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Published on The Brussels Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com) Dalrymple on Decadence, Europe, America and Islam By Paul Belien Created 2006-09-16 23:50 An interview with Theodore DalrympleAnthony Daniels is a 57-year old recently retired psychiatrist. He began his career in Africa and worked for many years as a hospital and prison doctor in Birmingham before he moved to the South of France in 2005. Using the pen name Theodore Dalrymple he writes about the collapse of Western civilization in Europe, analyzing the social pathologies of our time. When he chose his pen name, he says, he opted for a name that would evoke...

One of the longest-running soap operas in Britain is that of the supposed mutual antagonism of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As is traditionally the case, one of these office-holders lives at No. 10, and the other at No. 11 Downing Street. Mr. Brown is said to want to swap No. 11 for No. 10, but Mr. Blair is said to be determined to stop him from doing so. Now it looks as if Mr. Brown is about to triumph. It is not unknown for next-door neighbours to exhibit hostility toward one...

British passengers on a flight from Malaga to Manchester did a little impromptu terrorist profiling recently. Some already on the aircraft got off, while those waiting to get on refused to do so, until the flight crew removed from the plane two apparently South Asian young men who seemed to be talking Arabic. The press has widely condemned the action of the skittish passengers. After all, the two young men had gone through searches like everybody else. Besides, there are many Muslims and very few suicide bombers. The passengers would no doubt have argued—rightly—that security services have not always been...

While I was on a visit to Toronto recently, police arrested 17 men, the oldest of them 43 but most much younger, on charges of plotting a terrorist attack. They wished, apparently, to blow up the parliament in Ottawa and publicly behead the prime minister. Cops caught them in the process of buying three times as much material for explosives as Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Reporting the arrests, the New York Times called the men “South Asians”—though one of them was an Egyptian, two were Somali, and most had been born in Canada—thus concealing by an...

For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence. An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be...

On a London street, “social” housing encourages antisocial egotism. An interesting experiment took place on the London street where I have an apartment. A few years ago, the borough council permitted a developer to build six apartment complexes across from my building, on the condition that he reserve three of them for “social”—what Americans would call public—housing. The architecture of the buildings, while deeply undistinguished, is far from the worst of the genre and certainly does not suffer from the gigantism that was once the vogue. The street remains leafy, and edges on a fashionable area. A two-bedroom apartment in...

Theodore Dalrymple - Subsidized Stupidity Rather than elevate the culture, the BBC degrades it—at public expense. 21 July 2006 For a license to receive television broadcasts in their homes, British households must pay an annual fee of about $200 (soon to rise), which subsidizes the once famous but now increasingly infamous BBC. This broadcasting system exemplifies two of the guiding principles of contemporary British public life: the active promotion of vulgarity and the shameless looting of the public purse. Conservative Party head David Cameron recently sat down for an interview on the BBC with Jonathan Ross, whom the organization values...

July 07, 2006, 7:46 a.m. Failure of IntelligenceIf stupid hurt, we’d all be in a world of pain. Well, ow. By Denis Boyles Surely, after Christmas, the July 4th weekend must be the Internet equivalent of August in Paris. Nobody’s around but us tourists. So you may have missed the results of a poll published in the Daily Telegraph last weekend showing “Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.” Such is the fury of an ex-, I suppose, but it’s good...

Strolling with my dog down the road in the village in North Wales where I have been staying for the last month, I passed a small boy aged about six, dressed in a green school uniform, who was walking on the top of a stone wall, his hands outstretched to form airplane wings. His mother was behind him, watching. “That’s a nice little dog,” he said in a strong Welsh accent. “Yes, he is,” I replied. “My dog’s black and white and a little smaller than yours,” he said. “What’s he called?” I asked. “Jack,” he said, and laughed, returning...

Theodore Dalrymple: From stiff upper lip to clenched jaws - Youthful embrace of human rights is destroying British dignity and decorum May 06, 2006 WHAT a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom. Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone...

Theodore Dalrymple: Growing Up British - The sordid is all too typical. 28 April 2006 Not long ago, a defense lawyer asked me to prepare a medical report on a young woman, aged 18, who had nastily assaulted an elderly relative, with whom she was living. She had been drunk at the time, and in fact was already an alcoholic of some six years’ standing. She told me that when she and her friends were 12, they would ask adults to buy alcohol for them, since they could not legally buy it themselves. Apparently, many of the adults they asked...

