Absolutely no answer
the Guardian - 08.05.2002 13:38
In individual terms, Monday´s killing of the Dutch far-right politician, Pim Fortuyn, was a quintessentially absolutist act. Murder brooks no argument; it is, by definition, final
kamikaze tegen coexistentie
Europe keeps looking for enlightenment
[...] Absolutism was the temptation, and the undoing, of kings, popes and emperors and of the French and Russian revolutionaries. The empirical ideologues of the Bush administration now proclaim absolutely the universal rightness of American values; the new absolutism is their "war on terror", portrayed as a pivotal, global battle between good and evil eclipsing all other moral considerations and admitting of no argument. By seeking to impose final, definitive answers to eternal questions, adherents of the absolutist tendency guarantee their own ultimate confounding. Yet still they try. Enlightenment does not lie this way.
In individual terms, Monday´s killing of the Dutch far-right politician, Pim Fortuyn, was a quintessentially absolutist act. Murder brooks no argument; it is, by definition, final. "Taking a man´s life is a terrible thing," says Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. "You take away everything he has, and everything he´ll ever have." Yet perhaps the murderer really believed that by killing Fortuyn, he could kill his ideas, too. This outrage may in fact have the opposite effect, by spreading a martyr´s contagion. And this, indeed, is a potent theme, in the Netherlands, in France and across a continent haunted by the spectre of a new fascism. Fortuyn´s more menacing kindred spirits thrive by offering crude, simply deceptive answers to complex issues. "Immigration? Ban it. Crime? We know who to blame. Identity crisis? Let´s keep our country to ourselves! And while we´re at it, sack the elitist politicians and Brussels bureaucrats and cut taxes." It is a popular, populist refrain; but in its fiction of absolute solutions, it is as old and tyrannical as it is ubiquitous and superficial. Enlightenment does not lie this way.
When the Arab nation fails to condemn suicide bombings and opens the spigot of a bilious anti-semitism, it suspends reason and besmirches the cause of Palestine. But when Israel´s prime minister trades tanks for talks, wreaks havoc in a place like Jenin, and argues that only repression and more repression can provide true security, he, too, pretends at answers he does not possess and flirts with despotism. When George Bush, contemplating the September 11 product of another lethal brand of fundamentalism, responds with a violent, unyielding absolutism of his own, he moves closer to betraying, not fortifying, America´s values. Before US columnists shower contempt upon an "infected" Europe where intolerance makes life unsafe for Jews, they should pause and gaze inwards. No nation, no political party and no individual is immune to seductively absolutist panaceas, to illiberal, prejudicial claims to know the answers, to the belief that it alone is right. But self-knowledge is more valuable. It is a surer guide to absolution in a world of imponderables. This way lies enlightenment.
 Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/0,11981,711653,00.html
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