The Strange Death of Theo Van Gogh
Robert Bruce (July 2017)
Little Dutch Boy safeguarding the essential. (Artwork built on the work of Marguerite Scott)
Prelude
Following raucous TV encounters with the likes of high profile Islamist Abou Jabah and a stream of publications like “Allah knows Best,” he was attracting enough death threats to prompt an offer of close protection from the Dutch security and intelligence services. Undaunted and doubtless underwhelmed (the AIVD had been watching Pym Fortuyn, hardly a promising portent), van Gogh pressed on and, in September 2004, he teamed up with Dutch Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce his final daring blasphemy.
Canary in the Mine
As a modish trendsetter for enlightened opinion, the Netherlands, with its long-haired soldiers and militarised social workers, is a symbol of the kind of politically correct Utopia British Left wingers salivate over. No country could be more conspicuously tolerant. And its rise, at the expense of pious counter-enlightenment Spain, offers a ready-made morality tale for those proselytising the benefits of open borders and open minds.
All the same, tolerance as conviction, forced upon individuals by the fear of impiously pre-empting grace, is a different beast to tolerance as timid indifference and the history of the Netherlands is at least in part a story of personal piety and republican virtue yielding to a less heroic spirit. Much as its Calvinist patriarchs might have feared, abstention bred riches and avarice drove out virtue. After the excesses of a literally burning conviction, enlightened self-interest could do the heavy lifting and, in a country where institutions have been designed above all to prevent the intrusion of strong beliefs into public life, this enfeebling of the collective conscience has been particularly pronounced.
Van Gogh had pierced the squeamish sensibilities of this most conscience-stricken of nations and, in a climate where the right not-to-be-offended enjoys parity of esteem with the rights of free expression, many of the respectable liberal outlets were prepared to bend the knee.
Founded to stand sentinel over the liberties of Europe, the ostensibly nonpartisan Index on Censorship had in fact imbibed so much of Marxisant of the counter culture, that its columnist Rohan Jayasekera could openly snigger at anyone who thought its mission was the protection of Mill’s sole dissenting voice. As he told the British journalist Nick Cohen, this may have been its original youthful purpose, but it was now more concerned with combatting hate crime and, having served up the alibi, he did his worst—penning a sordid attack on a ‘free speech fundamentalist’ who had abused his freedom of speech.
When the European Parliament’s Racism and Xenophobia Monitoring Centre published its report on anti-Semitic violence, it was summarising in strangled academic argot what any Dutch policemen knew—not least those running decoy Jews in the salubrious parts of the inner city. But when the commission suddenly discovered methodological errors and realised that the culprits were mostly neo Nazis, few dared raise the elementary questions and no one was more willing to connive in the doublethink than Cohen who, as a gay Jew, perhaps felt discretion was the better part of valour.
All this is boundlessly depressing and smug liberals who sniff at Trump’s war against grammar would do well to remember the kind of doublethink that sophisticated Europeans have been indulging in for decades. Freedom of speech, needless to say, is still a good thing but, like most things, it can be pushed to extremes. It is through sleights of hand like this that the likes of Cohen have debased the substance of these basic values. So much talk of the “golden mean” just masks the underlying lack of conviction: If an idea is not good in the extreme case, it is simply a bad idea and only someone with the most awry of moral compasses and a deaf ear to Barry Goldwater would claim moderation in defence of freedom-is-a-virtue. We once would have called this cowardice and, in this respect, the Dutch are in good company.
If Europeans can agree on anything it is the evil of conflict, an aversion to megalothymia so engraved in the European psyche that pop Marxist philosophers have elevated it to a symbol of national purpose. The following passages by John Stuart Mill and Jurgen Habermas tell you all you need to know about Europe’s spiritual malaise.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. (J. S. Mill, The Contest in America, 1862)
What forms the common core of the European identity is the character of the painful learning process it has gone through as much as its results. It is the lasting memory of nationalist excess and moral abyss that lends our present commitments the quality of a peculiar achievement. This historical background should ease the transition to a post-national democracy based on the mutual recognition of the differences between strong and proud national cultures. Neither assimilation nor coexistence–in the sense of pale modus vivendi–are appropriate terms for our history of learning how to construct new and ever more sophisticated forms of ‘solidarity amongst strangers.’ Today, moreover, all European nation states are being brought together by the challenges which they all face equally. All are in the process of becoming countries of immigration and multicultural societies. All are exposed to an economic and cultural globalisation that awakes memories of a shared history of conflict and reconciliation–and of a comparatively low threshold of toleration towards exclusion. (Jurgen Habermas, “Why Europe Needs a Constitution,” New Left Review, 2001)
Can anyone read these statements and the embodied sensibilities and not detect a fading grandeur in the sentiments of the 21st century?
