The Leftist Mindset

Our Flemish correspondent VH has been a tireless Gates of Vienna researcher for the last couple of months, supplying news tips, translating material from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, and in particular investigating the Antifa movement through its websites in the Netherlands and Belgium.

For a change of pace, VH has composed his own essay on the mindset of a radical leftist, as evidenced by the background and actions of the murderer of Pim Fortuyn.


The Leftist Mindset
by VH

Bob Geldof, along with Bono and many other exhibitionist leftists, never made the news by sending 99.9% of their wealth to African bureaucrats, and asking other artists to follow their example. They also never wondered why all those billions and billions of dollars poured into Africa over the past four decades only resulted in more poverty, more violence, and more wealthy dictators and tribal chieftains.

They also never wondered whether sending massive shipments of cooking oil and wheat to Africa — purchased with profits of Live8, not the bank accounts of the performing artists that swelled substantially after their very lucrative Live8 performance — might destroy the local market, discourage or bankrupt local producers, and make people dependent on Live8’s handouts for many years to come.

Maybe they don’t want to see it nor hear about it. Maybe they think they know everything and critics know nothing, and that Africa is poor and they are OK!

It is interesting to get some insight in the Liberal Radical Mindset. A tiny bit was unveiled a few days ago in a new book about the murderer of Pim Fortuyn.

Volkert van der Graaf (born July 9, 1969), the murderer of the Dutch conservative politician (and anti- Islamization advocate) Pim Fortuyn, grew up in the rural Dutch province of Zeeland. He studied “pollution studies” in Wageningen, became a vegan there, and active in the environmental movement.

Van de Graaf was also co-founder of the (subsidized) Association for Environmental Offense (Vereniging Milieu Offensief), which fought against violations of environmental law, and was involved in the Animal Liberation Front, which engaged in illegal actions.

All this appears in a book about the murderer of Pim Fortuyn, What possessed Volkert van der G.? (Wat bezielde Volkert van der G.?) written by Johan Faber.

Out of the information collected by Faber rises the image of a somewhat timid but extremely dogmatic and radical person. “He seemed to be a normal guy. Raised in a terraced house in Zeeland [in the southwest of Holland]. Studied in Wageningen for a while, lived in Harderwijk, had a girlfriend and a child. And then suddenly this,” Faber said in a recent TV interview.
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But it was not all that sudden. The murder of Fortuyn was not an impulsive act. Faber says that Volkert van der Graaf radicalized long before the murder, and also for a long time did not shy away from using violence. Extreme left-wing radical literature was found at his home: “These magazines were not innocent. In one of them was an instruction on how to make a Molotov cocktail, and how to use it.”

The writer (and psychologist) Johan Faber said: “He is a stubborn man with a strong ‘ethical’ notion about what is good and bad, but sees himself as the highest authority in that area; his morality is ‘law’, so to speak. He sees himself as the measure of all things in that respect; he knows how things are. It carries something adolescent in it, something immature; as an adolescent you always think you know everything, and everybody else is wrong. That is what his view on the world is like: he looks at it like an adolescent.”

In the late eighties and early nineties Van de Graaf became active in the Animal Liberation Front, “liberating” animals at night from farms. In 1996, six years before the murder of Fortuyn, he bought a gun to protect himself against angry farmers. “This shows that he then already didn’t acknowledge the government’s monopoly on the use of force. He felt himself to be standing above the law, that he had the right to have a gun and others did not.

“In those days when he associated himself with the Animal Liberation Front in The Netherlands, the actions lay in the range from liberating a few dogs from test animal laboratories, taking some chicken away, to ‘liberating’ a bunch of minks from a farm. I think that they themselves saw it as monkey tricks — though the mink farmers were of a completely different opinion.

“It was exciting to them, for the ‘good cause,’ they supported it completely, just went out for it and never got caught. They felt themselves near invulnerable. To me this does make sense in judging Van der Graaf. Because with this you can see he already exceeded all bounds of what is legal and illegal. During the court case, the public prosecutor therefore tried to prove that his motive for killing Fortuyn partly resulted from his background as an animal rights activist.

“Apart from being the one he is — somewhat peculiar, an outsider, a bit introverted — he also is someone who feels himself to be above the law, who thinks that only he can see things the way they really are. But that was amplified by his environment, in Wageningen, in the student housing he lived in, surrounded by many environmental activists who were very convinced of their green case. That did encourage a personality like Van der Graaf. But still, he bought a gun six years before the assassination. If you want to point somewhere, there it is, because who decides to store a gun in his house and leave it there for six years?”

Some suspect him of having murdered Chris van der Werken in 1996, a municipal environmental official from Nunspeet. This has not been proved (yet), and the murder is still unsolved. When a Dutch newspaper (De Telegraaf) earlier this year connected the murder of Van der Werken to Van der Graaf, the latter instantly conducted a judicial proceeding (from his cell) against the newspaper and won.

As is now demonstrated, the murder took place the same year Van de Graaf bought the gun.

“He himself says that he bought the gun to protect himself against the farmers, because he filed appeals against the environmental permits of farmers, and that often ended up in tough confrontations. He felt threatened, and maybe he was right: angry farmers once turned his car upside down, and also once were waiting for him in his room. That is why he bought the gun.”

Pim Fortuyn was assassinated after he left a radio studio in Hilversum, on May 6, 2002. After the arrest of the murderer, the police found large quantities of chemicals that could be used to make a bomb in a shed next to the house where Volkert van der Graaf lived. A connection with illegal activities could not be proven in court.

“I think he felt that he was the chosen one to save The Netherlands. He sees himself as The Man who had to do it.” says Faber.

The murderer, Van der Graaf, was sentenced in 2002 to a jail term of eighteen years, and will be released in 2014. (In The Netherlands, a prison sentence is automatically reduced by one third.) In 2010, the murderer will be allowed short “recreational” leaves to prepare for his release. (Also a standard rule in The Netherlands.)

Many are waiting for that moment…


Additional information:

• A book review (in Dutch).
  
• A TV interview (in Dutch) with Johan Faber.