Saturday, October 11, 2008

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 GraafVolkert 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:

8 comments:

Profitsbeard said...

Someone who thinks like the killer may have the same solution for him when her gets his 'recreational' release.

How could he argue against it?

And, since the murder laws are utterly laughable in the Netherlands (and EU), who would fear the consequences?

Klootzak.

Richard said...

He took away the hope of a nation: Pim Fortuyn's movement against the established elite.

Now a stronger movement has risen from that: Geert Wilders. Not only is he threatened every day by Muslims, but leftists would want to see him die as well. When an argument cannot be won, they quickly resort to namecalling and violence.

This is what I think: Volkert van der Graaf was promised concessions on environmental and animal rights issues by the Dutch government. He was also promised a fat bank account and to live out the remainder of his life after sentence in luxery. They wanted someone they could motivate to kill Pim Fortuyn and they found him.

The question is: Can a government like that be trusted or will security slip long enough for someone to take out Volkert van der Graaf? The risk of the truth getting out will be significantly reduced.

All of the above is a conspiracy theory, but I have not found anything that can disprove it. It is not something I am convinced of, but it is a possibility.

Vladtepesblog.com said...

One of the best speeches on moral and cultural relativism was given at a memorial to Mr. Fortuyne not long after his assassination. It's well worth the read. One of the most lucid tomes on how we got to be where we are now.
http://vladtepesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/pim-fortyn-memorial-speech1.doc

Homophobic Horse said...

Vlad has linked to a good speech:

This crisis in European thought found its high-point in the philosophies of the '68-ers and the French nihilists, Foucault's blessing of the Iranian revolution standing as the consummate demonstration of the gravitation of European intellectuals back towards totalitarianism. They may, like Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades, have come at it the other way round, but Derrida and Foucault ended up the helpers and lapdogs of tyrants as surely as Martin Heidegger did.
"But this is about philosophy", people will say, "not about how to stop Islamists killing us". But it is about that, for the nihilistic philosophies of Europe seeped from those who argued them into the heads of those who dared not disagree with them, or who saw – in good faith – the attractions of non-judgementalism. In its attempt to be post-historical, enlightened and rational, Europe found itself incapable of rationalising its own survival. It lost all sense of natural right. It became irrational. Today the effects of the rejection of natural right are practically felt. A society like France's in which revolution and rebellion are ingrained into the national psyche in the wake of '68 can now find no honourable way of crushing rioting and disorder on her own streets. A culture which celebrates rebellion as well as relativism ends up finding no reason not to tolerate its own destruction. And so it will be destroyed. Anyone who thinks that Islamic populations in the West are going to convert to relativism before we are all converted, or subjugated, to Islam is living in a fantasy.


Here.

Sam Grant said...

Horsefeathers. The Dutch government didn't commmission the murder of Pim Fortuyn. To see conspiracy theories everywhere is to be blind to the obvious. Once a social climate is forged in which men like Volkert are encouraged in their delusions and sociopathy, some of them will graduate to murdering the "enemy". The government doesn't have to lift a finger. It doesn't even have to open its own eyes and see that it has created the probability of such murders.

Volkert is quite safe. He got no promises from the government, which has no reason to kill him, and no tools or agents who would do it. There is no climate of opinion that will raise up and prime some random new V to do the job `on his own'.

xlbrl said...

This fellow is a ringer for the Unibomber. There are no shacks in the wilds in which to live in Holland, so he had to make do.
These are men who would claim disinterest, or even better, disparage the qualities they themselves lack--manliness, empahy, the ability to love or be loved, and undoubtedly, just not being good in the sack.
The truth is that if they do not care very much what people think of them, they cannot stand the thought that people do not think of them at all. The potential for insignificance is something they cannot bear.

Ypp said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ypp said...

Question to author:
Would you prefer that he give his money to honest Africans, or that he don't spend money on Africa at all?