Defaming The Dead: The Posthumous Mugging of Dutch Activist Pim Fortuyn...

Defaming The Dead: The Posthumous Mugging of Dutch Activist Pim Fortuyn...
by Murray Soupcoff
Daily Notebook
The Iconoclast

May 13, 2002

May 11, 2002: Poor Pim Fortuyn (right), the recently assassinated Dutch activist/politician. Not only did he suffer the misfortune of being cut down in the prime of his life by an environmentalist nutcase's bullets, but now he's also undergoing the posthumous indignity of being demonized in death even more than he was in life.

In the many instant news analyses that have popped up since his political assassination, Mr. Fortuyn has been described variously as a "racist", "far right-wing extremist" and "hard right winger". In most cases, this dynamic young activist has also been characterized as the Dutch equivalent of France's fossilized "far-right" Vichy apologist, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

On the contrary, on pretty well every subject except immigration, Mr. Fortuyn was closer to a progressive libertarian in his politics than a racist reactionary of the likes of Monsieur Le Pen. Not only was Pim Fortuyn a gay activist, but -- rightly or wrongly -- he championed the permissive, open, libertine culture that dominates life in the Netherlands today.

Mr. Fortuyn's real sin was that he dared to question the liberal-left status-quo in Europe. For example, he railed against the ever-increasing restrictions on Dutch life and commerce imposed by the imperious (and unelected) European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. He campaigned for less taxes, more government accountability to voters, and fewer decisions made behind closed doors by an isolated, self-appointed political elite (as is now the accepted way of exercising power in Europe and Canada).

Most important, of course, Pim Fortuyn spoke out against unrestricted and unregulated immigration, and supported more vigorous attempts to assimilate recent immigrants into the prevailing Dutch culture.

However, Mr. Fortuyn opened himself up to the inevitable "racist" and 'extremist" labels, quickly applied to him by the media, when he openly expressed his disgust with the insular, homophobic and misogynist views of the Muslim immigrant community -- recent immigrants who comprise the majority of the Netherlands' landed immigrant population. The ultra-liberal Mr. Fortuyn was anything but a racist (he never made a secret of the multicultural backgrounds of his many male lovers). But he dared break the European establishment's restrictive "speech code" regarding "minorities", and told it like is regarding an emerging social problem that ultimately threatens the very existence of the Dutch democracy (namely the future threat posed by an ever-growing and increasingly more militant Muslim population that has no core identification with Dutch democratic values and prefers instead to hijack those very values in the service of ultimately imposing a restrictive Taliban-style Muslim theocracy on the country).

For his troubles, Pim Fortuyn suffered the usual punishment favored by today's liberal-left oligarchies in Europe and Canada -- the equivalent of a secular excommunication or modern-day shunning. Mr. Fortuyn, in both life and death, was labelled a "racist", an "extremist" and a "hard right-winger" -- labels that, in contemporary liberal society everywhere, prescriptively imply that the stigmatized person is so unfair, irrational, self-serving and cruel as to be beyond the moral pale. Built into such judgmental labels is the ideologically-charged assumption that anyone espousing such views must be so twisted and pathological as to be some kind of subhuman monster -- the global left's ingenious method for Hitlerfying (and thus stigmatizing) any dissent against their prevailing orthodoxies.

Certainly, as Pim Fortuyn found out, the unspoken intention of such prescriptive labels is to de-legitimize selected dissenters in the eyes of their peers, and to strip away any and all credibility from the ideas or opinions expressed by such individuals, by wrongfully identifying them with cataclysmic outpourings of hate and wrongdoing in the past. The Orwellian corruption of language is used to transform authentic dissidents into dangerous social reprobates so morally bankrupt they're not eveb worthy of being given a hearing.

And according to the unspoken strictures of this perjorative status degradation operation, what should happen if a politically-incorrect dissident should find a venue for his or her ideas? Then the individual should be literally shouted down because of the sheer "horribleness" of his or her "extremist" viewpoints.

Unfortunately, as the Dutch political elite discovered to their chagrin, the one safe venue left to such dissidents as Pim Fortuyn is the democatic electoral arena -- a political battleground which the crafty and charismatic Mr. Fortuyn looked capable of sufficiently mastering to win a seat at the tables of power in the Netherlands.

Of course, six bullets quickly put an end to that scenario. And the status quo has at least temporarily been restored.

In the meantime, the international journalistic cabal continues to put the symbolic boot to Pim Fortuyn's memory, attempting to ensure that both his reputation and his dissenting ideas are tainted forever.

Unfortunately for the international media elite, I suspect that they haven't heard the last of his populist rhertoric. Because until the arrogant oligarchs exercising power in Amsterdam, Paris, Brussel, Bonn, Washington and Ottawa find a way to completely eliminate elections, the teeming masses whom they hold in such contempt will still have the last word, at the ballot box. And despite all the manipulative mud-slinging and propagandizing by the international media elites, the majoritarian center that embraced and empowered the likes of Ronald Reagan and Maragaret Thatcher appears ready to rise again.

In spite of all the talk about this being the new century of trans-national world bodies of international justice like the United Nations, the World Court in the Hague and the new International Court of Justice, representative democracy at the local level may yet triumph again in the West. And despite all the prevailing rhetorical gibberish about post-colonial social, economic and environmental justice, the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill may soon be resurrected and take their rightful place atop the echelon of freedom's heroes, as the West's electorates once again exercise their will and toss out their leftist masters. ***

Murray Soupcoff is the author of 'Canada 1984' and a former radio and television producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He also was Executive Editor of We Compute Magazine for several years, and is now the Managing Editor of the popular Canadian conservative Web site, Iconoclast.ca

Photo of Pim Fortuyn courtesy of the Associated Press