Our Culture, What's Left of It

A must-read interview with Theodore Dalrymple, a British doctor who practices medicine at an inner-city hospital and prison. He is the author of the recent book, Our Culture, What's Left of It. Here's a good excerpt:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

One more quote, this one from a separate article by Mr. Dalrymple in City Journal. In a few deft paragraphs, he destroys a militant feminist's pathetic excuses concerning why she and her comrades have remained silent about Muslim misogyny:

The silliest paragraph in the [Sunday Times] article was this one: “The situation of a Muslim woman in Britain today is not so different from that of an English woman in the 1950s, in the era of ‘no wife of mine works,’ when virginity was at a premium, when to be a ‘spinster’ over the age of 25 was a humiliation, to be barren was a ‘tragedy,’ when contraception was largely unavailable; when a woman was defined as a person who had babies and to whom many professions were closed.”

It is difficult to say what is worse in this passage, the self-pity (“I too was a victim, and know what it is like to be oppressed”) or the complete lack of imagination as to what it is like to be locked in a house all day for years on end and not permitted to leave except under the closest supervision, or to be taken to Pakistan at the age of 15 to be forcibly married to a first cousin you have never seen before and who is deeply repellent to you, knowing that a refusal might well lead to beatings and even to death.

The inability of western intellectuals to distinguish between the major suffering of others and their own minor irritations and frustrations goes back a long way: Virginia Woolf is a prime example...

The guy has a positive gift for cutting to the quick of modern leftist hypocrisy.