Nidal Malik Hasan

Let’s turn the Fort Hood attack perpetrator into a poor victim.

You thought MSNBC’s Chris “leg tingle” Matthews was an expert at spinning stories, including that of Nidal Malik Hasan, the lone gunman who killed thirteen and wounded many more on Thursday? Expect a lot better from the Dutch media, reliable accomplices to the multiculturalist establishment in the Netherlands.

Readers of De Volkskrant must especially feel sorry for the poor guy. On Thursday, it reported: “According to his family and colleagues, Hasan had lots of problems in the army. Fellow soldiers questioned his loyalty because of his religion and descent.” The readers are then referred to an article in the Guardian, obviously the most reliable and authoritative source imaginable when it comes to such matters. This British newspaper “predicts that the bloodbath will cause tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the U.S. army to increase.”

But lest we get worried that Mr. Hasan, who after all shouted “Allahu Akbar” before commencing his massacre, might perhaps be an Islamic terrorist, De Volkskrant assures us there is “no evidence” to suppose he is.

Dutch public television station NOS is pulling the same trick it pulled when Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was slaughtered on the street by an Islamic extremist: the real victims are the Muslims, who are now harassed by angry white people wherever they go. So it reports that “Muslims are worried about the consequences of the attack… . They are afraid of acts of revenge; countless threats have reportedly been received.”

The report then refers to “Islamic congressman [André] Carson from Indiana”, whom I’m sure not a single NOS employee had ever heard of previously. “According to Carson, the attack says just as little about Islam as the attack by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma says about Christianity.”   (Which is funny, because I recall McVeigh specifically invoking the Lord Jesus Christ when explaining his motives afterwards.)  And echoing Chris Matthews and De Volkskrant, the report concludes: “Up until now one can only speculate about the shooter’s motives.”

When American media were already digging up spicy background facts about Mr. Hasan and airing eyewitness reports, the Dutch were still being fed this nonsense. Even today, De Volkskrant, while at least acknowledging the possibility of an extremist motive, still makes it sound as if, in this case, there were only victims, no agressors: “Hasan’s aunt said her nephew was nagged because he was a Muslim.” Indeed, according to his imam in Washington, he was even “a pious Muslim”, for what that’s worth. But who wouldn’t snap after treating “numerous veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq with amputations and war traumas”?

Famous Dutch author Godfried Bomans once said: “Concealing something constantly is a form of indoctrination.” Indeed it is. I have stopped buying Dutch newspapers a long time ago. Judging from their reports on this subject these last few days, that has been a correct decision.

Update: Those (Dutch) readers interested in learning more about Mr. Hasan’s troubling background, should read this Hot Air posting.

Geert Wilders

Research conducted by three scholars and authorized by the Dutch government attempts to demonstrate that Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party belong to the “extreme right”.

Do the Dutch liberals actually want to be decimated in the next elections? Last weekend, we found Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders scoring political points once more by ridiculing the findings of three Dutch academic researchers.  Hans Moors, Jaap van Donselaar and Bob de Graaff, it was revealed, have just finished research on radicalization within Dutch society, based on which they concluded — after long deliberation and the delicate weighing of arguments, needless to say — that Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party is an extreme-right party which mobilizes Islamophobia and “systemic hatred” against the government. Indeed, the three argue in their as of yet unpublished report, Mr. Wilders “undermines democracy” itself.

These findings apparently demonstrate, in the words of Dutch daily De Volkskrant, what “various government agencies and departments” dare not say out loud out of fear Mr. Wilders “will score political points by claiming the authorities are attempting to silence him”. In fact, they are “fed up with Wilders”.

Well, their horror scenario seems to have come true anyway. But at least the sophisticated elites occupying our government bureaucracies will be able to shift the blame to these three researchers. Except for the fact that the latter were paid for their ground-breaking research by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior. According to De Volkskrant, the ministry is now distancing itself from their findings, given the “political sensitivity”.  (Interior minister Ms. Guusje ter Horst of course denies this.)

Too late. This genie is out of the bottle. Mr. Wilders reacted instantly by calling the researchers “lunatic”. Claiming his means and motives are fully democratic, he added: “If something’s undermining democracy it’s this liberal elite (these fake researchers among them) and Islamization.” A labour party minister and liberal democrat opposition leader, who claimed the report confirmed their long-held suspicions, were on Monday qualified by Mr. Wilders as “accomplices to Mohammed Bouyeri” (the Islamic extremist who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, accidentally five years ago last Monday).

Edwin Bakker, another terrorism expert of the Clingendael institute — to which I devoted a previous post recently –, added fuel to the fire by stating, in the same Volkskrant article, that Geert Wilders indeed “undermines state security” by slandering Islam and so unleashing violent forces against Dutch interests (mostly) abroad. On television on Monday night, Mr. Bakker added that the “systemic hatred” argument holds true as well, since Wilders keeps bashing those politicians, journalists and judges in the “system” day after day.

Well, Mr. Bakker, if we decide to collectively adjust our tone to the delicate ears of radicals in the Middle East, we can be sure our level of freedom will accordingly decrease to the level common over there. Better be careful what you wish for. Perhaps you care less for democracy than for international “stability”, but others — including myself — might disagree. As for Mr. Wilders attacking the Dutch political system, he tends to go nuclear on the liberals occupying it rather than on the system as such. Regardless of his sometimes repulsive methods, one can hardly blame him for doing so.

