A Touch of Madness: 5. Our own madness

I

On the website of Vlaams Belang there's an article about a right-wing meeting in Vienna. "A delegation from the party attended, invited by Heinz-Christian Strache of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ)," the article says, continuing:

"In addition to European and national parliament members from parties like Vlaams Belang, FPÖ, Front National and others, delegates from the former Eastern Europe also took part. It was to become, amongst other things, an interesting opportunity to get to know parliament members from Romania and Bulgaria, countries that will probably both join the European Union in 2007. Also in Poland Vlaams Belang has very good contacts with the large right-wing parties having great success there".

Illustrating the story is a picture of a smiling Marie-Rose Morel (VB) together with the Bulgarian politician Volen Siderov. Siderov is a TV host and the leader of the right-wing party Nacionalen Sayuz Ataka, National Union Attack, openly anti-Romani, openly anti-Turk (including against ethnic Turks living in Bulgaria for centuries) and openly anti-Semitic. A former winner of an award of the Union of Bulgarian Journalists, he has written several books, including «Bulgarophobia» and «The Boomerang of Evil», the latter placing the blame for most of the world's ills on the Jews.

One of Siderov's chief opponents, Yuliana Metodieva, a spokeswoman of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, believes that Siderov poses a threat to Bulgaria's democracy. In an interview, she states:

- His influence is obvious and damaging for our developing democracy. [His] programmes clearly instigate ethnic hatred and even violence […], he has referred to the Romanis as 'cockroaches and termites'. [He once told] cheering supporters that gypsies should be sent to camps and jews and Turks should go home [and in the «Boomerang of Evil], Siderov even calls upon 'Orthodox believers' to take revenge on the 'murderers of Jesus'.

When the Flemish racists say that it was an interesting meeting, you'd better believe them. And yet, it's one of the many examples of the distance between old-fashioned fascism and modern-day fascism not always being that long. There's more to it, though. Throughout the research I have done for this series of articles, I have often been baffled by how short the distance is between liberalism and political thinking which should constitute its very antithesis. There are plenty of liberal people in political parties that are anything but liberal; sometimes the only thing the politicians of parties on the far right has in common is their obsession with the national, their fantasies of monoculturalism. Still, I have often been surprised by how abruptly the road turns, or maybe by how the landscape along the road changes from the wild jungle of liberalism - a place where, unlike in Mao's world, thousands of flowers are actually growing – and into the dark, gloomy and cold forest of fascism. A few steps, and suddenly the whole debate is being defined by extremists, the order of the day set by fanatics. A few steps, and suddenly a complex world religion is being reduced to a symbol of Utter Evil, compared with Nazism.

A few steps, and suddenly there's talk of repatriation, of apartheid, of violent action… while sometimes, clad in the robes of fiction, like the fiction of Dan Simmons, it is still recognisable.

A few steps, and you step right into the kind of nationalism that turned murderous in the former Yugoslavia. Serge Trifkovic is turning up on the reading lists of Flemish politicians, maybe not surprisingly, since he says what they want to hear, that «Islam is a violent cult [characterised] by the fundamental lack of love», in his books with a few more words than in interviews. In one of his books, «The Sword of the Prophet», he delivers a heavy-handed critique of Islam. Not all of it is displaced, but Trifkovic routinely falls into several of the most common traps Islam critics are falling in: he tries to understand Muslims from a conception of Islam they do not share, he portrays his own conception of Islam as the correct understanding, stating that Muslims believing something else than his antagonists are not «true Muslims» and – of course - he rewrites history in an often creative manner, choosing the bits that fit to his tale, leaving out the bits that might ruin it. This last is typical not only for the superstars of Islamophobia, it is also typical for Balkan nationalists. Trifkovic can be seen as both. He is not only an Islam-critic fit for reading in the living rooms of Flanders.

He is also a Serb nationalists, he is an eloquent voice, of course, but he is also one of the Serbs who have continually opposed the Hague tribunal, and who claims that «the Bosnian Muslim government has stage-managed three well publicized explosions in Sarajevo», two of them the socalled Markale market massacres. His statements mirror one made by Radovan Karadzic, who described one of those explosions with the following words: «the Muslim side, as usual, on the eve of important moments in the negotiations, staged a massacre of its own population to sabotage the peace process». Karadzic's information minister called it «a classic act of Islamic terrorism». In 2005, Stanislav Galic, a Serb general was found guilty beyond reasonable doubt for the incident.

Trifkovic also used to be an advisor of Biljana Plavsic, the «Serbian Iron Lady», who once defended the purge of Bosnian non-Serbs as «a natural phenomenon», and who, in a widely-circulated photograph from 1992 can be seen stepping over the body of a dead Muslim civilian to kiss the Serbian warlord Zeljko Raznjatovic, Arkan. She is currently imprisoned in Sweden, convicted for «persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds», a crime against humanity, which she pleaded guilty to, after initially having pleaded not guilty on all counts. It only takes a few steps.

