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Dutch neo-conservative revolution: the Edmund Burke Foundation
Version August 27th, 2007 Maria Trepp www.passagenproject.com
This is a summary of (the original) Dutch text as well as a lay-out for my future research. This is work in progress, this text is not complete and is not continuous yet!
For Dutch original quotes and documentation see www.passagenproject.com/conservatisme.html
1.1.The Burke Foundation: history 1.3. Neoconservatives at Leiden University 1.3.2. Andreas Kinneging, professor of Philosophy of Law at Leiden University 1.3.3. Afshin Ellian, professor of Social Coherence at Leiden University 1.3.4. Paul Cliteur, Professor of the Philosophy of Law at Leiden University 1.3.5. A young neo-conservative ideologist at the Leiden German institution: Jerker Spits 1.3.6. Burke director and secretary Bart Jan Spruyt 1.3.7. In the background : prof.dr. Frits Bolkestein 2.1.1. Ideas the Burke Foundation shares with Edmund Burke 2.1.2. Ideas the Burke Foundation does not share with Burke 2.3. Carl Schmitt: anti-Semitism and Islam-bashing 2.3.1. The Burke Foundation and Carl Schmitt 2.3.2. The historical parallels between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia 2.3.3. Carl Schmitt and the spirit of polarization 2.4 Between idealism and “new-realism” 2.5. Fortuyn, Burke Foundation and Wilders 2.6. The “clash of civilizations”. 2.6.1. The European history of anti-Islamism 2.6.2. Lewis, Huntington and their Dutch followers 2.7. Enlightenment fundamentalism 2.7.1. The “liberal jihad”: shortcut-and-paste Enlightenment 2.7.2. The inconsistent criticism of Enlightenment in Kinneging and Spruyt 2.7.3. In Voltaire’s footsteps 2.7.4. Critical enlightenment: emancipation 2.7.5. Pragmatics as a “third enlightenment” 2.7.6. Enlightenment and liberal religion 2.8. The core of neo-conservatism : fear of decadence 2.8.1. “Decadence” and “nihilism” 2.8.2. The historical tradition of anti-decadence: fascism, communism, fundamentalism 2.8.4. Acceptance of decadence and nihilism: Post-modern morality 2.9. Good bye to social welfare 2.10 Striving for a patriarchal society 2.12 Towards a non-dogmatic criticism of fundamentalism
0. IntroductionDutch politics have raised interest worldwide. The harsh tone of the anti-Islam debate is baffling the world that was used to stereotypical Dutch tolerance. International newspaper articles discuss the end of tolerance and the raise of right-wing populism in Holland. After the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, the EUMC (European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia) registered a wave of violence against Muslims - worse in Holland than anywhere else. Shortly before the murder on Theo van Gogh, the Dutch national security service warned that an increasing number of Muslims felt denigrated and stigmatised by opinion leaders.[1] After the murder of Van Gogh a new wave of violence hit Mosques and Islamic schools. In the month after the murder 174 incidents took place. New research shows growing hostility against Muslims in the Dutch population, as well as serious discrimination: ”On average, Moroccan youths have 30% less chance of finding a job than their autochthonous contemporaries. In the building trade their chances are actually three times less.”[2] Holders of a university degree for instance, have a double rate of unemployment if they have an immigrant background.[3] Research by Frank Buijs also shows that many young Dutch Muslims feel severely humiliated and discriminated by stigmatising statements about Islam. This is not only true for young radical Muslims, but also for democratically engaged and integrated Muslims.[4]
The 2006 Amnesty International Yearbook is critical of the Netherlands because of bad treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and because of the new anti-terror laws. Dutch intellectuals have played a crucial role in convincing the public that the Islam is an intrinsically inferior religion and in promoting the official policy that is now criticized by Amnesty International. The first openly anti-Islamic intellectual was the VVD-politician Frits Bolkestein. In his footsteps came professor Pim Fortuyn. A group of professors at Leiden University have started a neo-conservative think tank called the Burke-Foundation, which sympathizes with Fortuyn and is cooperating with the anti-Islamic new right-wing politician Geert Wilders. Bolkestein is now a Leiden University professor who also forms a part of the Burke Foundation.
The Edmund Burke Foundation started in 2000 as an initiative by the Leiden law professor Andreas Kinneging, who wanted to start a conservative think tank based on an American model. The Foundation expanded, financed by several American companies including the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, the Amway family and Bush supporters DeVos.
Influencing the political debate and putting conservative topics on the agenda was the first goal of the think tank. ***The neoconservatives are constantly present in the media, in all daily papers, all weekly papers, on all public television programmes. The second goal was to provide a conservative curriculum for students, “building and arming” in a “shadow university”. The third goal was to influence public organizations and political parties directly. When the American financers withdrew from the Burke Foundation, Burke director Bart Jan Spruyt became the personal advisor of the right-wing politician Geert Wilders, the new anti-Islam politician who is walking in Pim Fortuyn’s footsteps. The Burke Foundation is interesting from an international perspective. Some foreign observers, like Michael Ignatieff, have commented critically on the Dutch neo-conservatives, organised in the Burke Foundation. The Burke Foundation is also closely related to the American Enterprise Association (AEI) and has for instance organised a conference about Islam together with the AEI.
A couple of scientific articles have appeared about different aspects of the “Burke” political ideology, but no thorough comprising research has been done. Especially the recent development of the Foundation, and the cooperation with the right-wing populist Geert Wilders, is not described yet in scientific literature. Research about the Burke Foundation offers a couple of intriguing questions. In the first place it is worthwhile to describe the ideas, goals and development of this Foundation in the context of Dutch and German conservatism (the Burke Foundation is relying heavily on the ideas of the German conservative revolution of the 1930s) and American neo-conservatism. In the second place the Foundation has a couple of prominent intellectual members, three of whom are professors of the Law Faculty in Leiden, often present in the media and influencing public opinion. They are doing this by popularising philosophical ideas. It is very interesting to follow their argumentation closely and to read the original texts they are using. This way the intellectual context of the Foundation can be explored, and it can be determined, in which intellectual tradition the Burkeans stand. The intellectual claims have to be checked against the claimed intellectual tradition. Basically there are two possibilities: the intellectual tradition which they claim to belong to can indeed be used to explain their political ideas. This is for instance the case with the Burkean reference to Leo Strauss, to Carl Schmitt and to Plato. On the other hand, the Burkeans also refer to authors whose ideas cannot be used for neo conservative purposes without problems. For instance, a discussion of the ideas of Edmund Burke and the ideology of the Burke Foundation will deepen the understanding of the political and philosophical background of the Foundation and the quality of their (neo-) conservative worldview. By comparing original texts with the demagogic and populist Burkean references it will be possible to reveal the manipulative strategies that underlie Burkean political views. The hermeneutic method has to be used to discuss the meaning of the original texts in its context. It has to be shown that the Burkeans abuse original texts by disregarding the context in which these texts belong, thus making use of the typical fundamentalist “cut-and-paste” method of manipulative and eclectic text editing.
The Burkean view has much in common with the American neo-conservative vision, but also differs from the American perspective in some important aspects. Dutch neo-conservatism differs significantly from American neo-conservatism in its extreme hostility against Islam as a religion and against liberal Muslims, but also in its heavy reliance on secular dogmatic reasoning.
One very intriguing question about the Burke Foundation is, how it is possible that Catholic anti-modernists (e.g. the Leiden professor and Burke founder Kinneging) and protestant fundamentalists (e.g. former Burke director Bart Jan Spruyt) can cooperate closely with militant secular fighters (the Leiden professors Cliteur and Ellian) and with a politician who has announced himself as a liberal “jihad”-fighter (Geert Wilders). My research will, in the footsteps of John Gray’s criticism of neo-conservatism, look for the shared concepts in the ideas of the Burkeans. In the Burke Foundation classical protestant fundamentalists and anti-modernists unite politically with dogmatic secular thinkers. The result of this union can with good reasons be viewed as “fundamentalist”. My hypothesis is, that the binding element in the Burke Foundation can be described as the fundamentalist element.
It will have to be examined further if “fundamentalism” is an appropriate term to be used for the views of the Burkeans. Other terms that are connected to this question are “dogma” and “heresy”. The Burkeans have tried to give themselves the appearance of rebels and heretics who courageously question the society “dogma” of peace between population groups. This is why the dialectics between dogma and heresy have to be reviewed, as well as the relationship between populism, heresy and fundamentalism.
Almond/Appleby/Sivan define in Strong Religion fundamentalism as follows: “Fundamentalism […] refers to a discernible pattern of religious militance by which self-styled ‘true believers’ attempt to arrest the erosion of religious identity, fortify the borders of the religious community, and create viable alternatives to secular institutions and behaviors.” This definition only applies to the religious members of the Foundation. In opposition to Almond/Appleby/ Sivan I want to argue that from the study of the Burke Foundation it becomes clear that secular militance can be considered “fundamentalist” in spite of its lack of hope of eternal reward. On the other hand I do not want to go as far as the Dutch minister of Justice, when he claimed that fundamentalism is a general human attitude, found in every individual.[5] The following criteria or attributes of fundamentalism that are described in Almond/ Appleby/ Sivan Strong Religion, can, as I will demonstrate, also be found in the philosophy and organization of the Burkeans, or in some important aspects of their strategy and arguments: 1. Fundamentalists act strategically. “The new leaders ransack the tradition’s past, retrieving an restoring politically useful doctrines and practices and creating others in an effort to construct a religiopolitical ideology capable of mobilizing disgruntled youth.”(p. 10) “manipulating traditional teachings to serve political ends” (p.14) see 2.3. and 2.9. 2. They impose a strict discipline on their followers (p.10 ) : The Burkean war on decadence and on nihilism. See 2.10. 3. They can be players in local, regional, and even national politics, not as result of their nostalgia […] but for their ability to adopt to modern organizational imperatives, political strategies, communication advances and economic theories.”(p. 10) see background information Burke Foundation. 4. Fundamentalists blame “the erosion of religious belief and the irreligious worldviews and materialistic lifestyles accompanying the growth and spread of secular science and technology.” But they do not retreat from the secular-scientific world; they strive, rather “to transform or conquer it.”(p.11) see 2.9. 5. Defense and consolidation of patriarchy: anti-feminism. (p.11) see 2.12
6. Scriptual inerrancy( p.14, 96) : see 2.7. 7. Classical protestant fundamentalism (p.14); “When describing particular movements, then, the term ‘fundamentalists’ is accurately applied only to those Protestant Christians of North America, who coined the term in the early twentieth century, and their contemporary ideological heirs” (p. 16) : Burke director Spruyt is a classical contemporary protestant fundamentalist . See 1.1.5. Classical protestant fundamentalism loves apocalyptical prophecies. (p. 94) So do the Burkeans, see 2.5.3. 8. Obsession with purity, uniformity and ideas of contamination; sharp boundaries (p.17, 20, 23, 97) ; obsession with the disintegration of the social order (p. 26) ; culture of austerity and asceticism (p 30) ; “there is no mistaking the leitmotif: the outside is polluted, contagious, dangerous.” “ (p. 36) see 2.6, 2.8. ; 2.10. 9. Militant Obsession with overwhelming enemies (p.19); Moral Manichaeanism (p. 95) : see 2.3., 2.4., 2.5. and 2.8. 10. At the same time imitation and resistance to the modern state ( p. 20) ; fundamentalists select en embrace some aspects of modernity (p. 95) see 2.4, 2.7. 11. Enemies are perceived as powerful and potentially overwhelming (p.19); Fear for the infiltration of the “fifth column” (p. 26) see 2.5.; 2.7.
12. Modernity, (and especially the modern leftist multicultural, pluralistic ideals) , is seen as the threat (p. 37) .Fundamentalism is reactive (p. 93) see 2.9.
13. Messianism (p. 65, 96) : The Burke Foundation has a close and positive relationship to Pim Fortuyn, who has described himself as a religious charismatic leader in the tradition of Moses. See 2.7.
One more core issue concerning fundamentalism can be explored, and that is the question of Platonic essentialism in fundamentalism: the tendency to withdraw from historical and economic circumstances. I will discuss this essentialism and the lack of pragmatism in the theory and practice of the Burke Foundation.
By applying the theory of fundamentalism to the Burke Foundation, I hope that a better understanding of the political and psychological mechanism of Dutch neoconservative thinking can be reached, as well as an understanding of present-day Western fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is not only in the strict sense of the definition a religious fundamentalism, but also in the wider sense a form of rigidity and hardness against critical and open thinking. I would like to
explore the structure and the psychological elements of fundamentalism, like - the theory of resentment ( Scheler, Nietzsche) - the theory of the authoritarian personality ( Frenkel-Brunswik) - the theory of projection (classical and modern psychoanalysis) - fear of ambiguity - lack of self-reflection
The different groups within historical American protestant fundamentalism united in their affront against modernism. The “jihad” against modernism and post-modernism is also the most important feature of the ideology of the Burke Foundation. (Post)-modern society is described by the Burkeans as “decadent” and “nihilist”. A thorough analysis must therefore be made of the Burkean criticism of modernity and decadence as well as of the tradition of anti-modernism and of anti-decadence that was very powerful under the flag of “degeneration” between 1890 and 1945. The Burkean moral, in its contempt for “decadence” and its plead for moral, virtues and decency, has to be compared to the criticism of others (Margalit, Sennett, Kunneman) who’s criticism of modern man is not- like the Burkean criticism- disconnected from the analysis of the mechanisms of modern society and the role of capitalism. While the Burkeans criticise private moral, they are fervent advocates of a harsh and competitive capitalism. They cut off societal mechanisms from the private sphere and create a double moral.
Modernity is closely related to Enlightenment. With regard to Enlightenment, the Burkeans differ widely in their judgement. It will be necessary to look closely into the ideological differences between the intellectual Burke sympathizers with regard to Enlightenment, and to decide what aspects of Enlightenment-thinking rightly can be claimed by the neo-conservatives and what aspects of Enlightenment they neglect. A critical study of the tradition of Enlightenment must therefore be part of this research. One important question related to this is, in how far the Dutch “Enlightenment/ Western Superiority” discourse is a discourse of one-dimensional rationality and of triumphant colonialism in the tradition of the 19th century, opposing Barbarism versus Culture in a chauvinistic and social-Darwinist manner and leading to a dangerous culture of contempt and humiliation of the other.
The Burkeans and their spiritual father, Frits Bolkestein, have contributed in a quite non-scholarly way to a severe polarization in society. Frits Bolkestein is now at Leiden University researching the role of intellectuals in the politics of the 20th century. My research, and my artistic and political activities should be a counterbalance to his activities and to the Burkean influence on society.
My research is part of a scientific, political and artistic project - the Passage(n)-project - that is connected to the University of Leiden, the University where the Dutch neo-conservatives have their headquarters. With a wide range of methods (posters, mailings, street music, internet debate and so on) I have tried, already since Fortuyn started his attack on Islam, to involve students, teachers and common people in a discussion about tolerance and the open society. I want to counteract a negative spiral of hostility between population groups. I find it absolutely necessary that my research is in contact with society, and I think I have succeeded quite well in engaging people – especially also people who do not share my opinion- in an open discussion. This research is continually published, read and debated on internet. I participate actively in Internet discussion-forums. This way my research is - as one of the internet-debaters has stated correctly - an example of “collective enlightenment” and of living hermeneutics (Nasr Abu Zayd). Muslim fundamentalists are using Internet to spread their poisonous ideas. Internet can and must be used for critical Enlightenment. Nasr Abu Zayd says that we must fight both Muslim fundamentalists and their mirroring “Clash-of- civilization”-thinkers with the means of open dialogue: “We have to be alert and to join our efforts to fight both claims and their consequences by all possible democratic means.” Or, like three researchers from Nijmegen say: “We are busy to realize a “clash of civilizations” if we are joining the demagogic maximization of differences and thus make the fear of The Other political. Truth and reality are being occupied by two radicalizing parties [ terrorists and neocons]. We have to free ourselves of this terrorist discourse.”[6]
I think that this fight for freedom is necessary even without a guarantee or hope of success. My motivation comes more from the need and pleasure in expressing myself than from the optimism that I will be able to convince others. I am not very much concerned with finding The Truth, I am concerned with living a good life and this way creating an open and welcoming society, thus creating a good life also for others. I am motivated by a pragmatic emancipatory interest (Habermas: emanzipatorisches Erkenntnisinteresse) and want to connect knowledge with practical life experience and reflection.[7] I oppose to the metaphysical essentialism that is the philosophical base of Burkean thinking and that considers itself as “objective”. I am more interested in solidarity that in “objectivity”, I am dropping the distinction between knowledge and opinion, “construed as the distinction between truth as correspondence to reality and truth as a commendatory term for well-justified beliefs”. For “partisans of solidarity” like me the account of the “value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base”. [8] I am not interested in metaphysical questions. I am explicitly interested in politics and in pragmatics, which according to Dewey and to Rorty are “clearing the ground for democratic politics.”[9] In the footsteps of Rorty, Popper and (with some limitations) Habermas, my desire for objectivity is not the desire to escape the limitations of one’s community, like the Platonic philosopher’s, but “the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible, the desire to extend the reference of ‘us’ as far as we can.”[10] For a pragmatist, the difference between knowledge and opinion is simply “the difference between topics on which agreement is relatively easy to get and topics on which agreement is relatively hard to get.”[11] I write about topics where agreement is relatively hard to get, and I work hard to get this agreement from a group as large as possible. This stance places me at a maximum philosophical and psychological distance to my counteragents, the Burkeans, for whom there is nothing more dangerous and appalling than what they call “relativism” and “postmodernism”. ”Criticism of criticism” is according to Dewey and Hilary Putnam the core of pragmatic enlightenment. Criticism of the Burkean criticism is thus my goal.
My work is strongly political. My opponents are tied to political parties ( the populist right wing of the VVD, and the right wing parties of Fortuyn and Wilders) and I am a member of a political party (the Green Left Party) as well. Because of the highly political context of my research I find it very difficult to use words as “objectivity” or “truth”. I find that this could be considered as an unfair attempt from my side to place myself on a higher level than my opponents. Of course, science should generally seek truth, and be tied to facts as much as possible. But there are fields in science and research, where the truth does not so much already exist, as it is actively constructed. The Burkeans are convinced of an existing “clash of civilizations” and claim that this clash truly exists. In opposition to this, I say (with John Gray), that the neoconservatives themselves are creating a world, where this clash becomes truth. Objectivity and truth can be easily claimed, but ones opponents will never agree that one is objective anyway, while one’s soul mates will anyway understand. So why bother with big words? Prof. Annemarie Mol ( University of Twente) who has given critical objections to Ellian and Cliteur says: “Objectivity assumes a position above struggling parties. I refuse that position. Philosopher kings dictate. But I want to inspire, to give different views.“[12]
The issue objectivity and scientific method was recently raised in the controversy around the WRR-report about Islam, when Afshin Ellian, in the footsteps of Wilders, rejected the report and with it one of authors, Nasr Abu Zayd, as fraud. Baukje Prins, author of the important book about minorities and integration Voorbij de onschuld (No more innocence; 2000/2004) writes about the issue of objectivity: “ I want to defend the proposition that every scientific statement, that how ever objective, implies a certain moral and political bias. The ivory tower of science does not exist. Even the most neutral or ‘fundamental’ research is connected by all kind of strings with everyday reality of interests, values, ambitions and power relations, material and non-material hinders and incitements. And there is nothing wrong with this bias. The critical question for science when it comes to reality itself, is according to me [Prins] not so much : how much is scientific knowledge prejudiced? But: which prejudice is better? What kind of bias gives knowledge that can be useful, en which has a negative influence? The epistemological question about ‘objective’, ‘just’ reproduction of reality gives way for a moral-political question after the societal effects of different reconstructions of reality. “[13]
Objectivity to me is an empty word. But on the other hand “to object” is a very important phrase to me. Karl Popper has argued that only negative statements can be true. I am trying to find negative statements about my opponents, and maybe that way some “objectivity“ can be reached indirectly. Another way to create some objectivity is to put people, statements, and political ideas in their context. This is indeed necessary: to put the Burke foundation in all kind of historical and philosophical contexts- in the first place into contexts they are placing themselves. ***Of, course, science as a whole must strive for objectivity. But this is often done while an individual researcher is taking a pronounced stance, is declaring his/her view and also is describing the societal point from where he/she is speaking. Thus, while objectivity or truth in itself are no goals for me, in order to convince as many people as possible I will have to present a coherent, interesting and differentiated argument, that is including as much as possible non-controversial “facts” (or: opinions most people agree on) and is meeting academic standards.
My research has an important context in my family background. In my earlier (highly controversial) research[14] I have given a quite extensive account of my historical family background,[15] and of my motives to choose intellectual right-wing populists as my opponents (my earlier research was turned against a former DDR-German author, the Hitler and Stalin admirer Christoph Hein). To summarize the facts that are important also in the light of my new research about the Burke Foundation: my grandfather was a Lutheran minister (like many of my ancestors) and also an active member of the National Socialist party. He published articles in the series of “National-socialist theologians”. He was, as many intellectuals, not a hard-core racist. He was fanatically national-conservative. There is a direct link between the philosophy he stood for and the Burkean’s heavy philosophical reliance on German pre-war conservative revolutionaries. The other important side of my family history is connected with my grandfather’s daughter, my beloved godmother. She was a teacher of history, politically active, and a writer who published articles about liberalism.[17] Her live companion, the Jewish socialist, humanist, pacifist and politician Heinz Brandt has been an important influence in my life. His ideas (to be found in his articles and books, especially his autobiography Ein Traum, der nicht entführbar ist, translated into English as The Search for a Third Way)[18] are almost identical to the ideas I find described in Peter Derkx’s biography about H.J. Pos.[19] As a former GDR- citizen and advisor of the Social-democratic party in West-Germany Brandt played an important role in supporting Willy Brandt’s dialogue with East Germany.
I have been following and criticising individual members of the Burke Foundation ( Paul Cliteur) since 2004. But my research with the Burke Foundation as a whole started in July 2005, when the sociologist Kees Schuyt spoke in the Pieterskerk in Leiden. He turned against Cliteur and the condemnation of the sixties that Cliteur and the Burkeans propagate. He ended with a little rhyme, saying that the time has come for a rebellion. Since I knew Schuyt’s texts and his criticism of the Burkean view well, I took this as the starting point of my new research, a research that is committed to this rebellion.
The Leiden professor and Burke sympathisant Afshin Ellian has already a couple years ago foreseen a rebellion against the neoconservative ideas. He wrote: “The multiculturalists are desperately waiting for a moment to rebel. […] The coalition of the multiculturalists is colourful. It includes sectarian social-democrats, postmodernists, anthropologists, immigration specialists, the scientific staff of the multicultural research industry, Islamite staff members from left parties, and workless social workers.” [20] Ellian is right: there is a rebellion growing against his ideas. My research is part and tool of this rebellion.
My research is closely related to the work of Nasr Abu Zayd. In November 2005 I saw a notice in the paper that Abu Zayd had received the Ibn Rushd-Prize for Freedom of Thought in Berlin. I wrote to him about my research, and he asked me to keep him up to date. When I then found that the Leiden professor Paul Cliteur had published very hostile articles about Nasr Abu Zayd ( saying that the Egyptian fundamentalists had been right about Abu Zayd) , our cooperation became even closer. Meanwhile, even Afshin Ellian ( who was contrasted by Cliteur as the Good Muslim against the Bad Muslim Abu Zayd) is publicly extremely hostile against Nasr Abu Zayd. My research will also be designed to give a thorough analysis of the form and content of their criticism.
