Wis[s]e Words – Page 642 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Lobsters

Published on May 15, 2002

Charlie Stross is a hacker (in the respectable sense of the word), computer journalist, weblogger and science fiction writer. It’s because of the latter he just fried my brain. If Neal Stephenson was the Bruce Sterling of the nineties, Charlie is the Neal Stephenson of the noughties.

You see, Charlie’s short story Lobsters has been nominated for the 2002 short story Hugo Awards which inspired Asimovs to put it online. Charlie linked to it in his weblog as a bit of shameless self promotion, so I read the story during my lunch break.

Whoa.

That was … weird. Weird and dense and wonderful. Exhilirating in a way I only get from good science fiction, the sort of science fiction where you actually feel your neural pathways expanding because the writer is throwing so much new stuff at you, the sort of science fiction that gives you a bigger sugar buzz then a crate of Jolt cola, the sort of science fiction that leaves you bouncing new ideas of the edge of your cranium.

Not bad at all.

Lijst Fortuyn: hypocrites-r-us

Published on May 14, 2002

In a previous post I mentioned how every political party involved in the elections had stopped their campaign out of piety for the deceased. Every party apart from Lijst Pim Fortuyn it seems. This morning, the Spits — a free newspaper aimed at commuters — carried a huge advertisement for the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF). On the left, stretched out over a third of the page there was a picture of Pim with his characteristic smirk with to the right his trademark motto “at your service. Underneath which there was a text stating how touched and impressed the party was bythe massive show of support and grief for Pim Fortuyn during the last week and how important it was,especially now to vote for him and his party.

Is it just me, or is this attempt at winning votes over the body of their murdered leader a bit hypocritical? Not to mention dumb and greedy. Do they really think they will win votes with this stunt? Anybody likely to be swayed by this will already have decided to vote for LPF and it’ll only annoy others. Judging from the comments on Tonie’s Kladblok at least some of the LPF members realise this.

Others however do their best to reinforce the image LPF has as a collection of flyweight nitwits only kept together by Fortuyn’s personality. Take freshly minted chairman Peter Langendam (on the left in the picture) for example. In an interview with the Amsterdam evening paper Het Parool he stated “the bullets came from the Left” [1] and accused PvdA and Groen Links politicians for having helped killed Pim Fortuyn. He is also convinced that the killer was a “professional hitman” [2].

He seems to have a special hatred for Groen Links and its leader Paul Rosenmöller, linking them with Stalin: History’s worst massmurderer was Stalin. He killed sixty million Russians. Communists, that’s where Groen Links comes from. With a green label stamped on it, it was acceptable again. [3] Not that this has anything to do with Groen Links, but that doesn’t matter. They’re a green party and hence part of the “environmental terrorists that do such things” [4], meaning the killing of Pim Fortuyn. He asks “how long we will have to tolerate a fifth estate of non elected organisations that dictates the law to us” [5], meaning those “environmental terrorists”.

I hope I don’t have to tell you that these are just paranoid rants, that there is no organised network of environmental terrorists. There’s no reason to suppose the probable murderer acted other than alone and no evidence so far of his motives. All we know is that yes, he was an environmental activist, but one whose group worked within the system to oppose factory farming, using legalistic and democratic means to stop factory farming. You can disagree with their goals, but not their methods.

So why all this melodrama from mister Langendam? Perhaps he truly believes in a vast environmental leftwing conspiracy, perhaps he used it as a piece of cheap election rhetoric, I don’t know. But one thing is certain, it has no base in fact whatsoever.

Incidentally, Langendam has already stated he will resign immediately after the elections, as he thinks of politics as something unworthy of him. His party can only agree with him.

[1] “kogel kwam van links”
[2 “professionele huurmoordenaar”
[3] “De grootste massamoordenaar uit de geschiedenis was Stalin. Hij heeft zestig miljoen Russen vermoord. Communisten, daar komt Groen Links vandaan. Er is het label groen opgeplakt en dan kan het weer”
[4] “milieuterroristen die dat soort dingen doen”
[5] “Hoe lang moeten we nog tolereren dat een vijfde macht van niet-democratisch gekozen organen ons de wet dicteert?”

The big lie?

