How Wilders finally came Home in the supremacist European Scene [EN]

Never a dull moment with my compatriot Geert Wilders!

At the June 9 national elections in Holland, he got 15% of the vote, 24 mandates out of 150 in Parliament, and hoped to be unavoidable at the formation of a right-wing Government with the winning conservative Liberal Party VVD (31/150) and the crushed Christien Democrats (CDA), who lost half of their following, scoring only 21/150.

Arithmetically, a VVD-PVV-CDA coalition (31+24+21= 76 out of 150) would have been possible. As much so, as the fundamentalist Christian SGP party (2 mandates, forbids women to take office on biblical grounds) offered its support.

But an intervention of the Queen and her advisers helped the young new VVD leader Mark Rutte, to have NOT to negotiate about the loony Wilders Government programme. The final blow came from the new CDA leader Maxime Verhagen, acting Foreign Minister, in a parliamentary debate, when he rejected any compromise on the program of Wilders' PVV, as it puts forward proposals that undermine the Rule Of Law and the democratic State.

It was very late in the process, but just in time, we thought. But, once again, I have been too optimistic. Or, if you like, not pessimistic enough.

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Het geval Benno Barnard. Manipulatie, provocatie, infiltratie. Vaak werkt het niet. Soms wel. [NL]

Sommige mensen werkt het op de zenuwen, dat de Islamisten nog maar steeds geen spectaculaire aanslagen plegen, om het gelijk van Wilders en consorten te bewijzen.

Deze laatsten moeten zich daarom knarsetandend tevredenstellen met niet meer dan vermoedens: Uit hun verband gerukte citaten uit de Koran, bij voorbeeld, of een relletje rond een absoluut loony groepje provocateurs.

Dat laatste deed zich onlangs weer voor bij de zogenaamd "door Islamisten onmogelijk gemaakte" lezing in de marge van de Antwerpse Universiteit door de Belgisch-Nederlandse literator Benno Barnard. Zoals gebruikelijk, interesseerde zich geen hond voor het verwarde gebabbel van Benno. Zelfs de aantrekkelijke titel van Barnard's tussenkomst, zoiets als: "Weg met Allah, leve God!", vermocht de Antwerpse studenten niet massaal te trekken. Die zijn namelijk al minstens twee generaties van god los. In Leuven is dat misschien anders, aan de Katholieke Universiteit. Maar daar hebben ze Rik Torfs, een echte professor, die er veel harder tegenaan gaat, zowel tegen de Kerk als tegen de Sharia, dan Benno.

Goede raad was duur. Ofwel: Duur? Nee: Goedkoop!

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Holocaust education is to encourage reflection, not to encourage a taboo [EN]

Walther Rathenau was a philosopher, businessman and minister of foreign affairs in the early Weimar Republic. He was also a Jew.He would now be classified as a Liberal Conservative or a right Social Democrat. All the same, many reasons for revanchists, anti-Semites, PI-ler, Mafiosis und Ulfkotte-people to hate him. So much so that he was murdered in 1922 by three so-called Fememörderern with a hand grenade.

He makes the difference between predetermined conclusions  from superficial analogies from history (or the collective memories) on one hand and, on the other hand, the enlightened thinking, not  the based upon stories attached to prejudice, but engaged to comparison with what is now happening. Stating: 

Denken heißt Vergleichen In short: To think is to compare

What we get to hear now too often in the debates about the supposedly necessary exclusion of potential terrorists and enemies of the Enlightenment in "our West", are the prejudiced conclusions of "the" History.
But, THE history does not exist. Only stories do exist. Narratives that communicate what people think or thought that woul be important.

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How the Wilders Hysteria is Linked to Holland. Who exploits it. And how it will disappear. (2, Colonial attitudes.) [EN]

Wilders is NOT about Islam. Any foreign intrusion would have done. He is about xenophobia and hate-mongering.

In the first part of this series, we talked about the transnational effects of the Dutch Wilders hysteria against Muslims. And how it is exploited and financed by foreign sources like the Advocacy Project of Daniel Pipes in the U.S.A. and Israel. We will have to return to the international financing problem as well as to the ongoing European contamination, in one of the next instances.

"Geert Akbar": The some 200 activists who supported Wilders on January 20 at his Amsterdam court appearance, were not without some humour...Our subject here, in the second part, is the typical Dutch background of the hysterical Wilders upsurge. The Wilders phenomenon has nothing to do, in our opinion, with the Islam. Any religious, ethnic or cultural intrusion into the dream of a peaceful and quiet Dutch society, could have done the job. Wilders is not about Islam. It is about xenophobia. And hate-mongering.

Redundant workers are left alone

As many researchers and thinkers nowadays understand, the globalization of economy, trade and culture are felt as an intrusion into their daily life, by the men and women who live in marginalized parts of Western cities. Structurally, they are no more needed for production of goods. (See my articles about the rise and downfall of the need for urban workers at the e-urban site: Les quartiers relégués... (FR),  Missbrauch der Geographie des Armuts.. (DE).

Foreign, mostly Muslim, immigrants take the jobs of the former local (former generation) immigrant workers. And the new immigrants are in their turn put aside, as their wages get too high, compared to those in, for instance, China. But China is over their horizon. The local inhabitants only see their immigrant neighbours.

And that is hard.

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