1. The Edmund Burke Foundation
1.1. Frits Bolkestein and his friends: liberalism and conservatism
The Edmund Burke Foundation, a rightwing think-tank after American model with mainly white men started in 2000/2001 as a think-tank after American model. The name of the foundation was chosen after Edmund Burke, the first one who had designed a comprising typology of conservative philosophy. Burke can be called a “conservation-conservative” . But his idea’s are also usable for a reveille-conservatism which could recall Burke’s doctrine of two kinds of renewal, and could reject all renewal after 1989 as godless and as humane hubris.
In februari 2001 an article appeared in the Dutch main newspaper for well educated people, the NRC Handelsblad, with title The conservative moment has come. In this article the Edmund Burke Foundation has for the first time become visible for a broader public, with a programmatic vision and the announcement of the website[21] belonging to the foundation.
The author of the article, Joshua Livestro - one of the initiators of the Foundation, together with the Leiden legal philosopher Andreas Kinneging -, had worked in London at the head office of the Conservative Party and had been the personal assistant of the EU commissionary and Dutch right-wing liberal politician Frits Bolkestein in Brussels. Just like his former university teacher Kinneging and the Leiden professor of Philosophy of Law Paul Cliteur ( member of the advisory committee of the Edmund Burke Foundation) Livestro had been tightly connected to the rightwing liberal Bolkestein, who, while never directly connected to the Burke Foundation, has played an important role in the background of foundation. Bolkesteins name is mentioned on the first website of the foundation, where he figures as an example of a conservative person- “according to some”.
Bolkestein’s role for the Burke Foundation has not been described yet in newspaper articles or scientific articles, and only very few people are aware of his important background role.
Bolkestein tells in his diary 1999-2000, Grensverkenningen, that he had a reading club together with Kinneging and Cliteur that met regularly. They were reading Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a text that can be found on the present Burke-website[22]. Bolkestein in his diary: “Friday, august 6th 1999: In the afternoon my reading club met in Amsterdam, Andreas Kinneging and Paul Cliteur. We were reading Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke is more convincing about the British constitution, with its emphasis on precedent, small steps, tradition, than in criticizing the French Revolution- which he does in a brilliant manner. He has a too positive opinion about the Ancient Régime. Andreas [ Kinneging] does not agree with me on that. He thinks that the French Revolution was not necessary at all, that the nobility were adjusting to modern circumstances and played a useful role, and that our vision on the Ancient Régime is colored by historiography, that is, through the opponents. My knowledge is not sufficient to disagree. Of course the French Revolution is responsible for many crimes. But did she not also modernize? “(p. 18) With his partially positive view on the French Revolution Bolkestein stands ideologically closer to the Enlightenment advocate Paul Cliteur than to Kinneging. Within the Edmund Burke Foundation there are – with respect to the Enlightenment- very different views to be found. But in spite of certain differences the Burkeans can find each other nicely in their right-wing liberal goals( in the American system they would be called Republicans, not Liberals) ; rejecting social welfare and Islam. The later director of the Burke Foundation, Bart Jan Spruyt, writes in Lof van het conservatisme (Praise of Conservatism, 2003) : “Only a few individuals have been advocates of conservatism: Paul Cliteur and Andreas Kinneging, who have made the discussion about conservatism heard even outside the Dutch liberal party and have given a substantial support to the revival of conservatism.” ( p.8) In the same book Spruyt calls Bolkestein a conservative who did not wish to call him self conservative, “because he had political reasons.” (p.8) Spruyt writes extensively about Bolkestein, Cliteur and Kinneging in Lof van het conservatisme. Bolkestein, who was according to Spruyt a fighter for a combination of economic progressiveness and cultural conservatism, was “convinced of the necessity to start fighting against moral nihilism, but did not know how to make the system of norms and values concrete. The so-called Cardinal Virtues from the classical and Christian tradition are according to Bolkestein laudable, but what can a liberal politician do with these? Liberalism was formulated in an age when moral was mainly the domain of the Church. A liberal politician did then not so much want to formulate a morale of his own, as to separate state and church. Morale was more or less obvious. Bolkestein’s final conclusion is that the construction of a frame where virtues get the emphasis they earn is the big challenge for today’s liberalism.” ( p. 54f.)
Kinneging’s and Cliteur’s positions are in this book outlined as follows: “Within the liberal stream [of conservatism] two thinkers have been visible. Paul Cliteur (1955) and Andreas Kinneging (1962)” “Cliteur and Kinneging have together set up the Edmund Burke Foundation, which aims at formulating and spreading conservative ideas.” “In his thesis, Cliteur sought a path between positivism of law and classical natural law. He was looking for a non-random basis for law and could not use the metaphysical abstractions of classical natural law. He pleads for a more ‘modest’ variant of natural law and calls it ‘cultural law’. By this Cliteur means, in line with Friedrich Hayek,‘spontaneously grown orders’. By a process of trial and error and by slowly changing the own system of law (piecemeal engineering) a cultural community can find principles which function as the normative basis of law. […]
The doctrine of the democratic constitutional state- that binds the state to everyday law and reviews legislature and interventions in the light of the constitution- has according to Cliteur come into the hands of epigones, to an extend that people even started to plead for freedom of expression for civil servants. These examples of the ‘law of epigony ‘ offer Cliteur substance to concretize his conservatism. And as a professorial speaker in the popular political tv-programme Buitenhof he finds a broad public for his pleads.
Kinneging went through a different development. He started as a liberal free spirit and as an employee of the Telders Foundation ( the scientific department of the Dutch liberal party VVD) and as a ghost writer for Bolkestein. In his thesis he wanted to show that liberalism is the obvious outcome of a process of modernization that showed itself at least since the 18th century in thinkers as Montesquieu. But this 'Whig interpretation of history' (Herbert Butterfield) was rejected by the facts. When he [Kinneging] started to read the political philosophers from the 18th century he discovered how important the classical books were for these authors and that their vision of human existence differed from the liberal vision. Classical political theory was not longer an unquestioned preamble of liberalism to him but the greatest critic of liberalism. The human being is prone to Evil, Kinneging learned, and has to overcome the animal within himself by forming of character and conscience. This forming had been outlined by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and (in his Christian appearance) Gregorius the Great. And this doctrine of virtues was a mirror of an eternal order of being, bearing implicitly a prescribed moral order. In contrast to Cliteur Kinneging is a convinced partisan of Natural Law. This means that he wants to start with the (self-applied) confinement of the individual. Only this way the cultural and moral capital can grow that lets the constitutional state flourish. In his thesis (1996) Kinneging reports about his discovery of the ‘aristocratic’ tradition in political philosophy. After that Kinneging became known for his departure from the Dutch liberal party VVD and for a number of scientific publications and popular articles in weekly and daily papers about the doctrine of virtues and (conservative) political implications. Also, Kinneging studies the tradition ( the doctrine of virtues) in the 19th and 20th century, where his special interest is with phenomenologists like Josef Pieper, Max Scheler en Nicolai Hartmann.” ( p. 55 ff)
Burke-director Bart Jan Spruyt described in his pamphlet De crisis in Nederland en het conservatieve antwoord (The crisis in The Netherlands and the conservative answer, 2003; this text can still be downloaded from the Burke-website) the different streams of conservatism. He distinguishes skeptical, historical and conservatism of natural law, and he connects the two latter variants to the names Cliteur respectively Kinneging. He writes: “The first form of conservatism is the skeptic variant. This kind of conservatism is cultivated by people with a dark view on mankind and a pessimistic view on human reason. They are deeply convinced that our knowledge is partial en imperfect, and that this is why we never can penetrate reality or could reshape reality with theories we have formed in our heads. We should not try to build heaven here on earth, because then we create hell. A famous representative of this conservative variant is Friedrich Hayek, Nobel prize winner in 1974, an heir to Edmund Burke, Lord Acton and Adam Smith. Blueprints for a society ( or economic interventions as Keynes favored them) are based per definition on fragmentary information and poor insights and are inevitably resulting in misery and repression. This kind of conservatism is found especially in England. Michael Oakeshott is someone who stands for this kind of conservatism. In the Netherlands the columnist J. L. Heldring is an example.
Sometimes this skeptic variant goes over into a second form, which we could characterize as the historical school within conservatism. Representatives of this school are trying to slide the beneficial protection of tradition between the lonely individual and the chaos of history. Hayek did already emphasize the value of spontaneously grown institutions. For conservatives it is not important if these institutions are embodying a truth. They did origin and proved themselves as valuable in a historical process of trial and error (Karl Popper). They give order and an inspired link to life. One famous representative of this form of conservatism is the English philosopher Roger Scruton, who repeatedly emphasizes that institutions and social links are prior to the individual and make his/her life meaningful. These conservatives are critical of the modern destruction of institutions and traditions, because, according to them, after this destruction nothing but a yawning emptiness is left and modern man then is endlessly busy to find an identity for himself in this nihilistic climate.
About Paul Cliteur, Dutch philosopher of Law, we could say that he is the spokesman of an special variant of historic conservatism. Ever since his thesis in 1989 and in innumerable publications thereafter he has propagated the notion of “Cultural Law”, clearly inspired by a range of conservative thinkers and writers. Cliteur, professor in the Encyclopedia of Law and member of the Advisory Council of the Edmund Burke Foundation hereby means that a cultural community can find normative principles for Law by slowly changing the system of Law (piecemeal engineering). Tradition and history are thus sources of cultural law, that has become form as ‘a whole of rationally outlined principles’ in declarations of human rights, fundamental rights and written and unwritten constitutional law . [note M.T.: Cliteur has nowadays turned explicitly against his own Burkean/Popperian principle of piecemeal engineering and demands a neoconservative revolution, see below, ad see Cliteur’s articel in the NRC, 17-12-2002] . This variant of Cliteur is a conscious attempt to find a middle path between positivism of law and classical natural law, based on metaphysical abstractions, that are rejected by Cliteur [note M.T. in contradiction to what Spruyt writes here is Cliteur is a Platonic metaphysical essentialist, see below] .
The third group of conservatives base themselves on the tradition of natural law. This tradition that originated in thinkers like Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, and that continues throughout the middle ages until our times, assumes a moral order that is not made by human beings, but can be discovered by the right use of reason. The order is given a priori and exists independently from human beings. This order is absolute, and has the purpose to limit human existence beneficially. Natural law has nothing to do ( and this is a common misunderstanding) with ‘the survival of the fittest’ , but is the law that is in accordance with the essence of nature of human beings. Human beings are not prone to the Good. Human beings need traits or virtues that help them to master wrong inclinations within themselves.
This third form of conservatism is thus based on the Jewish-Christian Tradition as well as on the classical-humanistic tradition which are together dominating Western cultural tradition. Edmund Burke spoke of the ‘spirit of the gentleman and the spirit of religion’. In the Netherlands this tradition has gained influence through the publications of the Leiden legal philosopher, Andreas Kinneging, who also is a member of the Advisory Council of the Edmund Burke Foundation. [Since 2005 is Kinneging director of the Burke Foundation, M.T.] [23]
Andreas Kinneging, initiator of the Burke Foundation, and Frits Bolkestein are ideologically closely related to one other. As linked articles on the first Burke website conservatisme.net report, Kinneging has left the Dutch liberal party VVD because of the weakened political role of Bolkestein within this party. After Bolkestein left the position of party leader, Kinneging could not agree with the more social-liberal course of the party. “To my regret Bolkestein’s ideas about the limits of personal freedom have not grown roots within the party (VVD)“ he says. Together with Bolkestein Kinneging had in 1996 taken the initiative for the moral debate within the liberal party VVD. In this debate they took the stance that the government may limit citizens in their liberties if societal order demands this. According to them liberalism is falling short if it only demands the freedom of the individual. ( Trouw, 1-12-1999) If liberalism is marked by striving for a society with diversity and pluralism – then in fact not only Kinneging, but also Bolkestein has taken distance from liberalism. Western society has absolute priority for them, as for all the other Burke Foundation members. Bolkestein also is mentioned in the Burke pamphlet De crisis in Nederland ( Spruyt: “Also the welfare state needs a fundament reform. Conservatives embrace the slogan by Frits Bolkestein: rather the warmth of a job than the coldness of social benefits’) . And vice versa: in Bolkestein’s diary Grensverkenningen not only Livestro, Kinneging and Cliteur are mentioned frequently[24] , also Michiel Visser, secretary of the Burke Foundation and co-author of a number of articles is mentioned[25] just like neo-con and Burke- honorary- donator Afshin Ellian[26] who also can be seen together with Bart Jan Spruyt on the website of the Burke Foundation[27]. Bolkestein met also with Burke-Foundation-conservative Roger Scruton ( “Thursday 5th of July 2001[..] I was present at a lecture by Roger Scruton. Quite a few people, and good lecture. It was nice to have a glass of bier with him afterwards. Kinneging and Livestro gave introductions.”). Bolkestein thus was present at the first official meeting of the Burke Foundation, the Scruton lecture De betekenis van het conservatisme ( The meaning of conservatism), with an introduction by Livestro and Kinneging. Scruton and his (often very anti-Islamic) texts are linked to the website of the Burke Foundation. In his first Burke lecture Scruton is quoting Edmund Burke extensively. Scruton bases his own “conservation-conservatism” a well as his “reveille-conservatism” on Burke: “I am looking […] for a lost experience of being home. And beneath that emotion of loss there is, I assume, the lasting experience that what has been lost also can be regained – not necessarily exactly as it was before, when we lost it, but as it will be when it has been won back, reconsidered, and been formed in a new way.” Scruton explains in his lectures what is so attractive to him in Burke- and Kinneging and Cliteur are obviously moved by motivations like his: “First: the defense of obedience [ made impression on me]. To Burke, authority was not at all the contemptible thing it was to my generation, but the basis of political order. Society, he argued, is not kept together by abstract rights of citizens, as the French revolutionaries thought, but by authority, a term that primarily means the right to obedience, and not only the power to enforce it. Obedience on the other and is the most important virtue of political beings, the mental attitude which makes it possible to reign above them and without it societies degenerate to ‘dust and powder of individuality’. These thoughts were as obvious to me as they were shock to my contemporaries. Burke defended the traditional opinion that human beings in society are subjects to a sovereign, against the new opinion that they are citizens of a state. “ ( p. 29) Scruton also said in his speech that he wants to use the ideas of Burke against the ideas of the generation of the sixties. In the spirit of Burke Scruton defends prejudices. He is impressed by Burke’s provocative defense of prejudices ( the range of convictions and ideas which originate spontaneously in individuals) . As an example Scruton mentions prejudices about sexual behavior. These prejudices have to exist according to Scruton; shame and feeling of honor may not give in to wrong ideas of sexual liberation. “The result [sexual liberation] is exactly like Burke would have predicted: not only a rapture in the trust between sexes but also a decline of reproduction.” “In these competent, clear thoughts Burke gave a summary of all my instinctive doubts about the call to liberation.” (p. 31ff)
In his diary Bolkestein mentions this lecture by Scruton without making any critical remarks about Scruton’s strongly anti-liberal attitude concerning sexual matters. But of course, Bolkestein knows that his friend Kinneging is against homosexuality and abortion ( as stated on the website conservatisme.web) and Bolkestein did not have any problem with that. Bolkestein also takes the conservative position that the government should protect institutions as the family, who over time have proven their aptitude for the “cultivation of moral capital”. For Kinneging the institution of the family cannot be “thick” and strong enough, and he rejects the idea that an intolerant defense of traditional family life can have an fascistoid quality. “We have to concentrate on the protection of the family. The concept of the family is totally diluted and deserves protection more than ever. But what concerns the market: there the laws of the market must rule. “( Reformatorisch Dagblad, 16-12-2000) Obviously Kinneging does not think that the laws of the market could interfere with good family life – like they often do ( thinking of working hours etc). The combination of very traditional moral and at the same time acceptance of the harsh laws of the market: that is the cocktail of the Burke Foundation. Kinneging: “An equal position for traditional family and other ways of living together, like for instance gay marriage, is wrong. This does not recognize or underline the special position and task of the family in society.” ( Reformatorisch Dagblad 16-10- 1999). Bart Jan Spruyt classifies Scruton and Cliteur ( in De crisis in Nederland) in the same division of conservatism ( “historical conservatism”) , and indeed Cliteur is very content with Scruton about whom he wrote a very positive review in the newspaper ( de Volkskrant 15-9-2006) where he prizes Scruton’s book about religious terrorism, The West and the rest (2002) . Back to Bolkestein and his role in the background of the Edmund Burke Foundation. In 2002 the first Burke director Joshua Livestro says, looking back: “The soil for the [conservative] renaissance was created especially by Bolkestein and the Leiden teacher of legal philosophy Andreas Kinneging. ”( NRC 13-7-2002). The politician Frits Bolkestein became professor at the University of Leiden, where he since 2004 resides in the new Law Building together with the Burkean neoconservative legal philosophers Kinneging, Ellian and Cliteur. Bolkesteins office is situated in the Law Building in spite of the fact that he is a professor of Political Science, and thus should have his office among social scientists. “ [Kinnegings] office is located at the light attic of the former Kamerlingh Onnes physics laboratory, that has been rebuilt as Law Faculty. Across his office works under strict safety guard the advocate of the - by Kinneging rejected - Enlightenment , the professor of Social Cohesion and Law, Afshin Ellian. At his corridor there are two other scholars with a pronounced liberal profile: the VVD-party-member Paul Cliteur, professor of the Encyclopedia of Law, and former VVD-leader Frits Bolkestein, also former commissioner of the European Commission and now professor of the “Intellectual basics of Political Developments”. ( NRC 13-5-2006)
In spite of differences in detail there is a strong bond between Livestro, Kinneging, Cliteur, Ellian and Bolkestein: a physical bond ( the Leiden Law building) and/or a social bond ( the VVD party/ the University of Leiden) and/or a intellectual –political bond. All of these intellectuals can be found at the right wing of the VVD, close to the right-wing populism of Fortuyn and Wilders. Since juanuary 2007 all of these intellectuals: Livestro, Bolkestein, Spruyt, Kinneging, Ellian, Cliteur (and by the way Scruton, too) are authors in the new Dutch neoconservative paper Opinio.
In the first programmatic text about the Burke Stichting Het conservatieve moment is gekomen in February 2001, Joshua Livestro quotes Burke: “Conservatives have to take Edmund Burke’s warning seriously, that, when the enemies of Truth and Moral unite, the defenders [ of Truth and Moral] have to do the same.” The Burke Foundation is a club of friends, with a strong base at Leiden University. “There is really the impression, that we have here [ at the Law Faculty in Leiden] an office of the Burke Foundation. Not everybody is happy about this”, says Bart Labuschagne, teacher at the Leiden Law Faculty and also former speaker for the Burke Foundation. Burke director Bart Jan Spruyt: “Bart [Labuschagne] is a real conservative. We feel friends, Cliteur, Kinneging, Labuschagne and me. “[28] In Kinnegings new book Van kwaad tot erger ( From evil to worse) these four Leiden friends are represented with articles. Burke director/secretary Bart Jan Spruyt is not directly tied to Leiden University, but he got his PhD in Leiden ( at the Theological Faculty, 1996) . His background is described in an article in the paper Nederlands Dagblad (23-12-2000) , an article that is linked to the website conservatisme.web; “The secretary of the recent new Foundation, the Edmund Burke Foundation, is dr. Bart Jan Spruyt. In his daily life he is the editor of the political section of the Reformatorisch Dagblad ( a rightwing protestant paper)[…] Bart Jan Spruyt calls himself a “conservative from birth”. By this he wants to say that conservatism is a life attitude of his. But until recently he did not know that conservatism had a concrete and detailed political philosophy. By studying the work of Kinneging and discussing with him he discovered that a ‘gap’ could be filled. A gap that existed between Christian principles and basics on the one hand and the translation into concrete political situations on the other hand. For him the value of conservative philosophy lies in the emphasis on institutions as family, state and the market.” About the relationship between Bolkestein and the Edmund Burke Foundation is stated on the website of the Foundation ( under the title: “About the Foundation - Edmund Burke): “What is of permanent importance in Burke’s ideas is the ideal of ‘wise and independent’ public representatives, who are politically active on the basis of philosophical principles, monitor the constitution and do not strive after the grace of the common people, but after common wealth. One of the last Dutch politicians who did not only show this importance practically, but also argued for it was Frits Bolkestein.” Then Bolkestein’s article Burgerschap en democratie, (Citizenship and democracy) is quoted. In this by Spruyt quoted article Bolkestein takes a stance against citizenship, participation, democratization; all the things he associates (rightly) with the changes of the Sixties and Seventies. Bolkestein is, like the Burkeans, a decided opponent of the Sixties and everything that has to with democratization. In this article Bolkestein quotes correctly the criticism of his opponents on market mechanisms – without mentioning that he, exactly like the gentlemen from the Burke Foundation, always is on the side of market mechanisms and never takes the criticism of the market into account. Bolkestein: “Democracy assumes, they say [ the advocates of democratization, M.T.], education and schooling to become a citizen, concerning knowledge and attitude, and above this a great deal of economic equality. In that way there is a fundamental tension between democracy and market economy. Market economy asks for education and schooling that is directed towards labor market. Necessary knowledge and necessary attitude for market economy differ greatly from necessary knowledge and attitude for citizenship. Moreover, market economy produces economic inequality. The free functioning of the market has to be limited, because otherwise democracy will be undermined and damaged.[…] The greater the differences in income and property, the greater the possibilities of some to damage the independence of others.“ Bolkestein concludes this summary of the opinion of his adversaries: “This argumentation is convincing.” ( p. 14 f.) Yet he does not integrate this market-critical viewpoint in his own political thinking, his quote and conclusion is totally non-committing. In this article Bolkestein wrongfully reduces citizenship and democratization politics to a simple plead for direct democracy and to a plead to overtake the vox populi uncritically into politics. In fact, the vox populi has found her best expression in Bolkesteins disciple Geert Wilders, en Bolkestein himself has grown big by listening to this vox populi. Ian Buruma quotes Bolkestein in his book Murder in Amsterdam: “One must never underestimate the degree of hatred that Dutch people feel for Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. My political success is based on the fact that I was prepared to listen to such people.” Buruma says that this is a remarkable statement.[29] With this quote Bolkestein underlines that he himself is exploiting political resentments. In that respect he must be called a populist. Bolkestein denies that he has said what Buruma quoted, but Buruma is sure that he wrote down exactly what Bolkestein had said.
