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Britain is experiencing a spate of murders that suggests a population increasingly unable, or unwilling, to control itself. A recent survey suggested that the British are now more prone to knife-fights than any other people in Europe. Guns have also become fashionable, despite—or is it because of?—stringent laws against them. An emblematic recent murder was that of Krystal Hart, a pregnant 22 year-old, shot with two bullets in the head and then found in her apartment in an up-and-coming part of London, which she shared with her mother. As with any widely publicized murder in Britain these days, an outpouring...

How do bad ideas spread and enter the general stock of received wisdom? One culprit is sloppy or uncritical newspaper reporting. For example, a recent small item on the front page of the Sunday Times, the largest-selling serious Sunday newspaper in Britain, insinuated something both false and dangerous to believe. The headline ran: WANT A FIGHT? SCIENTISTS SAY IT’S ALL IN YOUR GENES. The story begins: “Scientists have discovered an answer to one of the most intractable squabbles in family life—argumentative children are born and not made.” According to the article, new research has found antisocial traits to be inherited...

Dr. Daniels begins predictably witht this: ...Why should Orwell be so desired and desirable, in short so unanswerable, an ally? He is a secular saint, over whose relics everyone squabbles. There are good reasons for this, no doubt. In his essay, Why I Write, published in 1946, Orwell disarmingly tells us that all writers are to some extent egotistical: they desire to seem clever, to be talked about and admired, and to be remembered after their death.... But finally Dr. Daniels points this out: ...But by far the worst aspect of Homage to Catalonia is its strong advocacy of totalitarianism....

When, as a medical student, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film of A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story’s adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called “ultra-violence.” The film had been controversial in Britain; its detractors, who wanted it banned, charged that it glamorized and thereby promoted violence. The young men dressed as droogs seemed to confirm the charge, though of course it is one thing to imitate a form of dress and quite another to imitate behavior. Still,...

I have long been preoccupied by the problem of evil. Not being a philosopher, I have no satisfactory explanation of evil to offer, nor even, indeed, a satisfactory definition of it. For me, evil is rather like poetry was for Doctor Johnson: easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. All I know for certain is that there’s a lot of it about - evil, I mean, not poetry. Why? Is the heart of man irredeemably evil, or at any rate inclined to evil? What are the conditions in which evil may flourish? My medical practice, admittedly of...

The Gift of Language - Theodore Dalrymple No, Dr. Pinker, it’s not just from nature.Now that I’ve retired early from medical practice in a slum hospital and the prison next door, my former colleagues sometimes ask me, not without a trace of anxiety, whether I think that I made the right choice or whether I miss my previous life. They are good friends and fine men, but it is only human nature not to wish unalloyed happiness to one who has chosen a path that diverges, even slightly, from one’s own. Fortunately, I do miss some aspects of my work:...

On a recent visit to New Zealand, I happened across a book that I had long intended to read, In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott. (Before the advent of the Internet, which equalised world prices, New Zealand used to be the best place in the English-speaking world for second-hand books.) The name probably faintly rings a bell. He was a career criminal, and had spent the vast majority of his life in penal institutions of one kind or another. At the time he first wrote to Norman Mailer, he was serving a sentence of up to...

Theodore Dalrymple: The Frivolity of Evil - 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...

As alternatives to the NHS are considered, which model of healthcare will Britain adopt? The French, the Swiss, the German or the American? Theodore Dalrymple thinks it might well be the Zairean - Theodore Dalrymple May 3, 2006 The Zairean model of healthcare as pioneered by Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko is gradually being adopted in Britain - or so argues Theodore Dalrymple. This model is a simple one - the rulers receive the best healthcare money can buy, the mass of the populace get an aspirin if they are lucky. In Britain, the mass of the populace will do rather...

Not long ago in the hospital in which I once worked, a young male nurse was asked by the administration to remove the ironmongery with which he had recently adorned his face and ears. He was outraged by this assault on his inalienable right to mutilate himself in any way that he chose, which he believed to be narrow-minded. He was, after all, the owner of his face and ears in fee simple; they were his to dispose of as he saw fit. As it happens, he was a decent and dedicated young man, albeit one with the bad taste...

"Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, f--k the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull,...

This essay asks two questions: Are Europeans in the throes of passive cultural and political suicide as they ignore the threat of fanatical Muslims in their communities? And if so, have the leaders of the Democratic Party in America joined the Europeans in sleepwalking towards a precipice? My main source for answering the first question is a book review titled Suicide of the West, by Theodore Dalrymple which appeared in the Clairmont Review of Books, Fall 2006. Dalrymple reviewed three books in pursuit of his theme of the "Suicide of the West" — namely, Why the Continent's Crisis is America's...

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...

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...

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...

The week following the Muslim protests in London against the Danish cartoons—with marchers carrying signs calling for the beheading of infidels—other Muslims demonstrated to claim that Islam really meant peace and tolerance. While their implicit recognition that peace and tolerance are preferable to strife and bigotry did these Muslims personal honor, the claim regarding Islam was both historically and intellectually preposterous. Only someone ignorant of the most elementary facts could believe such a thing. From the first, Islam was a religion of pillage, violence, and compulsion, which it justified and glorified. And it is certainly not “the evident truth of...

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...