Free Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma

“is both a father and mother…. The capable leader is the biblical good shepherd… who will lead us to the father’s house. Let us prepare for his coming….”
    In 2001, before his first electoral triumph, he gave a very peculiar interview. “Even if I don’t become prime minister,” he said, “I still will be. Because that is how many people see me. Politics cry out for a turnaround . So you have to show the people. Precisely. Politics on the spot. I will visit hospitals and schools, and I’ll show the nurses and teachers exactly how to do things…. That is the type of leader we need. Someone who can show people what to do. Then you will automatically become the incarnation of the people.” 8
    It sounds slightly deranged, those strange shifts of personal pronouns from “we” to “you” to “I.” It is the fantasy of a dictatorial dreamer, the “politics on the spot,” the idea of natural selection to be leader. It is the language used in the leadership cults of Kim Il Sung or Chairman Mao. What makes this most peculiar is that Fortuyn’s model in this reverie was neither Mao, nor Kim, but Joop den Uyl, a former prime minister, whose brand of puritanical social democracy was not some romantic ideal, but a typical product of Dutch moralism, profoundly influenced by the Calvinist attitudes he grew up with. Den Uyl’s aim to level Dutch society by taxing the wealthy was bold for its time, the early 1970s, but he was far from being a dictator, and his policies would have been loathed by Fortuyn’s rich backers. But to seek for consistency here is to miss the point. Like so muchelse in a society that appears on the surface to have rejected the Church, Catholic or Protestant, Fortuyn’s views were still steeped in biblical terms. He was the leader who, in a secular age, would guide his Dutch flock back to the father’s house. What made him a potential menace was that both he and his followers imagined him to be the father—the father they had lost.
    The loathing of Islam, then, may have gone deeper than a hatred of those Moroccan vandals who threatened gay men in Rotterdam. To see it as the conflict of rival monotheistic religions is too simple. Fortuyn’s venom is drawn more from the fact that he, and millions of others, not just in the Netherlands, but all over Europe, had painfully wrested themselves free from the strictures of their own religions. And here were these newcomers injecting society with religion once again. The fact that many Europeans, including Fortuyn, were less liberated from religious yearnings than they might have imagined, made the confrontation with Islam all the more painful. This was especially true of those who considered themselves to be people of the Left. Some swapped the faiths of their parents for Marxist illusions, until they too ended in disillusion. The religious zeal of immigrants was a mirror image of what they themselves once had been.
    Theo van Gogh’s fascination with “the divine baldy” was more idiosyncratic. He certainly had no longing for a family-state,nor a hankering for a strong leader to herd the Dutch into a collective state of bliss. But he shared Fortuyn’s allergy to the regenten, their smugness, their complacency, their patronizing air of “we know best.” Both he and Fortuyn, though not quite the same age, were products of the 1960s, when the rebellion against the pillars of church and state shook everything up. To shake things up was Van Gogh’s aim in life. It kept him going. Whatever else he said or did, Fortuyn shook things up in the polders of his native country. And like Van Gogh, he paid with his life.
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Spruyt did not take the money. He did, however, enter politics in a more active capacity by joining forces with Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician with an anti-immigration agenda.

THREE

The Healthy