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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Theodore Dalrymple</title>
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		<title>The Black Book of the American Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/theodore-dalrymple/the-black-book-of-the-american-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-black-book-of-the-american-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:55:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213422</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's new collection unveils the heart of progressive darkness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-213426" alt="tbb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb.jpg" width="300" height="454" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8220;<em>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life And Times,&#8221; </em><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Ever since Stéphane Courtois published his <em>The Black Book of Communism</em>, there has been a deluge of black books, particularly in France, where the latest is that of Vichy. David Horowitz’s <em>Black Book</em> is that of the American left, which he charges – with a great deal of cumulative evidence – of equivocation towards, support for and outright complicity with the Soviet Union. Ignorance of the horrors of Soviet rule was not an excuse, because the horrors were known and documented from the very first, and for decades the left preferred to ignore the facts than abandon its fantasies. And although the American left was not responsible for much violence in America itself, there was hardly any revolutionary violence that to which it did not provide aid and comfort, repeating its original <em>sin ad nuaseam</em>. In the process it rewrote its own history as assiduously and dishonestly as Stalin wrote his.</p>
<p>It is against the attempt by intellectuals to disconnect the ideas that their words express and the deeds that those ideas have inspired, condoned or encouraged, that David Horowitz has written for a quarter of a century. He has focused his powerful guns on the American left for two reasons, the first personal and the second sociological, though in fact in his case the two reasons are inextricably linked. First he himself was a member of the left for much of his youth and early adulthood, and second leftist ideas of various stripes were and remain predominant in academia and among the intelligentsia.</p>
<p>He was a red diaper baby, that is to say the child of ‘orthodox’ communist parents, but by the time he came to young adulthood the Soviet Union was no longer plausibly the hope of the world. However, Horowitz did not at that stage want to throw the baby out with the diapers, and therefore helped to found the New Left. Unfortunately, the internal logic of its socialist beliefs led it to support or make excuses for totalitarian regimes such as Castro’s, just as the previous generation of orthodox communists had done. It also indulged in what would have been comic operetta revolutionism had it not been for the extreme criminal nastiness of the acts which it excused, condoned, concealed or perpetrated.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s essays collected here, written over twenty-five years, are dedicated to demonstrating that this leftism was not an ‘infantile disorder,’ to quote Lenin, or a mild and mostly harmless childhood illness like mumps, but more usually like a chronic condition with lingering after-effects and flare-ups. Those who suffered it only very rarely got over it fully, the late Christopher Hitchens being a good example of one who did not. He, Hitchens, could never bring himself to admit that he had for all his life admired and extolled a man who was at least as bad as Stalin, namely Trotsky; and his failure to renounce his choice of maître à penser became in time not just a youthful peccadillo of a clever adolescent who wanted to shock the adults but a symptom of a deep character flaw, a fundamental indifference to important truth. With the exception of Hitchens, for whom he has a soft spot and to whom in my opinion he is over-indulgent, Horowitz does not want any of the leftists to get away with it by rewriting not only history but their own biographies.</p>
<p>There is inevitably some repetition in collection. There are also things with which one might disagree: it is far too categorical, for example, to state that up to 100,000,000 people have died of malaria as a result of the ban on the use of DDT. I think the author greatly underestimates the strength of possible conservative objection, both on grounds of moral justification and practical effects, to the second Gulf War (though he admits that not all those who objected to it were motivated by American self-hating animus). He does not identify the real source of dangerous Islamism in most of the west, namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which play double games if ever such double games were played, and which are not mentioned by him.</p>
<p>He is very good on the guerrilla movements in Latin America, which far from being the spontaneous and justified expression of a downtrodden peasantry, as was the received wisdom among western intellectuals at the time of those movements’ apogee, were the products of rapidly expanding numbers of university students led by leftist intellectuals. The Guatemalan guerrilla group, ORPA, for example, was led by the son of the then sole Guatemalan Nobel Prize Winner, the novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias. The worst of them all, Peru’s Sendero Luminoso, was led by a university professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzmán, who very nearly became Peru’s Pol Pot. Just as American leftist intellectuals ceased to be interested in Indochina the moment American troops left, so the fate of Central America ceased to interest them once there was no possibility that utopian leftist regimes would be established in them. Their interest in far-flung places was only as a screen upon which they could project their own psychodrama.</p>
