And the government falls again. You’d think the old rightwing parties, VVD and CDA had learned from their experiences with the LPF, but once again an extreme rightwing populist party has brought down a neoliberal government. This at the end of seven weeks of very serious negotiations about the 16 billion euros of spending cuts the three parties were engaged in, spending cuts that are now off the table.
Though unlikely to remain so for long, at least this will give the opportunity for the leftwing parties in parliament to minimise these cuts and steer them in the right direction, e.g. by ending the Dutch participation in the JSF. The collapse of the PVV support for the minority government will also mean the likely end of already agreed upon cuts, e.g. in the social workplaces, as well and just as important, the end of support from the other two parties for the PVV’s idee fixes, like the burqa ban.
Even more importantly, though Wilders and co will still be around after the next elections, this will probably be their high water mark, their moment of greatest power. As I’ve written about time and again, Wilders had to walk the tightrope between populism and power. He knew that if he had gone into a proper coalition government, he ran the risk of ending up like the LPF, splintered between the two old dirty fighters of Dutch politics, while if he had gone into opposition, his base would’ve deserted him because he couldn’t achieved anything that way, as had happened to the SP before. So he ended up with what looked like the best of both worlds, supporting a minority government while not having any governmental responsibility himself, yet he and his party still got into trouble anyway. And the voters have started to leave already, even before this happened.
The final result of this fall is the end to the myth that we need to make tough, harsh decisions right now, as no earlier date than 12 September for elections seems likely to be decided upon, while any drastic measures before that seem unlikely as well. And with that, the idea that we do need to conform to the EU demands for a budget deficit no larger than three percent of GDP seems less likely too.
The newest brainfart of our supported by bigots rightwing government is to throw a bone to those bigots by imposing a quota on the police to catch at least 4800 “illegal” immigrants. Many mayors, as the heads of police in their districts, are less than enthusiastic about this idea. After all, as the Amsterdam mayor said, everybody was outraged when the police had a quota on fining bicyclists for broken tail lights…
And it’s not as if illegal immigration is all that big a problem in the Netherlands anyway; we’ve made ourselves less than appealing to anybody who isn’t white, “western” and preferably rich.
Meanwhile, continuing on the same theme, one of the ministries that’s most likely to have its budget slash to the bone once the government has made up its mind how much and where to cut is that of economic development aid, as Wilders’ PVV is dead set against spending money on foreigners. Something that worried Bill Gates, currently the world’s most generous philantrope as he’s attempts to work off his bad Windows karma, enough to call on the government in an interview with Dutch radio to not implement these cuts. It’s yet another great advertisment for the Netherlands, coming after last month’s anti-Polish website set up by the PVV. If you had any illusions that Holland is still a liberal, tolerant country, this should disabuse you of them…
One of the more frustrating aspects of the rise and rise of Geert Wilders and his Freedom (sci) Party has been the general unwillingness of serious people in the media and politics to actually call them what they are: bigots and racists. That the average Dutch person was never as tolerant of foreigners as our reputation of a liberal, tolerant country would imply I long knew, but I assumed that at the very least his leftwing political opponents would have the courage to call him out on his bigotry, rather than hiding behind terms like “populist”. Yet with some honourable exceptions, Wilders and his ideas have been taken seriously by the political establishment, both on the right and the left, in so far as they are not rejected out of hand, but as viewpoints that can be debated and taken seriously into consideration, even if you disagree with them, as normal bits of political thought. Hence such foulness as the upcoming burqa ban, now in parliament, where the bullying of a minority group in Dutch society by forbidding its members their traditional clothing is sold as somehow feminist and serious people debate the merits of this.
But now Wilders may have gone too far. Not content with being an anti-Muslim bigot, where in the past decade he had the political climate with him, he has now branched out into more traditional territory for bigots, by starting hating on Eastern and Middle European migrants — and he doesn’t mean Austrians by that. Polish and other Eastern European migrants have been coming to the Netherlands in large numbers in the past ten years, ever since these countries became part of the EU and they gained the rights of all EU citizens, to work and live in any country in the union. These migrants fit the classical pattern of the labour migrant, first coming over for short term work Dutch workers are hard to find for, slowly branching out into more permanent work, finally bringing over their families and settling in the country for good. There’s the usual exploitation, as Dutch employers under pay or under report their Polish workers, landlords rent them awful flats and charge them a fortune for it, which in turn brings along the usual fallout of social problems any city with a huge influx of unexpected migrants has to deal with: lack of living space, lack of amenities for these people in their own language, culture clashes, heightened visibility of social conflict (petty crime, drunkenness et all) the more noticable because it’s done in a new language, and so on. Nothing new, but the same Wilders voter who dislikes Islam is more than likely not to find these Poles all that attractive either.
