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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 12, 2002
Fortuyn's progeny
The Dutch go into a general election Wednesday in which the party likeliest to make the big gains is led by a dead man. Pim Fortuyn the flamboyant dandyish witty freethinking eloquent and occasionally demagogic opponent of "multiculturalism" and most forms of "political correction" was gunned down (with an unregistered weapon) allegedly by an animal rights nutjob after a radio interview in Hilversum last Monday. In a universal revelation of the mindset of our mass media the late politician was identified on both sides of the Atlantic as "radically right wing" and compared with the Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Austrian Jorg Haider. (Neither of them is really right-wing either most of their policies are the traditional left interventionist ones but we'll leave that for another day.) Quite apart from his sexual orientation Mr. Fortuyn was once a sociology professor and campus Marxist. This would normally grant a lifetime exemption from the label right wing . He was the cutting edge for a new generation of European politicians who because they are new will be hard to categorize or at first even to recognize. As Mr. Fortuyn grew further into adulthood he came to question much of the pap he had imbibed in youth. In economics for instance he realized that Margaret Thatcher's policies were more compatible with individual freedom than those of Josef Stalin. That there is a direct conflict between "class" rights and the individual ones. That bureaucracy very seldom has the answers to any questions. That people must take responsibility for their acts. That fundamentalist Islam is a threat to gay rights. That massive further immigration from North Africa in particular would create a social disaster. That the recent arrivals were not being assimilated an increasing proportion not even learning to speak Dutch. More generally he grew into the realization that paradox is embedded in most worldly things and deceit in most positions that go unchallenged (therefore embrace paradox not deceit). He discerned a contradiction between the idea of free speech and the idea that everyone should have the same views or agree to shut up about controversial topics. He tired of deferring to "the steatopygous victims of incessant borborygmi" -- to the pompous asses who refuse to defend or even expound their received views on the grounds that every challenge is "beneath them" while they lead little Holland towards hell in a handcart. To most of the Dutch I've seen writing or quoted in the past week Pim Fortuyn was neither left nor right but rather a breath of fresh air -- and in a political atmosphere which not unlike Canada's had been stultifying. Like here it didn't matter which party you voted for you were voting for the same old cliches in the service of an essentially unremovable government culture gradually subsiding in corruption. It is a culture that defends itself with the use of mindless dated labels -- we see this in our own Parliament if a member of the Alliance asks a question about immigration. Before they could possibly have heard what he said the yobs along the Liberal front bench are drowning him in a chorus of "Le Pen". Corrupt they may be and thugs intellectually but in their hearts the Grits know they would lose the debate and they must prevent it from getting started. The Dutch ruling class is not much different from the Canadian apart from being better educated and better dressed. In some ways they are worse simply because better educated and more capable of defending themselves with verbiage. Our Canadian Grits are only semi-literate which saves them from some forms of hypocrisy. Jean Chretien is their ideal: a man who is bilingually incomprehensible. One must not speak ill of the dead and for the past crucial week running up to their election the Dutch "centre" parties have granted the late Pim Fortuyn his first free pass. The sympathy vote alone will swell his party's numbers. And if as some pollsters have begun to fear this party takes a third or more of the vote a wild group of complete political novices may find themselves trying to form a government. They will be led by Fortuyn's surviving deputy -- the first black man ever to be presented as a candidate for the prime ministry of a European state. And it is widely thought that the good Queen Beatrix will feel obliged to create a constitutional crisis by refusing to have tea with him -- one Joao Varela 27 from Cape Verde -- on the grounds that his party is "racist". In the recent municipal election in Rotterdam -- a city whose population is almost half immigrant and most of that "visibly" so -- List Pim Fortuyn flooded into the municipal chamber on 35 per cent of the vote. The shock for the political establishment was not just the size of this groundswell. It was where the swell appeared. For the party was taking huge chunks of the vote at the most consistently "coloured" polling stations. They must have realized state "multiculturalism" was in serious trouble as the supposed beneficiaries turned against it. For this is what made Pim Fortuyn different from the Le Pens and Haiders -- not only the man himself but the constituency to which he appealed. In Europe as in Canada among the most obvious victims of state multiculturalism are the immigrants who find themselves being ghettoized and marginalized by it and used by the governing "centrist" parties as vote fodder. (It is the idea behind the Canadian Liberal multicultural strategy -- to create big blocks of reliably grateful Grit "clients" shepherded to the polls by government-subsidized "community leaders" who advise in disbursing the taxpayers' largesse.) In other words Fortuyn had called the bluff of "multiculturalism". That is what made him such a lethal danger to the political establishment in the Netherlands. They couldn't pin labels on him these kept falling off. Yet from his death they can hardly draw a sigh of relief. There will be more like Pim Fortuyn for the plain incontestible reason that he has proved the existence of a market for his product. The Dutch -- perhaps the most politically correct tribe in the whole European confederation -- are sick and tired of political correctness. They are tired of being told how to live and even what to think when it is nonsense. The wall of conformity is being cracked. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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