history in politics
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But now, during the debate between party leaders in the Dutch television program Een Vandaag, he made a remark that I just could not believe and that really shocked me. The topic of that section of the debate (see video below) was the statement: “Muslims are a danger to Dutch society”. After some reasonable remarks by my party leader, Alexander Pechtold, and some actually excellent ones by the leader of the (conservative-)liberal party VVD, Mark Rutte, it is the turn for the party leader of the Socialist Party, Agnes Kant. Her first statement is that she considers not the Islam, but Geert Wilders (the party leader whose main campaign item is that the Islam is dangerous) a danger to Dutch society. And then she explains that he is emphasizing ethnic and religious identity and that history has taught us what can happen when you do this. Yes, quite so! Especially 20th century history is, worldwide, full of ethnic violence and incidences of genocide. Wouter Bos soon after wanted to say something - and to my great surprise he almost started to defend Wilders. He said that Kant was attacking the person instead of his policies (Was she? She is saying that his propagande leads to hatred, isn’t that attacking his ideology, not his personality?) and then he went on to say that we should not bring history into the debate, we don’t need it. We should not bring in history?! Is he really suggesting that it is somehow not a good idea to learn from all this history when we have to deal with ethnic or religious conflict? How can anyone honestly suggest that?!
By the way, I think the main issue here is reference to World War II. The “Dutch psyche” never quite got over that war and any comparison of anyone now to that is just not done (which is shocking by itself). Kant did not explicitly refer to WWII, nor did Bos, but this is probably implied. The funny thing is that the clearer reference to WWII, in my view, was made by Pechtold a few minutes earlier, though, when he argued that Wilders’ ideas would lead to banning headscarves from parks and trams - i.e. he compared it to Jews in the Netherlands during WWII (I think).
Yesterday, Kant resigned as party leader. Probably because they lost so badly in the municipal elections and people blame her in part. Hopefully not because of the criticism even within her own party about her remarks in that debate. I am not at all a big fan of the SP, but I think with Agnes Kant we are losing a very good politician in the parliament.
Add comment March 5th, 2010