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1)Who? and 2) Why? Dutch anti-immigrant politician Pym Fortuyn has been assassinated. First reports suggest he was shot several times outside a radio station in Hilversum by a lone gunman. I think those tectonic plates of history just juddered. Stay tuned. May 6th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Tony Millard serves up a tasty critique of politics. I was listening to Radio 4, my only live link with the Anglosphere, the other day and heard a short trailer for Sunday morning’s news and comment slot, Broadcasting House. The journalist listed out five reasonable-sounding but right wing policies and then sought our amazement by saying they were taken from Le Pen’s manifesto. I got thinking about this whilst doing something pointless with a tractor and it occurred to me that the body politic is in many ways like the human body. Left wing policies – radicchio and polenta, right wing policies – carpaccio of beef and wild boar sausage. No healthy human body can be properly and efficiently nourished with only one or the other, and it’s the same with nations. Some of Mr Le Pen’s view I am sure are reasonable and meritorious but are rejected wholesale by the left because of some of his less palatable concepts. Unfortunately, our politicians believe in a mostly herbivorous diet and lack conviction when it comes to richer flavours. Perhaps someone should gently remind them of our omnivorous tendencies and introduce them to a Fiorentina (T-Bone steak, Tuscan style) every now and then. Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy) May 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
 My Norwegian libertarian friend Kristine Lowe has a personal interest in tattoos, and in their tax status, see above. (“Lowe” is Norwegian for “lion”, hence the nature of her magnificent adornment.) Thus alerted to any tattoo-related media item, she sent me the following report, based on a longer piece in the Norwegian Aftenposten:
Kristine has also had trouble with her legs. Now me, I’ve never had trouble with Kristine’s legs – see below. But she had a bad accident several years ago, and the original doctors didn’t catch everything. So soon she’s off back to Norway to get everything finally fixed. I and the rest of the libertarian movement wish her all the best.  April 26th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I have to disagree with some of David Carr‘s analysis in What say ye, Fukuyama? regarding the extreme nationalist ‘right-wing’ successes in Europe recently. I do not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is comparable with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the Schiller Partei in the German local elections in the Bundeslander. I think these parties have challenged a profoundly decadent strain of European cultural relativism. I have not completely read through through Schiller’s or Fortuyn’s manifestos yet, but my first impression is that Dutchman Pim Fortuyn is the first populist leader who started a strong movement to defend the current level of liberties and democratic institutions rather than being behind some atavistic fascist movement. Fortuyn is not racist: he discriminates on the issue of Dutch language skills as a measure of cultural integration. The Muslim immigrants refuse to learn Dutch and are thus seen as being ‘unavailable for democratic dialogue’. Fortuyn says that he wishes a new anti-discrimination paragraph in the Dutch constitution because he wants to criticize the Islamic immigrants who refuse to accept western norms of human rights. He says that inciting violence against these groups should be banned, but not merely criticizing them. He is a sociology professor and proud to be gay, and he says he is quite thankful for the Dutch Liberal democracy for the fact that he need not hide away all his life because of his sexual orientation. He accuses the non-Dutch speaking immigrants of hatred towards homosexuals, extreme oppression of women, sexism and such things, thus he should not be lumped in with the ‘far right’ like Le Pen. The shocked left-wing, whose ‘multi-cultural’ agenda is facing its strongest challenge in the last three decades, accuses Fortuyn of discrimination when he says things like: “Islam is a backward religion, whose followers see us Westerners as an inferior race.” And he questions the first article of the Dutch constitution, which bans discrimination. “If it means that people are no longer allowed to make discriminatory remarks, I’d say this is not good. Let people say what they want. However, there is another important line to be drawn: one should never incite violence.” In short, Fortuyn is advocating an approach not unlike the US First Amendment. Also not indicative of neo-fascist views is Fortuyn’s anti-militarism: he wants to have a Dutch navy only, but no army or airforce. He wants a smaller government, a cause close to the heart of any libertarian. He wants to change the Dutch election system, in which currently people vote for party lists and thus the political elite never changes and there is no personal responsibility in the system. This is a far from undemocratic or unreasonable aim. Fortuyn attacks segregation in the cities, denouncing it as ‘city apartheid’. However, he gives a ‘right wing’ answer to the problem: Dutch education without cultural relativism. He says that refugee welfare benefits should be contingent on Dutch schooling: only those should receive Dutch education, learn the Dutch language and some aspects of the achievements of the broader Dutch culture will qualify for welfare benefits. This is not exclusion: this is a new and ‘politically incorrect’ way of rejecting the exclusion of ghettoization. I do not want to praise Fortuyn too much before knowing more about his manifesto. But I believe that people who are proud of their liberties and the culture from which they sprang should listen to him carefully. Analyse the left wing media with caution and bemused skepticism: they are not beyond outright lying when a populist politician like Fortuyn seems to be not just challenging the unquestioned world view of the left from an unexpected direction but doing it successfully. Daniel Antal (London/Budapest) April 24th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world. Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be. The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of ‘enlightened’ self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it? The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn. But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions. There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation? Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet. April 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
I was just watching CNN and saw that Wim Kok will resign along with much of the Dutch government over a damning report on the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladic. Although I am bitter regarding the role of the UN throughout Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, at least the Dutch are objective enough and have the courage to face the reality of what happened just seven years ago and their part in it. The efforts of the Dutch army to cover up this dark page in their military history has been thwarted by enough fine Dutch people (including some in their army) who were determined that the truth be known and publicly faced. I am glad that blame is being taken although in truth the Dutch soldiers were placed in an invidious position,without a clear mandate on the use of force, lightly equipped and denied air support when they demanded it. For this, although the Dutch are rightly searching their souls for being a party to the murder of 7000 men and children, I primarily blame that epitome of despicable moral relativism, Yakushi Akashi and the entire rotten edifice of the UN for which he worked, for allowing the UN ‘Safe Havens’ to become a lethal fiction, making them nothing more than collection centres for mass murder by Ratko Mladic and his cetnic einsatztruppen. April 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
If anybody needs a sobering insight into the mindset of the European elites, they need look no further than this staggering decision from an Italian Court.