Which Wilders has now attempted to cash in on, by opening an online registry for complaints about those people, about how they took your job, they were criminal, they were violent, noisy neighbours, spoke filthy foreign languages, just are not properly Dutch. Classic racist dogwhistling, in other words. Surely now the fiction that Wilders is just a populist, a too strident critic of Islam and certain of its practises but not a bigot or a racist, oh no, can no longer be maintained. Or can it?
I hope I’m right and serious political commentators will finally have the courage to say what is plain to see, that he is a bigot and should be treated as such, but I’m not hopeful. If nobody twigged on three years ago, when he’d said he would like to deport millions of Jews Muslims from Europe, why will they now?
An ideology for justifying violence against racial minorities, the Left and the labour movement has been developing in plain sight, rather than in the underworld of NSDAP re-enactors. It has now led to a massacre of the children of the one of the most moderate labour movements in the world.
Two things have to come out of this: first, the mainstream left and labour movements have to take seriously security and self-defence; second, the mainstream right must be made to pay a heavy political price for this atrocity.
In a Dutch context this means that we need to be honest about Geert Wilders and his responsibility for Breivik’s actions and what this means for our political system. Wilders isn’t the only one who has been banging the drum about the Muslim menace and Eurabia and treasonous leftwing multicultural elites, but he is the most influential mainstream European politician to have done so. Wilders is unique in Europe because he has managed to get his programme into the mainstream of Dutch politics, with the current minority Christian Democrat/neoliberal government being dependent on his support to survive, hence not inclined to oppose him, if not quite actively supportive of his politics. Which in turn means that he has had the opportunity to make true on some of his rhetoric, the cuts in arts funding (“leftwing hobbies”) being one example.
Wilders has also been quite succesful in exporting his brand of Islamophobia, through e.g. the Fitna movie, the controversy about the initial refusal to let him speak in the UK and not unimportantly, his ties with fellow extremists in Europe (EDL) and elsewhere (Pam Geller). He’s a central pivot in the conveyor belt of rightwing extremism. Ideas that originate in the fringes of the rightwing, in the sordi little blogs and forums, shitty thinktanks and neonazi and fascistoid fringe groups are picked up by him and made respectable, because he is a serious, respectable mainstream politician, even if we don’t agree with them. Meanwhile his rhetoric, his talk about being in a “hot war with Islam” and how leftwing/social democratic parties have betrayed their countries in turn, fires up this fringe even more, justification for even more extreme opinions and ultimately, as in Norway this weekend, action.
But our mainstream politicians and commentators, those who thought to fight fire with fire and wanted to address the very real concerns of the white working classes/real Dutch people about the excesses of the Islam in the name of more votes, those who wanted to declare multiculturism dead and buried, a failed experiment, those who agreed that art is a leftwing hobby and the Dutch weather institute dangerously partisan because it takes climate change seriously, those politicians and commentators also have the blood of Oslo and Utøya on their hands. They are not completely innocent either of having created a political climate in which such atrocities were made possible.
So we got ourselves a rightwing minority goverment in the Netherlands a while back, who now rule with support of the racists aka Geert Willders and his “Freedom Party”. Wilders thanks his success by pandering to the worst prejudices of the socalled common man, while the government thanks its succes to pandering to Wilders. Which explains why while the government tries to sell us on how Maturely they are trying to handle the Very Serious Task of getting Holland’s finances back in order in the wake of the bankers’ crisis, the sort of measures they come up with is to slash the culture budget. As the picture on top shows, the total amount of money the government spents each year on culture is roughly 450 million euros: a lot of money, but nothing compared to the 7,6 billion euros it would cost to buy the F-35. So why is that sacrosant when cutting the cultural budget is only penny ante stuff?
