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Fortuyn And Van Gogh

That also reminds me that, unlike all the respectable voices, I’ve always been even more upset by the murder of Pym Fortuyn, a potential Prime Minister of the Netherlands, in 2002 than by the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004. The van Gogh murder was the obvious result of letting a whole bunch of […]

That also reminds me that, unlike all the respectable voices, I’ve always been even more upset by the murder of Pym Fortuyn, a potential Prime Minister of the Netherlands, in 2002 than by the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004. The van Gogh murder was the obvious result of letting a whole bunch of Muslims into the country, a problem that can be solved (granted, at vast expense) by paying them to leave and other sensible reforms. The only solution to the West’s Muslim problem is to disconnect.

But Fortuyn’s assassination was carried out by a well-educated Dutch-born white leftist the day after the climax of the “Two-Week Hate” against immigration-restrictionists that swept Europe when Le Pen won a spot in the French Presidential final. When Fortuyn was murdered, respectable voices across Europe opined that Fortuyn more or less had it coming. The European Establishment excused themselves from any responsibility by blaming it all on animal rights craziness.

For example, the Dutch-born Ian Buruma asserted in The New Yorker in 2005 that Fortuyn was “assassinated in 2002 by a deranged animal-rights activist.” Nothing to look at here, folks, just move along. Just a random lunatic. Didn’t have nuthin’ to do with immigration.

Yet, more than year before Buruma wrote that, the murderer had made clear at his trial that Fortuyn had to die because of his anti-Muslim immigration restrictionist views. ~Steve Sailer

I completely agree with Steve Sailer on this one.  The hatemongering carried out by then-PM Wim Kok and the other leading representatives of Dutch “consensus” politics was as hideous a display of multiculti fanaticism as any I have ever seen.  The express desire to erect a cordon sanitaire around Fortuyn’s political appeal and the condemnation of him as a kind of neo-Nazi directly contributed to his murder, and the appalling extent to which some Europeans were willing to go suppress dissident speech on questions of immigration was revealed for all to see. 

Fortuyn’s murder is more worrisome in a way than Van Gogh’s (though both are horrible) because it shows the derangement that Westerners have inflicted on themselves on questions of immigration and tolerance, such that native Westerners will be moved to murder one of their fellow citizens for his alleged “bigotry” sooner than they will lift a finger to protest the violence wrought by immigrants against natives who offend their “values.”  

Fortuyn’s appeal heralded a shift in Dutch politics that did not disappear after his violent death.  Van Gogh’s murder intensified the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong in the pursuit of endless tolerance, but without Fortuyn blazing the trail in talking openly about these problems (and paying for it with his life) Van Gogh’s death would probably not have resonated as much as it did in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the West.  Of course, Fortuyn was able to make his appeal to the extent that he did because he was able to make it in defense of a very liberally defined kind of liberal society; as a Marxist academic and openly homosexual man, he possessed some immunity from the boilerplate accusations of prejudice that would dog conservative and far-right opponents of immigration.  In the end, he did not possess nearly enough immunity.  Fortuyn’s death was far more chilling in its way because it showed the extent to which Westerners were willing to adopt the tactics of religious and ideological fanatics to enforce an unthinking tolerance that has been sapping Europe from within for decades and which makes combating the kind of person who murdered Van Gogh that much more difficult through an unwillingness to confront the violence and drive for domination within Islam.

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