On Tiptoe Through the Tulips: Why Holland is nervous — and an alarming case for the entire West - Pim Fortuyn and Netherlands politics and society

National Review, July 15, 2002 by Rod Dreher

Amsterdam

Dildos, tulips, and waffles, all on the same block: Welcome to the Netherlands, a country renowned for the bourgeoisification of vice.

I have just entered Amsterdam's red-light district in -- honest! -- an attempt to visit the Oude Kerk, the medieval "old church" that is the capital city's oldest stone building. Because the streets are so clean, orderly, and nonthreatening, you hardly realize you've entered the louche part of town, until you notice that the sickly-sweet aroma of burning hashish from the "coffeeshops" never really goes away. Then you notice display windows proffering a selection of bizarre devices and videos appealing to every imaginable vile affection (and even some unimaginable ones, about which PETA should be concerned). And, of course, there are the whores, many of them transvestites, standing in their windows, rapping on the glass to solicit attention and trade. The Oude Kerk sits in the middle of this cesspool, a faded jewel in a steaming dunghill.

Like many of the great old churches of Holland, this place is barely used for worship anymore -- one hour on Sunday morning, for what's left of the Calvinist community -- and is instead primarily a monument and exhibition hall. On this day, they were having an exhibition of prizewinning photos from the world press, which I didn't give a fig about, but for which I had to buy a ticket if I wanted to see the interior. As it turned out, several of the photos were potent images from the September 11 attack.

And these overwhelming images have everything to do with why I'm in this country. If not for the Islamist terrorist attacks, the fear and loathing many Dutch people have concerning the presence of Muslims in their country would not have been aired in Holland's politically correct public square, and certainly would not have found a voice in the late Pim Fortuyn. The rookie politician was assassinated by, police believe, a radical animal-rights activist days before the May 15 election; the aftermath of the killing helped return the center-right Christian Democrats to power, and made the List Pim Fortuyn, a brand- new political party, one of the country's largest.

The libertarian Fortuyn came to prominence in large part by persuading voters that the secular West was in the midst of a clash of civilizations with intolerant Islam. Fortuyn said that Holland's civil order is under assault by sharply rising levels of street crime, much of which is attributable to young men from Islamic countries; worse, Muslim immigrants, over the long term, pose a potential fifth-column threat to tolerant democracy as long as they refuse to assimilate and accept Dutch values. Multiculturalist dogma and political correctness, he argued, prevent the West from accurately gauging the threat posed by Islam, and discussing ways to counter it. "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel," said Robert Frost -- a succinct phrasing of Fortuyn's indictment of the Dutch establishment.

Fortuyn was not the first contemporary European politician to draw attention to the immigration question, but he was the first to frame it explicitly as a matter of the bankruptcy of multiculturalism -- which, he contended, was meeting its Waterloo in the crime-ridden Islamic ghettos of Dutch cities. It's apt that this problem emerged so pointedly in the Netherlands, because this country is perhaps the world's most postmodern nation, the place where liberalism has penetrated most deeply. It's an egalitarian social democracy, sexually emancipated, thoroughly irreligious, and largely devoid of nationalist consciousness. Holland prides itself on tolerance uber alles -- except, of course, toward conservatives. Until now, the Islamic sort of conservative has drawn a pass, owing to his origins in the Third World, before which good European liberals cannot sufficiently abase themselves.

The plunging birthrate of native-born Europeans, and thus their need to import foreign workers (mostly Muslims), raises some doubt as to whether democratic Europe can survive in its present form. Fortuyn understood this, and wanted to save the Netherlands -- but what exactly did he want to save it for? An open homosexual who bragged about his promiscuity, Fortuyn championed Holland's anything-goes society as a morally desirable end. For him, the glorious fruit of Dutch liberty was not the civilization the Oude Kerk stands for, but the institutions on the church's ramparts: Sexyland ("Live F**k Show"), the High Time Coffeeshop, and the ladies in the windows. He did not grasp that the licentious individualism he praised was seriously weakening the bonds of the society he wanted to preserve.

And such bonds still exist. The Dutch are, by and large, a middle-class nation of friendly, modest people beavering through ordinary lives in quiet towns and suburbs. But they are the canary in the West's cultural coal mine -- an advance warning system of what's to come for the rest of us.

"The things you Americans are facing today, Holland faced ten or fifteen years ago," says Rob Hondsmerk, a child psychologist who directs Focus on the Family-Netherlands. "I see America going down the same path, and if things keep going at the present rate, it's not going to take you fifteen years to get there."