Because stopping money being “wasted” on opera, theatre and other “leftwing hobbies” as Wilders put it, is a goal in itself for this government. It keeps Wilders and its voters happy, can be spun as showing how serious the government takes the budget deficits and pisses off the leftwing opposition. Who cares that it doesn’t help achieve its nominal goal as long as white elephants like the F-35 are kept fully funded but does destroy a lot of cultural capital?
Pure pandering. And to add insult to injury, not only are the budgets slashed, the value added tax paided on art and other cultural products will be upped as well, from six to nineteen percent. Except on porn. Because wanking is a rightwing hobby…
On 18 February 1943, in his famous Sport Palast speech, Joseph Goebbels asked the German population whether they wanted “der Totaler Krieg”, Total War. Almost sixty years on, Geert Wilders uses the same imagery in his first speech at his new trial. Accused of discrimination and incitement of hatred against Muslims, he doubles down on his racist kookery, using not just Goebbels’ Total War, but also the famous Chruchill quote about “all over Europe the lights are going out”.
The new fascism comes partially clothed in the language of anti-fascism, of freedom, but betrays itself with its obsessions. Wilders talks about defending freedom, but paints the whole Muslim world as “a desert”, all Muslims as “creators of deserts”, of a people without a Mozart, a Bill Gates, of an ideology (sic) that can only produce murder and manslaugther, whose societies can only be barbaric and backward. And in this they are supported by the “multicultural elites of Europe waging total war on their own peoples”. We’ve gotten used to similar sort of outbursts, Isloam bashing has sadly gone mainstream in the past decade, but we can still get to know its evil if we translate it into the ideology of seventy years ago, with some simple search and replaces of the key words in Wilders’ speech:
President, members of the court,
Lights are fading out all over Europe. Everywhere on the continent where our civilization flourished and where man created liberty, prosperity and culture, everywhere the foundation of the West is under fire. Everywhere in Europe the elites act as the defenders of an ideology that has been out for our destruction for over 30 centuries
(Plaintiff: Mr. president, may I leave the room?)
(Judge presiding: You may leave the room if you do so quietly)
An ideology that originates from the desert and one that can only produce deserts, because it doesn’t allow man to be free. The Jewish Mozart, the Jewish Gerard Reve, the Jewish Bill Gates, they do not exist, because there can be no creativity without liberty.
And I believe, with everything I have in me, that Judaism is an ideology that distinguishes itself in murder and manslaughter only, that only brings forth societies that are backward and impoverished. And strangely, those same elites won’t tolerate any negative word about this ideology.
My trial is not an isolated incident. Only the ignorant think it is.
Throughout Europe, not just in the Netherlands, but in Europe as a whole, multiculturalist elites are fighting a total war against their people, with continuing mass immigration and Judaismisation at stake, ultimately resulting in an Jewish Europe. A Europe without liberty. Eurozion
All over Europe the lights are going out.
Who thinks and speaks independently, is in danger, freedom loving citizens that criticize Judaism or even only dare to suggest there is a correlation between Judaism and criminality or, for instance, honour revenge, pay a bitter price. And are threatened, persecuted and criminalized. He who speaks, who speaks the truth, is in danger.
All over Europe the lights are going out.
Everywhere the Orwellian thought police are at the ready, looking out for thought-crime everywhere. Everywhere looking to throw the people back within the lines within which they are supposed to think.
This trial, Mr. president, members of the court, is hence not just about me.
It is about something much bigger. Freedom of opinion is not the property of the accidental elite of a country. It is an inalienable right, the birth right of the Dutch people as well. Centuries have been spent fighting for it and now it is about to be sacrifices to accommodate a totalitarian ideology.
Future generations will watch, and look back on this trial, and wonder who was on the good side and who wasn’t. Who stood for liberty and who wanted to sell out liberty.
All over Europe the lights are going out.
Everywhere our liberty is being curtailed. That is why I will close with the words I also spoke last year during the first session. It is not only the right, but also the duty of free people, to speak out against any ideology that threatens our liberty.
It is hence a right as well as a duty, my right and my duty as a member of parliament as well, to speak the truth about the malignant ideology that is Judaism.
I hope the freedom of opinion will be victorious in this trial, I hope not only that I will be acquitted, but above all that the freedom of opinion of so many Dutch and so many Europeans, will continue to exist.
Thank you.
