The Dutch Rightist populist politician Pim Fortuyn, killed in early May 2002, two weeks before elections in which he was expected to win a fifth of the votes, was a paradoxical symptomal figure: a Rightist populist whose personal features, and even (most of his) opinions, were almost perfectly politically correct: he was gay, had good personal relations with many immigrants, with an innate sense of irony, and so on--in short, he was a good tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic political stance. What he embodied was thus the intersection between Rightist populism and liberal political correctness--perhaps he had to die because he was living proof that the opposition between Rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin. Should we not, therefore, be striving for the exact opposite of the unfortunate Fortuyn: not the Fascist with a human face, but the freedom fighter with an inhuman face?
From Welcome to the Desert of the Real
I wonder what Zizek makes of the strange social engineering going on in Holland now, as the Dutch try desperately to maintain their traditional tolerance after Islamicist fundamentalists butchered a filmmaker for daring to criticize the treatment of women under Islam? I'm sure he's at work on an obtuse, cryptic, and damn interesting essay explaining what he thinks.
The filmaker was the great-great grand-nephew of Vincent Van Gogh. That is weird.
ReplyDeleteI had not read that--but when I saw his name I'd thought--I wonder if...nah!
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