Geert Wilders – Wis[s]e Words

Totaler krieg

Published on February 9, 20112 Comments

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.

Dutch football to Wilders: F-off

Published on October 25, 2010

amateur football

Sometimes rightwing populism backfires, as Geert Wilders’ party the PVV found out last week. A PVV member of the Den Haag city council proposed an “allochtonenstop” in amateur football, in response to the supposed “flood of problems” football clubs with too many non-western immigrant members were having. According to Richard de Mos (also a PVV member of parliament), such people don’t volunteer for their clubs, are disrespectful and responsible for daily violence on the football pitch. To combat this behaviour clubs should stop accepting new non-western immigrants as members.

Deliberately controversial, this sort of proposal is what helped make the PVV into the third biggest party in the Netherlands. You just make up a lot of stupid but tough sounding shit about Muslims or “non-western immigrants” that reinforce already existing stereotypes in your base, let the experts explain why you’re wrong but emerge as the party of common sense, in touch with the public mood, unlike the elitist eggheads who refuse to see deportation of all muslims to Texel is the right answer to Holland’s crime problems.

This time, it failed spectacularly. Because this time the PVV talked nonsense on a subject their voters actually knew something about. Too many people voluntarily spent their weekend running around wet and cold football pitches to believe this nonsense about foreigners running amateur football. this time therefore the backlash came not just from the experts, but from the very same people the PVV normally has on their side. Richard de Vos forgot that if you want to bullshit people, best not attempt that on subjects they actually know something about…

In short: the PVV got roundly thrashed on this proposal, with everybody from the Dutch football union on down ridiculing it.

Thilo Sarrazin: Islamophobia is okay, but mention Jews just once…

Published on August 31, 2010

A rightwing blowhard spouting racist nonsense, even when he is a high ranking official at the German Central Bank, does not become an international scandal, but Thilo Sarrazin made one big mistake. He targeted the wrong ethnical group:

Over the weekend, Sarrazin went even further. In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, Sarrazin waded into the fraught field of genetics, saying “all Jews share a certain gene, all Basques have certain genes that make them different from other people.”

The comment came as he was discussing the identities of different European cultures, but the reference to a Jewish gene has unleashed yet another storm of critique. Such references have been largely taboo in Germany since World War II.

When asked by the interviewer if perhaps he meant to talk of “races” rather than “cultures,” Sarrazin responded “I am not a racist.”

Had he only kept his racism to the usual Islamophobia, it wouldn’t have mattered, but talking about a “Jewish gene” when you’re a German banker? That’s asking for trouble. As The online archive at Der Spiegel shows Sarrazin has been Islamophobic for a long time without it harming his career much. He might have faced censure by his own party (the social democratic SPD!) and criticism from the usual quarters, but his job was safe and he has been described as a “provocateur” and “blunt talking” rather than “racist bastard” in respectable newspapers. One little mention of the “Jewish gene” has changed all that….

Geert Wilders is smarter; not only a “critic of Islam” but also a “friend of Israel” (and you do wonder how much of his Islamophobia is caused by this friendship and imbibing the Israeli views of it, or vice versa). He has kept his racism confided to acceptable targets and as a result is taken seriously as a coalition partner in the next Dutch government. That’s the bad news. The good news is that one of its intended coalition partners, the Christian Democrat CDA has gotten cold feet at the last moment, as many of its members do not feel comfortable with Wilders. As well they should: rightwing or leftwing, no non-racist politician should want anything to do with somebody who wants to use a specific ethnic group of citizens (and in the vocabulary of Wilders’ followers, if not always with Wilders himself, the word “Islam” is interchangable with “Moroccan”) as the scapegoat for all of our country’s problems.

Geert Wilders not wanted anywhere

Published on June 16, 20101 Comment

So Geert Wilders may have won the elections last week, but it seems for now he’s getting nowhere in organising a coalition. Negotiations with the other big winner and currently biggest party in parliament, the VVD are going slow, while the CDA, the party he wants for the third partner is so far still politely but firmly declining to talk. What’s more, many of the CDA’s members are vehemently opposed to any coalition with Wilders, as they find his politics and ideology abhorrent. And without the CDA it will become very difficult to form any coalition with Wilders in it. The other big party — the PvdA — is right out, having been diametrically opposed to him before and during the elections, while all other parties are just too small.