<p>It is on the psychological reasons for eschatological leftism that Horowitz is best. Eschatological leftists, rather than genuine liberals, or for that matter eschatological nationalists or religious fanatics, are not interested in righting this or that individual wrong, reforming this or that defective institution; they aim at resetting the terms and limits of human existence itself. They are like doctors who, instead of wanting to cure illness, want to abolish death. They dream of an existence in which there are no frustrations, no contradictory desires, no conflicting interests. For them anything less than root and branch change is but a sticking plaster over a gaping wound, and anyone who enjoys the present moment is deficient in compassion for those who are not in a position to do so. The only permissible enjoyment is in fighting the good fight.</p>
<p>Why? What is the gaping wound that they want to heal? It is the transitoriness of human life to which, in the absence of religious belief, they cannot reconcile themselves, the life that Macbeth says is full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. They seek in political action that transcendence that would assure them that their lives in fact have significance; and since the problem is a metaphysical one that will never be solved, victory over eschatological political belief, of whatsoever kind, is never final or even very lasting. Indeed, as things get materially better chiliasm grows stronger, for people have greater leisure to dwell upon their dissatisfactions.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s reflections on this problem, both obvious and revelatory, are for me the best thing in these volumes, and express very succinctly why conservatism, at least of the kind that I favour, is an attitude to life rather than a doctrine:</p>
<blockquote><p>It became clear to me that the world was not going to be changed into anything very different… from what it had been. On this earth there would be no kingdom of freedom where swords would be turned into plowshares and lions would lie down with lambs. It should have been obvious when I began. Many things change but people do not. Otherwise how could Shakespeare, or writers more ancient, capture in their creations a reality that we recognize, and that still moves us today?</p></blockquote>
<p>He continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>These revelations had a humbling effect. They took my attention away from noble fantasies that had enveloped me and forced me to focus on my ordinary existence; to see how common it was; how un-heroic, ordinary and unredeemed. The revelations that shattered my faith allowed me, for the first time, to look at my mortality… I was going to die like everyone else, and be forgotten.</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz then realized that his political fantasies were a way of ‘averting [my] eyes from this ordinary fact.’ And ‘who would want to hear the voice of a future that was only calling them to oblivion?’</p>
<p>The leftism that Horowitz wants to combat, then, is religious, but without a god and without beauty. His short essay, A Political Romance, reminds me of the words of Joseph Conrad:</p>
<blockquote><p>I felt in my heart that the further one ventures the better one understands how everything in our life is common, short and empty; that it is in ‘seeking’ the unknown in our sensations that we discover how mediocre are our attempts and how soon defeated!</p></blockquote>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
<b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Here and After</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/theodore-dalrymple/here-and-after/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=here-and-after</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Nov 2011 04:16:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[a point in time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[life and death]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Political warrior David Horowitz reflects on life and death.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/a-point-in-time.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-111447" title="a-point-in-time" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/a-point-in-time.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="619" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159698290X/manhattaninstitu/" target="new"><em>A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next</em></a>, by David Horowitz (Regnery, 128 pp., $24.95)</p>
<p>Death is every life’s inevitable denouement, but La Rochefoucauld  told us that we can no more stare it in the face than we can stare at  the sun. For the most part, we continue our daily round in a state of  presumed immortality, and because we are so unfamiliar nowadays with  death—it having been carefully put out of our sight by a host of  professionals—we treat it as an unwarranted intrusion into our affairs  rather than as an existential limit to our brief earthly sojourn. For  many, death has become anomalous rather than inevitable, something to  protest against rather than accept. For them, the concept of a good  death is entirely alien or antipathetic.</p>
<p>David Horowitz tries to stare his own death in the face. Now 71, he  has had cancer of the prostate, and he has diabetes and angina; his  diplomatic immunity from death, which we all grant ourselves, has been  unmistakably withdrawn. His short new book, which it is both necessary  and a pleasure to read in one sitting, is a meditation on the meaning of  life, <em>sub specie aeternitatis</em>.</p>
