All of what I am writing is nothing more or less than unproven conspiracy theory. I would love to provide anything else than circumstantial evidence, but it is what it is. If you don’t mind that, join me on a wonderful journey of exploration, and if you see any merit in this, feel free to provide me with feedback
in·oc·u·late (ĭ-nŏk′yə-lāt′)
tr.v. in·oc·u·lat·ed, in·oc·u·lat·ing, in·oc·u·lates
1. To introduce a serum, vaccine, or antigenic substance into (the body of a person or animal), especially to produce or boost immunity to a specific disease.
2. To communicate a disease to (a living organism) by transferring its causative agent into the organism.
3. To implant microorganisms or infectious material into (a culture medium).
4. To safeguard as if by inoculation; protect: “A lapsed idealist, [she] has been inoculated against life’s disappointments by her own skepticism” (John Lahr).
5. To introduce an idea or attitude into the mind of: “Young people … are inoculated with the fervor, and are heard about the streets, singing the temperance songs” (Walt Whitman).
In the 1980s the Netherlands was traumatized by the double shock of the cold war and the second world war, to a degree we haven’t seen since. Millenials may have trouble understanding or appreciating just how bad and pervasive the weltschmerz in Western Europe was. As a result there was a very lively left-wing and a morbid and deeply censored political right. The left did a lot of good things, “arguably” in terms of ensconcing several generations of welfare, pension rights, labour protections, et.al. Between the 1960s and 1980s the left could do a lot and still get away with it, even though the internal security apparatus still looked closely at any groups of people with too extreme ideas – mostly potential terrorists, anarchists or people who worked for the soviets.
The radical right received no such leeway from authorities, in particular when it came down to racist conservatism. For decades making right wing or racist statements of any kind, even very cautious populist sentiments was just unthinkable – and consequently heavily penalized.
We had a politician in the Netherlands that espoused fairly populist right wing sentiments, Janmaat, and he never gained any solid popularity. There wasn’t even any reason for implementing a so-called cordon sanitaire, as the Belgians implemented against Vlaams Belang. In retrospect the statements of Janmaat were rather tame, especially compared with the selfsame statements of a guy like Wilders.
There were other radical far right groups active in the Netherlands, and I briefly interacted with a character of national ill-repute here in the Hague by the name of Martijn Freelink. The guy was abhorrent but remarkably polite – if he wasn’t secretly strangling and torturing maroccans. The guy was without reservation a monster, as i learned later, and he was active in CP86, a political action committee with an active worship of Adolf Hitler. Freelink was the bodyguard of the Widow Ross-van-Tonningen, an unspeakably vile fascist-loving hag, for lack of worse appellations I could come up with. It is interesting to note my interaction with Freelink was fairly sedate and casual – he partook in Dungeons and Dragons in a store in the Hague called Boutique la Grande Armee, and he rolled up a character in my campaign for a few weeks. Years before I actually had anything resembling a clue.
My ‘relationship’ with Wilders is limited to his cordon of armored cars screaming by my apartment a few days a week – black securitate vehicles with blaring blue sirens, escorting the guy to work. Here’s a video of that silliness I shot for this article.
[insert video later on]
So whereas Janmaat had almost no status quo acceptation, Wilders gets an armored escort. I am not criticizing anyone – he probably needs the security detail. There’s a lot of people who want him dead, and with the statements he is making probably more every year. It’s not inconceivable radicals will one day attack his armored escort with RPG’s, I hope they plan such & such away from where I live.
So fast forward (or back up) to the early years of the second millennium just after the second Gulf War. Everyone was up in arms about how awful muslims were (and most still are so in 2016). Someone on the radical left, oddly enough, assassinated Pim Fortuyn, a person with right wing populist ideas, charisma and very little in the way of respect for the establishment. Pim Fortuyn was a very interesting guy.
He was unavowedly gay and he used to have sex and for all intents and purposes a relationship with one of my dearest girlfriends, who since her adventures with Pim turned from a very effeminate boy girl in to the prettiest girl you can imagine, around the mid 1990s. So you can guess how much of an oddity Pim Fortuyn was – someone who clearly had style, charisma and a lot of wit. He was a frequent guest on TV. At the same time Pim frequented rather sleazy darkrooms in Rotterdam and had no qualms about saying so in interviews – or admitting he had frequent sex with passionately consenting underage boys. The establishment was at a loss to deal with this the very moment the LPF (Lijst Pim Fortuyn) ascended the political arena and became noteworthy after 911.
After 911 you suddenly could publicly say things that would get Janmaat arrested twenty years earlier. The sentiment might be recognizable to people in the US – Fortuyn and Wilders “say what everyone is thinking”, or so the claim goes. In the 1970s a sideways glance would be associated with the severe WW2 trauma of widespread Dutch collaboration with the Nazi occupation. Janmaat in his day triggered that trauma, and was deemed universally unacceptable, but at least he got one or two seats in parliament. Janmaat was not a particularly smart individual, and he was utterly unconvincing. More extreme groups, as aforementioned CP86, were scattered to the wind well before 2000 and their organizers simply disappeared one by one. My clue is they were buried in cement somewhere, courtesy of our national security force.