Which puts Wilders in a difficult position. If he wants to get in government he’ll have to make big concessions to the VVD and CDA, disappointing his voters. If he decides it’s not worth it, he will again disappoint his voters. They after all were led to believe that if he won the elections, he would get down to business and not let anybody stop him. Another four years or so in opposition may find his votes drained away again. This is what happened to the SP after the 2006 elections, when it became the third largest party in parliament and the biggest winner of the elections, yet excluded from government, so it will prey on Wilders’ mind a lot. Also preying on his mind, what happened to the LPF, Pim Fortuyn’s party after they won the elections in 2002, who did get into government but squabbled so much it lasted less than a year and virtually annihilated the party….

The good election results for Wilders therefore are proving to be a double edged sword, as they have created expectations that will be difficult to fulfill. Good news for those of us who dislike him and his islamophobic ways.

And now to get a coalition

Published on June 11, 20101 Comment

2010 Dutch election results

The graph above shows the end results of Wednesday’s parliamentary elections. Unlike what it looked like on the night itself, the right now does have a slim majority in parliament, which makes my on the night prediction that the most likely coalition will be a rightwing one look right. However, as we Dutch know, a lot of things can happen in the post-election coalition negotiations and it is by no means sure that we will end up with such a government.

In this context it was quite funny to see how stressed the English became last month when faced with a hung parliament and the prospect of a *gasp* coalition government. Where they were annoyed a new government took a week to form, we are skeptical that Mark Rutte’s promise of a new government before 1 July will be kept. If it is, Rutte will have played a strong part in it, as he’s the leader of the VVD, the rightwing party that for the first time in its existence emerged as the largest party in parliament. This however is not entirely due to the VVD’s own strength, but rather more to the extreme divide between voters. Traditionally we’ve had two to three big parties dividing most of the votes between them; now there are five or six, depending on your definition. The VVD therefore needed to win less seats to become the biggest.

Which also explains the difficulty Rutte or anybody else will have in forming a new government. Usually it’s possible to form a coalition with only two parties, or two big ones and a little one to make up the numbers. After this election however, at least three big parties are needed.

On the right, it would be natural for the VVD to go into coalition with the PVV, Wilders’ party, but will still need the CDA to make up the numbers, even if the CDA was the big loser of this election. Now the CDA has never been too embarassed by this sort of circumstances to not try and get into power, but with Balkenende gone and all the soul searching that such a loss brings with it, it’s anybody’s guess whether they will actually want to or like to sit this one out. It all depends on what they can get, obviously.

The other big question hanging over a rightwing coalition is the PVV’s relation with the VVD, of which Wilders used to be a member. There is some personal antagonism there, even if economically their politics are largely the same. Finally, there’s also the worry about how the PVV will hold up under the pressures of government — everybody is looking at what happened to the LPF, Pim Fortuyn’s party when they won the elections just after his assassination. Wilders has done a lot to ensure the problems the LPF had won’t happen to his party, but even before the elections some faultlines appeared and it’s the question whether he has done enough.

Moving on to the centre, it is also possible that there will be a coalition between CDA, PvdA and the VVD, but hardly likely considering the bad blood between CDA and PvdA and the exclusion of the PVV, which goes against the unwritten rules of Dutch coalition making. You don’t exclude such obvious winners, though that did happen to the SP in the 2006 elections. A PvdA, VVD and PVV coalition is the next option, though how sensible it would be for the PvdA to be wedged in between two rightwing parties is anybody’s guess. Let’s not even mention how much the PVV and PvdA are opposed to each other anyway. Last option here is a monster coalition with both PvdA and VVD, joined with left-liberal D66 and very christian-democrat CU, what’s called “Paars-Plus”, in recognition of the nineties VVD-PvdA-D66 governments.

Then there’s the leftwing. This is the most fractured part of the political spectrum, with the PvdA at thirty seats, the SP as second biggest with half that, followed by D66 and the green GroenLinks at ten each and finally the PvdD (the animal rights party) with two. They’re stuck at sixtyseven seats then, not enough to form a majority government and impossible to keep together anyway with so many parties. Not going to happen.

My money therefore is on a PVV-VVD-CDA coalition, which is going to be awful, as that would be a government where the CDa was the most leftwing party in it… It will mean a government united in its desire to enforce budget cuts and “liberalise” the economy further, demolishing the welfare state further. Even worse, all the Islamophobic rhetoric the PVV has engaged in now has a chance of becoming law, though both VVD and CDA would be likely to temper it somewhat. We won’t see the deportation of all Moroccan-Dutch people, but there will perhaps be laws against their religion and harassement of them. You don’t need sweeping changes in law to make the lives of a lot of people more miserable.

On a positive side, actually being in government may actually destroy the PVV LPF-style, or at least moderate them once it becomes clear it’s easier to shout than to govern. Best case scenario sees an implosion of the PVV followed by a collapse of the coalition, new elections and another roll of the dice..