Bart Jan Spruyt makes a direct connection between neo-conservatism, Bolkestein, Kinneging, Cliteur en Fortuyn in his lecture De verdediging van het Westen, Leo Strauss, Amerikaans neoconservatisme en de kansen in Nederland ( De defense of the West, Leo Strauss, American neo-conservatism and chances in the Netherlands, 2006; this text can be found on the website of the Burke Foundation): “Neo-conservatism in the sense of liberals mugged by reality has in the past decades in the Netherlands been spread by people as Frits Bolkestein, […] who, as a party leader gathered people around himself who sympathized publicly with conservatism. After Bolkesteins departure from politics and the choice of his party for a social-liberal course […] conservative academics like Andreas Kinneging and Paul Cliteur took a distance or farewell from the party [VVD]. As a consequence of this development the famous “gap on the right” has been created, that in my opinion is fed by a quiet, not or not well articulated dissatisfaction with the promises of modernity and therefore asks for a conservative answer. This gap could have been prevented if the party VVD had decided to take over […] Bolkesteins proposal to give attention to inspiring values and moral which can maintain democracy and the free market. Pim Fortuyn […] could also have bridged the gap if he had gotten the time […]
But what could in the Netherlands be the program of a neoconservative political movement? This movement would have to consist of the rests (or the vanguard) of the Christian-conservative tradition and of liberals converted to reality. A movement like this is not easy established in The Netherlands with its old culture of religious Verzuiling ( societal pillar-structure). But it would be possible if the best of all traditions from Burke to Groen van Pingsterer [ Dutch protestant politician from the 19th century, M.T.] , to Bolkestein and Fortuyn, Cliteur and Kinneging could be designed into a program that could be the fundament for a cooperation.” ( p.12, 18)
Spruyt mentions Bolkestein, Fortuyn, Kinneging, Cliteur in one sentence, and he doing so correctly. Bolkestein himself and the Burkeans often try to accentuate the differences among themselves, and not without success. Shortly after the start of the Burke Foundation, journalist Rob Hartmans wrote an article in the weekly paper in De Groene Amsterdammer, Alles moet anders ( Everything has to change) . He writes about Livestro and Kinneging: “Both intellectuals have a clear affinity to Bolkestein, who does not only read dossiers but also books. But something has gone wrong in this relationship, because Bolkestein always has made a clear difference between liberalism and conservatism. Even more so, in an article in the bundle Boren in hard hout (1998) Bolkestein argues that conservatives have more in common with the hated socialists than with liberals: ‘Socialists and conservatives have collectivity written on their banner. Liberals want that people become concurring individuals who can make their own path in the world and who oppose to the state. For the former [conservatives] stability is the ideal, for the latter [liberals] dynamics is the ideal.’ “
But as we shall see is conservative “stability” not at all the ideal of the Burke Foundation, which has a highly neo-conservative revolutionary profile. Sometimes the Burkeans Kinneging and Spruyt are critical to market mechanisms, but in other quotes ( see for instance above) they praise the market and criticize especially the stability of the welfare state, they vote for a “conservative revolution” and – anti-liberally, but in the tradition of historical conservative national-liberalism: for a strong state with military features.
And Bart Jan Spruyt is certainly correct about the continuity between Bolkestein and Fortuyn, as well in tone as in content, when it comes to integration. In ‘De tikkende tijdbom’- de islamitische inbreuk op Nederlandse rrechten en vrijheden [30] ( The ticking bomb: the Islamite violation on Dutch rights and liberties ( also to be found on the Burke-site) he writes: “Frits Bolkestein proclaimed in the beginning of the Nineties bluntly that the ‘multicultural’ society was less desirable than Dutch opinion leaders had argued. […] Two years after the fall of the Berlin wall and in the middle of liberal euphoria about ‘the end of history’ he proclaimed that liberal democracy was a higher civilization than the Muslim-world who did not nourish principles of separation of church and state or freedom of speech or tolerance. […] We remember the criticism of Bolkestein on Fortuyn in 2002 […] But this tactical-political maneuver may not conceal that Bolkestein and Fortuyn- in spite of differences- anyway shared one important issue: the concern about the “orphaned society”, the concern about a moral fundament supporting society, the concern about a tradition of centuries which has resulted in constitutional arrangements which are directly threatened by a culture, that has values that do not fit with these arrangements.”
In the same article Spruyt underlines that Bolkestein is a conservative moralist: “Bolkestein felt a lot of relativism and self-hatred among Dutch intellectuals. And he argued continuously about the regulations of liberal democracy, the rules of the game, the values and norms which keep a society together. He spoke about the moral fundament that liberalism assumes, a fact that liberals always tend to forget, and he spoke about republican or conservative virtues that form this moral fundament. ‘Liberalism has been formulated in a time when moral in a way was the monopoly of the church. A liberal did not want to pose his own moral against this, but wanted to separate church and state. Moral was obvious at that time. The construction of a frame within which virtues can get the emphasis they need, that is the challenge of nowadays liberalism.’”
And together with the Dutch right-wing populist Geert Wilders Spruyt writes in Wilders’ party program Een Nieuw-realistische visie ( A new-realistic approach, on the Wilder/PVV site) : “In the Nineties Frits Bolkestein was one of the few politicians who understood and argued that a liberal society – the constitutional state as well as market liberalism - needs a fundament. According to Bolkestein liberalism has proved its superiority ‘on a political and economic level’, but ‘about the value of liberal culture, which reigns Western societies, there is more doubt.’ The constitutional state as well as economy need a moral basis. ‘And this is not only about freedom, equality and justice, but also, using an old-fashioned word, about virtue […]’ In the classical tradition of liberalism this insight has been formulated by Adam Smith, who wrote not only Wealth of Nations (1776), but also an ethical essay about virtues concerning the question how a free societies is kept together (A Theory of Moral Sentiments). It is necessary, Bolkestein said, to abolish superfluous rules in economic life and to break down moldered corporatist structures. ‘But on a cultural level instability and partitioning are a bigger danger than rigidity, especially because of the arrival of many people with different norms and values. Thus the importance of Christian and humanistic tradition as a binding element for our society .’ “ Spruyt is right to lean on the conservative ideas of Bolkestein. Bolkestein embraces liberal-conservatism and rejects communitarianism as state intervention (“Seen through liberal eyes groups grow en flower spontaneously”) and also the Burke Foundation has, in spite of all moral talk, no communitarian base, as will be shown here later. Bolkestein is the spiritual father of Kinneging. With Kinneging he shares his conservative interest for individual virtues. Bolkestein: “Kinneging argues that communitarians from social and Christian democratic circles put much too much emphasis on ‘social virtues’, solidarity and communal spirit. Solidarity and communal spirit become ‘the alpha and omega of social-political moral’. Of course these virtues are of great importance, but this importance may not be overestimated. Next to ‘social virtues’ there also are ‘individual virtues’ and only in combination with each other they form the condition for a ‘good society’. To be gracious and helpful presumes that one owns something that can be shared. ’If there is no money’, Kinneging says, ‘then there is nothing to be given.’ To earn that money we need in the first place individual virtues, like courage, zeal, inventivity, perseverance, discipline, and frugality. Social capital presumes thus a certain degree of spiritual capital. The individual cannot live without the community, but the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the individual. In a community where everyone is a victim and needs help from the community solidarity does not solve the problems. Community thinkers fail, because the moral void is not the consequence of a shortage of social capital ( that is only a symptom) but must be blamed on the shortage of spiritual capital. According to Kinneging. […] Rightly Kinneging says that the taboo on ‘moral education’ that stems from the Sixties has to be rejected. Kinneging would like to see that ‘moral education’ is conducted in the tradition of cardinal virtues ( courage, moderation, justice and piety) . I [Bolkestein] do not doubt that Kinneging will educate his own children in this tradition. But how can a liberal get others so far? How does a liberal proclaim his moral? Liberalism points to the state and can at the most appeal to public education. But it is a classical liberal dogma that the state needs to be neutral. Practically this neutrality is not easy to maintain, but the state is not the best educator. One can agree with Kinnegings moral crisis of virtues, one can praise his pleading for ‘moral education’, but solutions are lacking right now. “[31] Bolkestein thus agrees with Kinneging’s virtue-offensive, that is dated 1996, even if Bolkestein does not know how Kinneging’s ideas should be brought into practice. Kinneging himself does know how to put his virtue-theory into practice. There really is a connection between private virtues , or the deathly sins ( the opposite thus of virtues) summed up by Kinneging and societal solutions. Kinnegings conservatism is already from the beginning a call for social and juridical coercion, punishment and exclusion. Kinneging quotes Edmund Burke in the important text Het conservatisme: kritiek van de verlichting en de moderniteit (Conservatism: criticism of Enlightenment and Modernity; this article was published in Philosophia Reformata in the autumn of the year 2000, thus shortly before the Burke foundation started, and is also to be found on the website of the Burke Foundation and was written in cooperation with Paul Cliteur): “Self coercion through conscience is the first condition for individual freedom. If the first does not exist the second cannot be. ‘Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters, thus Burke. [32] Without ‘inner control’ human beings are slaves of their passions and emotions. And because many of these emotions are evil and thus bring disorder, fight and destruction[33] it is necessary, as inner control lacks, to maintain ‘outer control’ for order and harmony. What do we concretely mean by ‘outer control’? For ‘outer control’ we have two forms of sources. First the whole system of juridical instruments of order: the state, laws, rules, the army, police, the judiciary system, fines, prisons, and so on. Trough these means the human being is called ‘to order’ , mostly by the plump stimulus of fear of punishment. Next to this there is a broad range of social control that works with more subtle stimuli like reputation, prestige, status and rank. The call ‘to order’ here happens by the wish for a good reputation and fear for a bad reputation.” Burke’s statement “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters” is a very central quote for the attitude of the Burke Foundation. C.B. Macpherson writes about this passage of Burke’s: “Here is the Leviathan state indeed: not merely individual men but the whole mass must be ‘brought to subjection’ “[34] The link between Kinneging’s ethics of virtue and conservative politics lies in revenge. For the sake of revenge Kinneging even goes so far to praise Kant, THE big enlightenment thinker, and to turn him into an anti-Enlightenment conservative: “Kant, who usually is seen as a liberal philosopher of Enlightenment, can, certainly concerning his practical philosophy, better be interpreted as a conservative author, because he is opposing the naturalism of the Enlightenment. This is very obvious in his Metaphysics of Morals, where he describes criminal law as a system of revenge. “
Kinneging presents himself as a strong opponent to Enlightenment, but defines Enlightenment in his very own manner- if Kant suddenly is turned into a conservative thinker. The proportion between liberalism and conservatism in the cocktail of Bolkestein contains somewhat more liberalism and less conservatism than Kinneging’s cocktail, but the differences are not fundamental.
Also about the liberal thinker Adam Smith Kinneging is far from negative in his chapter on Smith in his Geografie van Goed en Kwaad ( Geography of Good and Evil) . But it is striking that Kinneging, who has virtues as his special topic, nowhere mentions Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book that Bolkestein values highly, see above. The reason is probably that Adam Smith is quite positive about the capabilities of human beings to cooperate- a point of view that does not fit Kinneging’s Black–and White/ Good-and –Evil –theory.
With reference to Edmund Burke Kinneging does not find any real opposition between conservatism and market liberalism: “[…] it is not true that conservatism does not value the excellence of the market. To the contrary. Many conservatives are outspoken advocates of free market economy, especially Burke. See his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795) […]. But conservatives have, differing from many liberals, also an eye for the limits and dangers of market thinking. Burke is a spokesman of market economy, but regrets the domination of 'sophists, oeconomists, and calculators'. (See Reflections, p. 169) .”[35]
And Kinneging is right: For different reasons the choice of the pessimistic rationalist Edmund Burke as a name giver for the foundation is a good choice. Burke’s patriarchal, elitist position, his opposition to democratization ( see Bolkestein above) and his sanctioning of the market forces make a rightwing-liberal appeal on him very understandable. Burke is the apologist for the privileged class. Roy Porter: “Laissez-faire economics thus endorsed an inhumane system in which the name of ‘the natural laws’ of market forces – laws which, the politician Edmund Burke proclaimed, were sacred, because they were the ‘laws of God’ “. [36] The social-democrat and political scientist Bart Tromp wrote in a first reaction to Livestro’s proclamation of the “conservative moment” and the strat of the Burke Foundation : “Although Livestro sums up ‘the market’ as one of the threats of his ’core institutions’, he does not mention anything about measurements against these threats. The state, not the market, is the big Satan. In this respect the conservatives in The Netherlands have not chosen a bad name giver.” (Het Parool, 15-2-2001; I would like to add: the welfare state is the Satan to the Burkeans, not the state, M.T.) Bart Tromp refers in his article to the monograph about Burke by Crawford Broderick MacPherson, who wrote about Burke’s ambivalence against the market and Tromp adds: “Burke’s defense of a traditional and hierarchical […] social order went hand in hand with his pleading for a pure capitalistic economy.”
MacPherson writes about Burke en the relationship between conservatism en liberalism: “Karl Marx called Burke “the celebrated sophist and sycophant” and “an out and out vulgar bourgeois” (p.3) “Burke’s preference in the matter of commercial policy was always for free trade “( p. 53) “Burke had no patience with modish talk about ‘the labouring poor’, nor with plans for the relief of the able-bodied poor.” “When the market did not treat the wage-earners well, even to the point that wages were less than bare subsistence, the state should not intervene.” “State regulation of wages or intervention in the labour market, then, was not only useless but was also unjust. It was the rules of commerce that were the ‘principles of justice’. “(p.55, 57, 58) “The crucial point of Burkes political economy was, that accumulations is essential. ‘It is possible only , if the body of the people accept a subordination which generally short-changes them.’ “ (p.61) .”Burke believed as firmly as […] Bentham, that an attack on any established system of property was a threat to every kind of property.” (p.66)
There is a substantial overlap in the ideas of Burke and Bentham, which is interesting in the context of the Burke Foundation, because Paul Cliteur relies heavily on Bentham ( in my opinion Cliteur’s variant of conservatism can better be classified as “utilitarian conservatism” than “historic conservatism”, as Spruyt does.
Criticism of the market can be found in the texts of the Burkeans Spruyt and Kinneging, but is never confirmed with examples or with substantial criticism. It stays abstract and without engagement. And the criticism of the state is exclusively a criticism of the welfare state. In line with Burke’s philosophy. In Edmund Burke a combination can be found of free market ideology and ethics of virtue, which has so much attraction to the Burkeans.
Another Leiden Burke Foundation activist, the scholar at the German department Jerker Spits[37], who has been very active in Dutch and German media writing about Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, defending the Burke director Bart Jan Spruyt as well as the right-wing populist Geert Wilders and the German Nazi jurist and conservative revolutionary Carl Schmitt, argues (in my opinion correctly) that the new ethics of virtue are supported by Edmund Burke: “The Irish statesman Edmund Burke rejected the appeal the Enlightenment did on natural rights of the individual. He stated that freedom has to be accompanied by responsibility and that only the right way of being free means real freedom. Against a ‘negative freedom’ which can degenerate into shamelessness, egoism and arbitrary judgement Burke puts the ‘positive’ freedom of order, ration and virtue. To Burke freedom was necessarily connected to virtue.” (Trouw, 11-8-2004)
Jerker Spits is moderately critical against Kinneging, giving a correct commentary on the tension between Kinneging’s virtue-propaganda and his belief in the market: “There seems to be a gap between Kinneging’s pessimistic, religiously oriented, vision of human beings and his unchangeably clinching at the market principle as an principle of order for society. Kinneging seems to follow Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and seems to believe that private vices can be public benefits. But it is very notable that Kinneging in all other areas defends the opinion that these vices lead society to perdition. One could reproach Kinneging that he, in his negative vision of mankind, makes an exception for entrepreneurs and merchants. The belief that the individual can stay on the right path received a knock in Kinnegings thinking, but his trust in market economy is solid. A contradiction Kinneging does not explain.”
After this well founded criticism Spits passes Kinneging on the political right-hand side by calling on the philosophers of the German Conservative Revolution, who later (2004) are also extensively used politically by Bart Jan Spruyt. Spits: “Further it is notable that on the conservative website, in the middle of many conservative thinkers, the great names of the Conservative Revolution from the Weimar Republic in Germany are missing. While Plato, Seneca, Hugo Grotius, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville en Benjamin Disraeli are chosen as subjects of identification, thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger en Carl Schmitt are left out.” [38] Spits also argues very convincingly that between conservatism and liberalism there is no contradiction, if liberalism is understood “classical”, thus not as “development” ( = social-liberal) liberalism.
Two themes that are recurring in the texts of the Burke Foundation also are the favorites of Frits Bolkestein: the dangers of cultural relativism and the necessary pride in the Dutch culture. Bolkestein does not shrink back from bluntest simplifications: “First out own cultural production lost against African penis sheaths, then the cultural heritage stood in a negative light because it was ‘elitary’. “[39] “A thorough study of other cultures and of our own culture could make insight and judgment possible. Then maybe it would become clear that indeed European culture is superior. And within European culture the Dutch culture has a prominent position. According to Bolkestein it is important that The Netherlands loose their minority complex.”[40]
But: historical insight and knowledge needs to be selective, for Bolkestein and also for the Burke Foundation: only the good things must be remembered, critical self-reflection would weaken the pride and superiority. Criticism is reserved for anything that seems leftish. The own patriotic tradition is by definition a history of heroes. Bolkestein constantly and without reflection appeals to the “superior Western civilization”. Newspaper-editor Eildert Mulder writes critically about Bolkestein’s relationship with history: “I deny him [Bolkestein] the right to appeal to the superior culture of the Renaissance and Erasmus. Last year [in 2001] he was asked to give his opinion on the issue if the West should offer excuses to the people from Suriname and Africa. “I never had a slave”, he said. To be drumming on your own breast for Erasmus, Renaissance and Enlightenment and the same time to pretend that slavery didn’t exist - that is not acceptable.” (Trouw, 23-2-2002)
Summarizing: the question after the role of Frits Bolkestein in the background of the Edmund Burke Foundation is on a more abstract level the question after the relationship between liberalism and conservatism. There is no tension between liberalism and conservatism, if liberalism is cut down to market liberalism.
Paul Cliteur has in 1989 written in an article about the relationship between conservatism and liberalism, for a conference on this topic of his and Bolkestein’s party, the VVD ( Bolkestein also spoke on the topic, with an above quoted article on liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, see quote Rob Hartmans, De Groene Amsterdammer, march 2001) . Interesting in Cliteur’s article, Conservatisme en liberalisme, een poging tot begripsbepaling ( Liberalism en conservatism: an attempt for a definition) , is in the first place that Cliteur already in 1989 likes to define conservatism as the “systemized thinking of Burke” ( p. 12). Also interesting is the fact that he states that in The Netherlands historically there has been a quite big overlap between conservatism and liberalism, and he mentions Thorbecke’s romantic vision on history ( p. 16) . He also sums up the major differences between conservatism and liberalism, concerning the major issues individualism, egalitarianism, universalism and meliorism (that is, institutions can change to the better). What concerns the differences between more liberal-minded Burkeans ( Cliteru, Ellian) and more conservative minded Burkeans (Kinneging, Spruyt, Spits) even in these four issues the differences are small, as will be shown here. Interestingly, in the same article Paul Cliteur characterizes himself very correctly as “simplificateur terrible” and as an essentialist. ( p. 17 f.) and the Burkean simplification of reality and the Platonic essentialism will indeed be a topic in the following.
As Cliteur correctly states, in spite of many differences, historically there has been quite some substantial overlap between conservatism and liberalism and have in history quite some liberal- conservatives turned to Burke. The Dutch historian Von der Dunk writes in his book Conservatisme: “The organic thinking is not only to be found in conservative thinkers. Also within liberalism an organologic vision of the state and society grew, which turns against the atomist and purely quantitative vision on society of the Enlightenment and Revolution and against the idea of the people as sovereign. The French doctrinaires Royer-Collard, Victor Cousin and especially Guizot strive for a state where different organs keep each others in balance [..] And besides, the people as such should be represented by the cultivated and well-to-do upper layer of society. Constitutional monarchy, the ideal of liberalism, was built after the English example and leant on Montesquieu […] and connected in certain ways to Burke’s point of view: entities that keep each others in balance, each with own independent roots and legitimating the top of an in fact centralized rational state. […] Liberalism was in the second half of the 19th century more and more confronted with the dilemma that it had to fight - as a political and humanitarian ideology and as an heir of the 18th-century belief in progress- for the emancipation of the masses, but this way came into conflict with the interests of the upper middle class, who had been the supporter of the liberal movement and who had reached their societal status with the help of this movement.[…] Some liberals even called on Burke, in their argument for a constitutional monarchy and for a slow harmonic growth, which avoided all revolutionary action. And in so far they in practice turned against renewal and against emancipation and thought that the just and best balance had been realized they indeed took a position like Burke in 1790. This way these liberals turned into conservatives.[..] The term liberal-conservatives is thus not unusual.
Liberals show also as conservatives a rational approach to the world and to history, which, fully in the footsteps of Enlightenment philosophy, are seen as products of human beings, a human being who is , because of God’s will, himself a creator of his own destiny; rational being, that should not be protected by groups and corporations, but needs an equal chance. Equal chances then will always lead to different results. Liberals do not know a elite from birth, but they know an elite of performance, which after some time takes on the features of a birth-elite. […] During the 19th century conservatism and liberalism confront each other as two big and fundamental antagonists. Conservatism has its inspiration in monarchial-feudal order and liberalism the bourgeois-urban order with its rationalistic view of the world. The first one is based on a fundamental inequality, human weakness and unchangeable condition, the second one on fundamental equality according to the ideas of Enlightenment, human perfectibility and progress in history. But is were the gradual successes of Enlightenment, it were the changes that the revolution had initiated, that also start binding the liberals at the existing world, and alienate them inconspicuously from their original starting point - with the consequence, that next to feudal-monarchial conservatism […] there also is a conservatism of liberal origin. “ ( p.98f.)
Von der Dunk wrote his book long before the start of the Burke Foundation, but he describes the mechanisms of liberalism growing conservative very well. The Edmund Burke Foundation wants to create a liberal-conservative society, that is a market liberal, Western-superior, Law-and-Order society which combines a self-righteous propaganda for virtues with hedonist consumerism and despise for the lower classes.
And to round up the topic on Frits Bolkestein, the conservative liberal, we can take a closer look on how Bolkestein, the apostle of market liberalism and of virtues, handled both market liberalism and virtues in a practical political situation. Bolkestein gives himself a profile as a moralist and saviour of Western civilization. In this context it is interesting, that he was politically responsible for the fact that Saddam Hussein received chemicals that were used to produce poison gas. Bolkestein did not do anything that was illegal at that time- but he has never taken moral responsibiliity for the fact that Saddam Hussein received chemicals from Holland, and that he, Bolkestein, ( knowing that the chemicals were used to produce poison gas) did nothing to prevent this, and met with Saddam in 1983 a “sympathetical” setting.. [41] Interestingly, Bolkestein himself once said the following about Western hypocrisy: “There are scholars, like Mohammed Arkoun, who accuse Europe of being hypocrite in doing business with corrupt regimes, and at the same time not caring about the population.” (NRC, 11-7-1992) Also interestingly, Bolkestein himself does not find the Western countries in the least responsible for the misery of the countries of the Middle East (de Volkskrant, het betoog, 9-9-2006).
