Britishers are slaves to the State

Britain, writes Dalrymple, faces

a cycle of high taxation and expenditure, with low growth necessitating ever higher taxation and expenditure. Much of the educated class already believes in the moral value of taxation irrespective of its effects. The British are trapped into slavery to their State — a State more incompetent, and more corrupt, than its European equivalents or even than the European Union.

An apparatchik class

will prosper among the embers of the slowly expiring economy.

The country

has been living beyond its means for 40 years at least, borrowing to sustain levels of consumption that it has not earned.

A clue to the despair that many people feel in Britain is

the incapacity and lack of courage of the political class, no matter how lengthily or expensively educated. Its incompetence and lack of probity, its absence of the most elementary understanding, compares unfavourably with the practical intelligence of the local plumber, carpenter, or electrician.

The solution to Britain’s deep-seated problems offered by almost the entire political class

is to turn the country into a giant version of the National Health Service, the country’s socialised healthcare system that has made paupers of the population, which is obliged to accept what it is given whether good, bad, or indifferent.

Enfeebled England

Sinking further into moral squalor

Why is Britain so lacking in moral confidence? (In this, it is only the worst case of a malaise in the West.) Dalrymple points to the expansion of tertiary education, especially in non-technical subjects. He notes that large numbers of people

have been educated in injustice and grievance studies, which have had for their effect the dissolution of a sense of human beings as agents rather than victimised vectors of forces.

If murderers and other violent criminals behave in the way that they do,

it must be (sociology, psychology, and criminology teach) because of social forces beyond their control. Hence it is unjust to inflict punishment upon them. Punishment can only be justified where a man is a free agent and could have done otherwise; since he is never a free agent and could never have done otherwise, punishment is never justified. Millions now believe this.

Islamism in Britain is not the product of Islam alone

Dalrymple notes that some British Muslims succeed in life, a fact which is interpreted backwards:

not that Muslims can succeed, but that generally they cannot, because British society is inimical to Muslims.

In coming to this conclusion, Dalrymple points out, young Muslims

would only be adopting the logic that has driven Western social policy for so long: that any difference in economic and social outcome between groups is the result of social injustice and adverse discrimination. The premises of multiculturalism do not even permit asking whether reasons internal to the groups might account for differences in outcomes.

This sociological view is peddled consistently by the poll-tax-funded British state broadcaster, which states, for example, that Muslims ‘continue to face discrimination’. Thus,

• if more Muslims than any other group possess no educational qualifications, even though the hurdles for winning such qualifications have constantly fallen, it can only be because of discrimination—though a quarter of all medical students in Britain are of Indian subcontinental descent. It can have nothing to do with the widespread—and illegal—practice of refusing to allow girls to continue at school, which the Press scarcely mentions, and which the educational authorities rarely if ever investigate
• if youth unemployment among Muslims is two-and-a half-times the rate among whites, it can be only because of discrimination—though youth unemployment among Hindus is  lower than among whites (and this even though many young Hindus complain of being mistaken for Muslims)

Dalrymple comments:

A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on ‘social justice’, the negation of which is ‘discrimination’, can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice.

Islamism in Britain, Dalrymple emphasises, is

the product of the meeting of Islam with an entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems.

The English were constipated: now they’re incontinent

Dalrymple explains that his account of Britain as a declining, broken society is

ironic in the sense that I don’t think there was a golden age in which society was whole.

But

we have to look at the problems we have. Every age looks at the problems it has, and what I’ve found in England is a refusal to face the problems: they’re just too uncomfortable.

Dalrymple says it is, to a degree, a

puzzle

as to why Britain has become more degraded than all other comparable countries. But he points to

a gestalt switch: what was regarded as good is regarded as bad, and vice-versa. Emotional constipation, once a characteristic of the British, has become emotional incontinence. People regard it as a good thing to express themselves, irrespective of whether they’ve anything to express.

For reasons of hormonal disaffection, young people are disposed to throw themselves into ideological causes. They are susceptible to ideological rot, as they are to criminality,

which is a young man’s game.