This nuance demonstrates perfectly why the report is ultimately a mere vulgar hit job. For it is now turned into a helpful tool in silencing Mr. Wilders’ dissent from the political mainstream. Jaap van Donselaar, one of its three writers and a self-proclaimed expert on the “extreme right”, has inflated that term so as to include politicians that emphasize “the self”, take a tough stance on crime, and want to curb immigration. As one Dutch journalist noted, by this standard more or less all political parties in the Netherlands would belong to the extreme right (as would the Republican Party in the U.S.).

In the end, the ascent of politicians such as Mr. Wilders is a direct result of the failure of the liberal establishment, which, after all, has caused great and irreversible damage to this country, and has often done so in a quite undemocratic fashion. Mass immigration is but one striking example.

Recently, a former Labour advisor casually conceded that one strong motive for mass immigration into Britain throughout the past decade has been to render that country truly multicultural, and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. This motive, however, has always been kept hidden from the public, which has heard nothing but economic arguments for Labour’s immigration policy.

Closer to home, I heard René Danen, the founder of an organization that promotes multiculturalism and fights the extreme and not so extreme right on every occasion imaginable, cheer the three researchers’ findings on television the other day. After all, this new report may just boost the Dutch public prosecutor’s attempts to have Mr. Wilders convicted for “hate-mongering” and “discrimination” (a lawsuit is currently being prepared). That, consequently, would signal to the Dutch that Dutch politics leaves no room for extremists, Mr. Danen said, causing people to turn their backs on Mr. Wilders’ Freedom Party.

Needless to say, these are the forces that “undermine democracy”, not Mr. Wilders. I will readily concede to Evelien Tonkens that some of Mr. Wilders’ proposals are, in fact, “smelly”. But the foul stench I’m smelling this autumn most decidedly originates on the left.

Nobel Peace Prize

Let’s just “recognize Barack Obama’s truly inspired leadership for what it is.” (What’s that supposed to mean anyway?)

The hitherto unknown Nils de Mooij, a research fellow at Dutch Institute of International Relations Clingendael, appears to disagree with my previous post, arguing instead that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama was fully justified: “The Peace Prize isn’t a life-time achievement award, and it can be an incentive to further positive action as much as an acknowledgement of concrete results.”

De Mooij’s resumé on Clingendael’s website reveals he and I completed more or less the same university programs. He’s also served as president of the Utrecht chapter of the Dutch United Nations Student Association, known among International Relations incrowd as SIB Utrecht. Now, in my college days I twice attended a lecture organized by SIB, one featuring Dutch anti-Israeli activist Gretta Duisenberg and the other a Tibet liberation activist. After that, I decided SIB wasn’t the thing for me.

In 2007, de Mooij accepted his current postion at Clingendael. Although a respectable think tank, it was the only of its kind in the Netherlands at that point (we now have two). Heavily subsized by the Dutch government, it conveniently serves — and holds intimate connections to — the Dutch foreign policy elites. Its policy positions waver from a descriptive foreign policy “realism” (mainly in order to explain away hostility by enemies of the West) to a prescriptive “liberal internationalism” (when urging the West to abide by the U.N. charter by any means).

So the Nobel Peace Prize, de Mooij argues, can serve as a mere “incentive” as much as being an award for “concrete results”. That being said, “there are four good reasons why granting [President Obama] the award, even this early in his presidency, was warranted” in any case: firstly, “setting the world’s most powerful nation back on the path to moral respectability”; secondly, recommitting “the United States more broadly to multilateral cooperation and respect for international law”; thirdly, President Obama’s “essentially realist insight that international cooperation cannot be fixed along moral lines”; and finally, his “high-profile efforts to curb the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.”

De Mooij’s “path to moral respectability” is, needless to say, a path away from extraordinary renditions, Guantánamo Bay, and “torture”: “One cannot lead if” not even “America’s friends and allies” are “willing to follow.” Amen to that. Except that “America’s friends and allies” have never in history been too eager to follow, except when international circumstances (i.c. World War II and the Cold War) forced them to allow the Americans to come to the rescue — once more. Even after repeated Jihadist attacks on its very own territory, Western Europe will not wake up from its current holiday from history.

Now President Obama has (foolishly) called for the closing of Guantánamo, moreover, European countries are hardly in a rush to help him out by adopting its detainees. Of course, pointing at the excruciating horrors inside Gitmo was politically convenient when the guy they loved to hate — President Bush — was in charge. None of the European leaders, however, will risk their already fragile careers by flying in bad guys who will prove impossible to prosecute and might return to the world-wide Jihad against the West right after being released from prison. Cheering for Obama was fun as long as it didn’t entail tough political choices. (This is not even to mention that enhanced interrogation in fact helped preventing terrorists from conducting new attacks against the United States.)

As for President Obama’s multilateralist foreign policy approach, the only pieces of evidence de Mooij comes up with are American recognition “that many nations besides the U.S. are ‘indispensable’”, President Obama’s shaking hands with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez at the OAS summit, and his extending a “hand of friendship” to Iran. And de Mooij sees some results already: “[The OAS'] agreement to lift the 47-year old ban on Cuban membership greatly improved the chances for meaningful cooperation in Latin America. Tone and style do make a difference. Perceptions matter. And never more so in a world [sic] that is as interconnected as that of the 21st century.”

