Grima Wormtongue Commemorates Theo van Gogh (Updated)

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the beastly assassination of Theo van Gogh.

Last night during a party convention Dutch PM Jan Peter Balkenende lamented - what is unbeknownst to him - the use of postmodern rhetoric in politics (it's also known as pomo lingo). The basic tenets are: facts are irrelevant, the truth is whatever you want it to be, and since everything is in the service of expediency, no bars where ad hominems and expletives are concerned.

Two years before Van Gogh wannabe politician Pim Fortuyn was murdered, in what was the first political murder since the founding of the country. Fortuyn was shot by a postmodern econut who claimed to act on behalf of an endangered minority, the Muslim collective. Van Gogh was slaughtered by a Muslim radical, acting on behalf of the same 'endangered' ideology.

Both murders set the country into turmoil. Both murders were preceded by the Left-Islamic ideological complex relentlessly demonizing the victims. A familiar pattern is emerging. 

Van Gogh set out as a Leftist, but sprouted brain cells and moved over to the Right. We know since yesterday that Fortuyn had asked Van Gogh to become his Minister of Culture. One of Theo's first acts would have been the abolition of government subsidized film productions. 

Fortuyn set out as a Socialist as well, but soon abandoned Leftism and developed his own specific brand of politics in the tradition of American grassroots liberalism. John F. Kennedy was his hero. In practice his politics were much more statist and socially liberal than would ever have been acceptable in pre Barack Hussein Obama's America. But that is still a whole lot less than is currently the case in the Netherlands.

Both men liked to provoke middle class sensitivities and Leftist notions of political correctness, each in his own way: the more outrage, the better. Van Gogh considered himself some sort of a court jester (reason why he figured he was safe), and called Muslims goat f@ckrs at every opportunity.

Fortuyn was openly gay, wheeled around in a chauffeur driven limo, wore tailored suits and was accompanied at all times by his two effeminate pet dogs.

Consider that the Netherlands, for all its small l liberalism is first and foremost an egalitarian society in which everyone is expected to conform to the middle ground. Mediocrity is the norm. The two stood out like fly-fishers in the dessert.

More importantly, both were what the Left considers to be sell-outs. A greater sin one cannot commit. As commented on in part II of "The Cosmology of the Progressive Narrative" , conservative and Republican African Americans know allll about it. Stray too far off the porch or the plantation and the entire progressive collective comes down on you like a ton of bricks. 

In the US in recent history we have seen how this "aims justifies the means" mentality set itself against the opposition: they morphed from opposition, to opponent, to enemy. It's a matter of incremental re-framing which we know as the soft power of political correctness: from a violation against accepted civility (you lie!), to socially reprehensible, to illegitimate and immoral.

Another time honored Marxist method are smears of fascism, extreme right and racism. It has reached such heights that it's a wonder people haven't stopped caring about it. The recent slurs are so ludicrously remote from reality that it has become a farce. Recently spoof has surfaced picturing White House spokesman Robert Gibbs as Washington Willy, a variation on Baghdad Bob, a measure of self-made narrative taking the place of reality.

In the Netherlands meanwhile the liberal Left, the Postmodern Left and the progressive middle ground have begun their assault on liberty in earnest. Singled out and targeted is Geert Wilders. Politics is war, the aim justifies the means, no bars allowed to stand in the way of Wilders' destruction.

The more vitriolic inveighers have gone as far as to call Fortuyn and Wilders "inferior human beings". The fascist epithet never quite stuck to Van Gogh. But the entire repertoire of classical Marxist scheming is set loose on the nation.

Yesterday the in-house Leftist newspaper De Volkskrant opened with an article about a leaked, state sponsored, 'scientific' investigation into Geert Wilders and the Freedom Party. The method is positively fascist and shockingly dishonest, precisely because it is done under the cover of 'science'. A freeish translation is available here.

