February 8th, 2012
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?
Categories: Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Racism
August 25th, 2011
The tribute Jack Layton got, with hundreds of people chalking down enough messages of support and remembrance to cover a whole square, is not something that I’ll ever suspect to see for a Dutch politician. There are no Jack Laytons in Holland, nobody on the left with the charisma and honesty to inspire such outbursts of solidarity. The closest who had was Jan Marijnissen, but he retired from active politics a few years ago. Instead we mostly seem to generate third rate Blair clones, media trained non-entities with no soul and no ideology fully bought into capitalist realism.
Categories: Dutch politics, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
July 26th, 2011
I’m with Ken MacLeod
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.
Categories: Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, wingnuts
July 11th, 2011
Move over Gen X and Y and go away millennials: gen U is here: generation unemployment. As the stats show, all over the western world it’s young workers who are paying the price for the economic crisis. Things didn’t look too good before 2008, but since then the spiral of economic depression and harsh saving measures by governments desperate to cut their way out of the crisis have hit young people hard. It’s not so bad in the Netherlands at the moment as it is elsewhere, but I do have the feeling that’s that because we’ve been in the eye of the storm and only now are going to feel the full brunt of it. We were lucky that when the crisis first hit, we still had a relatively moderate coalition governing the Netherlands that didn’t quite have the same neoliberal instinct to cut spending as our current minority rightwing government supported by fascists has. Didn’t mean that they did very much to combat the crisis in any recognisable Keynsian fashion, but they did put through several measures to dampen the worse effects of it.
No such luck anymore. We now have the same sort of government as every other European country, either slavering to start cutting everything they’ve disagreed with for decades, the crisis providing the perfect excuse for it, or forced to by the pressures of the financial markets and their fellow EU countries. So everybody’s cutting spending while the depression gets worse and of course it’s the most vulnerable, especially the young, who bear the brunt of it.
(Statistics via Mr Wonkish.)
Categories: Dutch politics, economic crisis
July 5th, 2011
Ever since the Srebrenica Massacre happened, the Dutch government has always denied any legal (or moral for that matter) responsibility for the murders as the Dutch troops were operating under UN mandate and hence the UN was ultimately responsible — but unindictable under international law. There have been various lawsuits against the Dutch state started by victims and their family, all of which were rejected: until now.
The Dutch court in Den Haag decided today that the Dutch troops had been wrong to force three Muslim men to leave the Dutchbat compound to be killed by Bosnian Serb troops and therefore the Dutch state was culpable in their deaths. From the report about the case at Radio Netherlands:
Hasan Nuhanovic – an interpreter for the Dutch battalion of UN peacekeepers (Dutchbat) which was responsible for protecting the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia – and the next of kin of Rizo Mustafic, a Dutchbat electrician, filed a lawsuit against the Dutch state alleging that Dutchbat knowingly handed over their relatives to the Bosnian Serbs.
The Dutch were in charge of Srebrenica when, under the command of then-general Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb forces overran it and killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
The two men had sought refuge at the Dutchbat headquarters with their families. Mustafic was forced to leave and separated from his wife just outside the compound fence. She was taken away and never heard from again; he was killed by Bosnian Serb forces. Nuhanovic was allowed to stay, but his relatives were forced to leave. The remains of his father and brother were recovered in 2007 and 2010.
The court ruled that Dutchbat, which abandoned the enclave in the face of a superior Bosnian-Serb force, should have foreseen that Mladic’s soldiers would kill the men, noting that Dutchbat had witnessed the abuse and execution of Muslim men at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces. The three were the last of a group of 5,000 men who had sought refuge in the Dutch compound.
Guessing from previous experience, I’m sure the Dutch government will do everything it can to minimise the impact of this ruling, though it would do better to accept it wholeheartedly. The Srebrenica Massacre is the logical outcome of socalled humanitarian interventions, but we haven’t internalised this message yet in the Netherlands. Hopefully this ruling will show that we cannot ignore the consequences when we do attempt to throw our weight around again…
Categories: Dutch politics
Tags: Srebrenica Massacre
July 4th, 2011
As I posted about a week ago, the current rightwing supported by racists Dutch government is putting through radical cuts on the arts. Though these measures have already gone through parliament, resistance against them hasn’t ended. And although comics in general barely get any government support anyway, that doesn’t mean cartoonists aren’t engaged with this struggle. Which is why today a dozen or so odd comic strips in as many daily newspapers had the same message.
Each participating comic drew its regular cast as stick figures, with some variant on the slogan “the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics”. Participants include Peter de Wit’s incredibly popular sarky psychiatrist Sigmund (top), as well as Fokke & Sukke (bottom), Mark Retera’s Dirkjan and many others. It’s of course unrealistic to expect this protest to change many people’s minds, but it is a good way to show the disastrous consequences of the slashing of art funding even to people with little use for art. Everybody reads the funnies after all.
Categories: Comix, Dutch politics, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
