Posted on 05/06/2002 5:58:30 PM PDT by dighton
PIM FORTUYN, who has been murdered at Hilversum aged 54, was a flamboyant, shaven-headed, gay, former Marxist professor of sociology who attracted considerable support in his home country for a political programme which rejected multi-culturalism, socialism, and Muslim immigration.
Recent polls suggested that his Leefbaar (“Liveable”) Rotterdam movement, which took 17 of 45 seats in the city’s elections in March, might gain around 20 per cent of the vote in national elections on May 15.
Fortuyn gloried in his dandyish, gadfly approach. In a nation where debate is generally conducted by consensus among bland Centre-Left liberals, Fortuyn - once voted the best-dressed man in Holland by Esquire magazine - adopted a deliberately controversial, mincing stance.
Usually wearing a pin-stripe suit, and accompanied by his two spaniels (Kenneth and Carla) and a butler, Fortuyn travelled around the country in a chauffeur-driven Daimler, smoking Cuban cigars.
His time as a newspaper columnist and television commentator made him well-known for his pungent, intolerant views; but his publications indicated that he was not content simply to be a controversialist - the Netherlands’ answer to Professor David Starkey, perhaps.
Instead, he made increasingly inflammatory claims - that Islam is a “backward culture”; that “16 million Dutchmen are about enough - this is a full country” or declaring: “Moroccan boys never steal from Moroccans. Have you noticed that?”
Last week, he told The Daily Telegraph that Tony Blair’s moralistic foreign policy was “a danger to world peace”.
Titles such as Soulless Europe; Suffocating Netherlands; The ‘60s: Wunderkind or Total Loss? and Against the Islamicisation of our Culture did not disguise Fortuyn’s uncompromising stance. But while he argued for an end to immigration, he did so from a peculiarly Dutch perspective.
Fortuyn singled out fundamentalist Islam as a threat to homosexuals, sexual permissiveness, women’s rights and casual drug use - all of which he was happy to defend.
Like Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose success in reaching the final round of the French presidential elections boosted Fortuyn’s own standing in the polls, he took a dim view of the EU, although in high-camp rather than nationalistic language.
“I will borrow that handbag from Margaret Thatcher, bang it on the table and say I want my money back,” he announced, referring to the Dutch contribution to the EU budget, proportionately the largest of any member state.
He was careful, too, to recruit members of ethnic minorities to his cause. A coloured businessman from the Cap Verde islands was number two on the Fortuyn list.
Fortuyn vehemently rejected suggestions that he had anything in common with Austria’s Jorg Haider or Le Pen as “intolerable”, but he shared much of their rhetoric, railing against rising crime, deteriorating public services, immigration and asylum seekers - and, above all, the established political class.
Pim Fortuyn was born on February 19 1948 at Velsen, a conservative, Catholic area on the Noordzeekanaal in the north-west of the Netherlands.
After leaving school, he went to the Universiteit Nyenrode (The Netherlands Business School) in Breukelen, where he studied History, Sociology, Law and Economics, graduating in 1970.
Fortuyn went on to study at the University of Amsterdam, where he became involved in the student movement; in 1971 he received a doctorate in Sociology. He then went to study at the faculty of Sociology at the Rilksuniversiteit Groningen, receiving a further degree in 1972, and in 1980 received his doctorate in Social Sciences.
In 1986 he took a part-time job at the Social and Economic Council (SER), the main advisory board of the Dutch government on national and international social and economic policy. In 1989 he took a post at the OV Studentenkaart BV company, before being appointed professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam the following year.
Around this time, he began to appear regularly in print and other media and shed his undergraduate Marxism in favour of a populist controversialism - saying, his supporters claimed, what many people in the Netherlands thought but dared not express.
In 1992, he set up Fortuyn BV, an “advice bureau”, and began to publish more. Against the Islamicisation of our Culture appeared in 1997, and in 2001 Fortuyn announced his intention of reshaping the politics of his home country.
The Leefbaar Nederland movement, which had begun in the late 1990s, elected him their leader in August last year; he had hardly taken the helm, though, before the party was compelled to disown him in February of this year, after he had called for an end to Islamic immigration and the repeal of the first section of the Dutch constitution, which outlaws discrimination.
Nothing daunted, the politician simply set up his own Lijst Fortuyn, which under the Leefbaar Rotterdam banner, instantly overtook his old party in the polls.
Fortuyn was the only Dutch politician besides the prime minister to have employed bodyguards. He had to be escorted to the polls in Rotterdam, and several weeks ago was attacked with custard pies laced with urine. He was shot leaving a radio interview; his murder was the most prominent political assassination in the Netherlands since that of William the Silent in 1584.
..former Marxist professor of sociology...
Why is this guy being refered to as a right-winger? Marxist usually means a leftist.
Means used to be, ain't now.
But you're right, he wasn't Jerry Falwell.
He's funny.
Well, obviously Fortuyn was no hero of the right as I pointed out yesterday, although he was well represenative of the New Euro-Right in Britain and elsewhere throughout the Continent which has discarded traditional morality as politically unsupportable. Championing all that is morally repugnant in the eyes of God--homosexuality, sexual immorality and usage of harmful mind-altering drugs, he had little or nothing in common with the conservative movement as we have come to know it in America today. Fortuyn would have likely singled out fundamentalist Christians as the greatest threat to his cherished godless Holland as well had they been a strong and growing political force in Holland. Clearly, Fortuyn was not a martyr for the cause of freedom on the same level as anti-Communist hero Jonas Savimbi.
Jonas Savimbi?!?!?!? Oh, dear God.....
Savimbi was just another African tribalist would-be dictator, who learned that he could gain American money and military support, not to mention corporate oil money, by spouting a lot of nonsense about free markets and capitalism, just as his Cuban-backed opponents curried favor from the USSR and Cuba by spouting a lot of Marxist nonsense. It's all about telling your sponsors what they want to hear. Savimibi is an "anti-communist hero" in the same sense that a player for the New York Yankees is a "New York hero" because he takes a paycheck from a baseball team that happens to play in New York.
As for Fortuyn: his appearance on the political scene is good news because it signals the start of the breakup of the liberal coalition. It is starting to dawn on some secularists and liberals that you cannot have a liberal, secular society, when you are constantly importing millions of people who hate your guts and who wish to tear down every liberal and secular institution that the West has created over the past 1,000 years (including the Western state-form itself, which is completely incompatible with Levantine style theocracies). As immigration becomes the defining issue of Western politics, old terms like "left" and "right" will either have to be redefined, or thrown out entirely.
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