The practical programme of the conservatives was characterized by a great concern for the state of family, societal organizations, school, university, and other institutions conservatives find important for teaching virtues. The journalist Marcel van Hooven (Trouw, 17-2-2001) said: “Antipathy against the spiritual heritage of the sixties was a read thread in the publications and on the website of the Burke Foundation.” In the beginning time of the Foundation, the Foundation sought cooperation with the Dutch reformed ChristenUnie and the Christian democrats. Politicians from both parties were in the beginning taking seat in the advisory board. The Foundation hoped to come to a broad cooperation between secular and non-secular conservatives. But already from the beginning there was a strong tension between Christian conservatives and the Burke Foundation, because the Foundation was neither interested in welfare politics nor in Environmental issues, and was clearly aiming at a “nightwatcher” state with an important role for charity organizations. When the Burke director Bart Jan Spruyt started his cooperation with the Rightwing populist Geert Wilders in 2004, all the Christian conservatives and Dutch reformed ( and some others as well) left the Foundation. In 2002 the new director Bart Jan Spruyt ( he became Burke director in September that year) had said, that conservatism should not become a synonym for Right-wing talk. But two years later he was directly cooperating with a very Right-wing populist.
A major change in the orientation of the Burke Foundation is marked by the “Conservative Manifest”, written by Bart Jan Spruyt and Michiel Visser in 2003. From being a broad conservative think-tank the Foundation now gets a clear political profile. The discourse of conservatism and private virtues now becomes one of Police, Law and Defence. From now on, the new Dutch conservatism shows its face as Right-wing populism, with Burke-director Bart Jan Spruyt’s cooperation with the Right-Winpopulist Geert Wilders (between October 2004 and august 2006) as a logical consequence. In august 2006 the regret about this once chosen direction is great: Former Burke-director ( now secretary) Bart Jan Spruyt ends his cooperation with Geert Wilders, because Wilders did not want to cooperate with the other Right-wing –populists ( for instance, the LPF, Fortuyns party).
The Burke Foundation included three or four different, partly overlapping conservative wings, which Spruyt/Visser describe as sceptical-conservative, historical-conservative and Natural-Law-conservative, with the vision of Cliteur and Kinneging as examples for the latter two. The “sceptical” conservatives (mostly Christian conservatives) all left the Foundation when Spruyt began his official cooperation with Geert Wilders in 2005. But there is a fourth political wing in the Foundation that was not described by Spruyt/Visser: the revolutionary/ neo-conservative wing. Visser and Spruyt themselves belong to this wing, as well as Afshin Ellian, but also Paul Cliteur, who several times advocated a “conservative revolution”. Also the ideas of Kinneging and Jerker Spits are overlapping strongly with neo-conservative ideology.
***The most important Dutch paper NRC wrote on the first page on august 28th, 2006: “The conservative moment is over”. Bart Jan Spruyt, secretary of the Burke Foundation, renounced his cooperation with Geert Wilders, disappointed about Wilders refusal to cooperate with other right-wing-parties. The paper writes: “For the past years, Spruyt has seen regularly moments who could have marked a new movement. For instance the murder on Theo van Gogh […] ‘Everybody knew: something terrible is happening. Dutch politics did not have an answer. It was time for new answers, which we conservatives could provide. But the moment was quickly over […]’. In the same manner, all ‘founding moments’ as Spruyt calls them in English (thereby underlining the neoconservative connotation) passed by and were lost: the murder on Fortuyn, 9/11, Iraq.” In short: the destabilizing moments, which the Burke Foundation wanted to use politically went by –to the regret of the Burkeans. In October Spruyt is hopeful again, stating that he hopes for a conservative moment in the future ( de Volkskrant, 20-10-2006) While it is good news, that Bart Jan Spruyt now renounces his revolutionary ideas and his tie to populism and sees them as a neo-conservative error, this change is nothing worth, as long as Spruyt and his revolutionary colleagues do not thoroughly reflect why and how they went wrong in their reasoning and as long they do not also recognize the very dark history of revolutionary conservatism, especially in the light of German history.
With Spruyts (partial) renunciation the moment has come to make up a balance of the Dutch conservative revolution. Was it all not more than a hype? According to Jos de Beus, professor of Political Science in Amsterdam, the ‘revolution’ has certainly marked all political parties: “The Edmund Burke Foundation for the renewal of conservative thinking has surely influenced and changed the climate of opinion makers […] a right-wing-turn of the opinions […] The frame of the debate today is conservative because the public speakers often use without realizing it, conservative concepts of Evil, Barbary, insecurity, and means of fighting these with order, tradition, and fatherly leadership.” (De Helling 2, 2006, p. 24)
1.2. American connectionsIn many ways the Burke Foundation nourishes an idealized version of American society a la Regan and Bush. The Burke Foundation is cooperating with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), according to Spruyt “a fantastic club of people, with whom the Edmund Burke Foundation a year ago has organized a conference about Islam and the future of Europe”. (Trouw, 27-5-2006) . Bart Jan Spruyt says about the presence of the AEI-Americans ( “The New Atlantic Initiative”) at the Burke –conference in may 2005: “In the circle of American think-tanks the fear is growing that the US will loose Europe as an ally. Europe is Islamizing, they think. For them the fact that Spain elected a social-democratic government in March 2004 is an important proof that Europe is not prepared to force Muslims to adopt Western values and norms.” (NRC, 21-5-2005)
Already in 2001 the Dutchman Kees Heesters, who is working at the AEI, was invited to speak for the Burke Foundation about “compassionate conservatism”. Heesters: “The [neoconservative] idea of pre-emptive strike is of course not a bad idea at all.” [42]
Guido Derksen gives a good summary of the program and the composition of the AEI: “This think tank is full of reborn Christians, Bush-followers, firm antagonists of homosexual marriage, hardcore neocons and hawks. […] For instance Karl Zinsmeister, assistant of George W. Bush, and Lynne Cheney, vice-president Dick Cheney’s wife. Or David Frum, former textwriter for George W. Bush. And the archconservatives Newt Gingrich and eanne Kirkpatrick […] Also employed at the AEI: Michael Ledeen, who was involved in the deliverance of weapons to Iran. And Richard Pearle, nickname ‘prince of darkness’, former minister of defence under Ronald Reagan, and one of the architects of the Iraq-war. Another interesting colleague is Charles Murray. He published in 1994 with Richard Herrnstein The Bell Curve; Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life . In this controversial study Murray explains that there is scientific evidence that there are ethnical and racial differences in intelligence. According to Murray, black people are on average less intelligent than whites. He also argues, that people belong to the lower classes because of less intelligence and not because of racial or social discrimination.” (de Volkskrant, 30-8-2006)
Dr. Sally Statel, psychiatrist at he AEI wants stricter criteria for Iraq-veterans with war trauma with respect to diagnosis, less benefits, and treatment for reintegration. Algemeen Dagblad, 30-1-2006)
Ben Wattenberg of he AEI has already in 1990 written an interesting book The First Universal Nation. “Memorize one thing about our striving: a uni-polar world is good idea under the condition that Amerika is the ‘uni’”. ( NRC 1-11-1990)
Also Dinesh D'Souza, author of The End of Racism (1995) belonged to the AEI. “The precarious position of especially the black under class is according to him the consequence of moral slackness and social dysfunction. It is not racism or discrimination, not lack of good housing, jobs or schools. The source of all evil is according to The End of Racism the theory of cultural relativism, as formulated by Franz Boas (1858-1942).(NRC 9-12-1995) . The echo of these opinions one encounters in Kinneging and Cliteur, the latter is also attacking Boas as the father of all evil multiculturalism [43] D'Souza is one of the new generation of neoconservatives who want to boost discussion with controversial statements and books. The Leiden Burkeans walk in his footsteps. ***Cliteur quotes D'Souza with consent, in the footsteps of Pim Fortuyn, because D'Souza is very positive of the anti-decadence discourse of the Islamic fundamentalists.[44] The anti-decadence discourse is one of the many common areas of Islamic and neoconservative fundamentalists.
The Dutch neocons also walk in the footsteps of the prominent intellectual Robert Bork (70), connected to the AEI and obsessed about the generation of the sixties. In his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) he accuses this generation of degeneration and of the decadence of Western culture he is sensing – like the Leiden Burkeans whose main object of aggression is the decadence and the generation of the baby-boomers. Also Irving Kristol, author of Neoconservatism. Autobiography of an idea (1995) and quoted with applause by Bart Jan Spruyt was verbonden aan het AEI.[45]
Conservatives from the AEI oppose to the multilateral contracts and agreements and to the United Nations. After 9/11 it were voices from the AEI that came with the idea , that Al Qu’da en Saddam were cooperating and that for this reason Saddam must be defeated. Laurie Mylroie from the AEI claimed that Saddam was nothing more than a con-man of Bin Laden….
Michael Ledeen, author of The war against the terror masters is one of the AEI-prophets and a real revolutionary. About the Iraq-war he says: “Stability is a goal unworthy America.” “This war might be war to redesign the world” ( NRC 22-3-2003)
***The AEI is the planning institute for radical neo-conservatism. Especially about tax policies and foreign affairs there is a lot of optimistic planning. The ideology that […] stated that the war against Iraq was desirable, ethical, militarily a minor deal, and politically a great chance always came from the coffee mornings of the AEI (NRC, 23-4-2003)
Still the Americans were up until now less negative about Islam than the Burke Foundation. A general stigmatizing judgement about Islam as a religion, as in Ellian and Cliteur, is not easy found in the US. David Frum of the AEI: “[….] you have to ask yourself: is the warfare we conduct, a fight of the West against the East, of Christianity against Islam, or: is this not a fight of freedom and individuality against suppression? I am afraid that Europe is fixating itself on Islam. I think that the American and European perspective do not connect.” (NRC 2-4-2005) Maybe the fact that Ayaan Hirsi Ali started to work at the AEI is a sign, that also the AEI wants to change into the direction of a more general hostility against Islam, especially now they need an excuse why the war on Iraq was not really a great idea.
Bart Jan Spruyt and Michiel Visser ( also board member of the Foundation) had given their full support to American neo-conservative idea’s and to the Iraq-war in an article with the heading America is bombing the Evil on April 19th, 2003 .[46] Also Afshin Ellian is aggressively defending the Iraq-war and George W. Bush, who, according to Ellian “has seen the light”[47]. Ellian: “Our intellectuals must understand as soon as possible, that the present problems are not made Bush cum suis.”[48] Paul Cliteur defended the Iraq-war, because, according to him, the US, as a superpower, are the ones who have to handle the sword of Justice. (Marcel van Dam, de Volkskrant, 2-4-2003) . Might is right, is his position.
***In the meanwhile the Iraq-war has turned out to be a catastrophe. No reason for Ellian to be critical of Bush and the AEI, but a reason for him to argue that Europe has to dismantle the welfare state in order give military support to the US in their staging of a “Clash of civilizations’. (NRC 14-10-2006)
***Henk Hofland, since 50 years commentator in important Dutch papers, regularly living in New York and one of the intellectuals, who, according to Ellian “ just do not want to understand, that our current problems are not cause by Bush sum suis”, writes: ”What has Bush done so far, while saving the world? Neglected one war, so it has to be fought once again, staged the next with lies and let it degenerate in a violent chaos, allowing a training camp for terrorists to develop, built a concentration camp that would not fit a dictatorship, evaded the convention of Geneva, made the Middle-East a pool of Anti-Americanism, fragmentised the Atlantic alliance, ended the political life of his best friend Tony Blair sooner that necessary, undermined the American constitutional state, supported stealthily the fruitless and destroying war in Lebanon, and finally, as a consequence of all this, divided America as deep as it has not been since Watergate. […] The American president is a megalomaniac animated by religion.”( De Groene Amsterdammer, 22-9-2006) One week later Hofland writes about the “Neoconservative International”, the international connection of the Burke Foundation: ”The fairy tales that Bush c.s. have invented were seducing. The Saviour Of The World had a strange mixture of supporters, a Neoconservative International, which distinguished themselves by a very simplified view of the world […] Besides it very superficial concept of the world the Neoconservative International is characterized by its big mouth. Whoever does not agree with their vision was according to them naïve, soft, or hauling secretly with the enemy. […] In the Netherlands the Neoconservative International is represented by a group of world reformers like Afshin Ellian, Leon de Winter and a couple of conservative think tankers.” (De Groene Amsterdammer, 29-9-2006)
The Leiden political scientists Huib Pellikaan en Sebastiaan van der Lubben write: “What connects Dutch neo-conservatives with their American antipodes is especially the idea of a ‘clash of civilizations’ and the policy against Iraq. They differ from the Americans with respect to the relationship between state and church. The American neoconservatives in the Bush-government handle Christian belief explicitly as the basis of their actions. Dutch neoconservatives on the other hand are limping on two thoughts. They are starting from an absolute moral frame of reference, but they are not looking for a basis in Christian dogma. The absolutism they defend is rather based on political philosophy like Plato’s Politeia. Christian dogma is not rejected, but Dutch neocons are looking for a secular moral absolutism.” [49] It has to be added that the Dutch neocons do differ in their attitude against Christianity from positive (Spruyt, Kinneging) to very hostile (Cliteur) , but the binding factor between them is moral absolutism based on Plato. This again, does in fact connect them with he American neocons - via Leo Strauss .
1.3. Neoconservatives at Leiden UniversityIn 2004 and 2005 at the Leiden Law Faculty three men who are connected to the neo-conservative Burke Foundation were appointed professors. “You do get the impression that we have here [at the Leiden Law Faculty] an office of the Burke Foundation”, says the Leiden Law Philosopher Labuschagne ( who himself is tied – looselely - to the Burke Foundation) . “Not everybody is happy about this.”[50] Recently a young graduate at Leiden University’s German department connected to the Burke Foundation has aggressively promoted neo-conservative and anti-Islamic ideas in the Dutch and German media. Two more men are important to the neoconservative ideology in Leiden: Bart Jan Spruyt, the former director of the Burke Foundation, holds a PhD in Theology from Leiden. And the VVD-politician Frits Bolkestein, who can be considered as the “spiritual father” of some of the Burke members and, especially, of Dutch Islamophobia, is now professor of Political Science in Leiden. 1.3.2. Andreas Kinneging, professor of Philosophy of Law at Leiden UniversityKinneging is one of the initiators and the chairman of the Burke Foundation. In a recently published book, Kinneging presents his ideas concerning freedom of speech. According to Kinneging, the freedom to express one's opinion must be used to insult others and to polarize society. Kinneging is a professor of Law, but he is not able to make a difference between a legal or humanitarian judgement of an issue. His logic is that if law does not prohibit something, then it is automatically desirable. I do not find it desirable that problems in society are solved by legal procedures. This is why I find it very important that one disagrees explicitly if another person makes a hostile statement that insults minorities. Kinneging says that one can allow polemics because one knows that in the long run all opinions will be expressed and will compensate one another. So, if somebody makes a hostile statement, according to Kinneging, we all can sit and wait for the natural process of compensating opinions. I say that we cannot sit and wait: we have to defend others who are insulted. Cooperation and peace will not be achieved if we are encouraged to express freely polarizing and insulting opinions. Kinneging says that he finds it excellent if someone says to be happy about the fact that Theo van Gogh was murdered! (Keeping in mind that Kinneging is teaching at a Law School…) In 2005 also Kinnegings book Geografie van Goed en Kwaad was published, where Kinneging is opposing both Enlightenment and Romanticism. He is promoting an antique doctrine of virtues and an old-fashioned patriarchal family life. The word “hypocrisy” is not to be found in Kinneging's book. It seems as though he has never heard of the fact that people build up a virtuous façade and hide behind it. This professor of law does not reflect upon the fact that many murderers have had fulfilling marriages and family lives, and loved to give speeches about moral and family (taking nazi's and communists into consideration). In Kinnegings book no reflection can be found on the fact that a great deal of both physical and mental abuse is taking place in families. The institution of family for many people, especially woman and children, never was nor will be a “harbour in a heartless world” (Kinnegings heading). Kinneging's defense of a patriarchal family with a double moral (he points out that it is more important to be faithful in marriage for women than for men) is in fact a very bad defense of family values. Kinneging does not value subjectivity and self-reflection - highly valued traits since the Enlightenment. The conscience he promotes is therefore not more than an uncritical acceptance of norms that have been formulated and enforced by others. Kinneging asks for self-control instead of self-reflection; he wants external direction instead of internal direction. He hates Romanticism, which he (rightly) considers as a child of Enlightenment. Kinneging neglects the fact that Romanticism contains the necessary criticism of Enlightenment and actually offers the understanding of the “dark side” of human existence. Romanticism has corrected the over-optimistic view the enlightenment had of human nature. Romanticism offers what Kinneging does not: a sceptical view of mankind combined with the awareness of the necessity of an infinite quest for the truth. Romantic (and modern) thinking does not offer a seemingly “certain truth”, but rather inspires a complex quest for the truth. One major achievement of romanticism is the promotion of the concept of irony. Kinneging does not have an ounce of irony in himself, and he tries to replace Romanticism with false securities and a closed society. Kinneging writes that he considers himself a “convert”. From having been a non-religious economic right-wing politician he became a fundamentalist Christian. I can certainly understand that his former strict economic thinking can easily lead to a feeling of existential emptiness. What a pity that Kinneging seeks the truth in Christian fundamentalism as an alternative to economic thinking, and is not interested in a secularized and individualized Christianity that has a very strong historical tradition in the Dutch religious liberal “vrijzinnigheid” and is in opposition to Enlightenment and Romanticism.
1.3.3. Afshin Ellian, professor of Social Coherence at Leiden UniversityEllian is known as one of the honourable members of the Burke-Foundation. I discovered his connection to the foundation by a photograph on the website of the foundation showing Ellian together with the director, Bart Jan Spruyt. Ellians appointment as a Leiden Law professor was a big surprise even for his close colleagues at the Law Faculty and was decided on behind the scenes. The Amsterdam politicologist Menno Hurenkamp: “Ellian is professor of social cohesion and multicultural society. But he has not published about this topic in the academic world , and very little about other topics. ”[51] Ian Buruma who has met with Ellian a couple of times has given an extensive account of Ellian and his idea’s in his book Murder in Amsterdam: “[…] This thirty-nine-year-old scholar, born in Tehran, acquired the “dangerous hobby” of writing a newspaper column that is harshly critical of political Islam. [In fact, many of Ellian’s columns are critical of Islam general, M.T.] Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he is seen by some as a dangerous agitator, and by others as a hero who arrived from the Muslim world to shake the Dutch from their deep sleep. This is what he believes: Citizenship of a democratic state means living by the laws of a country. A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes at divine laws trump those made by man. The fruits of the European Enlightenment must be defended, with force if necessary. It is time for the Muslims to be enlightened, too . European intellectuals, in their self-hating nihilism and utopian anti-Americanism, have lost the stomach to fight for Enlightenment values. The multicultural dream is over. The West, except for the U.S., is too afraid to use its power. The European welfare state is a disastrous, patronizing system, that treats people like patients. The Dutch government must act to protect those who criticize Islam. No religion or minority should be immune to censure or ridicule. The solution to the Muslim problem is a Muslim Voltaire, a Muslim Nietzsche- that is to say, people like ‘us, the heretics- me, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.’ The tone of his columns is sometimes strident, even shrill. Person, Ellian is more humorous, but his wit is barbed, and can be sarcastic in the somewhat heavy manner of a Marxist pamphleteer. Ellian was once a man of the far left, a member of the Tudeh party in Iran. […] Under the roly-poly demeanor and the dry chuckle runs a hard current of anger. In a television program broadcast hours after the murder of Van Gogh, Ellian couldn’t contain himself when a Moroccan-Dutch writer expressed the view that Bouyeri’s deed could not be explained by Islam alone, and pointed to the general “polarization” of Dutch society. Jabbing his finger at the an like an interrogator, Ellian shouted, that Bouyeri has gone to the mosque, had an imam, had read the Koran- “He murdered in the name of a perverted prophet!”[52] “When, on one occasion in 2005, Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, refused to use his riot police to crush a small but noisy demonstration during a public memorial to the victims of slavery, as a result of which, Rita Verdonk, the minister of integration, was unable to complete her speech, Ellian pulled out all the stops. Amsterdam, he ranted, had shown no tolerance for ‘dissidents’. By dissidents he meant people like Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and himself. Amsterdam, he continue, had become a ‘free city for Muslim terrorists, left-wing extremists and organized crime…After the dissidents, it is now the turn of the ministers to be barred from the city. As long as the citizens of Amsterdam are unable to bring about a political earthquake and get rid of the socialist mafia, nothing will change.’”And Buruma adds: ”Shades here, perhaps, of the old radio propagandist in Kabul.”[53] The biologist Ronald Plasterk says about Ellian: “Afshin Ellian, rightly, made a name for himself as an expert critic of the Iranian regime, which he knew from the inside. Then something went wrong. He took the role upon himself of the ultra-right-wing critic of the soft multi-culti left: the foreign lapdog of the right. And when he can’t find the soft left, he will make it up In doing so, he adopts a tone that does not exist among Dutch writers.” [54] Plasterk’s remarks about “the lapdog of the right” sounds too harsh, if one does not know the cooperation between Ellian and his protector and mental father Paul Cliteur. While Cliteur considered it nt safe enough for himself to continue criticizing Islam harshly,[55] he promoted Ellian, who took over Cliteur’s role as the national Islam-basher. Ellian and Cliteur are men with the deepest conviction, that freedom of speech is the freedom to insult. Ellian generalizes and stigmatises the Islamic faith with his daring statement: “Islam is nothing more than a structural misfit dominating all aspects of education, culture, economics, politics and manners for already 1400 years. It resembles plague: where there is Islam, there also is poverty, failing development, illiteracy, oppression, corruption, frustration and especially: violence.” Ellian loves to call his enemies “nihilist”. Both Ellian and his colleague Cliteur (see below) assume that multiculturalists do not have any values. If one calls me a nihilist, I would not totally disagree, although I consider myself a nihilist with values. I do not believe that values exist objectively outside myself. Reminiscent of Camus I deeply believe in the absurdity of human existence and I find a revolting attitude necessary, an attitude also based on human solidarity. This attitude is not founded on anything else than on a serious subjectivity, that questions itself constantly. Any attitude that finds final solutions and truth is potentially dangerous and dogmatic. Afshin Ellian asks: “Why should people show solidarity? Which person or God has given order, that we must show solidarity?” My answer: there is no order for solidarity. Exactly because there is no God, we humans must show solidarity. We have nobody else who can help us. And behind all solidarity the awareness can be found, that nobody is talented, successful and so on from his or her own power. If you are successful, you have always been given help and solidarity from others. You have been lucky and therefore you want others to be lucky as well. But according to Ellian solidarity with the poor and weak is nothing more than “petting slaves”. Ellian's rejection of religion, his simultaneous religious and mystical reverence for the state and his predator-mentality raise both questions and fear. Ellian is a polemist- that is in itself not a ground for criticism. Ellian trespasses the rules of good polemics however, when he denied the mayor of Amsterdam (Job Cohen) his human dignity. He did this in a newspaper column in August 2005. Devaluing Cohen, Ellian claims to speak in the spirit of Desmond Tutu and the principle of Ubuntu. Ellian severely abuses the Ubuntu principle. As the South-African writer Antije Krog has pointed out, Ubuntu means, that - in order to heal as a human community - the community can and even must forgive a murderer. Ellian uses Ubuntu to devalue others who are far away from having committed any crime.
