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Bonfire of the Vanities - By THEODORE DALRYMPLE - November 7, 2005 When it comes to rioting, there's no 35-hour week in France. It may be difficult nowadays to get people in what the French call the Hexagon to work on Friday afternoons, but not to riot, at least not in the "sensitive" quartiers that surround most towns and cities. The productivity of the rioters has been increasing rapidly of late, and France looks like it will be breaking its record for burnt-out cars: 1,295 on Saturday night alone and 750 on Friday night, 500 the night before, and 300...

All terrorists, presumably, know the dangers that they run, accepting them as an occupational hazard; given Man’s psychological makeup—or at least the psychological makeup of certain young men—these dangers may act as an attraction, not a deterrent. But only a few terrorists use their own deaths as an integral means of terrorizing others. They seem to be a breed apart, with whom the rest of humanity can have little or nothing in common. Certainly they sow panic more effectively than other terrorists. Those who leave bombs in public places and then depart, despicable as they are, presumably still have attachments...

Everyone knows la douce France: the France of wonderful food and wine, beautiful landscapes, splendid châteaux and cathedrals. More tourists (60 million a year) visit France than any country in the world by far. Indeed, the Germans have a saying, not altogether reassuring for the French: “to live as God in France.” Half a million Britons have bought second homes there; many of them bore their friends back home with how they order these things better in France. But there is another growing, and much less reassuring, side to France. I go to Paris about four times a year and...

Thursday 03 November 2005 How the French riot Theodore Dalrymple Les Vans, Ardèche For a patriot like me, it is a great consolation to know that other societies are undergoing precisely the kind of decomposition, if a little more slowly and with slightly more resistance to it, in which we so clearly lead the world. This reassures me that, eventually, nowhere will be better than Britain, and then I will be able once again, like George III, to rejoice in the name of Briton. In France, for example, it was not many years ago that people with tattoos were infrequently...

All terrorists, presumably, know the dangers that they run, accepting them as an occupational hazard; given Man’s psychological makeup—or at least the psychological makeup of certain young men—these dangers may act as an attraction, not a deterrent. But only a few terrorists use their own deaths as an integral means of terrorizing others. They seem to be a breed apart, with whom the rest of humanity can have little or nothing in common. Certainly they sow panic more effectively than other terrorists. Those who leave bombs in public places and then depart, despicable as they are, presumably still have attachments...

We can usually sympathize with one or another party to a dispute: one is usually more in the right—or less in the wrong—than the other. But with the breakdown of accepted conventions, it increasingly happens that neither side arouses our sympathies. Take a recent case in Sweden, where a lesbian couple wished to have children. An understanding and liberal-minded male friend agreed to donate his sperm, and three children were born to one of the two women between 1992 and 1996. But then relations between the two women deteriorated, and they split up. The mother of the children found herself...

An artist asks: Should Europe want Turkey; should Turkey want Europe?The power of art to shock, not in the trivial sense of drawing attention to an artist’s craving for notoriety, but of making us acutely and uncomfortably aware of the ambiguities and contradictions of the human condition, remains undiminished. All that is required for an artist to exert that power is imagination, talent, intelligence, and seriousness of purpose.A photograph exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial by the Turkish artist, Burak Delier, captures the existential dilemma confronting both his own country and Europe with brilliant precision. It shows a Muslim woman, heavily...

All too sad to explain In the days when murderers in Britain could still be executed by hanging, the Home Office used to receive five unsolicited applications a week for the position of hangman (not even the most rigidly doctrinal feminist has ever demanded that we use the word hangperson). The desire to kill one’s fellow beings in the pursuit of a good cause, in this case the preservation of law and order and the prevention of murder, is therefore quite widespread, even under the most civilized conditions. There is no doubt that a good execution has its attractions. Once...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of his new collection of essays Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses. FP: Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, welcome to Frontpage Magazine. It is a pleasure to have you with us. Dalrymple: Thank you very much for having invited me. FP: It's hard to know where to start Dr. Dalrymple, as your essays evoke so many profound themes. I guess we can begin with your observations on the root causes of many of our social ills. You discuss how in...

I nearly fell out of my Barcalounger Sunday morning, watching The McLaughlin Group. The old Jesuit had Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, Tony Blankley, and Clarence Page (who is black) sitting around. They were talking about Hurricane Katrina, of course. Suddenly, McLaughlin turned to Page and said: “Why the correlation between black and poor?” Good grief, I thought, you can’t ask that. People get taken off the air for less. Poor Clarence Page didn’t know whether to spit or wind his watch. He mumbled something that wasn’t even close to being an answer. McLaughlin, realizing his gaffe, quickly and deftly steered...

