On fuckery

Roger Hallam

Crudity will set you free

Dalrymple writes:

Secular holiness is an unpleasant trait, and it is always a pleasure to see the unfrocking of a secular bishop.

Roger Hallam is the founder of his evangelical church, the Extinction Rebellion. In an interview with the Hamburg newspaper the Zeit, Hallam declared that genocides were

like, a normal event. [Das ist ein fast normales Ereignis is the Zeit‘s translation.]

The Belgians, for instance,

went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated [sic] it. [Die Belgier kamen im späten 19. Jahrhundert in den Kongo und haben ihn dezimiert.]

In this context, the Holocaust was

just another fuckery in human history. [Nur ein weiterer Scheiß in der Menschheitsgeschichte is the Zeit‘s elegant rendering.]

Jean-Marie Le Pen

Dalrymple comments:

Hallam might appear to have joined the camp of the anti-Semites such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called the Holocaust a detail of history, but he was not claiming that the Holocaust did not happen or that it was not serious; he was saying that it was not unique and that we should not continue to say it was unique. There has long been debate as to whether the Holocaust is typologically comparable to, for example, the Armenian genocide or the mass killings in Cambodia. No doubt something can be said on both sides of the question; I do not think anything important turns on it. The Rwandan genocide would be neither better nor worse than it was, whether it were the same as, similar to or distinct from the Holocaust.

What is appalling about Hallam’s words, Dalrymple avers,

is their crudity. The vulgarity of his expression was matched by the imprecision of his thought. The word fuckery is extremely lazy, especially when used by someone with pretensions to seriousness. It is a bit like seeing the Himalayas and saying ‘Very nice.’ A cup of tea and Bach’s St Matthew Passion are also very nice.

Nice.

It is hardly to be expected, Dalrymple says,

that a man using such a term to describe the wilful murder of millions of people with a view to exterminating their kind would be a very clear thinker.

A fucked-up educational system

But it is indicative of a

a reduction in basic educational standards. People have always written tosh, but after many years of compulsory education of the entire population, one might have hoped for a better mastery of language and grasp of what constitutes an argument.

Dalrymple says that to be reduced to using the word fuckery in the face of a catastrophe in history of any scale is symptomatic of

• debasement of language
• limitation of vocabulary
• stunted imagination
• impoverishment of thought or inability to think

The degradation of public discourse in the West

is evident, and one is tempted to say planned and deliberate. It is as if the educated classes had been trying for years to demonstrate their sympathetic identification with the lower orders by adopting what they supposed, wrongly, were their vulgar habits of speech.

Linguistic Luddism

Take Tribes, by the highly praised playwright Nina Raine, in which she depicts life in an upper-middle-class household for the benefit of an upper-middle-class audience. Opening the script at random, to page 28, Dalrymple finds the following expressions within the space of 15 lines:

• ‘I want my fucking pen back.’
• ‘You thieving little shit!’
• ‘Fuck you!’
• My arse!

Dalrymple comments that such language, more or less constant throughout the play, is the reverse of expressive except in the most primitive sense, but the intelligentsia would probably consider that to draw attention to the fact is

• absurd
• retrograde
• censorious
• sanctimonious
• trying to turn the clock back
• narrow-minded
• bigoted
• linguistic Luddism
• inhibited

He concludes:

On this view, refinement will constrain or imprison you. But, then, we should not be surprised by a man who cannot tell the difference between genocide and pollution.

Scheiße for brains

Friend of would-be génocidaires

Dalrymple writes that Jeremy Corbyn’s

failure to condemn anti-Semitism in his party

and his

penchant for consorting in friendly fashion with extremist anti-Zionists of genocidal instincts

are cause for anxiety among British Jews to an extent not known since the time of Mosley.

No one can say for certain whether the man’s anti-Semitism is

a sincerely held prejudice or a matter of electoral calculation. (There are more than 10 times as many Muslims in Britain as Jews, and it makes electoral sense to appeal more to Muslims.)

Roots of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism

Dalrymple writes that Jeremy Corbyn’s

failure to condemn anti-Semitism in his party

and his

penchant for consorting in friendly fashion with extremist anti-Zionists of genocidal instincts

are cause for anxiety among British Jews to an extent not known since the time of Mosley.

