THEODORE DALRYMPLE: ISIS HAPPENS — ON THE LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS.

In this case, a recent Guardian headline on “How the ‘Pompey Lads’ fell into the hands of Isis:”

There is a strange parallel here with how heroin addicts explained themselves to me. When I asked them why they started taking heroin, they almost invariably answered that they “fell in” with the wrong crowd, again passively, as if by some kind of natural force. By this means they denied responsibility for their situation, though it was obvious that they had not so much fallen in with as sought the wrong crowd. They knew that their explanation was bogus, because they laughed when I said how strange it was that I met many people who fell in with the wrong crowd but never any members of the wrong crowd itself.

But this contrived account of “falling” into drug addiction is often accepted at face value by liberal intellectuals, who want to divide humanity into the tiny minority of people with agency (perpetrators) and the vast majority without it (victims)—the latter requiring salvation by liberal intellectuals. The rich and powerful are perpetrators with agency; everyone else is a victim without agency. To preserve this worldview, the Portsmouth lads had to be described as “falling” into Isis’s hands.

Read the whole thing.