St Theo of the Never-Never Lands
Peter Waterman - 15.11.2004 21:42
The assassination of Theo van Gogh can be understood as the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy - in which the prophet brings into existence that which he prophesies. But what is important here is less this purveyor of hate speech, or the Islamic fundamentalist who killed him, it is the reality (and myth) of post-World War II Netherlands.
Saint Theo of the Never-Neverlands?
Peter Waterman
When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the great Black leader, Malcolm X is reported to have said, ‘The chickens have come home to roost’. Two years later he was himself assassinated, by or with the collusion of, the Nation of Islam sect he had been too smart and too militant for, and which he had now deeply embarrassed.
On November 2, 2004, I heard, with shock but no surprise, that Dutch film-maker, TV personality and polemicist, Theo van Gogh, had been murdered, by a young Dutch/Moroccan man, wearing a djalaba. I am unsurprised because it has seemed to me that Theo van Gogh provoked the violence that eventually came down on his head.
There is such a phenomenon as a self-fulfilling prophecy, under which he who prophesies certain social behaviour himself brings it about. Van Gogh dismissed, as a debilitating myth, ‘the multi-cultural society’. At the enormous protest demonstration against his murder, that same evening, 90 percent of the participants were from the what one has to call the monocultural society. I welcome this demonstration in so far as it permitted a collective letting-off of the steam of outrage, and to the extent that it condemned any possible backlash against the Arab or Muslim population of the Netherlands – the spokespeople of which had already begun to condemn the murder. Outrage and blame, however, as in the case of Nine-Eleven in the USA, is no substitute for critical reflection on the conditions that give rise to that which causes outrage.
There is another phenomenon, called by global social-justice activist, Susan George, The Debt Boomerang. It is not, as George points out, only the debt that so boomerangs back on ruthless Northern states. The poverty they have visited on the South has led to wave upon wave of immigration by hungry and hopeless Southerners. These are not ‘economic migrants’, they are life migrants. Globalised corporate greed has made life for them increasingly impossible in the South. They hope they might have more chances in the North. Welcomed during the long boom, when their willing bodies and modest demands were valued, they are now seen as ‘the Martians at the Corner’ (title of a book about the invasion of Quito, Ecuador, by the Indian peasants who live around it).
A third thought, of another prominent thinker of the global justice and solidarity movement. The Portuguese academic, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, says we increasingly live on islands of political democracy surrounded by seas of social fascism: Liberal Democracy, in other words, is quite compatible with Social Darwinism. But this thought can be expanded: it is the islands that have poisoned the oceans. And the seas are encroaching on the islands – both metaphorically and literally. The Low Lands by the Sea should know this. And those living within them are going to have to learn how to live with rising tides that they have themselves – despite or because of their liberal-democratic political system? – contributed to.
The murder of van Gogh is to the advantage of nobody apart from religious and political fundamentalists, whether of the established order or at the social margins.
More profoundly was I disturbed, I have to say, by the almost unanimous defence of, or praise for, van Gogh, the related suggestion that the Netherlands is some kind of utopia of free expression. (Another comentator said that van Gogh did not know the difference between free speech and hate speech). All honour to those two women witnesses interviewed on Dutch daytime TV who refused, on the basis of his clothing, to assume that the murderer was an Arab or a Muslim. ‘We’, nowadays, like it or not, can no longer simply define ourselves - ‘our norms and values’ - as solely Dutch, European, Christian, Liberal-Democratic, or Civilised. Those who fail to recognise wider identities and values will do what was done the evening of van Gogh’s murder, to celebrate a Dutch identity laid down in 1945 and after (though not between 1941-45, when the Dutch had a worse record for defending their Jewish ‘others’ than any other West-European nationality).
Van Gogh enjoyed and exploited the privilege which wealthier whiter males considered their property in what I will call 'Netherlands I'. This was a country which, increasingly after World War II, could imagine itself an island of sanity, social welfare, compromise and tolerance in a less-civilised world.
'Netherlands I' never entirely lived up to the legend, but it could imagine itself to do so. Therefore my title: Never-Never Land as a place of the imagination. Teachers always complained that they were anti-racist but that the kids were racist. Fifteen or 20 years ago, a special issue of Vrij Nederland was devoted to a working-class street in Rotterdam that welcomed the Muslim immigrants until it discovered, to its considerable surprise and disappointment that they did not want to become…Dutch! But the self-congratulatory mood could continue until the first of Holland’s Twin Towers, Pim Fortuyn, was brought down by a Dutch assassin, in 2001.
We now live in 'Netherlands II', an increasingly globalised country, with all this means in terms of corporate greed, job loss, social service cuts, rampant, opinionated and thoughtless egoism (Pim and Theo) and a fortress mentality.