No one can say for certain whether the man’s anti-Semitism is

a sincerely held prejudice or a matter of electoral calculation. (There are more than 10 times as many Muslims in Britain as Jews, and it makes electoral sense to appeal more to Muslims.)

Corbyn the anti-Semite

The Enemy of Humanity Kalen Ockerman 2018. Mural in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields

Dalrymple reports that Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s far-Left-populist opposition party, recently mounted a defence of a mural depicting Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of naked minorities. Corbyn wrote:

Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.

Dalrymple points out that this sort of thing is

cause for anxiety among British Jews unknown since the rise — and thankfully swift fall — of Sir Oswald Mosley.

Nelson Rockefeller and Diego Rivera

Vladimir Lenin

Sir Oswald Mosley and friend

Roderick Spode (Lord Sidcup)

Man at the Crossroads Mural at the Rockefeller Center. Diego Rivera, 1933. Destroyed 1934

American Progress Josep Maria Sert, 1937 — the mural that replaced Rivera’s at the Rockefeller Center

Old-fashioned Jew-hating talk and action on the Left

Dalrymple writes:

When Professor Mona Baker of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology dismissed two Israeli academics from the editorial board of two academic journals, the Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts, on the grounds that they were Israeli, not a peep of protest was heard from British academics.

He points out that

if she had dismissed the academics on the grounds that they were Syrian, Rwandan Hutu, or Muslim, a great fuss would have ensued.

Dalrymple notes that the Middle East conflict

has given respectability to old prejudices, especially in British academic circles.

He reports that 200 British academics, some eminent,

have selected Israel, of all the countries in the world, as the object of a total boycott, as if it were a uniquely evil state. While one can disagree strongly with the Israeli government’s policies without being anti-Semitic, the selection of Israel alone for a boycott in a world in which atrocity and suppression of freedom are routine must arouse suspicions of pre-existing animus—that is to say, of old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

The Leftist populist Mélenchon’s appeal to envy and hatred

Dalrymple reports that Jean-Luc Mélenchon recently spoke to a crowd demonstrating against Emmanuel Macron’s proposed changes to labour laws, and

recited the fact (if it was a fact) that France had more millionaires than any other country in Europe.

This was, Dalrymple points out,

an appeal to envy and hatred—the kind of envy and hatred that has provoked at least as much mass murder as racial hatred.

Indeed, Dalrymple notes,

the two have often been closely associated, for what anti-Semite ever fails to draw attention to the economic success of Jews?

The word ‘millionaire’ as Mélenchon — himself a millionaire, of course — uttered it was intended to evoke,

by a Pavlovian reflex, an exploitative, parasitic, fat, lazy, cynical, privileged, dishonest, heartless and undeservedly lucky person, possibly still wearing a black tail coat and silk top hat, with a cigar stuck firmly between his fat and sybaritic lips.

Harley Street paved with gold

Harley Street: view from Cavendish Square

Iatrophobia is a serious medical condition (focal sepsis is very often present), though it is sometimes highly treatable — and at the very least can be managed and palliated — if the patient is constrained to undergo a colectomy and adjuvant frontal leucotomy along with inguinal orchiectomy and Metrazol-induced convulsion therapy.

The psychotic delusional condition of iatromisia, on the other hand, though it can be treated with the above methods — applied perforce with much greater intensity and with the addition of comprehensive salvage insulin coma therapy (Insulinschockbehandlung) — is sadly not so tractable.

Harley Street: view from Cavendish Square

Indeed, writes Dalrymple, carcinoma iatromisia is metastatising,

not among the general public, which on the whole retains its respect for and trust in doctors (a fact borne out by all the surveys), but among the intelligentsia — literary folk, journalists and so on.

This kind of people,

perhaps because their own crafts are held in such low public esteem, believe that doctors should be taken down a peg or two.

Harley Street: view from Cavendish Square

Dalrymple says there are two main charges against doctors, particularly hospital consultants:

• they are on the golf course most of the time
• they are making a fortune from their private practices

These two complaints, Dalrymple points out,

are not strictly compatible. Doctors are often quite clever people, but even they have not mastered the art of being in two places at once, and the only way of making money out of private practice is to work very hard at it. Doctors are not paid for a birdie three or an eagle two.

