response 1 of 68:

May 7 08:55 UTC 2002

  Well, it's not unusual for a politician's reputation to benefit in the
  period after their death.  When Richard Nixon died a few years ago there
  was much talk of his statesmanship and his diplomatic successes and 
  comparatively little talk about Watergate.  Usually the effect fades 
  after a while, though sometimes it seems to be permanent, as in the
  case of John F. Kennedy, whose public and personal failings were greatly
  overwhelmed in public opinion by the tragic circumstances of his death.

  I'm sorry that the Netherlands have been so abrubptly and unexpectedly
  introduced to the problem of political violence that plagues much of the
  rest of the world.  There seem to be a lot of unpleasant developments in
  European politics lately -- I hope their appearance together is mere
  coincidence and not the first indications of a trend towards increasingly
  polarized politics and resurgent nationalism on the European continent.

response 3 of 68:

May 7 16:08 UTC 2002

I agree with your perspective, clees. I often wish the demagogues and
fascists and racists would just go away, and I may fail to be very
upset about their natural demise or even murder, but I decry this
method of resolving political and social policy, and would much prefer
for them just to lose to better and more moral ideas and people. 

response 5 of 68:

May 7 19:04 UTC 2002

...it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy...?

response 7 of 68:

May 7 20:59 UTC 2002

"If it's going to happen to anyone..." How shameful.

(from nationalreview.com)

Murder in Holland 
Pim Fortuyn, martyr.

by Rod Dreher
 
We will not be able to gauge the full impact of Pim Fortuyn's murder on
European politics until we know who killed him, and why. Dutch police
have arrested a Dutch-born white male in connection with the crime, but
he's not talking. Whoever he turns out to be, the fact that a popular
anti-immigration politician was assassinated during a campaign in one of
Europe's most civil and tolerant nations is seismic on its own. 

Fortuyn's legion of enemies denounced him as a fascist and a racist,
partly for his tough-on-crime policies, but mostly for his belief that
immigration should stop, and that immigrants - particularly Muslims, whose
views on women and gays he considered barbaric - should be pressed harder 
to assimilate into Dutch life. Immigration and assimilation of Third World
immigrants: These are and will continue to be tremendously important
issues for Europe, particularly as its population ages with the native
birth rate remaining below replacement level. 

Whether Fortuyn's murderer turns out to have Islamic connections or is
part of the extreme Left, the sobering truth is that Europe - democratic, gun-
controlling Europe - is a place where questioning the immigration status
quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you
shot dead. It is hard to overestimate the psychological impact the
killing is having in Holland, a bourgeois and orderly country that prides
itself on tolerance. "We were a quiet, normal country, where we never had
any big criminal things happening," says Marnix Kort, 36, of Haarlem.
"This changes everything. We have become a banana republic in an instant." 

"Things like this don't happen in Holland. It's like the 11th of September
for us. Everybody thought this couldn't be, but we see that it is possible. I 
feel very insecure," said Miriam Jeurissen, 34, who lives in a suburb of
Amsterdam. A woman who answered the phone at Fortuyn campaign headquarters 
[http://www.pim-fortuyn.nl] last night said things were too chaotic there,
and that no one would be able to speak to the foreign press until today.
Through her tears, she said, "It's unbelievable that someone gets killed only 
for saying what they believe." 

What Fortuyn said and believed rocked the normally staid world of Dutch 
politics, which has for many decades been built around coalitions of
parties representing traditional Dutch constituencies - Catholics, Protestants,
 Socialists, and smaller parties. In practice, this has resulted in an
increasingly ossified statist government overseen by elitist political class
which, as in France and other European democracies, a growing number of voters
see as unresponsive to its desires. "Pim Fortuyn was reacting strongly against
a highly organized communal politics," says Erik Jones, a Netherlands expert at
the University of Nottingham. "What he was arguing for was more of a sense of
individualism, but within the context of a strong monoculturalism. He argued
that the Dutch needed to do away with all this consensus, and just voice their
opinions - but to do so within the general framework of Dutch culture." 