Well, if extending a hand of friendship to Iran entails remaining silent on the sidelines while the Mullahs in Tehran were having Iranian protesters murdered on the streets, de Mooij is completely right, but perhaps his memory failed him on this one. The supposedly necessary “thaw in relations with Iran” he calls for will not occur, however. The Iranian regime has since 1979 defined itself by its anti-Americanism, mostly for domestic purposes. Its only goal is creating its much-desired nuclear weapon, which will provide it with full-fledged security against an Israeli and/or American military attack, and thus likely guarantee its long-lasting survival. This is the way tyrannical regimes work.

Finally, de Mooij praises President Obama’s efforts at engaging with Russia. It has already resulted in Obama’s canceling the U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe, which, de Mooij argues, would have led to Russian retaliation “by placing new tactical nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad.” In fact, a system featuring ten defensive missiles was never a match for Russia’s nuclear arsenal, which the Kremlin of course knew. The real reasons for Russian intransigence were its renewed geopolitical ambitions and the humiliation of having to watch NATO military equipment being shipped to former Warschau Pact territory. While the Kremlin has succeeded in blackmailing the White House out of this, it has given nothing in return, since it still resists imposing further U.N. sanctions on Iran. In short, appeasing Russia has yielded zero results, while a powerful trump card was squandered in the process and loyal allies were snubbed.

De Mooij’s gratuitous opinionating demonstrates his eagerness to see “international cooperation” and abiding by “international law” as ends in themselves rather than means towards greater and more sustainable security for the United States and the West. With Obama having nothing to show for his Nobel Prize, de Mooij’s comments are perfect evidence for my original contention that, to liberals, “intentions matter more than actual results.”

In the meanwhile, neither the U.S. nor Europe has become the slightest bit safer, peace in the Middle East is no less a pipe dream than a year ago, and Iran hasn’t yet been stopped from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Until these facts — especially the latter — change, I say: sorry, no deal. As for Nils de Mooij, his comments would be insignificant if Clingendael weren’t so influential within the Dutch foreign policy establishment. Which makes his commentary all the more harmful.

President Obama

Awarding President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize fits conveniently into the liberal paradigm saying intentions matter more than actual results.

In the October 5 issue of National Review, it is recalled how a journalist asked then-Vice President Johnson whether he thought South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was the next Winston Churchill.  Johnson’s answer: ”S***, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.”

As it turned out, Ngo Dinh Diem wouldn’t be remembered as the next Churchill.  But in retrospect, he needn’t have worried.  For at the outset of the twenty-first century, great achievements are no longer a requirement to be awarded honor by both elites and masses in one’s country or around the world.  This shift explains the otherwise rather inexplicable world-wide adoration for U.S. President Barack Obama.

Yesterday, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Since the president, who has been in office for nine months now, has achieved literally nothing in his efforts — which efforts? — to promote peace anywhere on Earth, the Norwegian Nobel committee had to spin its choice thus: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

So it’s come to this: in 2009, the prospect of “hope” has, to the lefties in the Nobel committee, become the leading criterium for picking a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.  Because for all of President Obama’s ground-breaking diplomacy based on wonderful cosmopolitan Kumbaya “values and attitudes”, neither Iran nor North Korea has budged an inch, the Middle East may be more explosive now than it was a year ago, and, perhaps most importantly, the U.S. hasn’t won the hearts and minds in Moscow and Beijng, which might be the sine qua non for achieving these things through diplomacy.

The world’s apparently stunned.  Shortly after the announcement, President Obama himself stated he was surprised by the Nobel committee’s decision, and saw it as a “call to action” rather than an award for achieved results (so he does have some sense of judgment).  The media are a bit sceptical, and even the New York Times is confused.

However, a critical examination of the mysterious ways of the world-wide liberal establishment teaches us that we needn’t have wondered about the move.  After all, the left has always cared more about good intentions on the part of politicians than it has about concrete achievements.  If liberals had been held accountable for the consequences of their economic and social policies, which after all dominated much of twentieth-century public opinion, liberalism would have been as dead as communism.

Of course, the liberal ideology rests on mythical assumptions, not on common sense.  And since its intentions are deemed noble, its adherents are deemed intrinsically superior to their conservative counterparts, to whom the words “compassion” and “justice” have entirely different meanings.

The difference between these two political world views is that conservatism lacks a belief in redemption by politics.  By contrast, liberals all over the world found some sort of  redemption in Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States.  Hence the enormous cheering masses on election night in Chicago and all over the world, who all felt that, with their guy’s win, Change for the good had already come upon this world.  The same goes for the ignorant fools here in the Netherlands, who never hesitate to mention that President Reagan “ruined the U.S. economy” (in always these exact words), but look at me as if they saw E.T. giving them a lap dance whenever I say the same about President Obama.

Surely the Nobel committee, still caught up in the election night party mood, sought to extend this moment of Hope and Joy yet a few more months, having already gone through a horrible eight-year period of darkness under President Bush.  Its members no doubt fit right in with the overall political establishment in their country, which, according to the Heritage Foundation’s 2009 Index of Economic Freedom, chunked up as much as 43 percent of GDP in 2008, the majority of it wasted on lavish welfare programs.  (Also, as a percentage of GDP, Norway spends more on development aid than probably any other country in the world: 0.87 percent, compared to 0.2 percent by the U.S.)