<p>Horowitz begins by reflecting on the nature and character of his  dogs, whom he takes for regular walks. Perhaps those who don’t love dogs  will think this an odd way to begin a book on the meaning of life, but  it seems entirely natural and fitting. Indeed, I was struck by how  Horowitz’s meditations paralleled mine, occasioned by my relationship,  and walks, with my own dog—a relationship intense and happy, at least on  my side and, if I don’t delude myself, on his also. The dog, of course,  has no intimation of his own mortality, while the owner’s pleasure in  the animal’s company is increasingly tinged with a melancholy awareness  of his swiftly approaching dissolution. Yet the dog maintains his  passionate interest in the little world around him, his small-scale  curiosity in his immediate environment. In the face of the physical  immensity of the universe and the temporal vastness that both preceded  and will follow his oblivion, is a man in any fundamentally different  situation?</p>
<p>As far as we know, we are the only creatures to demand of their  existence a transcendent meaning. This can be supplied by various means,  most commonly religious belief. Horowitz is unable to accept belief in a  personal God, but wishes he could and, unlike many in his position,  does not scorn those who do. He is decidedly not the village atheist.</p>
<p>More than most, however, he has reason to know that politics can also  give, or at any rate appear to give, transcendent meaning to life. The  secular religion of Marxism was particularly adept at supplying this  meaning, though nationalist struggles could do the same. To believe that  one was a soldier in history’s army, marching toward the predestined  final victory when mankind would become terminally happy, and that one’s  participation would help bring forward that consummation, was to know  that one did not live in vain. Even personal suffering can be lessened  by adherence to a political cause: either such suffering is experienced  as a consequence of the struggle, or it is at least ameliorated by an  acceptance of its pettiness by comparison with the greater goal.</p>
<p>Horowitz offers brief but moving glimpses of his father, a true  believer in the ability of Marxism (in what he considered its  indubitably correct form) not only to interpret the world but to change  it. The preposterous intellectual grandiosity of this belief contrasted  comically, and sadly, with Horowitz senior’s position in the world. His  son’s depiction has an elegiac quality, portraying the tragicomedy of a  man who thought he had penetrated to the heart of existence’s mystery  but was really quite weak. Though he embraced a doctrine that had done  untold evil in the world, he himself was a gentle soul. His son writes  in sorrow, not anger.</p>
<p>The author has reason to know better than most the religious nature  of the revolutionary creed. In 1971, when still under the influence of  leftism, he edited a book of essays dedicated to the life and work of  the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. Like Horowitz’s father, Deutscher  kept his faith in the immaculate conception of the October Revolution, a  revolution that was, alas, subsequently to be corrupted—just as  Rousseau thought naturally innocent mankind was corrupted by society.  One of the essays in this book, by the <em>Economist</em>’s former Paris correspondent, Daniel Singer, contains the following passage:</p>
<blockquote><p>Could one trust the statement of a Komintern ready to  distort in such a fashion? Isaac was driven to question all authorized  versions, to go back to the October revolution, to study the conflicts  that followed Lenin’s death. The German heresy thus led him logically to  an understanding and rejection of the Stalinist system.</p></blockquote>
<p>The religious nature of Deutscher’s belief in revolutionary Marxism  could hardly have been clearer. Authorized versions give rise to, or at  least are the precondition of, heresies. Deutscher went back to the  October Revolution, and to Lenin’s words, as Muslim fundamentalists go  back to the Koran, for a source of undoubted and indisputable truth.  Inside every heretic, it seems, a dogmatist is trying to get out.</p>
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		<title>What’s Really Wrong with WikiLeaks</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/theodore-dalrymple/what%e2%80%99s-really-wrong-with-wikileaks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what%25e2%2580%2599s-really-wrong-with-wikileaks</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 15 Dec 2010 04:09:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=79165</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dissolution of privacy is a fundamental aim of totalitarianism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/privacy.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-79167" title="privacy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/privacy.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="549" /></a></div>
<div><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>.</strong></div>
<div><strong><br />
</strong></div>
<div>We hardly needed WikiLeaks to tell us,  among many other things, that Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France,  is a vulgar man with authoritarian inclinations, or that Silvio  Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, is interested in sex. It isn’t  even particularly reassuring to have our judgments confirmed for us by  American diplomatic messages, for if they had said anything different we  shouldn’t have believed them in any case.</p>
<p>After the first slight frisson of pleasure at the discomfiture of  powerful people and those in authority has worn off, a pleasure akin to  that of seeing a pompously dignified man slip on a banana skin, the real  significance of the greatest disclosure of official documents in the  history of the world—without, that is, the military downfall of a great  capital city—becomes apparent. It is not, of course, that revelations of  secrets are always unwelcome or ethically unjustified. It is not a new  insight that power is likely to be abused and can only be held in check  by a countervailing power, often that of public exposure. But WikiLeaks  goes far beyond the need to expose wrongdoing, or supposed wrongdoing:  it is unwittingly doing the work of totalitarianism.</p>
<p>The idea behind WikiLeaks is that life should be an open book, that  everything that is said and done should be immediately revealed to  everybody, that there should be no secret agreements, deeds, or  conversations. In the fanatically puritanical view of WikiLeaks, no one  and no organization should have anything to hide. It is scarcely worth  arguing against such a childish view of life.</p>