To do that, Fortuyn challenged one of the fundamental principles of
liberal Dutch culture: Thou shalt not be seen as intolerant. Immigration and 
immigration-related crime are not new problems in the Netherlands, but the 
ability to speak openly about it is. For years, the ruling elite, which
includes the media, has made discussion of the growing immigration
problem taboo, on pain of being branded a crypto-Nazi. 

As recently as last week, Fortuyn denounced this paralyzing political 
correctness, telling an interviewer that "everywhere in Europe, socialists
and the extreme left have forbidden the discussion of the problems of
multicultural society." "Professor Pim," a 54-year-old, openly gay,
ex-Marxist professor turned newspaper columnist, emerged as an unlikely
spokesman for anti-immigration sentiment in the Netherlands, where immigrants,
many of them Muslims from Turkey and North Africa, make up 10 percent of
the densely populated nation of 16 million. 

Unlike France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, to whom he was often unfairly likened, 
Fortuyn was a free-marketeer who preached lower taxes and deregulation. He 
promised to get tough on crime, return the police to local control, and
impose stricter standards on the educational system. Fortuyn, who frequented
gay bars in his hometown of Rotterdam, was an unapologetic libertine who stood 
firmly behind Dutch beliefs in a liberal, tolerant society, but he maintained
that Muslims and other immigrants who refused to accommodate themselves to 
Dutch values were a threat to liberty. Kicked out of his original party for
anti-Islamic statements - he once called Islam a "backward religion" for its
treatment of women and gays, and authored a best-seller, "Against the
Islamicization of our Culture - Fortuyn founded his own political party, List
Pim Fortuyn, and shocked political observers by taking a third of the seats in
Rotterdam municipal elections - this in a city where 45 percent of the
electorate are not ethnically Dutch. 

"If you look at his electoral list [of candidates], it was a case study in
ethnic diversity," Jones says. "He sounded right-wing, but at the end of the
day he was more about individual responsibility versus collective
responsibility, as opposed to 'we hate foreigners.'" 

Indeed, Fortuyn polled surprisingly well among ethnic voters, particularly
small businessmen worried about crime brought by newer immigrants. Twenty
percent of the votes at one Rotterdam mosque that served as a polling place
went for Fortuyn. Said Kort, "We had black people on TV saying they will vote
for him because he's doing something for black people who work for a living. He
was against freeloaders." "If anything, he was a libertarian, and that flew in
the face of 50 years of collectivist tradition in the Netherlands," says
analyst John Huslman of the Heritage Foundation.

The telegenic Fortuyn's media skills ("Imagine a gay Pat Buchanan," says
Jones) sometimes slipped into demagogy, but were effective. In a recent 
televised debate with an imam, Fortuyn baited the Muslim cleric by
flaunting his homosexuality. Finally the imam exploded, denouncing Fortuyn in 
strongly anti-homosexual terms. Fortuyn calmly turned to the camera and,
addressing viewers directly, told them that this is the kind of Trojan
horse of intolerance the Dutch are inviting into their society in the name
of multiculturalism. "They effect was galvanizing," says Jones. The September 
11 attacks in America also made voters more open to Fortuyn's warning
about the danger Islam poses to the open society. 

"I'm not anti-Muslim, I'm not anti-immigration; I'm saying we've got big 
problems in our cities," Fortuyn said last month. "It's not very smart to
make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural 
Muslim cultures that don't assimilate." Though Muslim extremists seem the 
natural suspects in the killing, Fortuyn had many enemies. The Dutch press
demonized him as "the Dutch Haider," even though Fortuyn distanced himself 
from the controversial Austrian rightist, denouncing anti-Semitism and vowing
strong support for Israel. 

