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It is now many years since I practiced medicine in an insalubrious part of a British city, but a case in France brought memories of that time. I am not sure that the memories of that time are entirely happy, but they are certainly interesting.
The case in question is that of a person so far known only as Abdelkader D., and it is significant because it displays more than one aspect of European weakness and decay—which, of course, is not confined to France.
Abdelkader D. was an illegal immigrant from Tunisia to France. He arrived in 2019. He was detained in centers for illegal immigrants but was released in 2020 because of Covid. He then took the wise precaution (from the point of view of being allowed to stay in France) of marrying a Frenchwoman, who was sixteen years older than he. Thus he made himself safe from deportation.
“This is but a single case, of course, but it is emblematic—a canary in the mine, as it were.”
He had been very nice to her before marriage, but—surprise! surprise!—he turned violent and aggressive afterward. This is a pattern I had seen twenty years before in England. A native-born British girl of Pakistani descent would have an arranged, or forced, marriage to a first cousin back “home,” who would then come to England and behave very well for a year. This was because his wife had the right to oppose his residency in that period, but on day 366 he underwent a sudden change and wreaked his revenge on her for having humiliated him for so long by making him behave well.
Abdelkader D. was fairly typical of the violent husband type. “He was adorable at times,” said his wife, “but suddenly he would become aggressive. He would have unpredictable changes of mood.”
Ah, how many times I heard this story! The unpredictability of the mood changes—adorable, violent, adorable, violent—was essential to their controlling function. There was no cause for these mood changes, but the woman, who believed in a world of causes and predictability, spent her time trying to puzzle out what she had done to cause them. This kept her frightened and subservient.
Given the lenience of the law, she did not complain to the police about his violence: “It would only have made things worse. He would have killed me,” Again, this is something I heard times out of number.
Eventually, however, the worm turned, as it so often does: “He pulled my hair and spat in my face as I was driving, which was going too far.” I recall reading a memoir of a woman whose habitually violent boyfriend gouged out her eyes with his fingers. “This time,” she wrote, “he went too far.”
However, before she left him, Abdelkader D. had stabbed his own nephew (who was also in France) several times because he suspected him of being homosexual, as well as having had sexual relations with his wife. He was charged with, and found guilty of, attempted murder and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, three of them suspended. However, he never went to prison because he appealed the sentence; and while waiting for the appeal to be heard, he went on his stabbing spree in Marseille, in which five people were injured. He was shot dead by the police.
Abdelkader D. was described as a “moderate” Muslim who prayed five times a day but drank alcohol and took cocaine as often as he prayed. He was described as paranoid in his manner, and he grew the long and unattractive beard that many Muslims sport. There are suggestions that he shouted, “Allah akbar!” as he stabbed the people in Marseille.
Religious fanaticism and madness are, of course, by no means incompatible. When people become deluded, they are deluded according to their culture. When the 18th-century Christian poet Christopher Smart went mad, he believed in his messianic role. I once had two Rastafarians in my ward who went mad smoking dope and who both believed that they were Haile Selassie (each could see through the absurd pretensions of the other).
The whole story that I have related is instructive in several ways. The first is the complete incapacity of the country to deal with illegal immigration into it. Conspiracy theorists would no doubt say that this was deliberate, either to create a fund of cheap labor or a population of dependents upon whom the welfare bureaucracy could exercise its wiles; but I think that moral cowardice and incompetence alone are sufficient to explain it.
The second is the degraded and degrading nature of relations between the sexes in our times of supposed liberation from oppressive convention. Sexual liberty and the desire for the exclusive sexual possession of someone (which is still almost universal) do not go very well together and commonly lead to insensate jealousy, itself provocative of much violence. The hypocrisy of conventional relations is much preferable.
Third, the case reveals that the state now considers the suppression of violent crime to be relatively unimportant—it has so many other functions to perform. A year in prison for having attempted to kill someone! No doubt it would be claimed by defenders of the criminal justice system that the suspension of the three years’ suspended sentence could be lifted if, after release from prison, the culprit misbehaved; but everyone knows that such a suspended sentence is virtually a dead letter, impossible to supervise, such supervision being quite beyond the capacity of a swollen but weak state to carry out.
The appeal was quite obviously frivolous. There was no question that Abdelkader D. had stabbed his nephew several times, and by then his violence to his wife was also known. Indeed, the exclusion order—that he was not to return to the area of his crimes—was maintained for the period before his appeal was heard, thus indicating that the baselessness of the appeal was perfectly well-known.
This is but a single case, of course, but it is emblematic—a canary in the mine, as it were. A state that is seen as bullying, intrusive, demanding, expensive, and ineffectual in its primary purpose—to secure the protection of its citizens from crime and disorder—is certain one day to produce a reaction, if not an explosion. The longer there is a denial of the problem, the more violent the reaction or the explosion will be, and the nastier the people who participate in it.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).