No wonder, then, that these Nobel committee members got carried away a little, and elected the new cosmopolitan, post-partisan, postmodern saviour of nations and peoples to be the recipient of their long-degraded Peace Prize.  It’s all about the feel-good moment, not about President Obama’s non-existent achievements.

Meet Ms. Evelien Tonkens: sociologist,  University of Amsterdam professor of “active citizenship”, and columnist for left-wing daily De Volkskrant.  Ms. Tonkens has for weeks used her precious space in said newspaper to bash Dutch right-wing parliamentarian Geert Wilders, who in an unprecedented move demanded that the Dutch government make a comprehensive calculation of the total costs and gains of mass immigration into the Netherlands (and the so far failed integration of immigrants into Dutch society).

One can already hear the liberals howl at such a horrific display of racism.  In a hit piece titled “Wilders’ smelly question”, Ms. Tonkens complained that “You don’t talk about integrating compatriots that way. …  Humans are no instruments of policy.”  Then, after referring to slavery, human trafficking and Nazi Germany, she went on: “This move of Wilders is fascist, in a way he has never shown before.”

One column on our national enemy of the sophisticated not being enough, Ms. Tonkens wondered in another last week: “What if the gains of immigration are higher than its costs, should we be happy?”  The answer: “No, we should be ashamed [if that were the case].  For it means that we don’t care that much for the well-being of the rest of the world.  There are billions of people who have a right to seek refuge, because they don’t have a life in their own country.”

This line of argument being somewhat odd already, the catch doesn’t come until later.  For Ms. Tonkens observes a parallel with a decisive event in history: while the U.S. at first generously opened up its borders to the Jews fleeing from the Eastern European pogroms, it imposed restrictions in 1924, “scared by the great numbers”.  ”Countless of Jews who barely had enough money to flee, did make a months-long journey to the U.S., but were sent back, only to fall into the hands of the Nazis anyway. The U.S. could, and of course should, have adopted those six million people. It’s that clear in retrospect, knowing about the Holocaust, which they didn’t back in 1924.”

I will not even engage upon the absurd notion that somehow all those unfortunate enough to die in the Nazi concentration camps could have made it to America (or in fact had made it, if one interprets Ms. Tonkens’ assertion a bit freely).  Nor will I touch upon her despicably nihilist “Blame America First” attitude.  I do have a different moral statement to make, however: Dutch parliamentarians are elected by the Dutch people, and accordingly represent the interest of — wait for it — the Dutch people.

Ms. Tonkens goes on to say that “Immigration is strongly connected to development aid.  The less we are prepared to support poor countries in their development, the more people have legitimate reasons to knock on our door.”  So now the Dutch have some moral obligation to relieve the entire world of hunger and pain, either by immigration or financial aid?

Interestingly, one report critical of development aid after another is being released, most of them claiming that much of the public money spent on aid for decades has fallen into the hands of corrupt dictators or NGO bureaucracies.  Moreover, with half the populations of the largest Dutch cities now being of foreign descent, their various countries of origin have improved little, while many of the immigrants live in ghettos and contribute little, if anything, to public life.  So much for the world-wide socialist Utopia.  It’s sort of a Paul Krugman argument — government “stimulus” will not work unless we spend more, more! — to assume all will be well as long as we just keep our borders open to all those in need of help.

On the one hand, it is wonderful to see people like Ms. Tonkens flounder like that.  For moral appeals like hers are ultimately brought forth by fear of Mr. Wilders, who doesn’t hesitate a second to smash the liberal dogmas concerning immigration to the Netherlands. On the other hand, one can only despair about the poor college freshmen, hundreds of whom are indoctrinated with these radical ideas each year.

Call it a conservative’s sin: having grown up during the eighties and nineties, I, too, have more than once been moved by Michael Jackson’s easy-listening yet over-the-top spectacular multimedia shows.  Listening to dozens of fans recalling on the radio and TV since his death how, back in the days, they were always struggling to copy Jackson’s many dance moves or taping radio broadcasts of his songs, brought up lots of childhood memories of my own.

Still, I cannot suppress the feeling that something’s missing in the thousands of news items, interviews and documentaries on Jackson that were aired honoring his life.  Yes, they did touch on Jackson’s megalomaniac world tours and his increasingly lavish spending on them (which didn’t contribute to artistic success, however: the HIStory tour, I am able to tell from personal experience, was a rather disappointing event).  And of course, there was plenty of talk about the multitude of personal scandals, including the infamous charges of sexual molestation of minors.

But the media have generally been missing the larger point of Jackson’s life, the meaning of his rise in the seventies and eighties and his fall in the nineties.  His was indeed a path of pioneers, but he was also, more than anybody, a product of his age.  The discrepancy between his public life and his personal misery was obvious, and both have something to tell us in this regard.

First, Jackson completed the transformation of music into how it is understood in this modern age.  In his book Culture Counts, Roger Scruton laments this evolution of the art form.  Music started out, Scruton writes, as a craftman’s product, a sublime piece of art of anonymous authorship, in whose execution anybody gifted enough to handle an instrument or sing could take part.  In modern times, music is all about the artist, about his vocals, his looks, his dance moves, his stage act, even his rock star life.

Even when one just focuses on the primary product — that is, the music — the artist remains irreplaceable: his music, through his recorded voice or unmistakable guitar play, will always be connected to him personally.  Nobody epitomized this transformation better than Michael Jackson, who always sought to perfect every aspect of his public appearance, including even his own face and the color of his skin.  Good though some of his songs were (but I wouldn’t exaggerate in that respect), the show was really all about Jackson.  The sometimes outlandish megalomania displayed in his shows testifies to that.