To some on the left, the rise of Fortuyn in the polls - some analysts
expected him to emerge from the May 15 elections as a major player in the next
coalition government - signaled the advent of fascism. To understand how 
hysterical this view is in an American context, you have to realize that
Fortuyn is to the left of most Democrats here. In his obituaries, Fortuyn
is being described as a "far right" or "hard right" politician, which is 
nonsense. Fortuyn routinely made the point that it was inaccurate and
foolish to put all anti-establishment politicians in Europe into the same
"far-right" camp. 

He was right, but it's in the interest of the political establishment in
Europe to demonize challengers like Fortuyn as neo-fascist, thus delegitimating
their ideas without having to engage these ideas democratically. A Belgian 
government official reacted to the Fortuyn murder by cautioning politicians to
be more careful about how they campaign - implicitly blaming Fortuyn for
his own assassination. This will not last, particularly when the average voters
believe people like Fortuyn are a liberating presence in the stultified,
statist world of European politics. 

"I wouldn't have voted for him, but he was a fresh breeze through the
whole political scene," says Jeurissen, a stay-at-home mom. "If somebody has a 
different view, and makes people aware that there's a different way to
think about things, that's okay." 

The fact that that anodyne opinion - that freedom of speech is an
acceptable part of democratic society - is enough to get a man killed in
today's Europe should shock the conscience of the continent. Fortuyn may or may
not be a martyr in the war against fundamentalist Islam, but he is almost
certainly a martyr in the war on political correctness. European populations
are aging, and cannot maintain their welfare states without massive
immigration; immigration from Islamic countries threatens to change European
values  inalterably.Fortuyn said Europe cannot avoid confronting these
realities. He may be a more powerful force for change by the way he died than
he would have been had he lived. "The clock is ticking in Europe, and is
ticking in a democratic way," says Hulsman. "Maybe now is the time to begin
real  dialogue about immigration, crime and culture, because if a real one
isn't  begun, these impulses that can't be processed through democratic
institutions are going to have ugly manifestations. This is the problem in
Europe: nothing of real significance is ever discussed by the political elites.

response 9 of 68:

May 7 22:31 UTC 2002

That's a Dutch right-winger as eulogized by the National Review.  Look at the
way he's written up by The Guardian for an alternate viewpoint.

response 11 of 68:

May 8 00:22 UTC 2002

I think it's also proper to discuss the potential civil liberties effects of
importing conservative Islamic voters into your electorate.

response 13 of 68:

May 8 03:14 UTC 2002

Someone should tell the Republicans that, because at the last convention
Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), who is gay, gave an address in the middle of prime
time. 

response 15 of 68:

May 8 07:40 UTC 2002

Obviously you-uns needs more gun control laws, huh.

response 17 of 68:

May 8 14:28 UTC 2002

Except Reagan's drug policy, for example, was not "You're an addict? Have
all you want!" - an actual Foruyn quote by the way.

response 19 of 68:

Jun 16 21:05 UTC 2002

Isn't that so typical, that the truth of what the man said couldn't be
admitted until he'd been martyred for it?  I recall reading that his
party was set to do well in the elections despite (or perhaps because
of) his murder, but I haven't seen anything beyond that.  I think it's
good that events called attention to the facts, however inconvenient
the facts might be for some people's preconceptions.

Fortuyn's comments about Islam sound a lot like Sylvio Berlusconi's
little talk about the superiority of Western culture, which was also
roundly condemned by the Politically Correct.  Of course, sooner or
later the public (if not the ivory-tower academics) are going to
realize that all of it is essentially true despite how much it makes
the cultural relativists squirm in their seats, and the west will
actually have the courage to fight for its values and proclaim them the
best.  After 11-Sep-2001, that can't come too soon.

(I'd much rather have the Dutch leading the fight for human rights and
secularism than having George Bush implicitly leading it for Pentecostals
and other Christian fundamentalists of the USA; the latter are almost
a mirror-image of the very thing they claim to oppose. :p )

response 21 of 68:

Jun 17 01:54 UTC 2002

But the fundamentalits are in control nearly everywhere. That is why
the generalization is made.

response 23 of 68:

Jun 17 03:04 UTC 2002

Or a lot of other places.