It has been difficult classifying assassinated Dutch politician,
Pim Fortuyn. He did not lend himself to easy political
characterization. His platform, as Tunku Varadarajan writes in the
Wall Street Journal, was “à la carte.”
Economically, he leaned libertarian. Culturally, Fortuyn
defended the extremes of liberal Dutch society. He ran on a
populist message of Dutch sovereignty and European Union
accountability. But what caused him to be tarnished with the label
“racist” was his conservative view that the large influx of Muslim
immigration to the Netherlands, if unassimilated, would alter
tolerant Holland.
Most cannot help but note the irony. The flamboyantly gay
Fortuyn foresaw an Islamified Holland forced to surrender its
libertine laws for Sharia. Melanie Phillips in the London
Spectator observed that Fortuyn embodied the
contradictions of the West.
In the week after his death, many rushed to claim Fortuyn as one
of their own, or at least a welcome ally. He was remembered as a
charismatic gadfly who drew support from many quarters and was
prepared to inject some honesty into Dutch political debate.
Yet it was neither his stance against Muslim immigration, nor
his opinion on tax cuts, that got him killed. It was his position
on fur.
The radical animal rights activist, Volkert van der Graaf,
reportedly assassinated Fortuyn because he wanted to lift a ban on
fur farming.
On the surface, the motive suffices. Van der Graaf was an
extremist. A super-vegan, he did not eat honey. Described as
humorless, scruffy and scrawny, van der Graaf lived on welfare in
the town in Harderwijk with his wife and infant child. He dedicated
his life to causing problems for local farmers.
The organization he helped found in 1994, Verenging Milieu
Offensief (VMO), had initiated over 2,000 lawsuits against the
expansion of animal farming.
Van der Graaf’s fanaticism led him to patrol pig pens and
condemn cattle-raising practices. “I thought he was a real
fundamentalist. I wanted nothing to do with him,” said pig farmer
Wien van der Brink.
When Peter Olofson tried to switch from raising ducks to cattle
farming, van der Graaf, who was intimately familiar with the
details of environmental codes, pursued him with legal action for
two years. “He was like a dog. He never let go,” recounted
Olofson.
In addition to being tenacious, he may also have been a serial
murderer. Police suspect van der Graaf may have been responsible
for killing a local environmental official in 1996, who worked too
closely with farmers.
But why assassinate Fortuyn? He had an undeveloped environmental
platform. He neither courted nor pandered to environmentalists.
“The whole environmental policy in the Netherlands has no substance
anymore. And I’m sick to death of your environmental movement,”
Fortuyn told Milieu Defensie (Environmental Defense)
during his campaign.
VMO was quick to condemn the killing. Greenpeace and a host of
other environmental organizations rushed to express shock and
dismay, while pointing out that van der Graaf was a fanatic who
acted alone.
Do the eco-extremists protest too much? Dutch dailies,
Reformatisch Dagblad and De Telegraf both report
that, if elected, Fortuyn would have reformed the left-wing “Action
Network,” which had funded VMO’s activities. Reports De
Telegraf: “The whole Action Network was in a panic when it was
predicted that Fortuyn would win big. They were afraid he’d clean
up the network.”
Through 1998, VMO received $125,000 from the National Postcode
Lottery, which was doled out by Foundation Doen (Do/Act
Foundation). However, the founders of the National Lottery were
also members of Action Network. Together with Novib, a foreign aid
organization, they established Foundation Doen. The money, National
Lottery assured, “was to give a share of the profit to
organizations that help nature and the environment.”
After being harassed by groups such as VMO, farmers asked the
Second Chamber of the Dutch government to investigate who was
funding their activities. No wrongdoing was found. However, the
chief investigator on the case had once overseen payments to
VMO.
Action Network, it is suggested, held too much influence in
Dutch political parties, Green Left and the PdA (Labor Party). Both
faced an unexpected populist challenge from Fortuyn.
If true, the motive behind Fortuyn’s murder runs deeper than an
act of passion by a tightly wound, malnourished madman out to save
the skins of minks and the hides of cattle. Indeed, the killing
sheds light on another paradox facing the tolerant West: the rise
of green fundamentalism in its institutions.
At the fringes, the green movement sees human life as a scourge
on the planet. Human economic freedom and its resulting affluence
is a grave threat to the Edenic mirage imagined by those beholden
to the cult of Gaia.
Fortuyn feared a Holland under the yoke of an oppressive Islamic
theocracy, which sustains itself by legally eradicating free will.
What he did not bargain for was being the target of another kind of
religious fundamentalism: one that despises economic freedom, and
by extension, human existence. He could detect the creep of a
foreign brand of intolerance, yet did not sense the danger posed by
the politically charged eco-terrorists in his midst.
Indeed, the green left, animal activists and other fringe groups
have found themselves in a sympathetic alliance with Islamic
extremists since 9/11 at marches and protests. They have one enemy:
Western freedom, broadly defined. Whether it is free markets, or
free will, both are fixated on removing the conditions under which
human beings thrive, or even survive.