Published on May 13, 2002Leave a comment

Read this, please. This was written by Adam Curry in a fit of anger at foreign representations of Fortuyn and the murder of him. Curry’s article makes two points:

Portraying Fortuyn as another Le Pen or another Haider is wrong. He wasn’t ultraright or anti-Muslim, he was just the first to speak his mind about problems everybody here knows about but is afraid to talk about.

This misconception can be traced back first to Wim Kok, the Dutch minister president calling him “hard right” and secondly to the Volkskrant interview Pim Fortuyn [1] gave in early februari this year. This was the interview that cost him the leadership of Leefbaar Nederland, the party for which he originally would be the lijsttrekker [2] for the oncoming elections.

Adam Curry’s main point is that this interview, amongst others misrepresented Fortuyn. I disagree with him. He was hung by his own words in that article. Curry stated that Fortuyn was not anti-immigration, while he actually said he wanted to stop all immigration of Muslims and even stop allowing asylum seekers to enter the Netherlands.

I can agree with Currey’s point that Fortuyn was not a second Le Pen, he was more complicated than that. I think he was genuine in his view of Islam as a danger to the liberal Dutch climate, but he took it too far. He talked about scrapping article 1 of our constitution, which forbids discrimination, talked about wanting to refuse all Muslims entry to the Netherlands, systematically confused migrants with asylum seekers, portraying them as threatening to swamp our country. He used exactly the samesort of language that the extreme right had used but managed to dress it up in slightly more respectable form. He may not have been a racist like Le Pen, but he was surely a bigot.

[1] Dutch only, unfortunately
[2] The lijsttrekker of a political party is the first person on the candidate list, usually the political leader if not always the party leader.

It’s that man again

Published on May 12, 2002Leave a comment

Speaking of demonising Pim Fortuyn…

Only the Dutch could have a gay sociologist fascist

The murder is further complicated by the fact that only the Dutch could have a fascist leader who was a gay sociologist. Maybe he was trying to build a liberal, inclusive fascism, dreaming of the day he could announce to his followers “and now, after a hard afternoon’s goose-stepping, let’s relax, massage each other’s shoulders and get rid off all that tension before invading a neighbouring country.”

His sexuality has been cited as one of the reasons that he couldn’t have been a fascist, but the far right seems capable of gliding over these contradictions. If Hitler had been gay, the only difference to history would have been the uniforms, when he’d thrown a strop and yelled, “Brown shirts and jackboots? Have you no sense of colour co-ordination”.

It’s typical that an English comedian did have the guts to take the mickey out of Fortuyn’s death, while our own cabaretiers haven’t dared comment.

“Openly gay”

Published on May 8, 2002Leave a comment

There is one thing about Pim Fortuyn that it seems foreigners, especially USAnians just cannot get their heads around: him being openly gay. And even more, his being gay and nobody caring about it. How could this be?

The fact is, the personal life of politicians is just not an issue. You may know the domestic arrangements of the various ministers, or you may not. If you know them, it’s usually because it came up in a sidebar to an interview, or because their family was also invited to some gala dinner or such. Unlike the US, we just don’t base our assesments of a politician’s suitability on their private life.

Apart from that, there’s also that homosexuality is an entirely normal and accepted fact of life here. Sure, there are people hostile to homosexuality or uncomfortable with it but on average people don’t care about it. Gay people are treated no different from others, the same legal rights as couples, including the right to marry. Being gay doesn’t mean anything here, isn’t a stigmata, doesn’t condemn you to a live of nightclubs, casual sex and having to hide from “normal” people. Few people are homophobic here.

And those who are, usually keep their hostility to themselves as it’s just not tolerated, as it isn’t for any minority. Fortuyn profited from this attitude in his private life, letting him live an “openly gay” lifestyle without reprecussions. In politics this attitude worked against him since for many people, including myself he crossed a line between legitamite criticism of certain opinions of (some) Muslims and condemning all Muslims for the sins of a few.

It’s true that there is a danger that our society will lose its tolerance towards homosexuals under the influence of immigrants and asylum seekers from less open backgrounds. It’s also true that the Morrocan community in the Netherlands is at the moment the least integrated of the big immigrant groups (others being Turks and Surinamers) as well as originally coming from very conservative areas in Morroco (theRif mountains). That does not mean all Muslims are raging homophobes wanting to burn all faggots in one big auto-da-fe, that they are all automatically suspect. Talking about all Muslims as being homophobes, as being backward and an automatic danger to tolerant Dutch society is what made Fortuyn borderline racists, is what made him controversial.