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		<title>When Freedom Isn’t Free</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/theodore-dalrymple/when-freedom-isn%e2%80%99t-free/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-freedom-isn%25e2%2580%2599t-free</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:00:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[moral judgments]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[political virtue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[provision of services]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=58251</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In Britain, compulsory virtue stifles individual liberty.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="story_text">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/freedom.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58253" title="freedom" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/freedom.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Liberal reformers, who might once have wished to extend the realm of liberty, now wish to restrict it in the name of compulsory political virtue.</p>
<p>There was a perfect recent illustration of this in Britain. An evangelical Christian couple, the Wilkinsons, ran a bed-and-breakfast business in a place called Cookham. They refused a middle-aged homosexual couple, Michael Black and John Morgan, accommodation because they believed that homosexuality was wrong; it is condemned in the Bible.</p>
<p>The spurned couple said that they felt like lepers; moreover, they felt that their legal rights, enshrined in the Equality Act of 2006, which makes it illegal to discriminate in the provision of services on the grounds of “sexual orientation,” had been infringed, and they complained to the police. As yet, no prosecution has followed. But shortly afterward a senior politician, Christopher Grayling, who might be a minister in the next government if David Cameron wins the forthcoming election, said that he thought that the owners of bed-and-breakfasts ought to be allowed to refuse homosexual couples if they so wished.</p>
<p>From the furious denunciation that Grayling’s remarks attracted, you might have thought that he had advocated medieval punishments for homosexuals. Instead, he was merely pointing out that the law as it stands is tyrannical, and that in a free society not everyone will make the same moral judgments. It is a necessary condition of freedom that private citizens should be allowed to treat with, or to refuse to treat with, whomever they choose, on any grounds that they choose, including those that strike others as repellent. Freedom is freedom, not the means by which everyone comes to precisely the same conclusion and conducts himself in precisely the same way.</p>
<p>The depressing, and perhaps sinister, aspect of the public commentary on the case is how largely it has ignored the question of freedom. For liberals, it seems, any trampling on freedom or individual conscience is now justified if it conduces to an end of which they approve. Thus liberalism turns into its opposite, illiberalism.</p>
<p>Messrs. Black and Morgan, who said they felt like lepers and went to the police as a result, condemned themselves out of their own mouths. They said that they had been together for decades, and that this was the first time they had ever experienced what they called “homophobia.” Not only does this suggest that the Equality Act was not, even on the false assumptions of liberals, necessary, but it means that anyone more mature than they would simply have found somewhere else to stay for the night.</p>
<p>Moreover, to waste police time on such a matter in a country with the highest crime rate in the Western world is nothing short of scandalous, a manifestation of the worst kind of inflamed egotism.</p>
<p><em>Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of </em>City Journal<em> and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594033722/manhattaninstitu/" target="display">The New Vichy Syndrome</a>.</p>
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		<title>When Aid is No Way to Aid a Country</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/theodore-dalrymple/when-aid-is-no-way-to-aid-a-country/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-aid-is-no-way-to-aid-a-country</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cholera epidemics]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=54484</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The sad case of Somalia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/somalia888.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54488" title="somalia888" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/somalia888.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="310" /></a></p>
<p>The New York Times on March 10 quoted a United Nations report to the effect that aid given to Somalia was not reaching the people most in need of it, that is to say the malnourished and the starving.</p>
<p>I would not be telling you the truth if I said that, when I read the news, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Can there be anyone left in the world who thinks that aid will go only, or even mainly, to the people most in need of it? By comparison with such a belief, faith in Father Christmas is a model of rational expectation. At least the presents arrive, even if Father Christmas doesn’t.</p>
<p>I have been to Somalia only once, in the comparatively palmy days of the wily dictator, Siad Barre, who by then had jumped ship from the Soviet to the American (Ethiopia has jumped in precisely the opposite direction). Among my treasured possessions of no value to anyone but myself is a Soviet-era (and produced) phrase book, with such essential expressions as ‘Hand me the opera glasses, please, and ‘How many workers does your collective farm have?’ translated into Somali. As everyone knows, Somali was reduced to writing only very recently; the Soviet time reduced it further in no time to nonsense.</p>