Every child, every viewer of Discovery TV, surely knows that you should not put your arm into the mouths of even apparently tame baby crocodiles. And you surely should not do this and whilst poking them in the eye with texts on the barbaric nature of Crocodile Culture. What, after all, are we to call a ‘civilised, Christian, Western democracy’ that is complicit in the killing of 100,000 Iraqis – 99,999 more people than were killed on November 2? Or in which one child per week dies as a result of child mishandling - without a single demonstration filling the Dam?
Freedom of Speech belongs, in the first place, to those with the most freedom, the loudest voices, the deepest pockets and the most privileged position. To simply celebrate freedom of speech in a situation of profound - and increasing - economic, social or cultural inequality is to defend the multi/national press magnate, and the language he uses to address the culture he cares to operate within and to significantly shape.
Does not everyone know that it is dangerous to humiliate those with large numbers but little power? This is what the USA has done with the Arab and Muslim world for a half century. This is what the White Christian West has done for 500 years before Fundamentalist-Terrorists-Without-the-State struck dramatically back within the West itself, employing the political space provided, and the technology developed, by their self-declared enemy. ‘Terrorists-Without-the-State’, I repeat, because we all know there are plenty of such people, ‘With-the-State’. But then they are not called either fundamentalists or terrorists. This is why George Bush is not called a fundamentalist and why the US and allied troops in Iraq are not called terrorists – even if 100,000 Iraqis have died since they arrived to free them (from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?).
Even those pea-brained provincial intellectuals, so buried in notions of national or regional cultural superiority that they are incapable of seeing themselves as others see them, must have heard of the Salman Rushdie case. The brilliant British-based South Asian writer, highly sensitive to the cultures of the sub-continent, himself discovered 15 or 20 years ago that we now live in some kind of global culture; that not only liberal critics from Cambridge, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts, but fundamentalist Muslim clerics in Isfahan can read - or hear, see, or be told what to think about - his book. And that out of a sense of humiliation and outrage they can react, using the weapons of the weak.
The Netherlands has not been spoiled, poisoned, degraded, by these two examples of political ‘senseless-violence’ (senseless only to observers with rose-coloured spectacles). On the contrary, the two assassinations occurred because the Netherlands has been being spoiled, poisoned, radically transformed for the worse, by the ‘cancer stage of capitalism’ for 10-15 years beforehand.
On the Dam in Amsterdam, someone actually bore a placard showing the ‘o’ of Theo with a halo above it! One hopes (and prays) that he is not going to join Pim Fortuyn in Madame Tussauds as the second Martin Luther King of the Netherlands. Someone else carried a placard stating ‘Multicultural Society Against Fundamentalism’. Quite. But which cultures? In what quantities and qualities? With what financial means? Against whose fundamentalism – only Islamic or also the religious fundamentalism of Bush, the secular ones of Fortuyn and van Gogh?
Those who identify themselves with him should first of all reflect on the words van Gogh addressed not to Third World Muslims but to Evelien Gans, the path-breaking Dutch Jewish woman writer. She is the author of a book on the unhealthy mutual dependence of Dutch Jews and non-Jews, 'Goyish Envy and Jewish Narcissism' ('Gojse Nijd en Joods Narcisme', 1994). Here, be it noted, she is criticising her own identities as Dutch and Jewish. Saint Theo of Free Speech wrote, in response, as follows (his ‘Doctor’ is Mengele, the Nazi doctor who practised Freedom of Medical Experimentation on living Jews):
"Sometimes she wonders if Doctor really exists, if she hasn’t imagined Doctor herself? Recently she was walking along the Kalverstraat and it was as if a man took her by the arm, ‘The White Angel’ she calls him. Her eyes get wet at the memory of his outrageous nonchalance; how she begged to be fucked from behind by him and he put a clothes peg on his nose. ‘A little respect for a lady if you please...’, she whispered and then when she begged him in tears to: ‘Spout me full’, he had pissed her full. The yellow stream that brings life." (My translation – PW).
I find this not only quite without even gallows humour but way below the Western liberal-democratic belt and travelling in the direction of the Nazi periodical, "Der Stürmer'. And surprisingly illiterate for a man of such brilliance. As a reader of Dutch novels, I have never noticed their authors to have any particular difficulty with punctuation. I have also lived about 30 years in the Netherlands without being confronted with such examples of Auschwitz humour. Inshallah (Arabic, G-d willing), I will live another 10 or 15 in the Netherlands without having to see this ever again.
Nie Wieder!
Enough already!
Basta ya!
Once can be once too often. This applies to political assassinations, the bombings of New York, wars and invasions by major powers that claim to represent a superior civilisation. But it also applies to those who by their arrogant, aggressive and provocative words and acts bring down upon themselves the wrath they have themselves prophesied.
* The author is an economic migrant who has lived in the Netherlands for over 30 years. Despite the fact that he is not a political refugee, he believes that his pink skin, middle-class status, professional occupation and membership of the Secular Church of the Latter-Day Enlighteners may have so far protected him from the vituperation addressed at more recent immigrants. [Another version of this item is to be found on the website of RISQ (Review of International Social Questions)].
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