Second, Jackson’s private life was as much of a rollercoaster ride as were his energetic live shows.  While he did have an actual family, unlike many of his African American compatriots, his family life was in shambles ever since his father Joseph realized his sons would be able to make him a fortune.  Having had no normal childhood, Jackson proved incapable of leading a decent adult life and starting a family of his own.

In the infamous 2003 Martin Bashir documentary, which crushed the last bit of credibility he had left, Jackson displayed an utmost inability to grasp the meaning of his own shattered childhood.  While praising his own efforts to offer his offspring a supposedly wonderful family life, he almost burst out in tears (although perhaps feigned) explaining how horrible he felt seeing little kids grow up in ghettos, without a father, and instead resorting to a future in criminal gangs.

This analysis obviously hits the nail on the head, but it is ironic that Jackson doesn’t see the slightest implication it has regarding his own life.  The fact that he publicly stated in Bashir’s documentary not to have any moral reservations about inviting 12-year-olds to sleep-over parties in his own house, testifies to a thorough lack of moral education.  The ultimate consequence, of course, is that his children will rather likely grow up to be equally incapable of telling right from wrong.

Both in public and private, then, Jackson epitomized modern life perhaps more than anybody of his age.  Today Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan have taken his place, but it was he who led them the way.  That is the meaning of Michael Jackson’s tragic life.

Bart Jan Spruyt

Bart Jan Spruyt paints a gloomy picture, yet is hopeful of the next generation.

On Wednesday night, three young bloggers organized a conservative lecture night.  An unexpected number of people attended, many of them conservative bloggers (like myself) whose age offers hope, in a land where not so long ago all hope was lost.  The speaker for the night was Bart Jan Spruyt, whom the person introducing him jokingly called “the Dutch William F. Buckley Jr.”.

This description is, in fact, more accurate than perhaps intended.  Like Buckley in the United States, Spruyt might be called the father of modern conservatism in the Netherlands.  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when this progressive country seemed to have reached the end of history, lavished itself in decadent prosperity, and bragged internationally about its various liberal social policies, Spruyt — fed up with this moral complacency – gathered a group of conservatives and established the Edmund Burke Foundation.

As he recalled on Wednesday, much of the unrest that was brewing in Dutch society had not yet come to the surface in 2000, but he and the others had been emboldened by the widespread civil resistance against the new euthanasia legislation Dutch parliament was about to pass.  If the movement protesting the legalization of euthanasia was so broad and diverse, these conservatives thought, why did parliament vote in favor of it by such a wide margin?  The answer, they suspected, was that a huge gap lay between Dutch politics and Dutch citizens.

They were right.  That now infamous “gap” was laid bare by the emergence of “populist” politician Pim Fortuyn.  Fortuyn perceived that the consensus-based political system in the Netherlands was worn out.  For decades and decades, the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and market-friendly Liberals had formed coalition governments in one combination or another.  These parties each represented a “pillar” within Dutch society, with its own radio and television stations, unions, schools, newspapers, and even sports clubs.  But after the 1960s, these pillars slowly but surely disappeared, while their political parties continued to exist.

These parties are no loose organizations of people sharing more or less the same worldview, such as those in the United States, nor is the Netherlands made up of electoral districts.  The Dutch vote not for persons but for a party, with usually only a few candidates getting public exposure.  When a party has gained a certain percentage of the vote, an according share of its candidates obtain a seat in parliament.  This way, tons of people are being voted into office without anyone ever having heard of them.  What’s more, these parties have a strong internal discipline.  Their parliamentarians cannot vote against the official party line (or at least not without suffering the consequences).  Instead, when entering negotiations on a new coalition (in secrecy, mind you), they attempt to draft a “governing accord”, in which the framework of the new government’s policies is already being put forward (although not, of course, without lots of quid pro quos, package deals and pork spending).  Those elected into parliament have virtually no freedom to vote according to their own conscience.

In this way, the social democrats in 2008 killed the referendum on the new EU Lisbon Treaty, even though on the campaign trail they presented it as a non-negotiable issue.  And the government policies to fight the recent economic crisis were all concocted behind closed doors, by cabinet members together with the parliamentary leaders of the coalition parties.  Moreover, this political culture strongly promotes nepotism, as people spend a lifetime climbing up within a party and their loyalty to it gets rewarded with the best jobs.

Finally, what bothers Bart Jan Spruyt most about all this, is that the three major center parties all agree on the great moral issues of the day: European integration, immigration, and social issues such as abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage.  In fact, all are strongly in favor of the issues mentioned here.  While most of the Dutch haven’t bothered too much about abortion and gay rights since the sixties, they grew increasingly sceptical of the European Union, and all the more so of mass immigration.  Even though those publicly criticizing multiculturalism where often shamefully demonized in the media and even silenced by “anti-fascists” on the streets, the Dutch felt that the influx of immigrants had brought serious trouble to their country.