First there was the dead of Pim Fortuyn, and a year later you had the slaying of Theo van Gogh, by some unemployed loser who had recently picked up on Islam.
The tide was reversed in the Netherlands. Decades of establishment centrism and, quite arguably, a lot of manufacture of consent, went up in smoke as furious mobs protested the Parliament in a fury. The political establishment was actually quite scared at the time. The guy became a legend instantaneously and the white segment of the population that was susceptible to anti-islamic populism worshiped him for years after. Again, the segment of the population that had always been thinking racist thoughts.
So after Pim died his legacy shambled on and unraveled. His party, the LPF, became an inconsequential embarrassment of incompetency, rivalry, adventurers and mumbling populists.
Enter Geert Wilders. I need to say a few things about Wilders. First and foremost he was always closely embedded in traditional establishment of the Netherlands. He was an active parliamentarian for the VVD, the Dutch “centrist republicans” more or less.. Also Geert lived for years in Israel, and it is self-evident he receives a lot of donations from Israeli and US sources. It was as if by magic – Wilders filled a vacuum not long after Fortuyns death, and he created a political party which PVV branched away from the Dutch right wing liberals (VVD) around 2005. In retrospect it was a bit uncanny.
While a few years earlier the establishment came out to mock and condemn Pim Fortuyn, Pim took them to the cleaners. It is safe to conclude that not long after Pim Fortuyn would have garnered sufficient votes (from not existing a few years earlier) to become Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
Let me now go deep in to the realms of conspiracy thinking here, so you are warned.
I have the idea (and I have had this idea for nearly ten years) that Wilders is a political ‘inoculation’, essentially a candidate that was bombarded in to the limelight, with sufficient physical extravagance to warrant modest claims of ‘charisma”. Wilders clearly isn’t a Fortuyn (even with his eccentric hair), but he garners so many votes he could in theory qualify as the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands. I live 5 minutes of the Dutch parliament and I have seen him up close as spectator on one occasion, and it struck me how choreographed the interchange between “pooh pooh outraged ruling parties” and “pooh pooh outraged Wilders” seemed to me. One sentence he spoke during that exchange lingers in my head even now.
“…ik ben vertegenwoordig miljoenen ontevreden nederlanders…”
And it again dawned on m just how probably Wilders has been doing this well-engineered theater of drawing right-leaning voters. The nutter vote, one might argue. The day Wilders entered the limelight he completely filled the Dutch niche for revolutionary racist votes. It feels to me he is somewhat akin to a lightning rod politician that exists solely to cooperate with US/Israel friendly interests and defuse the dangerous far right vote. As in – you can vote for him, but he’ll never do anything to endanger the national status quo.
It is an uncanny pattern that has been reverberating for well over a decade – something bad happens and the Dutch freak out about Muslims >> Wilders garners more votes in polls. A few months pass, and Wilders does something stupidly offensive, and he loses some votes, like a wellplayed jojo. Up and down, up and down.
The Netherlands has a strongly established “old money” elite and an electoral system of parties and coalition governments and that is whey I am authoring this article. I recommend parliamentary multi-party democracy with a direct vote (as opposed to arcane two party district based electoral nonsense). What has been happening in the last decades in the Netherlands is functionally a dress rehearsal for what happened in Italy (Berlusconi) and what is now transpiring in the US (Trump). I would never vote for Wilders, and I would never vote for someone of the likes of Pim Fortuyn (even though he had a lot of charm).
But Donald Trump is by any measure a tasteless vulgar buffoon, and I regard him the ideal spokesperson for a lot of deeply closeted racist, frantic, panicked, aging, futureshocked, staunchly conservative, increasingly impoverished white Americans. The political establishment of the US is well out of touch with its tea party lunatic electorate. I care absolutely not one iota for these people, but they exist and they are very angry. US politics will be incomparable compared to pre-Trump and post-Trump, just as the Dutch political status quo was shook up and left utterly transformed by Fortuyn.
I don’t think an artificial manipulation of electoral equilibrium is very smart. Yes, manufacture of consent works, but it only works for a few years and it snaps back hard. In my analysis there are massive similarities between what happened in the Netherlands, some decade ago, and what is happening now in the US.
Kruger-Dunning can destroy democracies and whole economies.
If my hypothesis is correct then Geert Wilders is a hero. Her may have singlehandedly staved off a sizable percentage of racist sentiments by consenting to a horrific and isolated lifestyle. But at the end of the day, if true, it remains voter deceit and a more elevated, perhaps a more enlightened manufacture of consent, and woe to the day it snaps back.