Enlightenment Fundamentalists
By any stretch of the imagination these were not frivolous accessories and, after van Gogh had paid the price for his modesty, a civilised government might have seen them as a necessary part of the state’s compact with its citizens. Even here, however, freedom of speech was weighed in the balance and, in a particularly shameful act of parsimony, the Justice Ministry announced the withdrawal of funding for her security detail leaving her with few options other than flight to the New World, the first refugee from Western Europe since the holocaust.
It is a sordid episode in the history of post-war Europe and even now it is difficult to credit the witch’s brew of vicious resentments stirred by someone who in saner times would have been hailed as a progressive feminist icon. Much of the explanation inevitably lies in the narcissism of small differences but some of it, too, is clearly driven by the joys of hatred.
To a well-bred ideologue operating in the starched and humourless atmosphere of the Left, with all its aborted thoughts and anxious taboos, is to be in the position of someone permanently hoarding their vengeance. All they need is the necessary cover and Hirsi Ali-like Zionist bogeymen, and vacant railway carriages provide it in spades. Everything she has done in her subsequent incarnation—from nesting in neo-con think tanks to marrying an unfashionably Right-wing historian—has fired this indignation and nowhere have these heights of psychological self-indulgence reached a grimmer frenzy than amongst genteel intellectuals.
“Enlightenment fundamentalist.” Now, there is an arresting oxymoron. It is difficult to credit that Buruma, an accomplished Sovietologist and keen student of the kind of persuasive definitions communists used to debase language and meaning, did not know what he was doing with this sinister neologism but, even if one were inclined to be generous, further passages give enough context to dismiss the idea of a slip of the pen. Thus, at first sight, the class values appear to be straightforward—on the one hand, secularism, science, equality between men and women, Individualism, freedom to criticise without fear of violent retribution and, on the other, divine laws, revealed truth, male domination, tribal honour, and so on. It is indeed hard to see how, in a liberal democracy, these contrasting values can be reconciled. How could one not be on the side of Fritz Bolkstein, Afshin Elian, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
Ian Baruma writes in Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limit of Tolerance:
A closer look reveals fissures that are less straightforward. People come to the struggle for Enlightenment values from very different angles and, even when they find common ground, their aims may be less than enlightened.
. . . struggling against oppressive cultures that force genital mutilation on young girls, and marriage with strangers on young women. The bracing air of universalism is a release from tribal traditions.
and
. . . But the same could be said, in a way, of their greatest enemy: the modern holy warrior, like the killer of Theo van Gogh. The young Moroccan-Dutch youth downloading English translations of Arabic texts from the Internet, is also looking for a universal cause, severed from cultural and tribal specificities.
This is, to be sure, not quite an endorsement but one wonders at the obsessive even-handedness. The effect of Buruma’s first two paragraphs—when one gets away from all the polite double negatives—is to put the two belief systems on the same moral plane. All this, and Buruma’s obsequies to Ramadan, should have alerted agile minds to the mischief of the phrase “Enlightenment fundamentalist” but, in a review of Murder in Amsterdam, Timothy Garton Ash chose to give it a second tawdry outing and for good measure threw in few calumnies of his own.
The question evidently only had to be asked to be answered: how could a devourer of Mills and Boon ever hope to compete in the arts of sacred exegis with such a cultivated scholar? One could sense the purring contentment as he penned his lapidary comments. How could one come back from this tour de force?
It was an incautious endorsement and, at the time he offered up his burnt offering to the Guardian, hubris was already beating its wings. The worldly Professor had published his piece on the same day that the Middle East media research unit had published a less flattering summary of the sheikh and the reading was sobering.
About 9/11, for example, Sheikh Gamal Al-Banna was unequivocal several days after the attacks (9/21/01). “It is the criminal and racist American foreign policy against the repressed peoples of the world, and primarily against the Arab and Muslim peoples, that is to blame for the New York and Washington events, whatever the national identity of the perpetrators . . .” And, for added discomfort, there is this:
Memri.org)
We flee a clash of civilisations for this? It seems almost redundant to point out that al Banna was undecided on hand chopping (we should doubtless be reassured the equivocation reflects a utilitarian rather than theological indecision), and one is left to marvel how a man otherwise so faithful to the habits of sceptical British empiricism (Berman’s speculations on hidden blood lusts are entirely wide of the mark—Ash is uncontaminated by postmodern fascinations with violence and fanaticism) could have been taken in by such charlatans.
In part, surely this is the inevitable result of setting a low bar. Compared with cartoonish Bond-like villains such as Anjem Choudhry and Abu Hamza, the likes of Tariq Ramadan and Yusuf Quaradawi do look like effete liberals and one can understand why men of honourable intent grope for the lesser evil but much of it also stems from a basic failure of imagination.