The basic, potentially 'explosive' findings are that Geert Wilders' Freedom Party is "extreme Rightist", "mobilizes fear, Islamophobia (how scientific!) and hatred of the system", "creates a threat", and "undermines democracy and social cohesion". In short: Wilders is an enemy of the state, a danger to security.

Unfortunately, in the recent polls the party of evil still manages to amass some 27 seats in Parliament. It somehow never enters their heads they're slurring all these potential voters in the process.

- Caption: Theo van Gogh Monument "The Shout", by Amsterdam artist Jeroen Henneman - 

Who are these 'scientists' who are constructing a perception of Wilders as an extreme Right wing "populist" as the enemy within? Possibly all come from the Postmodern school which states that science is but a Western narrative and proves nothing objectively true (which is actually true of their departments of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, etc., etc.).

That said, let's see - no Wikis, no national peer reviews, no international peer reviews, and that's just for starters. Only one of the triad, Prof. Dr. Bob de Graaff of Leiden University can be considered a serious investigator, albeit with a far Leftist slant (more details at the bottom of the translation).

Had these investigators not been professionals a possible conclusion might have been a case of psychological projection. But these are experienced ideologues who know how to spin a narrative. The enemy must be destroyed at all cost! 

Unfortunately many of our leaders are criminally naive. The Dutch MP doesn't recognize pomo lingo for what it is, and has no inkling he's being played like a violin by political ideologues masquerading as scientists. Another saw no problem in voting our way into sharia law, while yet a third specimen proposed to solve the self-induced problems of multiculturalism by simply "adding a hyphen"!

It sends chills up and down your spine to realize what has become of the free world. We've lost our way, and are well on our way of losing our liberty as well. But our leaders are manipulated by Grima Wormtongue c.s. into investigating the redoubt for evidence of the enemy within, while the real one is already rattling the gates!

Updated:

Elsevier Magazine: Minister of Integration one ups the scientists: "if Freedom Party grows very large, the rule of law is in jeopardy" (in Dutch)

Elsevier Editorial: "Five years after the murder of Theo it isn't Islamic terrorism that is endangering the security of the country, but Geert Wilders - at least, according to his opponents. The world is on its head: is Islam a symbol of democracy, rendering all critique a threat? Or is Islam Leftist, so that criticizing it is Rightist, or even extreme Rightist? One would almost think so. It is remarkable this debate is going on precisely five years after the murder."

"A number of politicians and pundits have security detail; standup comedians reluctantly admit they circumvent the subject out of fear (yes, bullying and terror works!), and exhibitions are called off because of threats from Muslim circles. Wilders vents his opinion but he's never threatened anyone. But he does endanger 'the system' in speaking up where others remain silent, which made him very popular with the voters."

Elsevier/Afshin Ellian Blog presents the short history of the term 'goat f@ckr'. Around the year 1900 Dutch soldiers used the term to indicate Asian British colonials. It again occurs in Dutch literature in 1988. Van Gogh used it at first in a column in 1995 entitled "Hurrah for Islam" about Salman Rushdie. After Van Gogh's death in 2004 no one ever dared use it again.

- Caption: newspaper headline "Hitlist: Hirsi Ali and Wilders underground - targets in Mohammed Bouyeri's letter" -

Related: 

- Van Gogh website, "The Healthy Smoker", now an online museum
- "Theo van Gogh Commemorations" (2007)
- Breitbart: "Amsterdam grapples with integration since filmmaker's murder" 

The Revolution of a Popular Political Realignment

Leftist politicians in the Netherlands are once again outraged with Islam skeptic MP, Geert Wilders. This time not for asking the questions they seek to avert, but for foregoing participation in all but two cities in the next municipal elections. "Weak" and "evasive" are the qualifications uttered by reds and greens.

Wilders, on his party's site clarifies not to have been able to find the right candidates. The horrors that may befall a young, fast upcoming movement have been iconified by the sometimes ridiculous goings-on in Pim Fortuyn's party, which mushroomed and then collapsed in on itself through internal squabbles. This is perhaps the last chance of a popular revolt to take hold.