To Americans, it might be hard to conceive how strong taboos such as these were in the Netherlands (for understandable historical reasons).  In the U.S., conservatism may have been marginalized for a few decades, but it has never been pushed out of the mainstream entirely.  In fact, the soaring market shares of Fox News and National Review, as well as the Republicans’ consecutive electoral successes prior to 2006, suggest that it is now fully within the mainstream.  When Pim Fortuyn in 2001 ran for office criticizing not just mass immigration but also the bigger picture concerning Dutch politics described above, he caused a political tidal wave that shook the Netherlands.  His assassination in May 2002 by a left-wing extremist testifies to the inability of the Dutch elites to deal with him. 

Although the political establishment was eager to return to its practices of the old days once Fortuyn’s revolt ended prematurely, the Dutch were less so.  Things took a turn for the worse with the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, and of course the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a young islamist, which confirmed suspicions among the Dutch that immigration from Islamic countries had perhaps not been such a blessing after all.  Another sign was their rejection, in May 2005, of the EU Constitution in a referendum (by a margin of over 60 percent on an equal turnout), while all major parties supported it.

The few right-wing politicians emerging after Fortuyn’s tragic death — Geert Wilders being the most prominent – have been able to feed on this resentment.  Unfortunately, Spruyt argues, they lack Fortuyn’s intelligence.  While Fortuyn attacked the political system as such, Wilders can only thrive within in it.  He has basically been running solely on an anti-Islam and anti-immigration agenda, promising the Dutch to return criminal immigrant youths back to Morocco and Turkey, to shoot them in the knees, to send the army after them, and to ban the Qur’an.  This is what Spruyt has often called “panic conservatism”.

Yet the more the establishment lambasts Wilders, the more the Dutch embrace him.  Having enjoyed an old-fashioned classic education, however, Spruyt fears — with Plato, Polybius and Tocqueville — that democracy can easily turn into ochlocracy (rule by the masses).  Moreover, since soon the major center parties might no longer be able to form parliamentary majorities and seem unwilling to build a coalition with Wilders’s Freedom Party, the Netherlands might even turn into a state of anarchy.  Indeed, Spruyt hasn’t shunned a comparison with the German Weimar Republic.  So in a sense, Wilders is a symptom of the problem rather than part of its solution.

What’s truly needed, in Spruyt’s eyes, is a serious conservative alternative, which shies away from great government schemes to transform society into a liberal utopia, which severs the choking connections between the individual and the state in order to give breath to civil society again, and which is realistic about human nature and the fallibility of man.  The current right-wing alternatives fail to offer such profound changes in political and moral thinking.

It is a gloomy picture Bart Jan Spruyt painted on Wednesday (as many times before).  However, looking at the Dutch youth, he said he’s hopeful, as he thinks them more conservative than their parents.  As soon as the babyboomers retire, he thinks, a renewal of the conservative spirit is far from impossible.

I beg to differ on that one.  Looking around me at work, where I have many highly-educated colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties, I find that only few of them ever intend to get married and/or have children.  Most of them prefer three holidays a year, flatscreen televisions and fancy cars.  They work out at the gym four times a week, eat out twice, and shop once. In other words, these supposed “elites” prefer a movie star life to the good life as understood in the classics.  (This is not even to mention their contributions to political discussions, of course.)  I fear that Spruyt’s picture might be blurred by the fact that he attracts just one (tiny) group of youths while being ignored by the overwhelming majority.

Apart from this, let us hope that Bart Jan Spruyt will one day indeed be remembered as the Dutch Bill Buckley.  He deserves it to the fullest.

Rob de Wijk

An old hobby of the left gains momentum: lambasting the free market.

In what must be the most idiotic column I’ve read so far this year, the famous Dutch international relations expert Rob de Wijk argued a few weeks ago that “Free-market thinking dealt a serious blow to civilization.”  Shifting all kinds of tasks from the public sector to the free market, de Wijk wrote, has led people to behave not like decent citizens but like customers: “I pay taxes; the state provides services, and I complain when it doesn’t provide quality.”

This loss of some sense of citizenship among the Dutch, according to de Wijk, is the root cause of the increase in uncivilized behavior, on the streets, but also in Dutch politics.  A case in point — surprise – is the emergence of foul-mouthed “populist” politicians such as Geert Wilders.  (When Wilders was about to release his ten-minute anti-Qur’an movie Fitna, de Wijk famously argued that Wilders be silenced by the Dutch government, in order to protect Dutch interests abroad.)

Well, I’m not too crazy about Dutch citizens seeing their government as the great benefactor of wealth, either.  It would seem, however, that this image of government as a provider of services which might become the object of scorn once it fails to deliver, is a product of fifty years of social democracy, not of the free market.  Government could hardly be scorned for underperforming in tasks it hasn’t taken on.

Unfortunately, the Dutch government has taken on quite a number of tasks, and it is not performing too well.  A government with an agenda limited to protecting its people from crime and foreign threats couldn’t be vilified for failing to collect the garbage twice a week.  Needless to say, the Dutch government is doing a bad job at these core duties as well (and I don’t mean collecting the garbage).  The difference between it and the free market is that, in this case, I can’t just walk away from company A and knock on company B’s door.  So much for the benevolence of government monopoly.

Moreover, if some sort of free-market mentality among the nations of the West were to blame for that civilization’s cultural and moral ills, nineteenth-century Western societies must have been most unpleasant communities.  The United States didn’t have a federal income tax until the early twentieth century.  In those days, government spending in the U.S. was about seven percent of GDP.  And hard to imagine though it is today, the Netherlands used to be a libertarian state as well.  It is doubtful that the U.S. and Dutch governments at that time had already taken on many of the tasks they shedded to the market under the sinister influence of Milton Friedman in the 1980s. Yet I don’t recall many politicians in either country publicly cursing and calling names back in the days; that is really a more recent phenomenon.