Soviet Marxism, the enemy Ash felt most comfortable with, took itself woefully seriously as the culmination of Enlightenment rationalism and was uniquely vulnerable to the kind of battle of ideas a sharp donnish mind might excel in. But what is one to do with cruder chiliastic ideologies, strewn with violent injunctions against the impiety of cold, calculating, reason while populating feeble minds with virgins and raisins? How do liberals respond when confronted with creeds that think with their blood? It is a question that was never answered satisfactorily in the thirties and Ash seemed no nearer to an answer when he faced Hirsi Ali in a follow up debate at the Royal Society of Arts in London
Gobbledygook
Having experienced a degree of vitriol normally not encountered in academia, Garton Ash was in conciliatory mood, and a big enough man to retract a “misunderstood phrase.” “It had not occurred to him,” he said, “that anyone would be so idiotic as to imagine that I was constructing any similarity between Islamic fundamentalists and Enlightenment fundamentalists,” a testy piece of contrition to be sure, but still, “Enlightenment fundamentalist” had gone and the short-squint-squat remark was also given a decent burial (he had meant it as a complement). Ash moreover made it clear that he had no doubts all the interminable odium theologicum and laborious weighing-in-the-balance of every Hadith and Sura was just much dancing on the end of a pin. “It was,” as he frankly put it, “all gobbledygook,” but, “if it is all gobbledygook, anyway, and I think it is gobbledygook, then we should prefer a version of gobbligook that is more compatible with a liberal society.”
Undeterred, Garton Ash ploughed on and drew on all his accumulated reserves of academic prestige to score a mighty blow. As a historian, he gravely remarked, he had started his career studying the anti-Hitler conspirators and, in pondering this noble cause, had been obliged to reflect on the disagreeable characteristics of many of them. The implication was clear—we cannot pick and choose our Muslim dissidents. For a distinguished historian, it was a strange thing to say—even the average viewer of the History Channel could tell you that the allies made no attempt to foment a fifth column, opting to crush the Nazis and drain the rather expansively defined ideological swamp. No compromises with Christian aristocrats, national Bolsheviks or wiley Nazis were entertained and, if he was foolish enough to think this imaginary precedent offered a crisp policy prescription, it is a relief that even the normally supine British establishment now swerves from the temptations of ideological cross-contamination.
After years of cultivating fellow travellers, the Prevent strategy is now as preoccupied with nonviolent extremism as it is with the ancillary instruments of terror and, if such epiphanies can dawn in the dullest of political minds, how much more should we expect from a Professor of European History?
Dialogue can be a dangerous thing when confronting barbarians. When one is expected to confront such questions as the desirability of stoning adulterers and killing apostates on the basis of pearls of wisdom drip-fed by acceptable clerics meditating earnestly on the sayings of a seventh century Holy book, it is a sign that we have set the bar of civilisation too low.
Given his second incarnation as a purveyor of weighty book stops, Ash is sticking to the task—even if the effort of stretching bien pensant banalities over 500-pages defeats his considerable literary powers. If Facts are Subversive was heavy going, Ten Principles for a Connected World is just plain tedious. Take the following nonsense on the Muslim reformation from Ash’s Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World:
The fact that in some profound sense, it embodies a contradiction (Fukuyama in ponderous moments of Hegelian faux profundity makes great hay of this), or that it does not provide a viable ethic for living in a modern post-industrial society is a moot point—they have, for the while, a healthy host and can draw on unlimited reserves of wishful thinking. To judge by the flippant pronouncements of European politicians, one might imagine that the odd murder or queer-bashing were small costs attendant on the greater benefits of a youthful injection to stagnant populations but no semi-literate economist would look at the unemployment rates of the Netherlands and conclude they are the saviours of an ageing population. After decades of confident pronouncements in Holland that Muslims would soon beat a path to the contented semi-prosperity that Surinamese migrants reached in the eighties, the sleights of hand necessary to ignore stubborn facts are becoming ever more desperate. For Mak, the problem is one of peasants and stubborn village habits. One would presumably encounter the same problems if Denmark exported its rural surplus and the larger political questions surrounding multiculturalism remain agonisingly fraught.
Officially, the problem does not exist: Europe is awash with noisy disavowals from its political elites but anyone taking these statements as the opening salvo in a confident restatement of western values would have been sorely disappointed.
Multiculturalism was always more a nihilist sensibility than a policy and, even if it has jettisoned a catchphrase, it is no closer to acquiring a belief. The result—even after a thousand sermons on Britishness or “core cultures”—is that multiculturalism remains as a demographic fact on the ground and its terminus is pretty clear even if most Europeans still refrain from the honesty of the Dutch Justice Minister.
Here, at least in the postmodern liberal bazaar, we have some iron certainty.
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Robert Bruce is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.
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