Theodore Dalrymple

Not with a Bang but a Whimper: the Politics and Culture of Decline

"Liberals ... have destroyed the family and any notion of progress or improvement. They have made a world in which the only freedom is self-indulgence, a world from which -most terrible of all- prison can sometimes be a liberation."

A keen observer and one who can write so concisely, and express himself this well, has to be treasured by anyone who enjoys the art of reading: "I miss, for instance, the sudden illumination into the worldview of my patients that their replies to simple questions sometimes gave me." This simple idea would have cost me a whole to explain. The author has now retired from his psychiatric work in the slums of Britain, and has moved to the hardly safer land of France.

I specially enjoyed the chapters on Anthony Burgess's The Clockwork Orange, the futuristic story that proved so true in today's Britain. One of the sentences that describes in a nutshell the state of the Western world is: "So thoroughly have we drunk at the wells of collectivism that we see the state always as the solution to any problem, never as an obstacle to be overcome. One can gauge how completely collectivism has entered our soul -so that we are now a people of the government, for the government, by the government."

And how about this one for the state of our education system: "The intelligent are not taught what they could learn, while the unintelligent are taught what they cannot learn."

Dalrymple pinpoints the hypocrisy of the left, and how easily they get away with it among our modern bread-and-circus lovers: "One consequence of the liberal intelligentsia's song march through the institutions is the acceptance of the category of Thoughtcrime. On the other hand, political correctness permits genuine incitement to murder -such as the BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM placards ? to go completely unpunished. Other people, other customs."

And how the state of of law -even- has retreated from their role of protecting us to securing their purity of heart in an liberally brainwashed society: "Proving their purity of heart is now more important to them than securing the safety of our streets."

The book is written in the calm but amusing tone of this very cultured -while still down to earth- man, far from the rage of Mrs Fallaci, but equally shrewd observer.