Seems that this low-life’s parents have to continue supporting him until he finds a job which is ‘to his liking’ (which, of course, will be never). Hardly an incentive to family-life in a country that already has a negative population growth. Understandably, the father is less than best pleased:
Do you think it might occur to him to stop voting for it? No, course not. Silly me. April 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Italy is becoming interesting Or, should I say, more interesting because Italy has always struck me as an intriguing place: exotic, sexy, creative, appealing and yet byzantine, noisy and chaotic. Italy is notorious for its instability. It has had some ridiculously high number of governments since World War II all of which are coalitions of social democrats, christian democrats, communists, fascists and probably a few mafiosi. All of them collapse after a couple of years or so in an orgy of self-destructive conflict and raucous bickering. Corruption is famously rife and state regulation is so labrythine and ridiculous that something like 50% of the population earn their living in the ‘black economy’. Despite this (or, more likely, because of it) Italy remains a prosperous country but it is clear that Silvio Berlusconi recognises that it will not remain one unless it liberalises its fossilised labour laws which, at present, guarantee a job for life.
The massive protest in Rome has been billed as a protest against terrorism following the assassination of government adviser Marco Biagi but let nobody be fooled. This was planned long before as a message to Berlusconi that the left are aiming to thwart him. The left and the public sector in Italy (as in the rest of Europe) is well-organised, stridently militant and relies on a hair-trigger willingness to adopt street confrontation as a tactic to defeat reformist politicians who, thus far, have lacked the cojones to face them down. Berlusconi is talking tough:
Can he succeed where so many others have previously failed? If so, he will be leading Italy down the road of ‘Thatcherite’ revolution. March 24th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Inside Europe: Iberian Notes on 11:00 CET, March. 22, 2002 (no link to individual articles) does a pretty good job of comprehensively trashing the Spanish claims on Gibraltar and pointing out the weird logic involved. March 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
When economist and law professor, Marco Biagi began advising the Italian government on reforms to Italy’s ossified Labour Laws, the Italian left sprang into immediate action. Using the rationale of marxist production theory and by the rigourous employment of dialectic method, they planned to confound Biagi by convincing him of the systemic contradictions of free-market ideology. But that didn’t work so they just shot him.
We have seen this in Europe before. In the late 60’s and early 70’s a number of marxist terror gangs starting springing up as the cracks in the heads of their own ‘intellectuals’ began to show. But, they were assuaged as Europe embraced the ‘Third Way’ and thus cocooned them from the chill wind of Reagan/Thatcher capitalism. Only now, the cracks are starting to appear in the ‘Third Way’ as well and they know it. Having nothing else to offer, the die-hard disciples must resort to terror and murder. What else can they do when they have invested so much of their lives in a bankrupt philosophy that fewer and fewer people wish to buy or even browse? Like their apprentices in the anti-globo movement, they seethe within the spiritual prison cells of their own incoherent minds.
The article makes it clear that we are not dealing with Islamic radicals here but, in a sense, we might as well be. The same flat-earth mentality is at work; an identical impotent rage in the face of better people and better ideas. Wahabbism and marxism are merely two sides of the same psychotic coin and it is entirely predictable that they are undertaking a congruence of method. The poor Mr.Biagi deserves better then to be a chilling portent of things to come. Tragically, though, that is exactly what he might be. March 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Following hot on the heels on people like Jorg Haider in Austria and Umberto Bossi in Italy, the newest kid on the Nationalist block appears to be Pim Fortuyn who is causing more than a stir in the normally sedate fabric of the Dutch political landscape. The rise of Mr.Fortuyn and his anti-immigrant message is notable if only because of Holland’s legendary tradition of moderation and tolerance. Maybe this is curiously reflected by the fact that I cannot think of any other Nationalist candidate who is overtly homosexual. It’s probably a ‘Dutch thing’. Mercifully, the article stops short of describing him as ‘charismatic’ but it pulls no punches otherwise:
And it looks like those 18-30 year olds were good to their word because Mr.Fortuyn has just trounced his opposition in the municipal elections in his native Rotterdam and, for better or worse, he is now clearly a man to be reckoned with:
Time will tell if the ‘Fortuyn Factor’ has legs. It could just be a flash in the proverbial pan; a protest vote that rear-ends the complacent political establishment into action. But I have the feeling that the phenomenon is not merely transitory. These guys are popping up all over Europe and making a whole lot of people very uncomfortable. Of course, to suggest that immigrants are the source of Europe’s problems is simplistic drivel but it is equally simplistic to suggest that men like Fortuyn are merely exploiting resentment for their advantage. Europe has been governed for decades by a consensual Centrist/Social Democratic porridge that long ago ran out of ideas. It is the Randian ‘stagnant swamp’ which exudes nothing but choking miasma from its fetid pools. Some people are praying for rain. March 11th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Or perhaps language ‘lesions’ might be a better description over on Spanglolink‘s page Inside Europe: Iberian Notes. Their resident ‘cranky yanqui’ seems to be living up to his billing! Not for the delicate of disposition. February 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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