Ellian also pleads for a Dutch version of Guantanamo Bay, and “administrative detention”. 1.3.4. Paul Cliteur, Professor of the Philosophy of Law at Leiden UniversitySe also www.passagenproject.com/cleveringaengels.html
Paul Cliteur has been a member of the council of advisors for the Burke Foundation since 2001, he appears and speaks at meetings of Pim Fortuyn’s party LPF. Cliteur's radical and militant version of enlightened thinking (enlightened fundamentalism) seems to be very different from the contempt his Burke-colleague Kinneging has for the Enlightenment. These two professors however, have a great deal in common. The core of Cliteur's thinking is a criticism of decadence (the title of one of his recent books being: Against decadence). With his harsh, almost absurd criticism of persons as “decadent”, he is in full agreement with Kineging. On the other hand, Kinneging is not negative about the technological progress that came with Enlightenment. He even chose - for the cover of his book Geografie van Goed en Kwaad - a painting by a modern scientist. Technological and scientific progress has been inseparable from philosophical and religious progress (for a highly regarded illustration of the complexities of the interaction of technological, religious and scientific progress, see Bertolt Brecht's Galilei). For the parallel between Cliteur and Kinneging: Cliteur is not positive about all aspects of Enlightenment. Cliteur ( like Kinneging) is not positive at all about critical thinking or of opposing against higher authorities. He clearly prefers authoritarian Enlightenment above critical Enlightenment, and he says to prefer Frederik the Great ( who said that everyone must seek happiness in his own way) above Kant's challenge for critical thinking. Frederic the Great really was religiously tolerant - but in that respect the anti-Islamic Cliteur is certainly not a follower of Frederic! “God doesn't like free spirit!” Cliteur states as the title of one of his books, although it is not God who doesn't like free spirit- it is Cliteur himself! In his book about God and free-spiritedness Cliteur says that Jesus is inferior as a teacher of wisdom to Buddha, Socrates, Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi. Jesus would certainly refuse to compete with others in wisdom, and as for Jesus and Albert Schweitzer: what is Albert Schweitzer if not a follower of the very practical teachings of Jesus? Kinneging, Ellian and Cliteur condemn the open society. Kinneging because he wants to go back to a patriarchal world, Ellian and Cliteur because they want a monocultural, closed society. Karl Popper ends his important book The open society and its enemies ( a book that is very critical against Platonism - this book is only mentioned in a short footnote in Kinneging's Platonist book) with the words: “We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. [...] we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic. [...] the more we return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely we do arrive at the Inquisiton [...] . There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way- we must return to the beasts. [...] But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into open society. We must go into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure [...]”[56] Courage is necessary, Kinneging says rightly. The open society requires courage, and citizens are more courageous in a society that offers them material security. The monocultural society that the Burke-Foundation wants, creates material insecurity and compensates this with the suggestion of cultural and moral unity and security.
1.3.5. A young neo-conservative ideologist at the Leiden German institution: Jerker Spits
(the following is a summary of Eric Krebber’s Dutch article on Jerker Spits, see http://www.gebladerte.nl/11148f73.htm)
The Germanist Jerker Spits at Leiden University is a supporter of the Burke Foundation, and is promoting Hitler’s ideological ancestors in his publications.
Next to his research at Leiden University Germanist Jerker Spits publishes regularly enthusiastic articles about the conservative revolutionaries who have built the ideological foundation for Nazism. According to Krebbers, Spits is fighting everything that is progressive or democratic. In Germany Spits is publishing in neo-conservative papers like Junge Freiheit and Sezession. These papers are promoting a neo-conservative revolution. Spits praises the “courage” of Geert Wilders ( the Dutch right-wing-populist) whom he calls ”the hope of all opponents of migration“. Spits also promotes the political opinions of the former director of the Burke Foundation, Bart Jan Spruyt. German courts have repeatedly stated that the paper Junge Freiheit, where Spits has published more than 50 articles, is fighting democracy and is publishing discriminating articles. According to the court (Oberverwaltungsgericht, a higher administrative court) this paper is publishing anti-Semitic articles where the author speaks contemptuously about the victims of the holocaust. Jerker Spits is fervently anti- Islam. He is also a great fan of Ernst Jünger, German “conservative revolutionary” and fanatical worshipper of war. Ironically, Jünger himself is also worshipped by young radical Moslims. [57] Spits also admires Jünger’s less well-known brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger. “Friedrich Georg Jünger wrote in an essay Krieg und Krieger ( War and Warriors) that Germany had lost the Great War because it had become to much “part of the West by taking on such Western values as ‘civilization, freedom, and peace.’ “[58]. Buruma/Margalit show the structural connection between the argumentation of the German conservative revolutionaries, nowadays neo-conservatives and radical Moslims: ”Some of the rhetoric now coming from the United States, especially in neoconservative circles, comes close to this vision […] “ (p. 59) Buruma/Margalit also write about the responsibility conservative revolutionaries had for the fall of Weimar republic: “The Weimar republic did not fall only because of Nazi brutality […]. It also fell because too few people were prepared to defend it.” (p.73)
[Extra: anti-Semitism at the Leiden German department Many issues that I have discussed in my German research[59] are also important in the context of my research about dogmatism/ fundamentalism. For instance, the refusal at Leiden to allow a debate about the play Passage ( not only the responsible professor at the German institution, prof Anthonya Visser, refused a debate, also the University administration up to the top was well-informed about the conflict, did even actively intervene to censor my final paper at the German department, and did not allow a debate about the play. Also the question of objectivity/ subjectivity that was raised by me (and I have corresponded about this with the Leiden rector Breimer) is important even in the discussion about fundamentalism. Thirdly, my broad discussion about the Passage-author Christoph Hein was deeply involved with an analysis of his fundamentalism. I can show in detail, that this DDR-author is an old-fashioned communist and at the same time an old-testament-style Christian fundamentalist. I can also show that there is a close relationship between the work and the thinking of Christoph Hein and the writings of the Jewish Zionist Max Nordau, author of Entartung ( Degeneration, 1892/93) . Passage is even a direct model of Max Nordau’s “degeneration”-theory. ( For people not familiar with funndamentalist Zionism, it may seem strange that I have claimed that Passage is an anti-Semitist play. But Max Nordau was positive about anti-Semitism. As a social-Darwinist he considered anti-Semitism as a good way to get rid of weak and “degenerate” Jews).
In my German research I had already established - for the play Passage - the close relationship between communist literature (“ socialist realism”) , Christian fundamentalism, and fundamentalist Zionism, when I noticed that the fact that a discussion about all these issues was abolished in Leiden, was no coincidence. Many of the neo-conservative ideas of the Leiden intellectuals are mirroring Max Nordau’s ideas about “degeneration”. And it is also no coincidence, that one of the Leiden publicly active neo-conservative intellectuals also is a researcher at the German institution.]
1.3.6. Burke director and secretary Bart Jan SpruytThe former director ( now secretary) of the Burke Foundation, Bart Jan Spruyt, is –besides his friendship and bonds with the Leiden Law professors- also connected to Leiden University by his Leiden PhD in theology (1996). As an active lecturer in the Burkean “shadow-university” he is teaching many (Leiden) students and leading them into conservative paths (still in August 2006) .
Spruyt is a classical protestant fundamentalist. He defends the Dutch protestant fundamentalist party SGP ( he was closely associated to this party; spoke at their congresses etc.) , and this party’s policy to refuse woman the right to be elected. Almond/Appleby/ Sivan describe nowadays heirs to protestant fundamentalism. Their description applies directly to Bart Jan Spruyt and his philosophy, and to the neo-conservative philosophy of the Burke Foundation: “[…] By the 1960’s the heirs to Protestant fundamentalism began to view the danger as much broader, as coming from a more alluring and external force- secularism, later called secular humanism ( or scientific humanism) , a full-fledged alternative to religion per se. This social force, said to be predicated upon the twin doctrines of atheism and evolution as well as upon an amoral way of life appealing to humanity’s baser instincts (permissiveness, promiscuity, pornography, feminism, etc.) seemed to have usurped cultural hegemony. By controlling the media and the educational establishment and wielding influence upon the intrusive federal government, secular humanism was spreading its facile credo into every nook and cranny and drawing in the naive masses.” (p. 26) 1.3.7. In the background : prof.dr. Frits Bolkestein
The former EU-politician, former European Union competition commissioner and now Leiden professor Bolkestein was first in Holland to create a frontal opposition between Islam and Enlightenment. He is closely
(but not directly) connected with the Burke Foundation. He has his office in
Leiden in the new Law building next to Kinneging, Ellian en Cliteur – this is
remarkable, because his chair belongs to the faculty of Political Science,
and this faculty is located in a different building. Bolkestein, anti-sixties-ideologist, islamophobic , and according to some even a white-collar racist[60] is the spiritual father of Kinneging. In his new book Grensverkenningen Bolkestein writes that he, Kinneging and Cliteur met regularly in the years 1999 and 2000, reading and discussing books ( for instance Burke). [61] Also Ellian is mentioned with emphasis in Bolkesteins book. [62]
Bolkestein is also the spiritual father of Geert Wilders. Wilders belongs to the so-called “class of Bolkestein”, young people in the party who brainstormed with the former party leader Bolkestein about topics that should be put on the political agenda. Wilders regularly wrote the - often polemic - speeches for Bolkestein. It is a strange thing, that Andreas Kinneging, who also wrote speeches for Bolkestein in about the same time period, says in a recent interview that he does not know Wilders personally. Wilders wrote speeches for Bolkestein like Kinneging, belonged to he same party, same generation and same right-wing part of the party. It is no coincidence that Bolkestein is cited extensively in Wilders new party program ( “A new-realistic vision”) …( It is worth mentioning that there is a third writer of Bolkestein’s speeches who also was an important member of the Burke Foundation: Joshua Livestro)
Already in September 1991 Bolkestein had published an hostile article about Islam and was accused of being a racist. He said that he could not see an equality between the West-European culture and Islam. Bolkestein claimed that he was putting the minority issue on the agenda, but many found that he was trying to get votes and to let the Muslims know, that there culture had a questionable nature. According to the Leiden professor of Islamology Sjoerd van Konigsveld there has been for quite some time a lobby who would like to remove all Muslims from the Netherlands and who see them as a danger to society. “First there were racists like Janmaat [a political right-wing racist in the 1990’s] . But then someone like Bolkestein picked up this thread. He sees Islam as a problem, exaggerates the importance of separate Islamic schools, and is suggesting that Islam cannot be integrated in Western society.” (Trouw, 12-8-1992) Bolkestein spoke in Leiden at the opening of courses at the University of Leiden 2004.[63] Christopher Caldwell wrote in the Weekly Standard about Bolkestein’s speech: “Days before the third anniversary of 9/11, Frits Bolkestein of the Netherlands, the outgoing European Union competition commissioner, caused an uproar when he mentioned Lewis's remark in the course of an address at the opening of courses at the University of Leiden. […] [Bolkestein] warned that the (projected) addition of 83 million Muslim Turks would further the Islamization of Europe. It was this part of his speech--in which he referred to Lewis's projections--that made headlines around the world: "Current trends allow only one conclusion," Bolkestein said. "The USA will remain the only superpower. China is becoming an economic giant. Europe is being Islamicized."” [64] Bolkestein opposed the EU-membership of Turkey. Also, he spoke about the migration streams from South to North, and he cited Bernard Lewis, who had said “Europe will be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb. ” [65] Bolkestein adds: “I don’t know if it will go that fast, but if Lewis is right, than the liberation of Vienna in 1683 was in vain.” These words were not meant as a joke, as it turned out two months later, when he spoke on television on November 7th 2004, a few days after the murder of Theo van Gogh. “As somebody ‘who has been under German occupation’ Bolkestein finds it a big worry, that the Muslims will soon be the biggest population group in the big cities. This makes him feel “intimidated’ and ‘un-free’ “Bolkestein also said, in the same interview, that the term “holy war” [against militant Muslims] is very suitable . [!] This interview took place a few days after the murder of Theo van Gogh, when the danger of a negative spiral of violence was obvious. Bolkestein found it necessary to make such a tasteless and indecent comparison between the Muslim population and the German occupation. Observe: it is Dutch citizens he is describing here as the enemy… One year later Bolkestein said on television: “Soon we will have [in Holland] an elected mayor. That means that we could get an Islamite mayor. And then to think that mayor Job Cohen wants the mayor to remain the head of the police!” (Het Parool, 22-12-2005) Bolkestein thus implied that the Amsterdam alderman Ahmed Aboutaleb, a believing Muslim, is unfit is a mayor. “A considerable blunder” Aboutaleb himself commented. ( Frits Abrahams, NRC 12-9-2006)
Ian Buruma: “Like Afshin Ellian, Bolkestein frets about European weakness. That is why he worries about the possibility of Turkey, with its 68 million Muslims, joining the European Union. For it would, in his view, spell the end of Europe, not as a geographical entity, but as a community of values born of the Enlightenment.”[66]
Bolkestein has had “national identity” “common inspiration” and “common fate” written on his flag for a long time. He considers the “dilution” of the nation as a big risk. Joshua Livestro, who started the Burke Foundation together with Kinneging, en who also is mentioned a couple of times in Bolkesteins Grensverkenningen describes Bolkestein as a predecessor of the Burke Foundation. He says that the base of the conservative “renaissance” has been laid in the past ten years by Kinneging and Bolkestein.
Bolkestein has been polemic against Fortuyn, but it is a fact that Fortuyn has only taken Bolkesteins main ideas and developed them further. “Fortuyn, and before him Bolkestein have opened the door for a group of conservative-liberal intellectuals, who have formed a critical mass and have dominated the debate.” “Bolkestein made a vision of politics acceptable that later was to become dominant with people as Fortuyn, Hirsi Ali, Ellian and Cliteur.” Also Bart Jan Spruyt sees Fortuyn as Bolkesteins mental son: “[..] ‘the orphan society’ : this is a Fortuyn quote, but he only said the same as former VVD-leader Bolkestein. The Dutch minister of Justice, Piet Hein Donner, also rightly sees the connection between Fortuyn and Bolkestein: “They [Fortuyn and Bolkestein] are setting u people against each other. Bolkestein in some ways , too. His message was all the time: we have to defend ourselves against Islam.” (Vrij Nederland, 16-9-2006)
Bolkestein spoke in the ‘90ies about the ‘inspiring bond’ for society. As a ‘cultural conservative’ - as Bolkestein called himself- he stated that there was a shortage of ‘spiritual capital’ [the strange Calvinistic term ‘spiritual capital’ also comes back in Kinnegings work, M.T.]. Future generations must therefore learn an understanding of classical virtues.[cf. Kinneging, M.T.] He said that it was ‘a challenge for nowadays liberalism’ to build a frame “where virtues get the emphasis they need.’”
Bolkestein as well as Fortuyn (and the Burkeans) anchor political differences in the “nature” of things and proclaim these as “moral truths” of a universal civilization. They claim the separation of church and state or of religion and politics as an essential achievement of liberal-democratic culture, without taking into account the different historical and national forms in which this separation has appeared. The effect of this point of view is, that one specific variant of this separation, the most harsh and principal variant, which is mirroring the French anticlerical tradition of laïcité , is announced as a universal binding norm, and other less harsh variants appear by definition to be minor.[67]
Dutch liberal politicians did scorn Bolkestein seriously. “He was the first to put emphasise to purely Dutch interests, so Fortuyn could use the chauvinistic feelings that arouse. Bolkestein was the one who let he spirit out of the bottle.” [68] Bolkestein himself is happily satisfied about the polarized debate in the Netherlands. “In Holland now everything an be said. We put everything on the table, without reserve. It is kind of raw, brutal. Well, you can call that the ruins after Fortuyn.“ This almost sounds as if Bolkestein is critical about the new tone of the debate. But this is not the case. Recently he again expressed his satisfaction with the new political incorrectness. ( de Volkskrant, 17-8-2006)
Ian Buruma quotes Bolkestein in his new book Murder in Amsterdam. Bolkestein: “One must never underestimate the degree of hatred that Dutch people feel for Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. My political success is based on the fact that I was prepared to listen to such people.” Buruma says that this is a remarkable statement.[69] With this quote Bolkestein underlines that he is exploiting political resentments. In that respect he must be considered as a populist. Bolkestein denies that he has said what Buruma quoted, but Buruma is sure that he wrote down exactly what Bolkestein has said. Buruma adds: “Bolkestein recently wrote in an article that Islamite children cannot sing Santa Claus songs. I find this an absolute trivial issue. You can accept people as citizens if they do not conform to the cultural image that you have about yourself. The idea, that anybody who isn’t conforming is not one of the club I find worrying. “(NRC, 16-9-2006)
It honours Bolkestein that he sought contact and dialogue with liberal Muslims like Mohammed Arkoun. But Arkoun is critical against Western intellectuals like Bolkestein. In his dialogue with Bolkestein he says: “This is a reproach in the direction of the liberal intellectual: he is denying his critical-intellectual task for ideological polemics in a anti-Eastern coat […] .”[70] Bolkestein constantly and without reflection appeals to the “superior Western civilization”. Trouw-editor Eildert Mulder: “I deny him [Bolkestein] the right to appeal to the superior culture of the Renaissance and Erasmus. Last year [in 2001] he was asked to give his opinion on the issue if the West should offer excuses to the people from Suriname and Africa. “I never had a slave”, he said. To be drumming on your own breast for Erasmus, Renaissance and Enlightenment and the same time to pretend that slavery didn’t exist - that is not acceptable.” (Trouw, 23-2-2002)
In his research Bolkestein is looking at the role which intellectuals play in politics. This is interesting, because I happen to research the same topic, and to look at Bolkesteins intellectual role in politics. Bolkestein gives himself a profile as a moralist and saviour of Western civilization. In this context it is interesting, that he was politically responsible for the fact that Saddam Hussein received chemicals that were used to produce poison gas. Bolkestein did not do anything that was illegal at that time- but he has never taken moral responsibiliity for the fact that Saddam Hussein received chemicals from Holland, and that he, Bolkestein, did nothing to prevent this, and met with Saddam in a “sympathetical” setting.. Interestingly, Bolkestein himself once said the following about Western hypocrisy: “There are scholars, like Mohammed Arkoun, who accuse Europe of being hypocrite in doing business with corrupt regimes, and at the same time not caring about the population.” (NRC, 11-7-1992) Bolkestein himself does not find the Western countries in the least responsible for the misery of the countries of the Middle East (de Volkskrant, het betoog, 9-9-2006). In a reaction to his article on this topic Nikita Shahbazi writes: “Bolkestein says that the oil dollars Saudi Arabia is spending on wrong things do not have anything to with Western influence. But the West is since decades supporting dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordania and Algeria with money, weapons and intelligence. With these means opposition in these countries is repressed. This was the reason for Bin Laden for the 9/11 assault. As Marc Sageman writes in his book Understandig terror networks, the presence of the United States in the Middle East, the unlimited support for Israel, and the death of thousands of Iraqi children through the boycott of Iraq gave Bin Laden the justification for his fight.” (de Volkskrant, 16-9-2006)
There are at least two major differences between Bolkestein and the Burkeans: 1. Bolkestein is not oriented towards America, and he always has been negative about the Iraq-war. This pleads for him, even if his reason for this was quite cynical: he thinks that it is impossible to democratise the Middle East . (Arend Jan Boekestijn, Trouw, 5-3-2005) 2. Bolkestein has sought a dialogue with liberal Muslims, for instance Mohammed Arkoun. 2. General Discussion2.1. The Burke Foundation and Edmund Burke : Classical conservatism versus revolutionary conservatismEdmund Burke is valued highly by neo-conservatives. ”Generally, twentieth century neo-conservative readings of Burke [….] rank him as a masterly political philosopher.”[71] Because of the very heterogeneous aspects of Edmund Burke’s politics Burke is a good choice as a reference for the Burke Foundation. The (seemingly and only superficially) very different views of Kinneging and of Cliteur/Ellian , but also the Christian “sceptical” conservatism can be traced back to Burke. The question of the “seeming incoherence between Burke the traditionalist and Burke the bourgeois liberal: how could the same man be at once the defender of a hierarchical order and the proponent of a liberal market society ”[72] is also the question of the seeming incoherence between old-fashioned traditionalism and hard-core liberalism in (Dutch) neo-conservatism.
Edmund Burke’s reputation has been based on widely varying interpretations of his work. “There is no dispute about the wide variations in the way he has been seen, and the grounds on which his writings have been celebrated. Through most of his life his work has been valued by moderate reforming Whigs as a reasoned support of their position, as in his exposure of the inroads he saw being made on the independence of Parliament by the Court, his case against the government’s policy on the American colonies, and his sustained attack on the arbitrary role of the chartered East India Company. Then quite suddenly, in the last decade of his life, he appeared in a new character, as the scourge of the liberal egalitarian ideas unleashed by the French Revolution, the great defender of traditional hierarchical society against the menacing theory and practice of that revolution. This brought him a much wider acclaim than any he had previously enjoyed, and from a different quarter. George III, of whose politics Burke had been a very vocal critic, went so far as to say, after the publication of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ‘You have been of use to us all…I know that there is no Man who calls himself a Gentleman who must not think himself obliged to you for you have supported the cause of the Gentleman.” Other crowned heads were equally impressed. Even the rationalist Edward Gibbon, who could not have relished Burke’s insistence that the Christian religion was the indispensable basis of political stability, congratulated Burke on his Reflections as ‘a most admirable medicine against the French disease’. The impression of Burke as the arch-conservative seemed indelibly fixed: his crusade against the French Revolution has eclipsed al his other works. But in the nineteenth century Burke was made over into a utilitarian liberal. His French crusade was set aside as something of an aberration.”[73] I will work on a detailed discussion on the relationship between the ideas of Edmund Burke and the ideas of the Burke Foundation. Since Burke had so many sides- liberal as well as illiberal- , different aspects of his political ideas match different sympathisants of the Burke Foundation.
I will start with only roughly summarizing pro- and con-arguments. 2.1.1. Ideas the Burke Foundation shares with Edmund Burke- “There is no doubt that in everything he [Burke] wrote and did, he venerated the traditional order [which, at his time, was the capitalist order] .”[74]
- Burke’s cardinal value was the “sanctity of property.” (Macpherson, p. 9)
- Roy Porter: “Laissez-faire economics thus endorsed an inhumane system in which the name of ‘the natural laws’ of market forces – laws which, the politician Edmund Burke proclaimed, were sacred, because they were the ‘laws of God’ “. [75] “Whatever one might think of Burke’s theology, one need not doubt his certainty that the laws of the market were divinely ordained.” (Macpherson, p. 59) - Karl Marx called Burke “the celebrated sophist and sycophant” and “an out and out vulgar bourgeois” [76] - Burke utilitarian- liberal ideas matches Cliteur’s utilitarianism. - Burke as the Natural Law anti-revolutionary fits Kinneging approach (???) . - Burke infused every particular issue with general principles. “He insisted that every issue should be debated in terms of some standard of justice or right or long-run human benefit, rather than of mere legal rights or short-run expediency” (Macpherson, p. 13). -
Burke took the bourgeois stance “that avarice is laudable, and that private
acquisition ought to be promoted by the state on the utilitarian ground that
acquisitiveness is the source of the wealth of the wealth of nations”
(Macpherson, p. 21, 54) - According to Burke individuals can only constitute a people if this people is of a hierarchical order ( Macpherson, 44) - Burke’s preference in the matter of commercial policy was always for free trade (Macpherson, p. 53) - “Burke had no patience with modish talk about ‘the labouring poor’, nor with plans for the relief of the able-bodied poor.” “When the market did not treat the wage-earners well, even to the point that wages were less than bare subsistence, the state should not intervene.” “State regulation of wages or intervention in the labour market, then, was not only useless but was also unjust. It was the rules of commerce that were the ‘principles of justice’. “ (Macpherson, p.55, 57, 58) The crucial point of Burkes political economy was, that accumulations is essential. “It is possible only , if the body of the people accept a subordination which generally short-changes them.” (p.61) .”Burke believed as firmly as […] Bentham, that an attack on any established system of property was a threat to every kind of property. - Burke praised the Whig Revolution ( p. 68) – in this sense he was a “revolutionary conservative” - Conservatives as Burke do have a strong tendency to underestimate societal conflicts and collisions. The Yale professor Louis Dupre writes: “In the 18th century [….] Edmund Burke spoke about Europe as practically one big state that was based on the same principles of Law and the same beliefs. Dupre comments: “This was even then more a dream than reality.”[77] The Leiden Burkeans also try to deny the heterogeneity of their own approach and try to construct a harmonious society, based on an alleged non-contradicting, harmonious “Jewish-Christian” heritage.
