Free Republic

EVERY doctor receives a large, and growing, number of free publications of varying degrees of usefulness. Undoubtedly the least useful - that is to say, the most completely useless - is the NHS Magazine, a patronising glossy compilation, entirely devoid of worthwhile informational content, upon which the Department of Health has seen fit to waste £900,000 of taxpayers' money.The magazine is pure propaganda, of course: spin made print. The NHS of the eponymous magazine is a land in which all faces are smiling, in which everyone looks forward to a glorious and untroubled future, in which the plan will be ...

Whenever we learn of events of world-shaking significance, of catastrophes or massacres, we are inclined not only to feel ashamed (all too briefly) of our querulous preoccupation with our own minor tribulations but also to question the wider value of all our activities. I do not know whether people who are faced by death in a few seconds' time see their lives flash before them, as they are said to do, and pass final judgment upon them; but whenever I read something about the Khmer Rouge, for example, or the genocide in Rwanda, I reflect for a time upon my ...

British tolerance of Muslim culture should not include condoning the savage treatment of young girls If it is not exactly a truth, it is at least a hope universally acknowledged that all cultures are fundamentally compatible in their values, and that cultural cross-fertilisation necessarily results in a flowering of the arts and sciences. In short, the more cultures, the merrier. There can be little doubt, of course, that the transformation of Britain into a cosmopolis has improved the quality of its food out of all recognition. Anyone who remembers the dire nature of British cuisine in its virtually unchallenged heyday ...

<p>By Theodore Dalrymple. Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician and contributing editor to City Journal.</p> <p>It was H.G. Wells who, only a few years after the development of the germ theory of disease, first realized the value of bacteria for terrorist purposes. In 1895, he published a story called "The Stolen Bacillus," in which an anarchist revolutionary worms his way into the confidence of a bacteriologist in order to obtain cholera germs to put in London's water supply.</p>

Rarely does the British Journal of Psychiatry produce in the reader anything other than déjà vu at best and ennui at worst; but an article in the July issue was startling in its implications and accordingly won wide publicity. Researchers carried out a double-blind trial of the effect of vitamin and mineral supplements on the behavior of prisoners aged 18 to 21. Two hundred and thirty-one such prisoners were divided randomly into two groups: one that received real vitamins, one that got only a placebo. Those who received the real vitamins committed about a third fewer disciplinary offenses and acts...

In a brilliant and troubling essay in Spectator, Theodore Dalrymple, chronicler of Life at the Bottom, a fine study of the underclass in England, kicks off an excursion into the deepest reaches of moral and political economy with this stunning first paragraph. If freedom entails responsibility, a fair proportion of mankind would prefer servitude; for it is far, far better to receive three meals a day and be told what to do than to take the consequences of one's own self-destructive choices. It is, moreover, a truth universally unacknowledged that freedom without understanding of what to do with it is...

France’s Headscarf Problem How should a western democracy accommodate Islam? | 23 April 2003 The French Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the first man for a long time to hold that post who has shown the courage and determination to confront France’s growing social problems. He has put policemen back on the beat; he is testing drivers of crashed cars for the presence of cannabis in their urine. But he made a rod with which to beat his own back in creating the Union of French Islamic Organizations as an intermediary between French Muslims and the French government....

A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended. In no country has the process of vulgarization gone further than in Britain: in this , at least, we lead the world. A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites and its unbridled and antisocial attempts to satisfy them. The mass drunkenness seen on weekends in the center...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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:...

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...

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...

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...

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...