<p>Even then, in those comparatively happy times (in how many countries in the world are the days of some loathsome dictator looked back upon with nostalgia, if not longing?), I should not have mistaken Somalia for a country in which the distribution of aid was likely to proceed smoothly in the direction of the needy. Far from it; and I also became rather sceptical there of the foreign distributors of aid.</p>
<p>I remember going into the headquarters of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Mogadishu to obtain information about the cholera epidemics then raging in some of the refugee camps. I was somewhat surprised to find two things: first, a complaint on the UNCHR staff notice-board that the portions in the staff canteen were too small, and second that the staff were de facto on strike because of the Somali government’s insistence on exchanging their salaries at the official exchange rate, which was only a fraction of the open market rate.</p>
<p>In effect, this little vignette captured not the paradox of aid (a policy that is persisted in cannot be regarded as paradoxical once its effects have been generally recognised), but the very essence of aid. In short, aid is no way to aid a country.</p>
<p>Another so call ‘paradox’ that is often referred to in the press is that of African countries that have remained generally impoverished despite the existence of vast natural resources. Nigeria and the Congo are two prominent cases that spring to mind. But the paradox is not a paradox, at least in the sense that it is something not explicable.</p>
<p>In most African countries, it is not the enterprise of the local people that had led to the extraction of mineral wealth, but rather that of foreigners, exploitative as they may often have been. Even though local people have supplied the manual labour necessary to the extraction, the wealth as a whole that accrues to African society as a whole comes as a free gift, more or less as aid does.</p>
<p>This is a disaster for the rounded development of a backward country, for it makes control of the government (which receives the bulk of the wealth accruing to African society from mineral extraction) the most important, and sometimes the only, path to personal or ethnic advancement. Ambition itself is wholly politicised, therefore, and  the humble task of producing things is left to the unambitious and perhaps the less able.</p>
<p>In countries such as Nigeria and the Congo, the mineral wealth is not sufficient by itself to enrich the population as a whole (unlike in Kuwait, for example, where everyone can be well-off doing nothing). However, the mineral wealth is more than sufficient to make those who control it very rich indeed. Wars are worth fighting in the Congo because control of the minerals is so lucrative, where the other possibilities are such commodities as coffee and bananas. In Nigeria, the oil revenues are immense by comparison with those of all other sectors of the economy: and Nigeria’s share of the oil revenues goes more or less straight to the government. If you mix in a little ethnic discord with government control of mineral revenues, the scene is set for prolonged, indeed endless and often bloody political struggles. Far from being a blessing, therefore, oil wealth has been a curse for Nigeria.</p>
<p>In countries less well-endowed with extractable wealth, foreign aid has played the part of oil in Nigeria. Oil constitutes at least 80 per cent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings; in several African countries, foreign aid constitutes very nearly as much.</p>
<p>This results in the same perversions of the national economy, and the same obstacles to real development, as oil has done in Nigeria. The ambitious and able people want to join the government, and so life in general is deeply politicised; genuine economic life is paralysed, and becomes a desperate zero sum game.</p>
<p>When this happens, there is a built-in and deeply perverse incentive to continue to follow policies that impoverish, for a flourishing economy would obviate the supposed need for the foreign aid which is the source of the power, influence and wealth of the elite through whom it is funnelled. Here is one case in which poverty really is a source of wealth.</p>
<p>The most extreme instance of the above syndrome is civil war. It is therefore not in the least surprising that aid to Somalia is not reaching the neediest; it would be very surprising, indeed it would be absolutely astonishing, if it were. Neither is it surprising, however, that it should be reported as if it were surprising (unsurprising news not being news). For otherwise, the fact that aid does not reach the neediest would be a threat to our sense of power, our feelings of omnipotence. How could a few lousy uneducated Somalian gunmen be thwarting our infinite benevolence?</p>
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		<title>Affirmative Action A La Française</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/theodore-dalrymple/affirmative-action-a-la-francaise-by-theodore-dalrymple/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=affirmative-action-a-la-francaise-by-theodore-dalrymple</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:02:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46180</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A politically correct assault threatens France’s elite academic institution.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46235" title="Sark" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Sark.jpg" alt="Sark" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>Stalinist-style social engineering is not quite dead. Indeed, it flourishes. In France, a controversy has broken out about the admission policies to the grandes ecoles, the elite tertiary educational establishments such as the Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration that, since Napoleon’s time, have provided France with much of its business, government and cultural elite.</p>