The French socialist philosopher who was much ridiculed by Marx as a sentimental petit-bourgeois moralist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, is now remembered mainly for his aphorism, so good that he repeated it many times, “Property is theft.” But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the reverse of this celebrated but preposterous dictum has actually become true: Theft is property. Pictures of the looting that followed the devastation in New Orleans have been flashed around the world. Everyone is, or at least pretends to be, shocked and horrified, as if the breakdown of law and order couldn’t happen here, wherever here happens to...

The children of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent make up a quarter of all British medical students, 12 times their proportion in the general population. They are likewise overrepresented in the law, science, and economics faculties of our universities. Among the Indian immigrants who arrived in the country with next to nothing, moreover, there are now reportedly some thousands of millionaires. Despite its reputation for being ossified and class-ridden, then, Britain is still a country in which social mobility is possible—provided, of course, that a belief that Britain is an ossified and class-ridden society doesn't completely stifle personal effort. It...

If a prisoner walks into my consulting room in the prison with a stick, he’s a sex offender; if he has gold front teeth, he’s a drug dealer; and if he’s reading Wittgenstein, he’s in for fraud: for it is virtually a law of our penal establishments that fraud and philosophy are what literary theorists like to call metonymic. When you work in a prison as I do, white-collar criminals come as something of a light relief. At last someone with whom you can have a disinterested, abstract intellectual conversation! No more talk about alcoholic mothers, brutal stepfathers, and terrible...

Interview with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple Posted April 11, 2005 Dr. Theodore Dalrymple is one of the few writers who excels in practically every endeavor attempted and never descends into mediocrity, regardless of his subject matter. Along with being an established writer, he is also a psychiatrist. Currently, he is a Contributing Editor for City Journal where he generally writes a couple of essays per quarterly issue, one is entitled, “Oh, to be in England”. Dr. Dalrymple is a frequent contributor to The New Criterion as well. He writes for a variety of publications including The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph....

Madrasas are Islamic colleges accused by the US of incubating terrorism and the attacks of 9/11. From Pakistan, William Dalrymple investigates the threat Halfway along the dangerous road to Kohat - deep in the lawless tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and where Osama Bin Laden is widely believed to be sheltering - we passed a small whitewashed shrine that had recently been erected by the side of the road: "That is where the army ambushed and killed two al-Qaeda men escaping from Afghanistan," said Javed Paracha. "Local people soon began to see the two martyrs in their dreams. Now...

Second opinion - Theodore Dalrymple Having spent so long, if not in the lower depths exactly, at least among their inhabitants, it is not surprising, perhaps, that I see the lower depths wherever I go. My experience haunts me, and I am on the lookout for them. For example, not long ago I was in a bookshop in a chic part of Paris when I picked up a book by a young woman who called herself simply Leila. The title of the book was Mariée de force (Forced Marriage), and the cover showed the eyes of a young woman peering...

Trying to Offend A little common sense would have eased a conflict between free expression and community sensitivities. | 5 January 2005For some of our intelligentsia, there could be no more reassuring proof of theater’s continuing importance in our society than a riot occasioned by a play. Recently in Birmingham, a mob attacked the local Repertory Theatre, forcing the closure of a play and the evacuation of the audience. The play in question was by a Sikh woman playwright, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. She tells the story a Sikh woman, raped in a Sikh temple by a man who had...

That the British are now a nation of drunken brutes, justly despised throughout the world wherever they congregate in any numbers, is so obvious a fact that it should require no repetition. A brief visit to the centre of any British town or city on a Saturday night - or indeed, almost any night - will confirm it for those who are still in doubt. There they will see scenes of charmless vulgarity, in which thousands of scantily clad, lumpen sluts scream drunkenly, and men vomit proudly in the gutters. The Government, whose solution to any social problem is to...

Second Opinion - Theodore Dalrymple Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts. In my own small way, I also sometimes empathise. Last week, for example, a patient came to see me who seemed very nervous. He looked around him as though he expected at any...

Second Opinion - Theodore Dalrymple Occasionally I walk home from the prison. Usually I take a taxi. Very rarely indeed do I drive; I don’t much care for parking within a mile radius of an establishment from which car thieves are released daily. I turned on the wireless and an unctuously sermonising Church of England voice emerged. ‘We pray for our world,’ it said, ‘especially those parts of it afflicted with violence.’ I thought for a moment that he was referring to the bed-sits and housing estates near my home, as well as the casualty department of my hospital. But...