they were not offered counselling at the time of an unpleasant occurrence, such as a surgical operation or the death of a friend or relative. Every form of human suffering, it seems, is susceptible to the magical powers of therapy. It is the superstition of our age. Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, examines this curious, and by no means harmless, phenomenon in some detail. Only...

The function of this propaganda was not to persuade, much less to inform, but rather to humiliate. To have the grossest lies poured into your ears and eyes all the time, day and night, and yet not to protest their untruth, but on the contrary to participate in their propagation, and to behave as if you believed they were true -- that is the ultimate dehumanization of man, for it robs him of meaningful language. Theodore Dalrymple National Post October 10, 2003 Their Words are as Plastic as Their Cutlery