Hence, something else must be at work here, and it’s typical that Rob de Wijk doesn’t seem to have the slightest clue as to what it is.  I’m willing to give it a shot: what’s to blame here, is the left’s overthrow, in the 1960s, of twenty-five centuries of intellectual thought about morality, law, and social order, which it deemed oppressive, racist, and/or sexist.  Once it became politically incorrect to state that Plato’s writings are objectively better than Jim Morrison’s song lyrics, the virtues could no longer govern the passions.  The result of this degeneracy into nihilism was that a blue-collar worker’s language was from then on thought to be on par with that of the educated men in parliament, leading the latter to adjust to the former instead of the other way around.

This “democratization of political debate”, as liberals would call it, didn’t start with populists on the right, but with the emergence of Jan Marijnissen’s Socialist Party on the left.  (Marijnissen was a factory worker turned union leader, who came to admire Mao Zedong, started a new, rather extremist political party, and introduced populist rhetoric in Dutch parliament.)  At least liberal historian Thomas von der Dunk — I’ve mentioned him before — acknowledged as much a while ago, when he wrote that right-wing populism is the result of “forty years of failed liberal education policy.”

It’s too bad von der Dunk fails to see the ultimate consequence of his own statement, however.  Born in 1961, he didn’t start studying until 1979 himself.  It is only fair to wonder whether von der Dunk, too, is a victim of liberal education policy.  In any case, he got his degree in 1988 at the University of Amsterdam, one of the largest bastions of campus activism in the Netherlands, many of whose teachers today still define themselves as Marxists.

Von der Dunk’s latest column in Dutch daily De Volkskrant provides us with some insight in his own education.  Walking away in anger from the UN racism conference when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began bashing Israel didn’t help the West anymore, he wrote, since, as a result of the current economic crisis, the West has lost its credibility in the world: “For decades, the West, through the IMF, imposed upon everyone a now morally and financially bankrupt fundamentalist neoliberalism.”  Moreover, people around the world have become sceptical of the Western imposition of its “values concerning democracy and human rights.”  “From Iraq to Pakistan, from Iran to Israel, from the Gulag to Guantánamo Bay: its own villains are allowed more.”

Comparing Guantánamo Bay to the Russian Gulag is shameful enough, of course, but one could have expected such moral nihilism from Thomas von der Dunk.  However, what this has to do with “neoliberalism” is beyond me. (Why do such pejorative labels always have to come with the prefix “neo” anyway: “neoconservative”, “neonazis”, “neoliberalism”?).  While President Reagan freed the U.S. from a decade of stagflation, Milton Friedman’s economic theories helped prosper literally every country that adopted them.  Resistance to the IMF emerged because the nations on the receiving end were often too addicted to their nanny states.  (I suppose von der Dunk, though, wouldn’t accuse them of “populism”.)  It’s been their free choice to accept or reject the IMF’s assistance, however: the West never forced any country to cooperate with the IMF.

Concerning the causes of the current credit crunch, not many Dutch have ever heard of the Communities Reinvestment Act, nor do they have a clue as to the harmful side-effects of well-intended government interventions in the U.S. housing market.  They just read left-wing dailies like De Volkskrant, watch the news on public television channels, and subsequently lambast capitalism. 

Moreover, insofar as the free market were to blame for it, this recession is a natural correction to the decades-long growth that same market has brought us.  Only the Brave New World is free of risk, and the same goes for moral hazard and indecent politicians.  Yet perhaps a Brave New World is exactly where Rob de Wijk and Thomas von der Dunk would lead us when presented with the opportunity.  Which reveals a lot about their own ideological allegiances.

Beware of cheap anti-capitalism these days.  Once more, it is becoming in vogue.

Rik Kuethe

Those in the Netherlands who look beyond public television and the mainstream newspapers may actually have second thoughts on President Obama.  Who would have thought?

Lest the American reader would get excited after reading this introduction, it is important to note that Obamania in Europe hasn’t diminished much, and surely less than in the United States (except, perhaps, in Britain, whose prime minister first saw the White House’s bust of Churchill returned to Downing Street, before being fobbed off with 25 DVD’s his DVD player couldn’t play).  Dutch papers may have reported to its readers some of the domestic criticism aimed at U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, but that’s not quite the same thing as openly taking on The One, of course.

Recent developments allow for cautious optimism, however.  First, a well-known right-wing commentator, Joshua Livestro, recently started his own group blog the Dagelijkse Standaard (Daily Standard).  Livestro once resigned from a public television station after it had censored one of his television columns, and then went public with the story.  This latest attempt to obtain a market share among the conservative fringe is admirable, even though one famous (and outstanding) Dutch Islam expert who had signed on, Hans Jansen, already resigned after a few weeks.  Interestingly, Jansen was dismayed to learn that one of his fellow conservative bloggers at the Dagelijkse Standaard, the 24-year-old Michael van der Galiën, turned out to be a Muslim convert, and had in the past been defending Islam over at Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.