With regard to English anti-social life, Dalrymple says:

If you go to entertainment areas, there is always an element of threat in Britain.

He recounts an experience he had in Manchester, where he was staying at an hotel.

There was laughing and screaming outside at 1.30 in the morning. When I went out the next morning, I found that someone had been nearly murdered — he was in hospital, in a coma. You can’t tell the difference in England between people enjoying themselves and someone being murdered.

The English then and now

Once, writes Dalrymple, the qualities of the English population included

• cool and ironic detachment from its own experience, that permitted it to face adversity with great good humour and modesty rather than by resort to histrionics
• a polite restraint that was a precondition of depth of character. This restraint seemed to me heroic in an undemonstrative way; it was also the guarantor of an implicit subtlety

Today the chief characteristics of the English, Dalrymple points out, are

• militant vulgarity
• lack of restraint
• arrogant loudness
• ferocious and determined drunkenness
• antisocial egotism
• aggression and quick resort to violence
• grossness of appetites
• prideful ugliness of appearance
• lack of finesse in any department of human existence

Dread of the Muslims

The West is running scared of the Mohammedans

Muslims know that Europe is running scared of them. They feel no gratitude whatsoever for the tolerance they may encounter in, for example, Britain, says Dalrymple, but rather

contempt for the spinelessness and decadence of a country whose tolerance can so easily be turned against it, and whose liberties might without difficulty be used to propagate and eventually impose tyranny.

Their contempt is not lessened by the knowledge that British society

does not have the will to impose upon them some of its own laws, notably those with regard to the education of their children.

Oppression of women

Dalrymple writes:

I have heard in my medical practice from innumerable young Muslim women that they were removed from school by their parents at an early age, several years before the law allowed, but I have yet to hear of even a single case in which a school or the school inspectors took effective action to return such a child to the school. I concede that the white girls who remain in the schools from which the Muslim parents illegally withdraw their daughters learn little after a certain age except how to be a lumpen slut, of the kind with which this country is so exceedingly well endowed: but the law is the law, and the subsequent fate of so many Muslim daughters is far from enviable.

Needless to say, Muslim men in Europe have it much easier than their womenfolk. A man, Dalrymple points out, can

have an arranged marriage to a woman he would not have selected for himself (but who is nonetheless useful to him as a provider of domestic comfort), and lead a happy life elsewhere; a life that often includes the possession of a concubine or two, more often than not of the lumpen white-slut class. It will not come as a surprise to learn that he treats his concubine or concubines with contempt and often violence, and the fact that they are willing to put up with it confirms him in his opinion of the decadence of the West.

Extraterritorial rights

You might have thought

that the girls who have been subjected to this culture that is now so much at variance with our own would have received loud, consistent and vociferous support from feminists. On the contrary, the feminists are the dog that did not bark, because feminism has appealed to the same kind of mind as multiculturalism has appealed to. And the only way the two isms can be held in the mind simultaneously is to ignore actual real-life evidence of their incompatibility.

Dalrymple explains that the fact that no one has consistently raised a voice in defence of these girls

has played its part in persuading certain Muslims that they are extraterritorial. They know that when the government talks of women’s rights, they — the Muslims — are excluded from its rhetoric, because it would take conviction and guts to include them. They draw the conclusion that our society is running scared of them.

Multiculturalism is not couscous; it is the stoning of adulterers

Muslims have become all too aware that Western society is, says Dalrymple,

but a rotting fruit waiting to fall from the tree.

Loosing off — from a long way away — a few missiles at, for instance, Syria

will not have changed their impression; rather, it will have confirmed it, and their opinion of the West’s cowardice.

Every multiculturalist, says Dalrymple,

believes — whether he knows it or not — that it is right to force young girls into marriages they don’t want, to deprive them of the schooling and careers that they do want, to regard them as prostitutes if they leave their abusive husbands, and to punish, even to kill, those who cross cultural and religious boundaries. As an Italian commentator once put it, multiculturalism is not couscous; it is the stoning of adulterers.