It’s This Bad - Theodore Dalrymple Returning briefly to England from France for a speaking engagement, I bought three of the major dailies to catch up on the latest developments in my native land. The impression they gave was of a country in the grip of a thoroughgoing moral frivolity. In a strange inversion of proper priorities, important matters are taken lightly and trivial ones taken seriously. This is not the charming or uplifting frivolity of Feydeau’s farces or Oscar Wilde’s comedies; it is the frivolity of real decadence, bespeaking a profound failure of nerve bound to have disastrous consequences...

It’s This Bad: Theodore Dalrymple Returning briefly to England from France for a speaking engagement, I bought three of the major dailies to catch up on the latest developments in my native land. The impression they gave was of a country in the grip of a thoroughgoing moral frivolity. In a strange inversion of proper priorities, important matters are taken lightly and trivial ones taken seriously. This is not the charming or uplifting frivolity of Feydeau’s farces or Oscar Wilde’s comedies; it is the frivolity of real decadence, bespeaking a profound failure of nerve bound to have disastrous consequences for...

My parents had conflicting views about the nature and origin of good manners. My father took the Romantic view that they were the expression of man’s natural goodness of heart and that they therefore emerged spontaneously—that is, if they emerged at all. If they didn’t, it was because of the social injustice that inhibited or destroyed natural goodness. My mother took the classical view that good manners were a matter of discipline, training, and habit and that goodness of heart would, at least to an extent, follow in their wake. The older I grow, the more decisively I take my...

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....

THE SIGHT OF MILLIONS of Frenchmen, predominantly young, demonstrating in deep sympathy and solidarity with themselves, is one that will cause amusement and satisfaction on the English side of the Channel. Everyone enjoys the troubles of his neighbours. And at least our public service strikers just stay away from work, and spend the day peacefully performing the rites of their religion, DIY, and not making a terrible nuisance of themselves. In fact, many of them are probably less of a public nuisance if they stay at home than if they go to work. Of course, demonstrating in huge numbers is...

Viva VoltaireIn the cartoon controversy, it’s the French who’ve been courageous, the Americans and British spineless. 10 February 2006 This time, the French have put the British and Americans to shame. From the outset of the crisis over the Danish caricatures, they have vigorously defended the right of free expression, unlike the British and Americans, whose pretence that they “understand” Muslim outrage has fooled no one and given the fanatics the (correct) impression of weakness and lack of conviction—and thus encouraged them. Two French satirical weeklies with Voltairean aplomb, Le Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo, have published a series of...

Unenlightened - As extremist Muslims react to the Danish cartoons, the Enlightenment doesn’t look so bad, huh? THEODORE DALRYMPLE Where do you get a Danish flag to burn when you live in Damascus or Karachi? I am not sure that I would find it easy to come by one, and I live in France, a fellow member of the European Union. In fact, I don’t think I could even find a French flag to burn in the streets of my nearest town (though I confess that I am not an experienced flag-burner). Moreover, Damascus is not the kind of place...

When the Taleban blew up the ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, there were no spontaneous or state-sponsored demonstrations in the Islamic world demanding that the feelings of Buddhists should be spared. Furthermore, the cartoonists and commentators of the Middle East have never been sparing with their insults of other people or of other people’s beliefs. In Egypt, one of the more tolerant of Middle Eastern countries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is available everywhere on the streets, often with accompanying caricatures straight out of Der Sturmer. My copy of The Protocols was printed and published in Kuwait,...

City JournalNo Beheadings, Please, We’re British.Appeasing Muslim extremists means surrendering Western liberties.Theodore Dalrymple 6 February 2006 The weekend edition of Le Monde carried on its front page a startling photograph of a masked protester in London, holding up a placard demanding the death of those who insult Islam. Policemen flanked him on either side, as if protecting him from the vicious assaults of cartoonists. Nothing could have captured better the cowardly and pusillanimous response of the British government to the crisis deliberately stirred up in many Muslim countries four months after the publication in a Danish newspaper of 12...