<p>Admission to one of the grandes ecoles more or less guarantees the student a prosperous subsequent career. Entry is by competitive examination; and it has long been a proud boast of France that such entry is by ability rather than by social connection or political prominence, for talented young people from poor homes are given a state subsidy that allows them to attend. The openness of the grandes ecoles to talent from wherever in society it comes is taken as one of the great achievements of the French Revolution.</p>
<p>But the purely formal nature of equality of opportunity that the grandes ecoles exemplifies has recently come under attack led by no less a personage than the President of the Republic who, though nominally conservative, argues like any left-wing demagogue.</p>
<p>The students at the grandes ecoles are in fact overwhelmingly from the comfortable middle or upper-middle classes. They do not represent the French population in the demographic sense at all; a child from the 16th arrondissement of Paris is far more likely to pass the entry examination than a child from the concrete wasteland that surrounds Paris. M. Sarkozy, taking populist advantage of this unsurprising fact like any unscrupulous politician, is supporting a proposal that 30 per cent of students should be taken, ex officio as it were, from poor backgrounds.</p>
<p>One way to achieve this ‘target’ is to change the nature of the entrance examination, which emphasises, among other things such as science and mathematics, modern languages (essentially English) and a knowledge of general culture such as history and literature.</p>
<p>Middle and upper-middle class children are at an unfair advantage, according to M. Sarkozy and other supporters of the proposal, because their parents are much more likely to be able to send them abroad for linguistic holidays than are poor parents. (My observation of my French nephews and nieces leads me to doubt whether such linguistic holidays are quite as advantageous as they are supposed to be.) So it would only be fair and socially just to suppress mastery of modern languages as a criterion for entry to the grandes ecoles.</p>
<p>What is true of languages is even truer of general culture, for it is obvious that children of cultivated parents have an enormous advantage over others: and cultivated parents tend to be of higher social class also. Therefore, the requirement that students should have general culture should also be suppressed.</p>
<p>This kind of reasoning was subject to the mockery of a historian, Sebastien Fach, in the pages of Le Monde, which are not generally known for their light satirical touch. Imagine, said Mr. Fach, the time a few years hence when social reformers have had their way, and the French national soccer team is no longer selected only from the best players in the best professional teams in the league, who are demographically unrepresentative of the population as a whole. Think of all the other people who play football in France: can they not run and do all the other things that the best professional players can do? Why should they be excluded from representing their nation? Why not women, children, the aged? A truly democratic team.</p>
<p>Mr. Fach rightly points out that while it would be quick and easy to lower the standards of the grandes ecoles, it would be slow and difficult to improve the standards of the secondary schools serving children from poor homes, and thereby giving them a better chance of admission to the grandes ecoles. Like any good politician, Mr Sarkozy opts for the line of least resistance, the soft option.</p>
<p>By far the most interesting fact to emerge from the debate is that the proportion of children from relatively poor homes attending the grandes ecoles declined precipitously in the first half century of France’s existence as a full welfare state: from 29 per cent in 1950 to 9 per cent in mid 1990s.</p>
<p>Of course, it is possible that, during this period, the proportion of children from relatively poor homes in the population as a whole also declined, although it is unlikely to have declined by two thirds, as the proportion of children from poor homes attending the grandes ecoles has done; one still say, therefore that at the very least the welfare state, one of whose justifications was the need to equalise opportunities, has failed signally to do so. If anything, the reverse. One might, if one were inclined to conspiracy theories, construe the welfare state as the means by which the middle class ensures that their children face no competition from clever children of the lower class.</p>
<p>The heart of the problem lies in the unassailability of the term ‘equality of opportunity,’ and the unthinking assent it commands. I was once asked on Dutch TV whether I was in favour of it, the interviewer assuming that I must be so in spite of all my other appalling opinions; and when I said that I was not, and indeed that I thought it was a truly hideous notion, his eyes opened with surprise. I thought he was going to slip off his chair.</p>
<p>Only under conditions reminiscent of those of Brave New World could there be equality of opportunity. But, of course, the very unattainability of equality of opportunity (in any sense other than that of an absence of formal, legal impediments to social advance) is precisely what recommends it as an ideal to politicians such as President Sarkozy, and indeed to most other western politicians, virtually irrespective of their putative political stripe. The fact that, reform notwithstanding, there are always differences in outcomes for different groups or classes of human beings in any society means that there is always scope, in the name of equality of opportunity, for further interference and control by politicians and bureaucrats. Not permanent revolution (to change the communist metaphor from Stalinism to Trotskyism), but permanent reform is the modern western politico-bureaucratic class’s route to lasting power and control.</p>
<p>Why anyone should want lasting power and control is to me a mystery: I suppose it must be the answer to a deep and insatiable inner emptiness.</p>
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