Democratization is described by Edmund Burke, as well as by Burke –director Bart Jan Spruyt as “Evil”. Spruyt: “ Burke may have thought that the Evil of the Revolution could be stopped, but he was wrong. The wave of modernization and democratization submerged Europe. ”[78] - Bart Tromp: “Burke was not a democrat and wrote with abomination about the ‘swinish multitudes’ who would get power with general elections.” (Het Parool, 9-9-2004)
The neo-conservative and intellectual godfather of George W. Bush, Myron Magnet, like to quote Burke : “If we don’t fight Evil, it will prevail”. The left wants to believe that Evil arises because of oppressing structures, Magnet says. We see now, according to him, as in Nazi-Germany: No, there is Evil. Politics are an attempt to control Evil and to delimit an area for life that we consider as human. Myron Magnet is an amicable man, but also an absolute hawk, who supports the Iraq-war unambiguously. “War will be clarifying. Bush understands that there is absolute Evil in the world. There is no way to resolve the problem of human incapacity definitely. There will always be Evil, and we need always be prepared to fight Evil with violence.” [79]
Many of Burke’s ideas are attractive to many Americans ( and thus to the Dutch Burke Foundation, who sees America as an ideal country) . John Micklethwait en Adrian Wooldridge describe in The Right Nation - Conservative Power in America the Amerikan version of Burkean conservatism as a deep distrust against the state, the desire for freedom above equality, and patriotism. [80]
- The Leiden Germanist Jerker Spits says about Burke ( and I think he his quoting Burke correctly) : “Edmund Burke rejected the Enlightenment appeal on general natural and individual human rights. He stated that freedom has to be linked with responsibility, and that only a correct application of being free means real freedom. Against a “negative” freedom, that can end in shamelessness, egoism and abuse Burke holds up the “positive” freedom of order, ratio and virtue. Freedom in the eyes of Burke was connected to virtue.” (Trouw, 11-8-2004)
- Bart Jan Spruyt defends ( I think rightly) with Burke his hand Geert Wilders and Wilders’ deviating opinion within his old party, the VVD ( Wilders was then at that point of time still a member of the VVD) : “According to Edmund Burke, in his famous speech to the voters in Bristol, a member of parliament may never give up his ‘unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience’ for any other man or group of people. A member of parliament is elected to serve the common interest of his country, and has to be led by ration and prudence.” (NRC,1-9-2004) . One can question if Geert Wilders was led by prudence and ratio, but Spruyt is right that Wilders according to Burke has a right of a deviating opinion.
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2.1.2. Ideas the Burke Foundation does not share with Burke
There are a number of aspects in Burke’s thinking that do not fit with the values of the Burke Foundation.
- \The Leiden professor of political science Koen Koch says ( but I personally do not fully agree with him) that Burke, if he lived now, would be a conservative social-democrat. Koch summarized a possible social-democratic vision of Burke as follows: “Edmund Burke, the supposed arch father of conservatism developed his ideas in the pamphlet 'Reflections on the French Revolution' (1790), where he was radically protesting against the revolution that then only was a couple of month old. The philosophes had put their hope on this revolution, but Burke foresaw already with a painfully foreseeing view that this revolution would end in blood and terror. It is wrong to consider this Burke an archconservative or reactionary, in the nowadays meaning of this word. As an English parliamentarian he supported the American fight for independence; he defended the Irish cause, he criticized the English governance in India; at his country house he received Indian gentlemen who were pleading for their Indian interests and he gave them the opportunity to follow their ( non-Christian) religious rituals. He took side for persecuted homosexuals. He was an opponent of absolute kingdom and was a founder of parliamentary democracy. Burke argued for institutional changes if these were necessary. Nowadays he would be a progressive democrat or a moderate social-democrat. As a norm for a fair distribution of income he developed an idea that later would be called socialism ( everybody receives what he needs, everybody gives what he can ).” (Trouw, 9-4-2004) Even if one could not, like Koch, transpose Burke as a social-democrat into our times, there are profound differences between the work of Burke and the ideology of the Burke Foundation. For instance, the Burkeans are all very negative about romanticism ( Kinneging describes romanticism correctly as part of the Enlightenment). Burke was a important romantic thinker and philosopher. People who want to fight u the flag of Burke can not simply disregard romanticism. Burke also was, in opposition to the Burkeans, a very good writer, and author of satirical and ironic (thus typically romantic ) books. Ellian is the only Burkean who now and then gives himself a romantic and satirical outlook. But Ellians romanticism is more a brutal variant of Nietzschean predator-mentality than a clever satire in the spirit of Burke.
- Burke was an anti-revolutionary and inspired Dutch 19th century anti-revolutionaries as Groen van Pingsterer. But Dutch 19th century conservatism, e.g. by Gerrit Jan Mulder, was not especially inspired by Burke and Burke’s insisting human humility.[81] Gerrit Jan Mulder, like the Burkeans, believed in striving for perfection.
- “Burke was deeply angered by the brutal poverty in which the peasantry were, as he saw it, kept by the decadent aristocratic rich […] “ (Macpherson, p. 9) The Burkeans criticise the decadence of modern society, but they do not mention the disgusting difference between the extreme riches and poverty in the world, or within Western societies, as an example of “decadence”.
- Burke was a pragmatist. He insisted that “the application of general principles must be mediated by attention to the always complex current circumstances and to the frailties of human nature”. (Macpherson, p. 19 f. ) His argumentation, for instance on Conciliation with the colonies ( 1775) is totally different from the confrontational and insulting course the Burkeans take in public discussion. Burke: “The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable; but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me, I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.[…] All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniencies; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others […] ” (Macpherson, p. 27 ) “Burke [insisted] that circumstances alter cases and that statesmen and projectors should always devise policies in the light of changing circumstances” ( p. 73)
- Burke’s fight against the East India Company does not have any correspondence in the Burkeans action or criticism against big, unfairly and immorally acting companies ( no protest has been heard from these people against failing companies) . Burke’s criticism against the East India Company could potentially inspire criticism against multinationals, t none of the Burkeans has picked up that aspect of Burke’s politics. “Much of his “[Burke’s] case against the East India Company was that it had deliberately set out to destroy the ancient constitutions, laws and customs of all the proud kingdoms of the Indian sub-continent. He argued also, that the Company’s rule in India was already endangering the authority f the established propertied classes at home, by creating a despicable new breed of nouveaux riches who were bringing home untold plunder from their service in India.”(Macpherson, p. 37.) - Burke was, unlike the Burkeans – concerned about the rights of future generations. (Macpherson, p.46) The moralizing of the Burkeans has so far not touched on environmental issues or other questions that concern future generations.
The director of the Burke Foundation Bart Jan Spruyt, who now is advisor to the right –wing-politician Geert Wilders, calls the new conservatism “revolutionary”. This puts the Burke Foundation at a distance from Edmund Burke. The Burkeans are historical followers of the very problematic German “conservative revolution”, and they admire one of the main figures of the German “conservative revolution”, the Nazi and anti-Semitist Carl Schmitt, who as jurist legitimized the Nurenberg Laws. Bart Jan Spruyt ( PhD at Leiden University) is in his publications a great admirer of Schmitt, and wants to use Schmitts political ideas of The Existential Enemy ( which Schmitt and the Nazi’s and turned against the Jews) against the Muslims.
Also Paul Cliteur is advocating a revolutionary conservatism that is not agreeable with Burke. Cliteur describes Burke’s conservatism correctly as a piecemeal-engineering-conservatism that [in this aspect] can be compared to Popper’s ideas. But Cliteur rejects this kind of conservatism, because it is only fit for times when “the ship is on the right course”. Because since that is not the case according to Cliteur, Burkean conservatism only means to muddle through in the wrong direction. (NRC, 17-12-2002) Cliteur expected and asked for a conservatism that is not based on Edmund Burke: “[The new conservatives] have to place their own moral codex against the one from the baby boomers. Their position differs also substantially from Burke himself. Burke warned against a revolution that had not yet taken place in his country. The conservatives of the Burke Foundation are questioning a moral codex from former revolutionaries who have succeeded completely in their revolution. [Cliteur is hinting at the sixties] .Whoever wants to unmask the baby boomers needs nothing less than a revolution. But it seems that this [revolution] is coming.” (NRC, 5-5-2001)
\ Koen Koch: “Cliteur wants to unlink moral thinking from religion. […] The sharp division between church and state after the French model [ as Cliteur desires] has never existed in the Netherlands. Cliteur’s program is revolutionary. He wants to reform Dutch society after a blueprint after his own design. He is a philosopher of extreme manageability. Burke would have seen this with aversion.” ( Trouw, 9-4-2004)
NRC-editor Sjoerd de Jong: “[…]Conservatives nowadays do not write any cautious ‘reflections’ as their big example Edmund Burke, but thundering ‘manifests’. ( NRC, 4-11-2003)
Burke reproached moral philistines and prophets of heartless virtues, like the Burkeans: “By hating vices too much, they [these people] come to love men too little.”[82]
John Gray, according to Paul Cliteur a “demagogue” who has said “awful things” has in 2004 given a lecture (Thomas More lecture) in Amsterdam with the title Enlightenment and terror. He is opposing the neoconservative believe in progress. “Neo-conservatism has more in common with Jacobinism and Leninism than conservatism as it is understood in Europe.”[83] […]
Family, church and school: these are institutions that deserve protection according to the classical conservatives. Revolutionary conservatism, in contrast, is not in favour of liberties for these institutions, such as the liberty of education, the liberty of association or the liberty of religion. Marcel ten Hooven in the recent book Ongeweste goden (Undesired Gods): “The impatience of the revolutionary spirit is nowadays visible in the ambition to solve the problems with the integration of Muslims and other immigrants within one generation in a Shortcut to Enlightenment ( title of the book Hirsi Ali is writing now for the AEI, the big brother of the Burke Foundation). A central value for classical conservatives is prudentia, practical wisdom. The Burkean impatience with societal dilemmas is certainly not an example of prudentia. Ten Hooven: “This impatience can be observed in the wish to change some fundamental (!) principles in the Dutch law system with the goal to limit believers in the possibility to live their live according to their own ethical convictions.” In many ways, the attitude of “Enlightenment fundamentalists” like Cliteur and Ellian can not be reconciled with the ideas of Burke. Roy Porter: “For Burke […] , the ‘illuminati’ had been visionaries drunk upon reason; their speciously attractive, pseudo-humanitarian projects and facile rhetoric had harmed the impressionable, and fatally undermined the status quo.”[84]
2.2. A safety utopiaThe Burkean philosophy is pursuing a “safety-utopia”. The Burkean Leiden jurists say that constitutional rights are unimportant in comparison to safety. I use Michael Ignatieff’s book The lesser evil to argue against the Burkean view. Here the quotations I have used ( I have not yet translated my own arguments, that come in between these statements) Ignatieff says: “One further assumption of the terrorists has proven wrong; that democratic peoples lack the will to fight for democracy. It is a commonplace, of both Burkean conservatives and left-wing communitarians, to bemoan the dearth of civic spirit, the ennui and disenchantment, of elites and electorate alike in capitalist democracies. Terrorist emergencies have shown, on the contrary, that democratic elites and publics alike can show a surprising tenacity when attacked.”( p.73)
“Life’s toughest choices are not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.” (Xiii). “The reality is, that we have to sacrifice some liberty for some security and some security for some liberty.”(p.XiV).
Ignatieff: “As the threat of terrorism targets our political identity as free peoples, our essential resource has to be that identity itself. We cannot fight and prevail against an enemy unless we know who we are and what we wish to defend at all costs. If the automatic response to mass casualty terrorism is to strengthen secret government, it is the wrong response. The right one is to strengthen open government. Democratic people will not lend assistance to authorities unless they believe in the system they are defending. . No strategy against terror is sustainable with public assistance and cooperation […] democratic systems do not have to be less decisive than authoritarian ones, and democratic institutions have the advantage of marshaling the wisdom, experience, and talent of the citizens as a whole rather than relying on the shallow pool of a closed elite (p.154).
“The challenge of an ethical life in liberal democracy is to live up, as individuals, to the engagements expressed in our constitutions and to seek to ensure that these engagements are kept in respect of the least advantaged of our fellow citizens.” (p. 169)
“ It is a condition of our freedom that we cannot compel anyone to believe in the premises of a liberal democracy. Either these premises freely convince others or they are useless. They cannot be imposed, and we violate everything we stand for if we coerce those who do not believe what we do. In any event, we cannot pre-emptively detain all the discontent in our midst. So we are stuck, as we should be, with persuasion”(p. 169).
”One of the strengths of the liberal tradition is its disabused realism, its believe that abuse of power is inevitable and no constitution can stop it. That is, why in Locke and Jefferson, for example, there remains an articulated right of revolution. Liberal theory places the final defense of constitutional liberty in ordinary citizens, in their willingness, when provoked by greater evil, to rise up and change their government, by peaceful means if possible, by force as a last resort. Civil disobedience has an honoured place in the traditions of liberal democracy, precisely because it is the defense of last resort when the constitutional identity of democracy is at risk.” (p.52)
[…] Cliteur calls John Grays criticism of Enlightenment and of the US “demagogic”. [85] But Cliteur himself is trying with demagogic and populist means to create a feeling of exaggerated urgency and anxiety in society with the goal to transform the liberal state into an authoritarian. Ignatieff emphasises that democracy is more than the right of the majority (p.5 ff.) In a democracy also the protection of individuals and minorities matters. Nowhere in the publications of the Burkeans one encounters a pleading for protecting minorities. Kinneging describes in his cent book Geografie van Goed en Kwaad (2005) the anger of minority groups, if the majority systematically ignores the will of the minority: Then the minority will, sooner or later - certainly when it is a large minority - decide that such a democracy her is not thus the conflict becomes a major societal problem. Insurrection against the authority, dissidence, civil war: these are possible consequences.” [86] This insight does not motivate Kinneging c.s. to advocate the rights of the Muslim community- to the contrary. The Burkeans make the Muslims the scapegoat of this time.
When the Burkeans defend democracy, democracy always is defined by the rights of the majority, and by the right for the strong state to enforce decisions - if necessary even by force. But “minority liberties protect democracy as a whole, not only the minorities. “(Ten Hooven) [87] Cliteur c.s. are prepared to throw democracy overboard in order to defend the “superior” Western civilization. The Dutch neocons consider repression justified because they feel superior to other cultures. Ignatieff on the side fights for the identity of democracy and of the constitutional state, while being very careful not to claim a “superiority”: “[We are not entitled to claim the success of liberal democracy] as a vindication of our superiority. The fact that we have succeeded in becoming both rich and free may be too much the result of a particular history and contingent good fortune for us to believe or life is a model for other peoples in other cultures. But the fact that our values may not have universal application does not make them less compulsory for us.”(p. 169).
The Leiden jurists are uncritical of the Bush administration. They are thinking and speaking in the “Good versus Evil” language of Bushian theological politics. This is not astounding, since the Burke Foundation is connected to the American Enterprise Institute, where the jurist John Yoo has made the plans for holding terror suspects without a trial. Afshin Ellian suggests a Dutch Guantanamo Bay and is playing down the severance of American excesses in Iraq. John Gray: “What is evident is that from the start of the war on terror the Bush administration has flouted or circumvented international law on treatment of detainees. In unilaterally declared members of terrorist organizations to be legal combatants who are not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.”[88] “The result [of the abuse] is that an indelible image of American depravity has been imprinted on the entire Islamic world.”[89].
2.3. Carl Schmitt: anti-Semitism and Islam-bashing2.3.1. The Burke Foundation and Carl SchmittThe relationship between Carl Schmitt and the Burke Foundation is for several reasons very important. First of all, Carl Schmitt is quoted with consent by the Burkeans ( by Afshin Ellian in his Leiden oration, by the Germanist Jerker Spits, and extensively and repeatedly by Bart Jan Spruyt, the personal link between the Burkeans in Leiden and the right-wing populist Geert Wilders). Second, also the thinking of the Leiden Burkeans who do not quote Schmitt explicitly (Kinneging and Cliteur) is dominated by the existential and hostile difference of friend and enemy, that is the core of Schmitts worldview. Especially their hostile statements in public - thick with apocalyptic war-thinking - turns adversaries into enemies, in the way Schmitt suggested. Third, Schmitt was one of the most important figures in the “conservative revolution” in Germany during the 1930’s and the Burkeans call themselves proudly “conservative revolutionaries”. Fourth, Carl Schmitt was, like the three Leiden professors, jurist. The example of Schmitt has shown how dangerous it is, when jurists attack parliamentary democracy and the constitutional state. The example of Schmitt gives a good reason to be worried about what is happening at the Leiden Law Faculty.
After the murder on Theo van Gogh the former Burke director ( now advisor of Geert Wilders) pleaded for a state of martial law, after the example of Carl Schmitts suggestions, in order to “defend democracy against Islam in general”. Carl Schmitts was an active national-socialist as well as an active anti-Semitist (this is not changed by the fact that he had Jewish friends). Schmitts theory about The Existential Enemy ( “the specific political distinicton to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy”)[90] is, as Raphael Gross has convincingly shown in Carl Schmitt und die Juden, basically a theory about The Jew as The Enemy. The Leiden Germanist Jerker Spits propagates Schmitt’s idea of The Enemy. He states that we need Schmitt in the War on Terrorism. Ideas and human values do not matter anymore, Spits says. Also Paul Cliteur shows himself as a Schmittian thinker when he says, that the constitutional state is secondary to the authoritarian state and that the order of the state is more important than democracy. In his introduction to Dutch Law Paul Cliteur asks: “One question we have to ask is, where does this mysterious power stem from, that keeps together a people? [He uses the term “volk”- which is more mysterious and nationalistic than the term ‘people’ or ‘nation’]”. Cliteur gives several answers such as language, culture and history. He forgets one important “mysterious” factor, that keeps people together: the creation of a scapegoat. This is what Carl Schmitt wanted: the creation of an enemy in order to keep the Volksgemeinschaft (see below) together
Michael Ignatieff criticises Carl Schmitt: ”Schmitts jurisprudence, in its worship of strong authority, lacked any conception of a constitution as moral order of liberty.”[91] He compares Schmitt to the liberal view of John Locke: “[..the Lockean view prefers] the risks of disorder to despotism. This moral ranking contrasts signally with Schmitt’s, for whom the greater evil was disorder and civil war, and for whom dictatorship, in contrast, was the lesser evil.”[92]
Claudia Koonz The Nazi Conscience ( 2003): “In 1933 Carl Schmitt a distinguished political theorist and avid Hitler supporter, paraphrased a slogan used often in Nazi circles, when he denounced the idea of universal human rights, saying: Not every being with a human face is human.” (p.1 f.) “[…] the political theorist Carl Schmitt made a crucial contribution to a version of anti-Semitism that was both respectable and ruthless. (p.14) “Within days of Schmitt’s joining the Nazi Party, on May 10 [1933] Nazi students at all German universities burnt books by Jewish authors. Schmitt cheered them on in an article for a regional National Socialist newspaper. He rejoiced that that the ‘un-German spirit’ and ‘anti-German filth’ of a decadent [ note the use of the word ‘decadent’, that is often used by the Burkeans to describe their enemies! M.T] age had been burned out and urged the government to annul the citizenship of German exiles (whose books were burnt) because they aided the ‘enemy’ .[…] Schmitt sneered that anyone who appreciated Jewish authors as unmanly.“ Koonz cites Schmitt: “ ‘Our educated grandmothers and aunts would read, with tears in their bourgeois eyes, verses by Heinrich Heine that they mistook for German’ “ . “Schmitt had only one criticism to the book burners: that they had consigned too few authors to the flames. Instead of burning only ‘un-German’ writer’s books, they should have included writings by non-Jewish authors who had been influenced by Jewish ideas in the sciences and professions. […] Schmitt’s next contribution was a cogently written pamphlet for general readers, State, Volk, and Movement: The Threefold Division of Political Unity, in which he justified Hitler’s dictatorship in theoretical terms. First, he defined politics itself as the battle between ethnic friend and foe. Schmitt succinctly branded political liberalism and ‘asphalt culture’ (code for Jewish influence) as a weakness that only the ‘ruthless will’ of a decisive Führer could eliminate. Second, he asked what Nazi society would look like. Its two constituent qualities were ‘homogeneity’ and ‘authenticity’. In place of squabbling politicians, German power would impose a single ethnic (völkisch) will. Avoiding the term ‘Jew’ and using ‘non-Aryan’ sparingly, Schmitt celebrated the ‘essential sameness’ and ‘homogeneity’ (Artgleichheit und Gleichartigkeit which unified ethnic Germans in the new community. (Volksgemeinschaft) The imperative that all citizens be gleich ( which means both ‘same’ and ‘equal’) vindicated the expulsion of Germans with Jewish ancestors from public institutions. The demand for homogeneity, he wrote, evoked a ‘deeper’ meaning than administrative ‘Nazification’ (Gleichschaltung) . He welcomed ‘ the purification of public life of all non-Aryan, essentially foreign elements so that …coming generations of Germans will be pure…No alien type can interfere with this great and profound, but also inner- I would almost say intimate- process to grow. Our most important task is to learn how to distinguish friend from enemy…[We must] cleanse public life of non-Aryan foreign elements.’ With democracy crushed, Schmitt called for an ethnically pure nation. In opposition to the universalist moral beliefs […] Schmitt worked out a theory of justice bound to the Volk, not to legal codes. Every ethnic community develops the legal values appropriate to its ‘blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden). In Schmitt’s view, authenticity, defined as allegiance to one’s Volk , accounted for more than abstract universals as the bass of morality and the law. “ (p. 58ff.)
