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HENRI BEUNDERS

Fortuyn, Van Gogh, Hirsi Ali: the Exorcism of an Unholy Trinity  
 
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ABSTRACT  

During the last week of each year a Dutch radio station broadcasts the ‘Top 2000’ pop songs of all times, chosen by the listeners. And millions of Dutch people are listening. For almost every year during this program of nostalgia’s existence, the number 1 song has been the same: Bohemian Rhapsody, written by Freddy Mercury and originally recorded by the band Queen for the 1975 album A Night at the Opera.

Is this the secret dream of the sober, level-headed, dike building Dutch; to live as a Bohemian? Maybe, but, as the deceased romantic writer Gerard Reve once wrote: the Dutch want to live adventurous, but with a good pension in their back pockets. 

This is why ordinary people in an egalitarian society, full of boredom and unfulfilled aspirations, create real and fictional heroes. They give the people sense of meaning, direction and just make them feel good because those heroes live the life they themselves know they don’t dare to perform.

How big of a contrast this is, with the Sixties-elites who think they are the sole political and intellectual heroes justified to run a country, and play the tune in the media democracy? If they – acting in a mimetic rivalry of self-righteousness, toothpaste ‘authenticity’ and wittyness - feel they are driven off stage by the masses knocking at their door, they start feeling nervous, get angry, and start fighting with each other. And then the process of scapegoating and sacrificing can begin.  

Angst, arrogance, and envy all the way

In the past 6 years, Angst, arrogance and envy have been the keys to the hatred cherished among members of the Dutch establishment – most of them raised to power in The Sixties - for those real Bohemians, who overtrumped and mocked them, like the boy in Anderson’s marvel who screamed out that the emperor did not wear any cloth at all.

The peculiar thing is: while A Bohemian Rhapsody is still nr. 1, there is no real bohemian in sight any more, after the most bloody ‘Opera’ Dutch history has ever seen in peace time. In the summer of 2001 the drug addict media rock star and painter Herman Brood, the last exuberant remnant of the pop scene of The Sixties, took a suicidal dive from the Amsterdam Hilton. He was like Serge Gainsbourg, an alter ego, politically not important.

This changed. In May 2002 – 9 days before he would be the predicted absolute winner of the parliamentary elections - Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant homosexual Holy Virgin loving, exhibitionist, charismatic and, above all, a passionate, witty and unsurpassed debater was killed by an ecological extremist, a fate he knew could be his own like his hero John F. Kennedy.

In November 2004 another enfant terrible from the Dutch circle of Bohemians, journalist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was slaughtered on an Amsterdam pavement, by a Dutch reborn Muslim fundamentalist from Moroccan descent. Fortuyn’s soul mate, Member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who ‘had to be killed’ as well, left the country in 2006 for the United States, after being haunted  by both  Muslim fanatics and parts of the establishment – politicians, journalists and TV-makers - because of her fierce criticism of Islam. With her flight the Unholy Trinity was exorcised from the country.

At first sight we might conclude that this bloody opera is the ultimate proof of all the things René Girard has written in respect of crisis and scapegoating to restore the peace and harmony in a society. To be sure, after the removal of the Unholy Trinity of radical threats to Dutch bourgeois culture, the temporary result seems to be a peace of a nature nobody could have predicted when the bloody play began. 

Let’s look who is ruling this country now, both in politics and in the media. The prime-minister is a Calvinist. But now his two vice-prime-ministers are Calvinist too. One of them is even more orthodox than he is, the other one is a social-democrat who was born into a Calvinist family and went to the same, originally, Calvinist University as the prime-minister did. On television, the only late night talk show in the past spring achieving ratings of a million viewers was presented by two Calvinist journalists who go to church twice every Sunday.

Is this a classical case of good intentions and misplaced results? Of a revolution that, like revolutions so often do, end in the very opposite direction of the intentions of the revolutionaries who ignited them?

If we take into account the 1951 book of Albert Camus, ‘L’homme révolté’, we will see that by exorcizing some devils, as has been done in recent years in The Netherlands, the status quo ante is not restored. The heart of a revolt is awakening, becoming conscious of the things that are worth to be defended at all times. So, The Netherlands of 2007 is a very different one than that of the nineties, the final political heyday of The Sixties.  

The problem of religion and violence

I will try to reflect on the special case The Netherlands seem to be, along the following lines:

- As a country with strong Calvinist traits, the dominant morality is based on a sense of guilt.

- As a small and military powerless country, the basic sentiment in the post-war Netherlands is Angst. As a result The Stockholm Syndrome – identification and accommodation with (foreign) enemies you can’t expulse – is always visible.

- Thanks to the cultural revolution of The Sixties – anything goes – and the secularization there were two things the Dutch could not cope with anymore: religion and violence.

- The political, intellectual and journalistic establishment that rose to power after ‘1968’ was dominated by ‘Amsterdam’, that regarded itself as a cosmopolitan, agnostic and rational embodiment of anarcho-liberal Holland, an exemplary melting pot of avant-garde but high brow art, culture and politics. The rivalry, and secret disgust or hatred, between big cities like Rotterdam and Amsterdam , and between’ the provinces’ and the big cities must not be underestimated.

- Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the acceleration of global capitalism, the advent of commercial (and free!) media, and the revolution in telecommunication drove the cartel of politics, quality papers and public broadcast media in the defensive. The emancipation of ‘the masses’ was seen as an alarming threat to the citadel of the Sixties-civilization in the public sphere.

- So, what we might call a very long Night at the Opera, was in fact a very complex mixture of wars that were going on at the same time. The Sixties-generation-establishment was fighting for survival against the ‘invasion of the barbarians’. This war was part of the two forces profondes that are similar to the rest of Western Europe : the crisis of ‘Americanization’ and the crisis of the multicultural society, or the question of how to cope with the force of Islam in particular.

The solution: don’t give offence!

This story is all about mimetic rivalry and finding scapegoats. But as far as the temporary end of the recent crisis is concerned, I am not sure if this is the real end, not to speak of the question whether it is a desirable one. The 19^th Century historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote, in ‘die geschichtliche Krisen’: ‘Wenn zwei Krisen sich kreuzen, so frisst momentan die stärkere sich durch die schwächere hindurch’ (p. 273)          

Although we are now ruled by three Calvinists who do not stop preaching ‘All together now’, Burckhardt’s statement at the moment does not seem to apply for Holland . The two crises are not solved yet. The proof is that, in November 2006, an extreme left-wing and an extreme right-wing party made very big gains at the elections, each focusing on one of these crises. The present small-minority coalition government exists of two moderate Christian and one moderate social-democrat party, clinging to each other in a desperate way to restore peace and rest, and – in the case of the social-democrats - to survive as a party. Their leader tried to imitate the best part of Fortuyn and, like most imitators, could not live up to it.

How long the present peace will last, nobody knows. For the moment everybody is exhausted after being fascinated by this ‘Opera’ for so many years. In the end it was like being stuck in a thundering roller-coaster. And even if we call our present society a decadent amusement park, after a while it is not entertaining anymore, it gets on your nerves.

Holland is no longer an amusement park, or the predicted permanent multicultural dance festival. Holland has become a miniature-US, but without its religion, myths and power, so it stays more vulnerable for all kinds of mimetic rivalry and nervousness. The present solution is the same as The Netherlands chose as an instrument for survival since it was reduced to a small, neutral country in 1839 amidst the expanding great European powers: do not give offence to anyone!

But one thing is for sure, the intellectual ironic climate of the post-Sixties that has dominated media and culture for so long is no longer dominant. Commercialism, opportunism and accommodation seem to have replaced the gratuity of progressiveness.