Delightful vignette from the always fascinating Theodore Dalrymple:
The fact is that people who commit fraud, at least on a large scale, have lively, intelligent minds. I usually end up admiring them, despite myself. My last encounter was with a man who defrauded the government of $38,000,000 of value added tax. I am afraid that I laughed. After all, he had merely united customers with cheap goods. Unfortunately for him, he had been lifted from his tropical paradise hideaway by helicopter and then extradited. By the time I met him, though, his sentence was almost over. He had discovered Wittgenstein in prison.
“Did you have to pay the money back?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “though I would have had a shorter sentence if I had.”
He had calculated that an extra two years as a guest of Her Majesty was worth it. I shook his hand, as a man who was unafraid: I could do no other.
This is merely the appetizer, though, for a delightful tale of literary “fraud.” Tantalizing you with an excerpt might spoil the fun, so I will simply urge you to, as the man says, read the whole thing.
What a brilliant piece. It could be a test as good as any other of whether someone is really a human being whether they could read that and come away understanding that Dalrymple has said something profound and important.
On the same topic, I’ve been wondering for a couple of weeks if the election result in Bethnal Green & Bow has changed Perry’s views about the assimilation of Muslims at all. He frequently writes here of the almost effortless inevitability of Muslims eventually adopting Western norms, so tempted as they are by our liberal culture and its pornography and pictures of Britney Spears. Is that quite congruent with what we saw in that constituency on 5th May?
A very good read – Dalrymple is always worth the time. It’s quite refreshing to hear his views on financial crime, which is at odds with the UK’s odd stringency on property crimes over personal harm crimes.
Yes brilliant indeed. The final flourish:
…………smelly little orthodoxies who are contending for tenure in the humanities departments of our universitities………….. raises it to sublime level.
Peter – I suspect that assimilation of reasonably sizeable subcultures is pretty much a thing of the past: it is pretty easy to live in the UK, while totally avoiding the BBC or other cultural normalizers – you can get al Jazeera 24/7 from your bedsit in Bethnal Green.
Steve, What an interesting and profound comment. Offhand, I’d say you are right. No more assimilation of the masses.
A fascinating story …. I was much taken by the experience of the Very Rvd in dealing with the BBC….
…”He had already sent his stories about working-class boys to the BBC under another pseudonym, Tom Dale, while he sent the ones about the Muslim girls as Rahila Khan. The BBC had treated the two writers quite differently: kind and considerate to Rahila, brusque and even rude to Tom. He learned his lesson.”
One wonders if the reverse occurs when sending material under an English name to the Asian programmes ?
Peter, please stay on-topic. And what I have said is they assimilate unless the state actively motivates them not to. Also, in many other places in the UK they are assimilating just fine. However this is not the place for that discussion.
Perry, it is the topic of the article Robert links to. Obviously you just read the quotation.
Well the article I read was about a hilarious unmasking of the attitudes (in Virago and the BBC) that automatically prefer something written by a black woman to something written by a white male.
Virago’s pompous blustering about fraud and deception also revealed their ignorance of a venerable tradition of writers disguising their identities in order to overcome the prejudices of their days (Bell brothers anyone?).
Well the article I read was about a hilarious unmasking of the attitudes (in Virago and the BBC) that automatically prefer something written by a black woman to something written by a white male.
Virago’s pompous blustering about fraud and deception also revealed their ignorance of a venerable tradition of writers disguising their identities in order to overcome the prejudices of their days (Bell brothers anyone?).
No, Dalrymple’s article was NOT mainly about the PC of Virago and the BBC (interesting though that was), but the plight of Asian and particularly Muslim girls growing up in the degenerate environment of inner Midland cities. How are Muslim fathers expected to protect their daughters? Here in Glasgow some of them try to by sending their daughters to the one remaining single-sex local authority school, paradoxically, Catholic Notre Dame. For those who don’t know, Scotland, as with Northern Ireland, has separate Catholic and “non-denominational” schools. There may be fee-paying single-sex schools here (certainly there are in Edinburgh), but I don’t know about them.
We must not ignore the message of what the Reverend Forward (aka Rahila Khan) was trying to get across with the treatment Virago accorded it.
We must hope, with Perry, that eventually assimilation of our minorities will take place, but assimilation to what? As the Rev/Khan makes clear, the surrounding culture is dire.
Thanks for the link to the excellent New Criterion, Dean. It’s unobtainable here, except by subscription. I’ve been wondering about that story since it broke in 1987. I’ve had it printed out in full (thanks to my dear wife, who is proficient in such matters).
Hi Peter – the guys at Harry’s Place should read this.
A fascinating article showing who really cares about the disadvantaged.
ilana – Excellent point about the Bell brothers.
And George Elliott, anyone? Georges Sand?