- Caption: design by Bosch Fawstin - 

The reds and greens are having great trouble fending off the advance of Wilders' Freedom Party. In the latest poll, while Groen Links (Greens) score 11 seats and Labor is stuck at 22 on an all time low, Wilders peaks at 28. What is going on? It has everything to do with The Unholy Alliance, the social contract the Left sought to strike with Islam.

Traditionally the party of the working class, the Left, through the art of cooptation, in the past lazily earned the loyalty of women, gays and other identity confused groups. Immigrants and Muslims were supposed to be yet two other minority groups whose interests they sought to represent. 

One culturally dense Labor Secretary not so long ago notoriously said that if we're having problems with the integration of Muslims because of our Judeo-Christian heritage, we'd just have to add another hyphen and turn our society into a Judeo-Christian-Islamic one. This statement says everything there is to know about the Postmodern Left: throwing reason to the wind, they remain oblivious of the inherent conflict in such an arbitrary, linguistic construct.

Back in the real world the Leftist 'social contract' with their voters was essentially a conspiracy of the elites and working classes to crush the bourgeoisie, traditionally detested by both. You know, the middle class on whose shoulders the duty rests to produce, manufacture, trade and keep the ship of state afloat by paying taxes and generally behaving like the good citizenry they are?

The thing is, (Muslim) immigrants started to supplant the working classes in the inner cities, alienating and marginalizing them at first, and finally pushing them out to the oh so middle class subsurbs.

Instead of being greatful for their upward social mobility, resentment set in. When Muslims began to radicalize - a process the Left claim to understand because that is what you do when you're poor and oppressed - the working class began to push back.

In their gluttony to harness the totally incompatible interests of yet another minority group, the Left have left their plebeian base in the lurch of encroaching Islamization. They are now paying the price for this politically dastard deed.

The elites meanwhile, being the elites, are getting more elitist by the day. Moreover, they' re reverting to their Postmodern roots! They've started to whine about such ingratitude ... that Wilders is a populist (a terrible insult!) ... that he's playing to the lowest sensibilities of the unwashed ... that he and his followers are closeted Nazis and fascists ... indeed, are practically subhuman. (This demonization has the precedent of the murders of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn, but the elite couldn't care less).

A self-defeating process has set in: the more ridiculous and divorced of reality these accusations become, the more often they seem to be willing to repeat them. Short of the social pressure of Nudging, political correctness and exclusion, they're at a loss what to do next. Panic is setting in.

We are seeing such insults also being traded in the US, for example in the discourse about health care reform, where Democrats are accusing their opponents - the Republican Party as well as the voters - of race baiting, hate mongering and vigilantism.

Grannies and mothers are portrayed as "angry mobs",  'Socialist health care' is really code word for racism. 

They've gone so far as to accuse the opposition of ... "stoking opposition" - in effect making rejection of their proposals a moral issue!

The White House had the unprecedented audacity to ask supporters to report dissent, turning the US into a latter day East Germany! (Btw, there's an app for that.) Latest rumor has it they've even resorted to spamming! (Update: we received a copy. It's absolutely true; the pamphlet is signed by the great Axelrod hisself.) Update: the spamming was done by a public private firm, paid for with taxpayer's money.)

Update: in a the latest development Obama has resorted to enlisting the assembled clergy so as to enlist God for his totalitarian purpose, and has accused opponents of being sinners ("bearing false witness"). Is this man an audicious demogogue, or is he just desperate?

It beggars the question, when does criticism qualify as criticism?  The answer is of course: never! These are just ploys to shut down the opposition: it's tyranny, pure and simple. 

Where this all will end is hard to say. The Left may make a choice yet for their original power base, letting Muslims to fend for themselves. I believe a Dutch Muslim party is in the making and may actually do some good in terms of maturing and emancipation. 

But if the Left stick to their pomo guns, the coalition of workers and the middle class, sometimes refered to as 'the people' (a concept much broader defined in the US, outside the confines of the traditional social strata), have no other recourse but to politically realign and find themselves the leaders willing to do their bidding, as was the original idea behind 'democracy' - you know, a government for and by the people. Very populist all, but there it is.

