Geert Wilders is routinely characterized in news reports as a “Dutch right-wing politician.”
Would any of the journalists who thus describe him care to tell us Geert Wilder’s views on, inter alia, taxation? The splendors and miseries of the free market? Global warming, perhaps? Education policy, and grants for students? What about on subsidies for mass transit? On the use of fossil fuels? On the regulation of sexual behavior by the state? On the use of public funds to support artists in the Netherlands? On health insurance, and the kind of health care made available to Dutch citizens that will be paid for by the state? On the relationship of the Dutch broadcasting networks to the government? On the monarchy, perhaps? On the relations of the judiciary to legislation? On anything at all, for god’s sake?
Why “right-wing”? What makes Geert Wilders “right-wing”? Is he a defender of Dickensian conditions in the workplace? A stout believer in Free-Market Fundamentalism? A believer in suppressing the rights of the middle class?
We don’t know, and no reporter tells us. The reporters who use formulaically the Homeric epithet “right-wing,” need to explain to us what they mean by this.
Or is “right-wing” merely an all-purpose denigrating epithet in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe, and possibly in North America too? It is designed to tell us what we must think about, the stance we must assume toward, the heroic, and as far as any of us knows, entirely admirable Geert Wilders. Wilders”s other views and other policies remain as unknown to you and to me as they do to the reporters who always slip in this vicious little adjective in order to influence the unaware.
Geert Wilders is no more, and no less, “far right” than the late Democratic Senator Henry Jackson, or for that matter than the late Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, or William Proxmire, or any number of others. Geert Wilders is as “far right” as Raymond Aron, or Alexis de Toqueville, or Benjamin Constant. He is as “far right” as Jean Moulin, fighting the more obvious Fascists of the more obvious army, the Wehrmacht, in France.
Why do newspapers, or the radio, or television, permit this propagandistic use of epithets for which not the slightest evidence is presented? The word “far right” or “right-wing” should not be used, as it has been used, to blacken the name and reputation of anyone at all who happens to grimly perceive the menace of Islam. What made Pim Fortuyn, the bemused and martyred Dutch libertine, “right-wing,” as he was routinely called, so stupidly, in the French, British, American press? What? There was nothing. Was Bertrand Russell “right-wing” because of how he saw Islam? Churchill — was he “right-wing” or “far right-wing”? Spinoza? Hume? John Quincy Adams? Jacques Ellul? Are they all “right-wing” because they grasped the essence of Islam?
Geert Wilders is also commonly described as a “populist.” This is more accurate in the sense that he represents the vast Dutch public, the public that is unrepresented by the elites who, in the Netherlands as elsewhere in Europe, presume to decide the fates of those indigenous Infidels who are fed up with the unchecked Muslim presence, and the Muslim crime, and the Muslim finagling, and the Muslim demands for changes in the legal and political institutions that make the Dutch the Dutch. Those Infidels would have been happy to have Pim Fortuyn, the non-right-wing “right-wing” Pim Fortuyn, be their standard-bearer, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But unfortunately, Pim Fortuyn was murdered, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali driven out of the country by death threats. Now there is only Geert Wilders, who is being described, quite inaccurately, as “right-wing” in order to poison minds against him. But his bravery and his self-sacrifice are now obvious. And the word “right-wing” just won’t do the trick. It just won’t perform the magic that all the appeasers of Islam, in the Netherlands, think it will. He is going to re-take the Netherlands for the Dutch.
He, and those who support him and others like him, will preserve Dutch culture, Dutch traditions, Dutch institutions, including a real and not a diseased notion of “tolerance.”