On the part of journalists and the literati, Dalrymple observes,

141 Harley Street

the primordial antagonism towards doctors is not fully rational: it is a little like anti-Semitism.

Jews, to the anti-Semite, are simultaneously

• capitalist plutocrats
• communist agitators

In the same way, doctors, to the iatromisiac, are simultaneously

• incredibly lazy
• ferociously avaricious

Crœsus of consultants: Lord Horder at 141 Harley Street. Note the framed photo of Neville Chamberlain

How fortunes are made effortlessly from private practice

The golf course is to iatromisia

what ritual murder is to the anti-Semite: a myth to keep a hatred warm.

Dalrymple explains that

doctors as a group are better than many groups of comparable size.

Of his own professional circumstances he writes:

I am on duty one night in five, and have been for years. I do no private practice, apart from some medico-legal work. I never refuse to get up in the middle of the night to see a patient, and if I do get up, I still have to go to work the following morning, however tired I may feel. My pay is adequate, and I do not complain about it: my wife, who is also a doctor, and I live well but not extravagantly. Certainly, many people with less strenuous lives earn much more than we do. As far as I am aware, I have not lost a single patient through carelessness in all those years.

Harley Street looking north from Weymouth Street

And what Dalrymple does

is only what thousands of other doctors do.

To be told that he belongs to

an avaricious, power-mad, privileged and lazy cabal by people whose prerogatives are distinctly those of the harlot sticks a little in my throat.

Dalrymple does not claim to love humanity,

Harley Street looking north from Weymouth Street

but I do get up at 3am if I am required to do so. It is far, far easier and less demanding to write an editorial; I know because I have done both.

Iatromisia, he points out,

coheres with governments’ increasing fear of professions that escape their complete control. Disproportionate criticism of the medical profession by journalists and authors serves governments’ goal of a totally managed society.

91 Harley Street. Note the parked Bentley. The chauffeur keeps the engine running, ready to take the consultant to golf course, club or bordello at any time of day

91 Harley Street

13 Harley Street

Consulting-room at 13 Harley Street. Note the painting of a young Margaret Thatcher

73 Harley Street. Architect: W. Henry White

73 Harley Street. ‘The French Loire style, brick with plenty of terracotta decoration on a small, playful scale’ of which there are several specimens in and around Harley Street, ‘characterised by heavy curved door canopies, shallow bay windows, Tudor mullions and transomes, steep gables’. (Pevsner)

83 Harley Street

Fireplace in a consulting-room at 83 Harley Street. The consultant stands before it, delivers a homily — with the patient maintaining a respectful silence — on bowel regulation or the virtue of broccoli ingestion, then it’s off to see the mistress in her Belgravia flat, or else to the links or the club. Yes, life is good

88 Harley Street

88 Harley Street

92 Harley Street

92 Harley Street

Harley Street viewed from Cavendish Square

Fate of the Ferrarese Jews

Dalrymple points out that Mussolini,

whom some of the Jewish bourgeoisie had strongly supported in the early days of his regime, opportunistically enacted antisemitic laws to curry favour with Hitler.

Some 96 of the 300 Jews of the city of Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, were deported to Poland, and only five of these survived.

Bassani and his wife Valeria in 1943

Dalrymple writes that the novelist Giorgio Bassani intends the reader of his Gli occhiali d’oro (1958)

to draw a parallel between the way in which [the homosexual protagonist] Dr Fadigati is treated and the increasing persecution of the narrator [a Jewish student].

Cimitero ebraico di Ferrara: the entrance, and Bassani’s grave

We are so wise and nice

Therefore what goes on in the rest of the world cannot affect us: Dalrymple on complacency, arrogance and the little fairytale country

How many divisions has Myra Hess?

Hess performs at lunchtime concert, Barry Room, National Gallery, 1940

No one thought that, writes Dalrymple, as she played Mozart at the National Gallery.

The quiet heroism of those concerts and recitals, broadcast to the nation, was a symbol, all the more potent because Hess was Jewish, and the enemy’s anti-Semitism was central to its depraved view of the world; and because the music she played, one of the highest peaks of human achievement, emanated from the land of the enemy’s leader, who represented the depths of barbarism.