The funny thing is, though, that van der Galiën has been promoting conservative policies ever since he started writing at the Dagelijkse Standaard.  His favourite news sources seem to include HotAir and RealClearPolitics (while adding little personal analysis to his blogs, unfortunately).  While most of his posts deal with economic issues and President Obama’s declining job approval ratings, van der Galiën hasn’t been hesitant to defend U.S. foreign policy under President Bush.  (The kid hasn’t done too badly for himself either, given the fact he’s also blogging at RCP and Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, as well as for some Turkish newspaper.)  But the most important thing is that he’s been slamming President Obama’s policies for weeks now, which, in the European climate of blind adoration, is a welcome development.

Over at Elsevier, the only serious conservative magazine in the Netherlands, its dissenting U.S. correspondent Rik Kuethe seems to be getting a slow but sure reality check.  Less than six weeks ago, Kuethe, while praising the president for his marvelous efforts to reach out to the Republicans in order to come to a bipartisan stimulus plan, noted that “The Republicans have declared war on the White house.”  And not shunning distasteful metaphors, he concluded: “The question remains whether the Republicans will benefit from their Jihad against the White House.”

Last week, however, Kuethe for the first time openly hinted at having some doubts about the president, more particularly about the frequence of the latter’s media appearances: “With some exaggeration, one might say that the American president can be seen in a television show almost every night to give a speech or an interview.”  Indeed, Obama seems to be “following Castro and Chávez.”

So is Kuethe now following that pathetic Christopher Buckley, who apologized to his father, the late conservative pioneer William Buckley, Jr. in November and voted for Barack Obama, only to find out later that the new president is actually — how surprising! — a closet socialist?  Not quite, I’d say.  In his latest column, Kuethe seems to back down again, and rather uncritically describes the U.S. administration’s effort to get the Europeans to pour yet more money in their flailing economies (here’s something new, by the way).  Back in line along with the rest of the media.

Which is why the Europeans might end up totally flabbergasted and outraged after the next U.S. elections four years from now, asking themselves: “How on Earth is this possible?”  Karl Rove’s dirty campaigning and the shamelessly biased American media (all owned by big business, of course), will be the only answers of which they’ll be able to conceive.

Thomas von der Dunk

The culture wars in the Netherlands are over, and we just don’t get what the fuss is about on the other side of the Atlantic.

“The contrast between the coming and the leaving man could hardly be bigger,” wrote Dutch cultural historian Thomas von der Dunk of the inauguration of Barack Obama.  ”[T]he zealous cosmopolitan versus the provincial slacker who got everything for free and didn’t make anything of it.”  It was hardly the first time Von der Dunk fired a cheap shot at George W. Bush or the Republicans in general.  Past October, he wrote: “For Christian and Islamic fundamentalists it is much worse when men fuck each other than when they kill each other.  Just because of the sick state of mind behind such a moral, we may pray that [Sarah] Palin will never end up in the White House.”

Von der Dunk, needless to say, is a rather talentless, frustrated crank, who’s had a disappointing academic career and now writes 400-word columns for left-wing daily De Volkskrant.  He fits the profile of the average Dutchman’s opinion on American politics, however: Democrats are good, Republicans are evil. Media reports suggesting otherwise are hard to come by. Even the U.S. correspondent of the only serious conservative Dutch magazine, Elsevier, has caught on to Obamania.

Calling Mr. Obama’s predecessor Ronald Reagan “a man who underwent his intellectual development on the sets of cowboy movies,” another Volkskrant columnist, Michaël Zeeman, wrote the other day that “The Enlightenment [in the United States] transforms from down-to-earth rationalism into an ideal, sometimes even with religious features.  Until recently, that vision didn’t make you popular, but it turned Obama into the most acclaimed president in a long time — the president of a generation.”  Zeeman continues by saying that perhaps the biggest renewal is that there’s “someone at the helm who not only has brains, but is not embarrassed by that, either.”

Never mind that it’s an outright anachronism to deliver this kind of analysis on day two of President Obama’s first term.  Suffice it to say that President Reagan had a lot more to show for his popularity.  The message is clear, however, and quite similar to that of Mr. Von der Dunk: President Bush was a lazy, narrow-minded anti-intellectual, while his successor is an enlightened, zealous and bright cosmopolitan.  The fact that 46 percent of American voters still voted for John McCain in November demonstrates that their character resembles the former rather than the latter, one supposes.

So deeply ingrained in the Dutch mind is this one-dimensional image of U.S. politics and culture, that few readers will have noticed the irony of Mr. Zeeman representing the Enlightenment in the U.S. as an “ideal” with “religious features”.  For such is the case not just in America — or, at least, in Obama’s America — but in Europe as well.  Indeed, it has become characteristic of modern Enlightenment itself.

Indoctrinated by liberal propaganda for decades, the Dutch can no longer appreciate an ideal in which government is largely absent and in which a grass-roots civil society plays the first violin. With the Dutch government taking care of matters ranging from national security to welfare, abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, the climate, sustainable food products, development aid, and “community programs” for the inner-city minorities, all that is left in society is the individual and the liberal state.  The strong horizontal bonds that once characterized the Calvinist Dutch have now fully disappeared.  All that is left, is their vertical connection to the state, which no doubt knows what is best for us in all social, economic and cultural issues facing our little country.

The fact that the Dutch have come to thoroughly resent the multiculturalism imposed upon them by their elites, unfortunately doesn’t make them face this bigger picture.  The culture wars in the Netherlands are over, and we just don’t get what the fuss is about on the other side of the Atlantic.