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?
Alex
February 19, 2012 at 10:27 pmThis was really interesting to me. I know nothing about Dutch politics, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of a tiny sliver. Do you think smaller countries are more vulnerable to racist politics? This seems to be the reason most frequently trotted out for the strong anti-immigrant policies in Denmark.
“landlords rent them awful flats”
Heh, this reminds me of a minor scandal at Copenhagen University recently. They don’t really supply housing because housing is so tight in the city, and so all the dorms or “kollegiums” are independently run, and they provide a list of landlords who rent rooms in the city. One of the landlords advertising through the university’s list this year specified “No gays” and when a student emailed to question the landlord about this, the landlord replied that all gays should be “executed.” The student complained to the university, whose initial response was that they had no control over landlords, and they couldn’t vet the ads, even though they were providing the advertising. In other words, “Screw you; it’s not our problem.” The student raised enough of a fuss that the statement was eventually retracted and the university said they’d start screening for this sort of thing.
It also makes me think of the currently more tenuous status of illegal immigrants in Alabama and recent policy changes. It opens them up to much more abuse from people like landlords.
Strangely, I’m strongly in favor of the burqa ban, which you referred to as foulness. My philosophical reasoning here is strongly affected by my emotions and the way I was brought up. I was brought up as a strongly conservative Christian, and sent to Christian schools my entire life, including boarding school in high school, and the dress codes were very strict. I look back on my entire childhood as abuse and torture, that affected me absolutely as much as the beatings. Given that most “women” are expected to start wearing these costumes at puberty, when they are not in control of any part of their lives, is giving too much control to parents. I know this raises issues of what an adult woman can choose for herself, but the adult women I know in any kind of conservative religion are mad and usually poor or no education which would enable them to have the economic freedom to choose, and they are kept from making real outside social connections which might offer them the support to make real choices.
I realize that my views are unpopular, and I know that the reason many liberal folks disagree with me is that my viewpoint borders on paternalism. I’m going to compare this with high heels, something I think is even more damaging, physically damaging to women, who are obviously not smart enough to make healthy choices. And yet I fall down (just barely) on the side of not banning high heels. Why? Because religion is prescriptive. Fashion, while peer pressure is horrible and immense, is not. In many cases these women would not be allowed to exist in their communities without wearing the burqa and, yet, even though it makes me less popular, not wearing high heels does not mean that I am ostracized.
If most women who chose the burqa were well-educated women in their thirties, or older, who were financially independent, I would support that as a choice. But this is not reality, and as such I think it is a form of abuse and control that should not be allowed to exist in 21st century civilization.
FGFM
March 20, 2012 at 8:34 amFunny how Alex put so much effort into a Decent defense of the burqa ban and failed to discuss Wilders. As far as the anti-Polish stuff goes, I noticed that Terry Sanderson has started working that angle.