“Carl Schmitt explained that because Hitler’s will was the supreme law of the land, ‘the true Führer is always also judge. The status of the judge flows from he status of Führer…The Führer’s deed was, in truth, the genuine exercise of justice. It is not subordinate to justice, but rather itself supreme justice.’” ( p. 98) “Carl Schmitt […] praised the Nuremberg Race Laws for restoring ‘German constitutional freedom’. ‘For the first time ‘[Carl Schmitt said] ‘our conception of constitutional principles is again German. German blood and German honor have become the basic principles of German law, while the state has become an expression of racial strength and unity.’ In his remarks at the [ de-Judaization-] conference Schmitt endowed tthe racial purge with a lofty moral purpose and translated the convoluted tirades of crude antisemites into his crisp prose. ‘The Jew’s relationship to our intellectual work is parasitical, tactical, and commercial…Being shrewd and quick, he knows how to say the right thing at the right time. That is his instinct as a parasite and a born trader.’ Praising Nazi leaders’ call for ‘healthy exorcism’ Schmitt welcomed ‘the genuine battle of principles‘ between Jews’ ’cruelty and impudence’ and Germans’ ethnic honor. ‘The Jew is sterile and unproductive,’ he has nothing to say to us, - no matter how ‘energetically he assimilates or how shrewdly he assembles information.’ He is ‘dangerous’ because, like all parasites, he diagnoses our weakness. When borderline cases and anomalies confused jurists, they blamed Jews ( and supposedly Jewish attitudes) for their confusion. In keeping with the ethos of white-collar persecution Schmitt criticized ‘emotional antisemitism that does not accomplish the task the task of driving out Jewish influence’ and closed the conference by quoting Mein Kampf, ‘In defending myself against the Jew … I am doing the work of the lord. ‘ “(p.208)
Carl Schmitts Manichaean Friend/Enemy Black/White thinking has no place within democracy. Thijs Wöltgens: “Democracy is not interested in the question of Good and Evil. Democracy does not live by Black and White, because of the threat of civil war. To the contrary, democracy cannot exist without criticism that is absorbed of democracy itself. That means: democracy tends to grey.” [93]
2.3.2. The historical parallels between anti-Semitism and IslamophobiaThe Amsterdam professor of literary criticism and newspaper columnist Elbeth Etty writes in het colum Cry wolf? About bad comparisons with World War II. In this column she discusses the results from a questionaire about racism ( GPD/Motivaction 2006: 28% of Dutchmen want a white neighbour, 33 procent an white son-in-law, 42% a white teacher, 57% a white premier; and 10 % calls themselves markedly racist) . She writes: “One problem is if one uses the holocaust as a mantra, that one is banalizing the terrible things that happened then.” But she summarizes: “The connection between the remembrance all forms of racism may not be taboo. This connection is a guideline in the public debate about (in)tolerance and the meeting with immigrants. Not in order to abolish unfavourable opinions or to keep people from expressing their opinion, but to prevent that we are sleeping if the wolf of racism is really bringing danger to society.” (NRC, 6-6- 2006)
Bart Jan Spruyt compares the present time with Nazi-times, and for him the correct parallel is Muslims = Hitler. “In the 1930ies Hitler abused ‘the door of Weimar’ and transformed it to the ‘arch of triumph of his entry’(Carl Schmitt). How can we prevent that the entrance of the Binnenhof [ Dutch parliament] is used as a arch of triumph for the political Islam- which will cancel a lot of what is dear to us? How can we secure the future of our city, of our political community? ”[94][66] It is quite sour, that Bart Jan Spruyt, himself an outspoken fan of the Nazi and anti-Semite Carl Schmitt, uses some partial theories of Schmitt to outline the Muslims as the new Nazi’s . He is hereby giving the wrong impression, that Schmitt has been a major critic of Hitler, while Schmitt in fact turned out as an important intellectual Nazi-support.
If anyone tries to make a connection between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia he will immediately encounter protest, because of the insufficiency of this comparison ( see for instance Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam) . Also, people will immediately point out that there is a great amount of serious anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. Afshin Ellian described pathetically how he felt compelled, when he heard people from Iran saying that the holocaust never happened, to scream against the TV-set: ” Westerbork! Westerbork!” His pathos does not help his credibility. Nonetheless: anti-Semitism and racism is a serious issue among Muslims. Marcel Poorthuis en Theo Salemink write in their recently published book Een donkere spiegel ( A dark mirror) : “[Israel is] oppressing the Palestinians and is seen in the Arab world as America’s servant. Arab leaders hope to draw attention from their country’s internal problems by taking Israel as a scapegoat, and are using whatever comes in handy: accusation of racism, activation of old anti-Semitic metaphors (mostly old European metaphors!) . The Jews are collectively identified with the policy of the state Israel. […] On the one hand there is an overlap between the negative view on Jews in the past and the negative picturing of Muslims nowadays, on the other hand some Dutch Muslims, especially young ones, are using the negative picture of the Jews in European history to demonstrate their own identity as anti-Western.”[95]
In the issue of Hirsi Ali’s passport Ellian compares our times to Nazi-times. Michael Zeeman writes about this: “Befehl ist Befehl [ German: order is order] write Afshin Ellian and Leon de Winter .[…] the parallel they want to force upon us is clear: The Hague today is the same like Berlin then, the judgement of the Council is the same as the Wannsee-conference.”[96]
For Ellian and for Cliteur, Muslims and their friends, the multiculturalists, are the new Nazi’s. It is important to realize, that Islamophobia shows some parallels to historical anti-Semitism, even if it no good to exaggerate the parallels. For instance, Paul Cliteur repeatedly refers positively to Ernest Renan (Cliteur: “If somebody nowadays would dare to state, like Renan did, that the Muslim is characterized by an unlimited hatred against science, then he would meet heavy resistance. Totally inappropriate resistance.”). Renan considered the difference of the races and the fact that some few are ruling over many others as a self-evident proof of an antidemocratic natural and social law and considered the Semitic race ( thus Muslims and Jews! ) as inferior. [97]
The former mayor of Amsterdam, Ed van Thijn, writes ( and Ian Buruma is quite critical about this argumentation) in his article Anti-Semitism and hatred against Muslims is underestimated “Anti-Semitism and hatred against Muslims are descendants from the same offspring- both are forms of pure racism. [… ] In the recent public climate anti-Semitism gets a new chance, but much stronger a more serious is the problem of hatred against Muslims. In a comprising research in many European countries in the spring of 2002 the EUMC determined that after the assault on the Twin Towers a wave violence against Muslims moved through Europe, the Netherlands of all places, as leader. In the researched period eighty assault were counted on mosques and Islamite shops and Muslim woman were threatened or humiliated. In the Netherlands! The reaction to this was laconically or nonexistent. In the meanwhile, history has repeated itself: De burned school in Uden after the terrible murder on Van Gogh was not the only thing. According to the official monitor of the Anne Frank Foundation after the murder 174 violent acts were committed. This development has been noticed abroad. The Netherlands were internationally an example of tolerance, but now [ and this is still true 2006] is known as the most intolerant country in Europe, and people are concerned about the tone in the public debate about Muslims. A debate where more and more nuances are getting lost and The Islam as a general idée is put in the position of the suspect. With the consequence, that many Muslims who already have a deprived position ( when going out in discotheques and restaurants; in labour market) feel as a group systematically humiliated and excluded. This is a development that is tragic for the cohesion in Dutch society, who shows more and more sign apartheid.” ( de Volkskrant, 16-6-2005)
Poorthuis/Salemink write in their recently published book about Catholicism and anti-Semitism also about the constructed image of Islam. They describe the parallels between anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism: “History does not repeat itself, but some motives that have been used by Catholics against Jews during more than one and half a century (e.g. impossible to integrate, clasping to their own religion) seem related to what can nowadays been heard- mostly from post-Christian [Enlightenment fundamentalist, M.T.] circles. For instance, in the debate about female circumcision Ayaan Hirsi Ali mentioned the Jewish practise of circumcision of young boys. Also, the imam who refused to give his hand to a female minister, was compared to orthodox rabbi’s. “[98] Ayaan Hirsi Ali stated thoughtlessly on television ( February 10th 2006) that Jews are a race.
Pim Fortuyn, hero of the Burkeans ( Ellian: “Pim was a character for everybody.” “Fortuyn is being, in contradiction with the truth, demonized as a Islam-basher”; Cliteur: “”Fortuyn deserves the Voltaire-prize”), was the first one to make stigmatizing Muslims fashionable. The Leiden researcher Jaap van Donselaar has stated recently that Fortuyn a has made discriminating statements that probably would have led to prosecution, if he was not murdered. To Fortuyn the Muslims were “[…] Goddammit, a fifth column, let me now tell it all, who wants to bring the country to hell.”
The historian Anne Pek writes in her article Moslims vormen geen vijfde colonne (“Muslims are no fifth column”) that there are a number of important correspondences between the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the time around 1900, and nowadays Muslim-immigrants. Around 1900 the same sounds could be heard among common people: “They live here, but their heart is somewhere else. They want welfare, but they don’t assimilate. They have a different God, and a backward culture. They speak a language we don’t understand and throw their garbage out of their windows. We have a feeling that they do not want to belong to us. Why should we accept them?” According to Pek the East European Jews gave a different face to the old parts of the European cities by bringing poverty. Also, they started their own schools and shops. [100]
Anti-Semitism is a very complex phenomenon that goes far beyond the hatred of poor East European Jews, but still: the contempt for the new Jewish immigrants was an essential part of the growing anti-Semitism in Europe. The Dutch sociologist J.A.A. van Doorn states: “It is not necessary to always demonstrate the evil of anti-Semitism with the holocaust. […] It is sometimes better to discuss historical and nowadays incidents and compare them to islamophobic statements which stem from the same social-psychological dark springs.[…] We can learn from the influence of war end terror on mass behaviour, such as unfounded generalizations and panic reactions. The sometimes blind discrimination of Muslims - because of actions from a minority - shows the same primitive reaction.”[101]
The liberal Rabbi Soetendorp (The Hague) said: “We know that stigmatizing en isolating whichever group of people has catastrophic consequences.” “What now is happening to the Dutch Muslims is deadly dangerous. Especially the trend to judge all Muslims by the deeds of a small group, and to see everyone as dangerous. This is what happened to the Jews in the ‘30s.” In fact, the Burkeans demonstrate that there really is a substantial overlap on an ideological and philosophical level between historical anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The reference to Carl Schmitt and especially the use of Schmitts theory of The Enemy against the Muslims shows the close relationship between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Soetendorp: “Life as a Jew teaches us, that as we are attacked, not only Jews are attacked , but always at the same time Human Rights are attacked. Stigmatizing Islam is not only a threat for Muslims, but for the quality of the entire society.”
Also the newspaper columnist (Trouw) and Leiden teacher of Political Journalism Willem Breedveld sees the analogy of certain anti-Semitic patterns and the sharp anti-Islamism of Geert Wilders: “This Wilders is dangerous. He is full of the holy conviction that all problems in the world stem from Islam. Behind all problems, varying from worldwide environment issues to traffic jams in Holland, almost automatically sees the hand of Islam and its million followers. Shortly, Wilders believes in a complot, a worldwide conspiracy of Islamites against the rest of the world. This lies in the prolongation of the belief system of the Nazi’s who stigmatized the Jews as the source of all evil, with the holocaust as a logical conclusion. Wilders does not want to go that far, but it really is the consequence of his complot theory.”
Wilders and Spruyt compare Jews and the Muslims. They state “that The Netherlands is disavowing its own cultural values because Queen Beatrix, when visiting a celebrating mosque in The Hague, did not demand to shake hands with the male Muslims. They refer to a conference with the European rabbi’s in 1982, when the queen strictly demanded that all rabbi’s should give her a hand. The rabbi’s who did not want to do this, had only one choice: to stay away in order avoid causing an incident.”[102] Logics of Wilders and Spruyt are not: from now on rabbi’s will not to have to shake hands with the queen, if they do not want. No, they demand that Muslims should be forced to shake hands.
Harry Polak of the Liberal Jewish community in Amsterdam reacts to the article by Wilders/Spruyt, saying that Jews and Muslims have much in common: “Jews and Muslims have much in common, certainly with respect to religion. For instance rules for food, or circumcision with males. But there are many overlaps also with the Christian religion: these are monotheist religions with the same patriarch: Abraham. There is unfortunately another overlap, which is prominent is the present time: there are extremists who are fighting for their absolute rights with fire and sword. Sometimes, because these extremists feel threatened by other cultures.” He pleads for societal tolerance, and he points out the difference between the situation in 1982 and the queen’s visit to the mosque in 2006. In 1982 the rabbi’s were visiting the queen, who was the host. In the case it is appropriate to accommodate to the rules of the host. In the mosque in The Hague this was different, and the queen was politely accommodating to the house rules and norms of the Muslims.” [103] The queens politeness is a practical expression of Western norms and values. Polak also explains that the male mosque visitor’s refusal to give hand to a female monarch not is an expression of inequality of men and woman, as Wilders/Spruyt think. “This fact is a sign of a different sexual moral and of different etiquette between the sexes. […] In the more orthodox variant of all three monotheist religions thou the strengthening of the position of woman is an important issue.” I hope, that Bart Jan Spruyt, who still defending the extremely orthodox position of the Dutch-reformed party with respect to woman, [104] has read these lines and will defended woman’s rights also before his orthodox Christian friends. .
Paul Cliteur speaks often of the Nazi-culture, and he says: “Also the German Third Reich was a multicultural society. Even if the elimination of the Jewish culture, the gipsy culture or the homosexual culture had succeeded, than still it would not have been a monoculture. [..] The monocultural dream in its most radical form is thus an illusion.” [105]
“Eliminate” I consider a euphemism that does not fit the circumstances.
Cliteur thus admits, that the Nazi’s had the goal of a monoculture, and that a couple of people have died while they pursued this goal. Cliteur thinks that he is fundamentally different from the Nazi’s because he is not following the unrealistic dream of a total monoculture. And, yes, there is some difference between his and the Nazi monocultural dream. But do not forget, that the Nazis have always been very practical and realistic, in spite of their crazy ideas, and at any given moment only did do what was possible and doable. They have, for instance, when it came to anti-Semitism, always tested the ground, and took a step back, when it seemed wise and when they met real opposition.[106] The goal of a monoculture for the Nazi’s was not static, it was a dynamic goal. They were testing how far they could go. My strong opinion is, that any pursue of a monocultural society is very dangerous, and the monoculturalists have to meet democratic resistance, and if possible, decent resistance. Cliteur is also writing extensively about the Nazi Eichmann. He is counting Eichmann ( with the help of a quote by Judith Boss) [107] in the camp of cultural relativists, which is more than strange if one thinks of the fact that Eichmann worked for a “Arian” monoculture. And: a monoculture is our goal, according to Cliteur, even if we, as he says, will not be able to reach that goal anyway. Even Hitler, says Cliteur, was maybe a relativist. [108] This is in strong opposition to what historical research is finding ( compare Claudia Koonz, The Nazi conscience). Hitler is neither the father of multiculturalists, nor an example that a monoculture is unrealistic and we thus can pursue this monoculture. Hitler has shown where one goes when one is pursuing monoculture.
In his books Cliteur is comparing the Nazi-period with present times, and he is comparing his own anti-Islamism to antifascism. With this argumentation Cliteur parallels his soul mates Pim Fortuyn and Frits Bolkestein. Fortuyn attacked, as Cliteur, not only militant fundamentalist, but also liberal Muslims. Fortuyn, too, made an comparison between Islam and the Third Reich. He argued for a bipolar world and a fight between Good and Bad. Because we lost communism as an enemy we need a new enemy, or as he implies, a new devil: Islam.[109] Fortuyn used the ideas of Ronald Reagan and the “evil empire” and wanted to turn this construction against Islam. Fortuyn , like Reagan and Bush – and like Islamic fundamentalists- , is a Manichean thinker. Buruma/Margalit: “When Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union as ‘the evil empire’ and George W. Bush lumped North Korea, Iran and Iraq together as “the axis of evil”, the were speaking in Manichaean terms.”[110]
Cliteur has two different, never reconciled faces. On the one hand is arguing, that the freedom of speech is the same as “the freedom to insult” ( title of one of his essays). On the other hand he claims against his opponents, that the “freedom of expression is limited by decency” ( (title of another essay) . I think, that Cliteur is right second time: decency is an important issue. The Amsterdam professor of Philsosophy of Law, Dorien Pessers, says (in a reaction to Ellian): “Does not every paper has a space for a scolding columnist? What is served by this, the openness of politics or the circulation numbers? Many opinions are expressed that do not have to do with freedom of expression. Stronger even, often the free word is abused to silence others. Systematically humiliating, baiting, provoking can have such an effect. The one who is claiming free expression has not understood a thing.”[111]
Ellian is rightly criticising the Manichean rhetoric of political Islam, which sketches Europe, America and Israel as the symbols of Evil. (NRC 19-8-2006) Only is his critique of Manichean thinking not credible. If the same rhetoric is coming from Reagan of president Bush, he finds this praiseworthy. “When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “ the evil empire” progressive intellectuals in the West reacted furiously. But the Russian population was happy with this. And so it is today. The majority of the World population is oppressed by tyranny. For them, words like these by Bush [ out the axis of Evil] are hopeful.[…] The left should be glad that Bush has seen the light.”[112] Elsbeth Etty is very critical abut Ellian’s column from 19-8-2006. She also is critical, like Ellian, of “islamofascism” ( she does not debate the term itself) . But Etty does not agree with Ellian, that “the political evil threatening humankind is implicitly is equating with the Islam as such. ‘Islam was already at the time of its birth a political phenomenon’ he [Ellian] writes, and suggests, that the political idea is intrinsic to this religion. According to me [Etty] political and societal conflicts have in history often taken a religious appearance. This is true for the Taliban in Afghanistan, grown and equipped with weapons by the United States for the fight against the Soviet oppressors. Muslim terrorism is in many ways a child of the Cold War, when the super powers knew little scruples in the periphery of there spheres.”(NRC 29-8-2006) Ellian does not see it this way at all: “Our intellectuals must understand as soon as possible, that the present problems are not made Bush cum suis.”[113] If one considers Reagan as one of Bushes soul mates, like Ellian himself does, see above, then it is certainly true, that the present problems with Muslim terrorism ARE also caused y Bush, Reagan c.s. Ellian found it wrong hat people demonstrated against Bush’s war; according to him one should have demonstrated against Saddam. He is right thou, when he writes that the demonstrants were “egoistical” and that they were not concerned with the people in Iraq in the first place.[114] In fact many people were then demonstrating for their own sake: against politics who defines The Other as The Evil and as the new Hitler and against politics which are revolutionary instead of pragmatic and thus are threatening to involve the world in a spiral of violence. Muslim terrorism is a great danger – and is a phenomenon partly created by the West. But Muslim are not the new Hitler, as Eric Frey has shown very concisely in his book Das Hitler-Syndrom.
Also the new Leiden professor and former VVD-party politician Frits Bolkestein sees a clear connection between the Islamic people in the Netherlands and the German occupier. I cite Wim de Jong, who writes in his Television-column in de Volkskrant: “As somebody ‘who has been under German occupation’ Bolkestein finds it a big worry, that the Muslims will soon be the biggest population group in the big cities. This makes him feel “intimidated’ and ‘un-free’ “
This interview took place on November 7th 2004, a few days after the murder of Theo van Gogh, when the danger of a negative spiral of violence was obvious. Bolkestein found it necessary to make such a tasteless and indecent comparison between the Muslim population and the German occupation. "
The Amsterdam political scientist Dick Pels says about Bolkesteins above utterances about Moslim “occupation” ( the idea of Muslim occupation lives strongly among Dutch citizens, see the extended internet-debate on this topic) : “In the discussion about a Islamic danger often a demographic argument (i.e. Moslims have more children, thus we must await an Islamic tsunami; good bye to Western civilization!) is used to induce fear. Ths argumentation implies that the “black” population will grow exponentially, and from generation to generation will be stupefied in the same orthodox position. Fear traders like Wilders even suspect a conscious population policy, where import of brides, reunion of families, suppression of woman and big families are used to obtain majority and thus be able to introduce the Sharia in the Netherlands.”[115]
Bolkesteins utterances remind us of Carl Schmitt (with the Muslim as The Enemy). They remind us also of Enoch Powell, a politician whose “Rivers-of-blood’- speech recently was cited with consent byy Bolkesteins former speech-writer Geert Wilders. Powell has said in a speech, and Bolkestein is echoing him: “From these whole area’s the indigenous population, the people of England, who fondly imagine that this is their country and these are their home-towns, have been dislodged - I have deliberately chosen the most neutral word I could find.[…] My judgement then is this: the people of England will not endure it. If so, it is idle to argue whether they ought or ought not to. I do not believe it is in human nature that a country, and a country such as ours, should passively watch the transformation of whole areas which lie at the heart of it into alien territory.”[116] Considering the quotes by Bolkestein I think it is not without right one speaks about “Islomophobia”. While people who suffer from a phobia in the psychiatric sense are aware of it, and suffer from their unrealistic fears, Islamophobics are not aware of the phobic character of their opinions. Nevertheless, some sign of genuine phobias are present: the magnifying of the feared object, the power the object ( here the Moslims) are supposedly gaining and the overwhelming, contagious and deadly power that the object supposedly is having. In reality there is 10% percent of the population having a different religion, of which only a handful of individuals is busy with criminal or even terrorist activities. That still is a problem, but nothing like the picture Bolkestein c.s. is sketching.
The Amsterdam political scientists Maarten Haajer en Marcel Maussen say about this kind of war metaphors: “Politicians and writers who say that we now have a war are responsible for the harshening of the societal climate. They should think better about the images that these words are calling for. […] People who handle these pictures without hesitation have a limitless self-consciousness. But do they think about consequences? One should think, that now, after the murder of Theo van Gogh, everybody is convinced about the deadly power of words and images. People who use metaphors like “war” or “enemy” are responsible for the fact that the societal conflict is deteriorating. War metaphors mobilize an image of an attacked people who must shut the rows. If one suggests that we are in wartimes, he/she suggests that the ones who seek dialogue are naive; that the one who refuses to show his contempt for the enemy is a traitor; and that the ones putting fire to a mosque can see themselves as resistance fighters. Images and metaphors are not innocent. The debate is not about the discussion of the “true” meaning of a happening. The meaning of the murder on Van Gogh is constructed in the debate itself.”[117] “The ‘war frame’ works in a dangerous way as a so-called wedge issue: it discriminates one group from another. […] By joining images as ‘war’ ’terror’ and ‘fight’ with a couple of other social themes as the street terror by Moroccan youths (Wilders, Scheffer) – a broad societal crisis is generated, not solved.”[118]
As Bolkestein, Afshin Ellian makes a comparison between the Nazi’s and the Muslims when saying, that he doesn’t trust the Dutch, because they surrendered in only five days against the Germans. (NRC 23-11-2004) Ellian is alluding to Moslem extremists, but still the comparison is tasteless and exaggerated, especially from a man who says to become nauseous, when people compare anti-Islamism to anti-Semitism. He considers this analogy as demagogy, but of course not his own comparisons. Moslims are not the new Nazi’s writes Sjoerd de Jong in the NRC, and he is opposing to the neoconservative metaphor of ‘occupation’: “Radical Muslims neither have the national state, nor the degree of organisation, nor the political ideology nor the support of their community that Hitler and his people had.” ( NRC 4-5-2006)
Anti-Semitism or racism are gradual phenomena, there is a whole scale of grey between hardcore racism and softer forms. Surely Cliteur and his mates are right that they are no hardcore racists in the classical sense of the word. The old biological racism is transformed to a “new racism”. Marcel Poorthuis en Theo Salemink:” The new racism is not longer based on the old doctrine of races and nations, nor on myths about the superior ‘Arian’ race, nor on the mission for whites to cultivate the others nor on myths about the inferior bastards. […] The new racism generates a hierarchy between groups on the base of a ‘cultural evolution’ which makes a people to a historical unity, and makes a difference between ‘own people’ and ‘aliens’, even if these aliens are citizens with equal rights. ‘Own people first’ is the political slogan of this movement in its extremist right-wing phase, to unconditionally adapt and assimilate is the new demand of the new millennium. A characteristic of this new racism is that it combines the classification of ‘own people’ above aliens with the vision that Europe itself is a kind of higher ‘natural community’ against non-European communities. The European people have together made a common historical evolution, which has brought forth a common culture, religion, and morale. This way the old doctrine about European superiority, which is stated with religious, cultural or biological arguments is reactivated and linked with the new racism of ‘own people first.” [119]
The Leiden Burkeans are maybe no racists, but they are surely ethnocentrists with feelings of superiority that lack foundation in reality. But some remarks by Burkeans are jus told-fashioned racism, like the following quote by Kinneging: “If Europeans do not reproducing- which they don’t - we will not have enough children to replace us. Europe will eventually Africanise and Asianise. Is that a bad thing? I think so, because this means the end of the occident. We have to prevent this.”[120] Ferry Haan and Hans Wansink had already in 2003 written in a reaction to the Conservative Manifest by Bart Jan Spruyt: “We read [in the manifest]: ‘Conservatives believe that a society which does not produce enough children, as it is the case in our country, and where half of the marriages ends by a bitter divorce is very unhealthy on one dimension. No serious cultural criticism can deny the problem of too low rates of childbirth and to many divorces.’ Too low rates of birth? Too many divorces ? Thanks to the Turkish and Moroccan communes, this is not a big problem. But the Burke Foundation mans: too few white children and too many Muslim children.” (de Volkskrant, 22-10-2003)
2.3.3. Carl Schmitt and the spirit of polarization
I will discuss the extremely hostile style of the Leiden professors, who, as Schmitt-followers- are consciously trying to create an existential enemy in public debate. […Freedom of Speech versus spreading hatred….]