Thomas Paine wraps it up ... could we please have a just a little bit of that spirit in Europe too? (no, I thought not - still subjects to this very day, he?) ...



Related:

- PJTV/Sonja Smidt: We take on country back, our culture and our kids too (on the Leftist infiltration of education, which is where it all started!)

Update: the leftist political media complex  mainstreaming halal lifestyle choices in defiance of Liberal values: an excellent example of creeping Islamization. This is how far it's come!

Pulling the Plug on the Press from Hell

Another day in the Postmodern dystopia, and another enigma wrapped in a conundrum solved: media bias. No, correction ... that would mean there's some bandwidth of reasonable neutrality to deviate from in the first place. They are simply 'in the tank.' Or, to put it politically correct: they're wholeheartedly practicing 'New', subjective Journalism.

I can hear the astroturfers from where I'm sitting: "The “liberal” media is a myth." "The Ayers connection is a non starter." "If there was anything to it [it being, whatever] the press would already have exposed, chewed, regurgitated, redigested and shat it out repeatedly."

Yeah, sure - we are all imagining it, it's all our own subjective consciousness ...

Forget it, the law of identity is unshakable ... the lid is off and I'm still reeling ... I'm shocked, shocked ... let's go again over 'the single, most important piece of blogging, since New Zeal published proof of Obama's socialist beginnings - perhaps I misread (yes, breaking news on a daily basis, is the joy of blogging ...):

Pajamas Media: "Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions," by Michael S. Malone - Hat Tip: Elizabeth H. on Team Sarah

The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game. With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate. The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. (...) You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut. I am a fourth generation newspaperman. (...) when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist”, you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there’s always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you ten different ways to color variations of the word “said” (...) we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against their unconscious.

- Cartoon: from "Yellow Journalism", Cox and Forkum -

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible [ed.: Plato is the father of subjectivism, but we get the picture]. That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views, and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty - especially in ourselves.

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine (...) but I always wrote it off as bad judgment, and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy. Sure, being a child of the ‘60s I saw a lot of subjective “New” Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from ‘real’ reporting, and at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased. (...)

I watched with disbelief as the nation’s leading newspapers, many of whom I’d written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith - and I know the day and place where it happened - was the War in Lebanon three summers ago. (...) The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story . . . but it never happened.

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current Presidential campaign. Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass - no, make that shameless support - they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press. (...)

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the Big Leagues (...) No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so. (...)

Why, for example to quote McCain’s lawyer, haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer - when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Senator Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate. So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it’s because we don’t understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide - especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50. (...)

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . . and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water. So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits. Why?

I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power ... only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe - and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country . . . >>>

... hm, so I did misread that ... I thought for a moment the media figure themselves playing Pravda to Obama's Supreme Soviet ... what a relief!

No, joking apart, something is seriously wrong. You can take this involvement one step further. Take the basic principle of any old totalitarian: you elevate your pet ideology to the status of moral arbiter! With pragmatism kicking in, acting on this misplaced moral indignation and you're in, knee-deep. This is how maverick Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn got killed: by a Green, self-righteous defender of Islamist 'victimhood'.

Fox Election HQ : "Former Newsweek Reporter Admits Dreaming About Taking Out Giuliani"

A former Newsweek reporter admitted in an article this week that he has no objectivity and imagined disabling Rudy Giuliani so he wouldn't run in the presidential primary race last year. Michael Hastings wrote in GQ magazine that he had a "recurring fantasy" that he could somehow stop the former New York City mayor in his tracks. (...) >>>

I hear any book with the words "Weimar Republic" on the dust cover, is flying off the shelves in the States. Watch out for this suicide potion: pragmatism, dogma, anti-reason and collectivism. Oh, and a backdrop of moral breakdown and economic depression help a lot ...


- Filed on Articles in "The Demise of Press from Hell" -