II

So why is it like that? How is it possible even for self-proclaimed liberals to be caught up in the madness touching the far right? Is it possible that the view of immigrants as dangerous savages is more widespread than anyone but the far right wants to admit? A TV programme on Swedish TV a couple of years back may shed some light. Two reporters of «Uppdrag Granskning» travelled around Sweden, speaking with politicians amid election campaigns…

When one of them took the part of a racist voter looking for a party to vote for, they discovered that some politicians say one thing when the camera rolls, and another thing when they think it is not. In front of the camera, a local politician from the Concervative party said that the country needed more immigrants and could afford to receive more refugees. But under four eyes he states that «Muslims are good at having children and at exploiting our system». A local social democratic politician, again under four eyes, stated that «it's the Muslims who are the problem, their viewpoints […] If we let more people like that in, we will have a problem in our society. The Muslims are a threat». Following the scandal that arose he told a labour union magazine that he had been thinking much about what he said:

- I really did not mean those words. I know how wrong it is to stereotype. Amongst Muslims, just like amongst Christians and everywhere else, there are good people and not-so-good people.

But maybe what the social democrat revealed was not first and foremost racism, but rather a touch of the madness that does not belong on the far right. Maybe the words came so easily because they were convenient… easy to borrow simply because the far right has been saying a few things that others have not dared saying? While it undoubtedly is true that one problem of today's political life is the reluctance to identify fascism for what it is, another and maybe more important problem is that the other political parties have given the far right something close to a monopoly in addressing some central issues. Perhaps the monopoly has resulted in a situation where it is difficult to express scepticism towards Islam or worry about ghettofication or concern for women's rights amongst immigrant groups without stealing the words, the slogans, the very ideas, even, of extremists?

Parties that normally fight for gay rights are often daring in their confrontations with fundamentalist Christian voices, but strikingly silent in confrontations with very similar ideas amongst Muslims. When the Flemish Greens addressed the issue a few years back, it was, characteristically, the work of a young man of immigrant background, Carim Bouzian. Bouzian's plans for a poster campaign were never fulfilled. However, he did manage to spark a debate where the Arab European League, a political movement led by one of the more controversial figures of Flemish politics, Dyad Abou Jahjah, showed itself as the reactionary movement it undoubtledly is. - Being gay is a sin. That's what the Qu'ran says. That's why we distance ourselves from it, said a spokesman for AEL.

Carim Bouzian later left for the liberal VLD, stating that the political correctness of the Greens was a problem. For once, the term «political correctness» did make sense. For once it was something else than a far right appeal to feel sorry for the far right. In the meantime AEL ran for elections together with the far left Belgian party Partij van de Arbeid. Would the latter be running together with the Christian fundamentalists that I know much too well from my childhood and early youth in countryside Norway? Somehow I doubt it.

Of course, it would not be fair to label AEL as religious fundamentalists, their principal ideas are nationalist, panarabist and quite secular, but it is strange to see what alliances, a tad of anti-Americanism and a solid dose of anti-Israeli sentiments can lead to. That is, if you don't see the odd alliance as natural in the climate of almost omnipresent racism in Flanders. I don't.

Groups normally seeing themselves as feminist have failed in attacking patriarchal structures amongst immigrant groups… sometimes they have even teamed up with the patriarchs. When the Norwegian Imam Ikram Jilan stated that it, «in very special cases», is okay for a man to hit his wife, based on a literal interpretation of a Qu'ranic verse, there were no hordes of feminist activists demonstrating against him. In fact, the Dutch Muslim TV program, NMO, has been addressing the issue of women's liberation amongst immigrant groups more thoroughly than most feminist groups. In a recent interview in their weekly broadcast one Dutchwoman of foreign origins stated that if suppressing women is a result of a culture it is a result of an underdeveloped culture, and that it was time to mention these things by their right name… - If you suppress your wife, she said, - you are a suppressor.

Do the left wing parties of Europe speak with such clarity? Or do they leave it to immigrant women to fight their battles on their own, and to the far right to put the immigrant women under double pressure?

III

Much too often, the task of defending so-called Western values have been left to far right parties. That way we have allowed them to set the order of the day. This is our madness. Through fear of being seen as racist we have invited those who really are racist to the stage. Trolls burst in sunlight, but modern-day fascists have learnt to wear suits and ties and to smile on TV, and even when the Blood & Honour flags are only steps away, they have learnt to revel in the light, to dance and spout their propaganda, letting the media they love to hate help them.

That way, the anti-immigrant sentiments became not only acceptable, unlike racism they became politically correct. It is one of the largest paradoxes of European politics today: you are not allowed to be a racist, but you are expected to act like one. In that climate the modern-day fascists can spread their poisonous ideas, their opposition to religious freedom, their division of people according to ethnic background, they can turn Islam as a whole into a monstrous, demonic religion, a religion with a «fundamental lack of love». In effect, we have put our faith in fascists, hoping for them to defend our most prized ideas. Of course, they won't. They do not believe in gay rights. They do not believe in feminism. They want to limit individual freedoms. They sport ideas of banning Islam, ideas of apartheid, forced repatriation, ideas that can have much more devastating consequences than the actions of Islamists have in Osama bin Laden's wettest dreams. And the worst thing of all is that we have started lending them our ears.

A survey done for the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in Germany, showed that 56 per cent believe there should be a ban on building mosques in Germany. When asked a rather leading question, 40 per cent even agreed they would support moves to impose «strict limits» on the practice of Islam. 56 per cent believe that «the clash of civilizations» has already begun. I have lost count of how many times I have heard similar views, far outside the circles that would even dreamt of voting for a party like Vlaams Belang. Out of fear for an attack on so-called Western values, people are prepared to betray the very same values.

However, to call these so-called Western values - democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the equality of the sexes - Western is in itself a betrayal. Their westernness have nothing to do with their validity, nothing to do with their value. Western ideas are only good when they are good, and that's the only reason for defending them. Against all attackers.