2.4 Between idealism and “new-realism”2.4.1. Leo Strauss and PlatoThe Burkeans are great admirers of Plato, and stand in the tradition of Plato-fan Leo Strauss, whom they also cite as a philosophical reference. Bart Jan Spruyt cites Strauss extensively in his recent essay in Ongewenste goden (Undesired Gods); also Spruyt and Wilders cite Strauss in the philosophical program that can be read on the homepage of Wilders’ populist party.
[I will discuss Strauss ideas, his Platonism and Popper’s criticism of Plato, and I will apply his ideas to the ongoing Dutch debate.]
Buruma/Maragalit say in their important book Occidentalism: The West in the eyes of its enemies, that there is some important overlap between anti- Western thinking in the West itself and anti-Western thinking in radical Islam. Platonism and especially the Platonic contempt of the body plays a crucial role in both traditions: “The idea that the body is inherently imperfect and prone to corruption continued to have an influence on both Christianity and Islam. The human body is subject to sexual desires that result in moral depravity. The flesh is not only unworthy of God, but unworthy even of man. For man is elevated from matter by the divine spirit in him, by his soul. Because they have souls, unlike other creatures, humans are able to live a higher, more spiritual form of existence.”[121]
From Poppers Plato-criticm in The Open society and Its Enemies: “We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. [...] we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic. [ Cliteur en zijn Moderne Papoea’s- dat is tribale magie!, M.T.] [...] the more we return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely we do arrive at the Inquisiton [...] . There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way- we must return to the beasts. [...] But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into open society. We must go into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure [...]”[122]
The Burkeans are looking for a way into the closed society. Former Burke director Bart Jan Spruyt asks in an recent essay to close the boarders for non-Western foreigners and asks for “strong walls” . [123]
***2.4.2. “New-realism”Spruyt and Wilders call the philosophical part of Wilders’ party program “a new-realistic vision”. In her book Voorbij de onschuld ( No more innocence) Baukje Prins is studying this new realism extensively. [ew-]realism is claiming to be able to reproduce reality exactly as is, in all its ugliness. [New-] realism is also the name of a style of speaking and writing which differs from other styles by certain rhetoric and stylistic means. The rhetoric of [new-]realism appeals to certain desires: to our desire for truth, objectivity and impartiality, in other words, to our desire for moral and political innocence. Self-appointed [new-]realists present their opponents as naïve idealists. While [new-]realists are claiming to put truth in the first place, idealists according to them are judging staements after their acceptability. Truth, according to them, is loosing from The Good. [New-]realists like to use the commonplace of the taboo - fearfully defended by their opponents, courageously broken by themselves. “ ( p. 18)
[…more to come] 2.5. Fortuyn, Burke Foundation and Wilders
There is a direct connection between the Leiden Burkeans, Pim Fortuyn, Bart Jan Spruyt and the right-wing politician Geert Wilders.[124]
The “conservative revolutionary“ Bart Jan Spruyt remarks in his book Lof van het conservatisme (Praise of conservatism) that for a couple of reasons Pim Fortuyns book De verweesde samenleving ( The orphan society) has to be considered “the most conservative book in the Netherlands since the early-twentieth-century publications by Araham Kuyper and A.F. de Savornin Lohman”.[125] Fortuyn’s book De verweesde samenleving is according to Spruyt “parallel to a lot of things the Burke Foundation is standing for”. [126]
The Burkeans are have been very positive about Pim Fortuyn, who got a prize as the “conservative of the year” from the Burke Foundation in 2002. Mr. P.J.F. Bouma ( the former head of the advisory council of the Burke Foundation): “ This programme [of the Burke Foundation] is not directly connected to Fortuyn’s agenda; there are common issues and differences. But the fact that we can see this is for a great part due to the clearness which Fortuyn has brought, and this is why conservatives want to acknowledge the debt conservatism owes to him.” ( Algemeen Dagblad, 6-2-2003) The former Burke director Livestro admitted that Fortuyn was awarded the conservative-of –the–year with ambivalent feelings: “Fortuyn wanted a libertarian Holland. We put emphasis on character and on moral. We chose him because he broke up the suffocating political correctness in the public discussion and put right-wing topics on the agenda.” ( de Volkskrant, 13-2-2003)
This last statement has to be confronted with a couple of quotes from Fortuyns book The Islamization of our culture where he suggests the demonization of Islam: “The West chooses for a strategy of lukewarm pragmatics. The Islamite countries are integrated as much as possible. The West wants good relationships with these countries. The same fault was made by the democratic countries of the West in the Munich of 1939 . In the 80’s this fault was not repeated by the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who did not hesitate to define the Soviet-Union as the “Empire of the Evil.” [129] In the same book Fortuyn is also turning explicitly against liberal Islam.[130] The historical newpaper Historisch Nieuwsblad quotes Fortuyn as follows: “[The Islamic groups in Europe are] vegetating dead weight and parasites “in a fifth column” [131] [compare this to what Carl Schmitt said about Jews and parasites] The columnist Frits Abrahams- according to Ellian a “moral terrorist” - gave the full quote by Fortuyn about “the fifth column”: “We do have , goddammit, a fifth column, let me tell it altogether, who wants to bring the country to hell.”[132] As the Burkeans, Fortuyn was an enemy of liberal Islam: “In his eyes, also liberal Islam can be reduced to its supposed core, that is to say, political and religious fundamentalism.”[133] Paul Cliteur: “Is not Fortuyn’s career one long demonstration of tolerance”? […] Fortuyn deserves the Voltaire-prize posthumously .”[134] Cliteur, who has been attending meetings organized by the party of Fortuyn, LPF, has also written a longer Fortuyn-apology in Civis Mundi [135]. In this article he is quoting with consent the American neoconservative D’Souza, whom he rightly considers as a spiritual relative of Fortuyn and himself (p.82) . The highly relevant motive of “decadence” ( see my chapter) ties together D’Souza ( and the American neocons) , Fortuyn and the Burke Foundation.
The Burkeans never mention Fortuyn’s very problematic sides, for instance his Messianic aspirations. But right-wing extremists in Belgium and Germany know what they owe to Fortuyn: the see him as a saviour and important example. The German right-wing nationalist Pastörs: “He [Fortuyn] listened to the cry of help from the population. He was their saviour.” (de Volkskrant, 29-9-2006)
From Fortuyns book The orphaned society (praised by Bart Jan Spruyt as a typically conservative book) : “A leader of substance is both a father and a mother . He gives the law, and is watching his herd. The capable leader is the biblical good shepherd who will lead us to the fathers’s house. Let us prepare for his coming. He is giving values and building bridges. He is distant and understanding. […] I am ready. Are you? Let’s go to the promised country” (p.238)[136] Ian Buruma: “He was the leader, who, in a secular age, would guide his Dutch flock back to the father’s house. What made him a potential menace was that both h and his followers imagined him to be the father- the father they had lost.””What mattered in [Fortuyns] ideal family state wasn’t class, it was, “what we want t be ‘one people, one country, one society.’ Despite his protests to the contrary, this kind of thing did put Fortuyn in the same camp as right-wing populists in other parts of Europe.” “It is the fantasy of a dictatorial dreamer, the ‘politics on the spot’, the idea of natural selection to be a leader.”[137]
Dick Pels writes in De geest van Pim: ( Pim’s spirit) “[…] In general he [Fortuyn] has the tendency to accept his ‘call’ gravely in classical-Messianic manner as a holy mission. Already in 1994 Fortuyn writes: ”I have to break up. Maybe this is the task of my life. If one thinks about Moses in this way, one understands how much he must have been suffering. We know where home is, we now the way, but will not arrive. This is not only painful, but also cruel. I hope I do not have to be a Moses.”(p. 66) Fortuyn is also quoting Jesaja: ‘’ `They do not call upon me, but I say: here I am, here I am.”(Pels, p. 66)
The change within the Burke Foundation from a broad conservatism to a populism with a conservative flavour came with the Conservative Manifesto (2003) Hans Wansink shows the high Fortuyn-content in this pamphlet with the subtitle The crisis in the Netherlands and the conservative answer: direct democracy, against ‘Islamiziation’, limitation of the state, against the European Union.[138] The political philosopher Hans Achterhuis about this manifesto: “What do we have to think about the idea to let judges be directly chosen by the population? Even in the wave of exaggerated democratization in the sixties nobody went this far. This proposal has nothing to do with what is called conservatism, it is a form of populism which is dropping the checks and balances of political power conservatives always defend, and which deteriorates the dynamics of society instead of slowing it down and leading it into good paths. ( Trouw, 25-10-2003)
John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and a harsh critic of neo-conservatism ( which is why Paul Cliteur calls his books “horrible”) , summarizes Fortuyn’s program :” The far right was a modernist movement in the 1930’s and so it is today. Now, as in the past, it appeals to voters for more traditional right-wing parties, but its widening support includes the much larger ranks of the politically disaffected. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Netherlands, where Pim Fortuyn showed the strategy of the far right as its most subtle. An ex-Marxist and former academic, Fortuyn was neo-Thatcherite on the economy and the environment, harping on the evils of regulation and the Burdens of taxation. Yet, unlike Thatcherites in Britain, he favoured a highly liberal regime on sex , euthanasia and drugs use. Again, he took a firm pro-Israel-line on conflict in the Middle East and does not seem to have been anti-Semitic. But he undoubtedly played the race card, particularly against Muslims, and he did so, at least by his own account, because he believed further Muslim immigration would threaten Dutch freedoms of lifestyle: he challenged the belief that liberal societies should assimilate immigrants whose values are anti-liberal. In effect, he advocated a policy of liberal cultural protectionism. He failed to explain how such a policy could be implemented in places where, as in the Netherlands and throughout Europe, multiculturalism is an irreversible reality.”[139]
Burke-director/secretary Bart Jan Spruyt is a great fan of Pim Fortuyn: “Fortuyn pointed out the real problem [with respect to Islam]”[140] The societal destabilization that Spruyt c.s. have hoped for has successfully been initiated by Fortuyn: “Fortuyn’s revolt only marked the beginning of the destabilization”[141] Spruyt uses a very much out-of-place metaphors of war in his book De Toekomst van de stad ( The future of the city; 2005) ( a book Afshin Ellian is holding in his hands on the website of the Burke Foundation). According to Spruyt our society has to grip to weapons.[142] Photo’s of Churchill are combined with an urgent warning against the enemy from outside and from within. The political columnist Jan Blokker has rightly remarked that in our times in some circles [ and this is certainly true for Fortuyn and the Burke Foundation. M.T ] tolerance is not more than appeasement “a very suspect idea that means tat people like mayor Cohen from Amsterdam drink coffee with an imam like Neville Chamberlain did in 1938 with Adolf Hitler.” (de Volkskrant, 20-5-2006) The Enemy ( and Spruyt is consciously using the terminology by Carl Schmitt, se above) is next to leftish nonchalance especially “the religion of Islam” (Spruyt, p. 13). The fortress of Dutch democracy has become a wrack, with big openings on all sides, where the enemy can just walk in.” (p.62) . How far to the right Spruyt’s colleagues Ellian and Cliteur are becomes apparent when one looks at what they think about a conservative Christian-democrat like the former minister of Justice. Cliteur mentions him as an example of decadence (!),[143] and for Spruyt Donner is an example of a virulent (!) enemy from within (p. 63). Like Ellian Spruyt is insinuating that nowadays problems with multicultural society and the murder of Fortuyn and Van Gogh are directly comparable with Hitlers dictatorial state. They want to explain their own plead for an authoritarian state out of a defensive attitude. This does contrast, but also fit with Spruyt praising of Carl Schmitt: Carl Schmitt: Schmitt defended Hitler’s race laws, because they had , according to Schmitt, a purely defensive character…People who actively want to use Carl Schmitt’s ideas nowadays can better not sell these ideas as “defensive”! Plenty of war language and misplaced metaphors one encounters in the speeches of the Dutch right-wing populist Geert Wilders with whom Spruyt cooperated closely between the autumn 2004 and august 2006. Like Fortuyn, Wilders was elected the conservative of the year by the Burke Foundation ( Wilders in 2004). Wilders quotes ( in the context of criminal Dutch-Moroccan youths whose Dutch nationality Wilders want to take away) the right-wing nationalist Enoch Powell, who in 1968 warned about the consequences of immigration: Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” [144] Huib Pellikaan and Sebastiaan van der Lubben, political scientist from Leiden University, write about Wilders’ program: “Wilders’ program fits seamless with the neoconservative agenda in the US. The most important thing is keeping intact the collective. For a stable society it is demanded that citizens are alike each others in cultural and moral aspects. The basis is cultural monism: the existence of cultural and moral diversity is seen as the main reason for political instability. Furthermore, minorities with a Islamic believe are pointed out as a danger for Western society. [I wonder f the is really typical for American neo-conservatism, it seems to me it is more special for Wilders , M.T.] The fact that terrorist attacks have been carried out in the name of Allah, and that these assaults were explicitly targeted against the core values of Western society, makes all Muslims suspects. […] The agenda of American neo-conservatives is aimed at the conservation of national sovereignty and mobilization of patriotism. Furthermore it seeks connection with a political sentiment that can be defined as ‘grass-roots anarchy’: the populist thought, that conservative values flourish more on the countryside that in the progressive elites of the big cities. Also these elements come back in Wilders’program. The defence of national sovereignty comes forward in . Ook met deze elementen vertoont het programma van Wilders veel overeenkomsten. De verdediging van de nationale soevereiniteit komt naar voren in zijn houding ten opzichte van de Europese integratie en de plannen tot uitbreiding van de EU. De gedachte van de ‘grass-roots anarchy’ is terug te vinden in voorstellen tot herziening van het kiesstelsel, het afschaffen van de wachtgeldregeling voor politici en het voorstel voor het rechtstreeks kiezen van de burgemeester, de politiecommissaris en de leden van de rechtbank. Het motto van de nieuwe politiek van de PvdV is: ‘De overheid is er voor de burgers en niet andersom’.” [145]
Geert Wilders, Kinneging and Cliteur all have been members of the liberal party VVD. For them applies, what Marcel ten Hooven writes in Religie verdeelt Nederland (Religion devides The Netherlands) : “The liberals are radicalizing in reaction to Islam. Now they are seeking the resolution in a stronger state at costs of freedom of schooling, association, and religion. [146] This liberal etatism has old traditions; Ten Hooven mentions Kappeyne van de Coppello. The laicism that Ellian and Cliteur ask for does not only keep religious symbols out of the public space, but also rises the state to a symbol of unity. Basic Human rights have a low value for Burkeans. Kinneging apologizes torture, for Cliteur human dignity is not unconditional, and Spruyt and Wilders want to make constitutional rights conditional. Spruyt writes in De toekomst van de stad, that the German constitution states that people who do not observe certain laws loose the right to appeal to these rights. He gives the impression that German constitutional law is conditional. [147] But this is not the case. Spruyt quotes article 18 of the German constitutional law. This article states, that that some rights, for instance freedom of expression, are conditional. But many German constitutional rights, especially human dignity, but also equality before law, equality of men and woman, abolishment of discrimination, freedom of religion, conscience and confession, are not conditional for the German constitutional law.[148] This means that even the person who discriminates may not be discriminated him/herself, and one who does not leave others free in their religion, still may be free in his own choice of religion. This asymmetries do not please right-wing politicians like Spruyt and Wilders, but they lie the base of the constitutional state. Geert Wilders had (together with Hirsi Ali) demanded, that freedom of religion […] has to be abandoned for some people and for some time” and that “basic rights and laws need to be put aside in dealing with people who abuse them”.[149] This old-testamentary eye-for-eye thinking does not fit the modern constitutional state, which indeed is asymmetrical when it comes to basic rights. The Dutch court who sentenced the Dutch Muslim-fundamental youths ( called the “Hofstad” group) stated: ”The defence has rightly been speaking about freedom of opinion and freedom of religion. It shows the power of our constitution that this has been said in defence even of those suspects who are deeply convinced that they want to destroy these liberties.”[150] The asymmetric nature of basic rights can be understood as a secularization of the Christian principle of Grace. ( For the topic of Law and Grace- as well as for the in Burke Foundation-context relevant topic of hypocrisy- are Shakespeare’s plays, especially The merchant of Venice[151] en Measure for Measure very relevant) . But Spruyt, a protestant Christian fundamentalist, also closely connected to the orthodox protestant party SPG, is an apocalyptic thinker who does not understand Grace. The concept of Grace ( by the way neither absent in the Old Testament – a point made by Shakespeare[152]- nor in the Koran) is very difficult to ggrip. In order to understand Grace, also in its secular forms, it is necessary to make use of both ration and emotions. Also Kinneging does not have any understanding of the principle of Grace. This concept can not be found in his Christian-fundamentalist book Geografie van Goed en Kwaad (Geographies of Good and Evil). Kinneging is representing a catholic-Aristotelian middle-age ethics of virtue. His “Enlightenment fundamentalist” colleagues do not have any problem with this. Ellian praises Kinnegings book. What is wrong with a Aristotelian private ethic of virtues has in my oinion been very well explained by Martin Luther. Self-righteousness and harshness against others are necessary consequences. In other words: mercilessness. The Leiden teacher of political science Willem Breedveld: “There is no understanding anymore for what the apostle Paulus said, that you should overcome Evil with Good. Concrete: anyone who is pleading for resocialization of criminals is nowadays to be considered crazy.”( Trouw,15-4-2006)
Spruyt, Wilders and Ellian want to deny Islamic groups preventively their social and political rights, just because abuse of these rights is leering. ( p.80) The German ( and also Dutch) constitutional law quoted by Spruyt makes it possible indeed to abolish parties that have broken the law, but what Spruyt suggests is, that already the suspicion of a transgression is enough to deny basic rights. He cannot use the German law though to underpin this undemocratic idea. Geert Wilders suggested to declare a state of emergency/martial law after the murder on Theo van Gogh. He proposed to arrest “at least 150 radicalized Muslims immediately, to lock them up on an island and take away the Dutch nationally.”[153] He also suggested ( in cooperation with Bart Spruyt) to take away Dutch nationality from adolescent Moroccan criminals and t parents. Destruction, threat and vandalism he considers as “street terror”. The commentary in the Dutch paper NRC says, in reaction to this: “The appliance of terminology from anti-terror-politics unto the disturbance o peace and order sounds powerful in the bar but can lead to accidents in the parliament.” [154]
Spruyt underlines the usefulness of religion, but only of Christian religion, which according to him should anchored as a Leitkultur in the constitution (p.82). Islam for him is “not suited” as a civic religion. (p.83) Spruyt wishes to follow the American neo-conservatives in everything, but his and Wilders discriminating hatred against a whole religion and Spruyt’s idea to bereave citizens of their nationality– these are very un-American thoughts. (The American sponsor Pfizer has finished the relationship with the Burke Foundation because of the anti-Islamic licies in this foundation. Americans also positive to a EU-membership of Turkey- in contrast to the Burkeans and to Bolkestein, who is regally publishing negatively about Turkey’s Eu-membership).
The theoretical vision laid out by (at that time) Burke director Spruyt in his book De toekomst van de stad in March 2005, a vision laid out with the support of Ellian who is holding this book on a photograph on the website of the Burke Foundation, is fulfilled in March 2006 by Geert Wilders, who now wishes to remove the first article of the Dutch constitution that is about the equal treatment of citizens. Volkskrant-columnist Anet Bleich about Spruyts book: “[If Spruyt gets what he wants ] basic rights will not be for everybody, no, one will have to earn them, and this can be done by consenting with ‘a basic fundament of values and norms’. At the end of his book [Spruyt] invites intellectual Muslims to offer “klare wijn”[“pure wine” [Dutch metaphor for telling the truth]”[155] “Klare wijn” – this is also the name of the election programme Spruyt has written for Wilders. As a consequence of his discriminating programme Wilders was called a racist in BBC-programme Hardtalk by Stephen Sackur.[156] The commentary in de Volkskrant said on 22 Mach 2006, when Wilders new programme became public: “The article of the Dutch constitutional law ‘All people who are dwelling in the Netherlands are to be treated the same in same case’ is a core value of our society shared by the whole population. This article is also an appeal to Christian and Muslim fundamentalists to stop treating woman and homosexuals as second rate citizens.” Who knows, maybe this is also a reason for Wilders and Spruyt to want to move this article. If one looks at the Christian fundamental, racist and sexist vision of Burke-founder and now director professor Kinneging, then one can be sure that the rights of woman and homosexuals do not interest the core people among Dutch neoconservatives.
In the paper de Volkskrant of 7 October 2006 Wilders repeats the core of his programme: The Netherlands stand on the dawn of a “tsunami of Islamization”. Muslims will submerge the Dutch society and cause criminality and nuisance, even on the countryside. Their intolerant and violent culture will hit the Dutch society “in its heart, in its identity”. “Their conduct comes from their religion and culture. You can’t see these things separately.” [ Like Cliteur and Ellian, M.T.] Wilders does not believe in an moderated Islam “I do not believe in Islam at all. What do you [ the interviewer] mean? Non-Western immigrants are not longer welcome in the Netherlands. Already present immigrants have to sign an “assimilation contract”, where they promise to adapt to the dominant Dutch culture and its norms and values. Immigrants who violate the contract have to leave the Netherlands. It won’t be very many, Wilders thinks, because of the deterring effect. “I think only one or two planes will be necessary.” The building of new mosques will be prohibited by Wilders. “We have too many. I get crazy by all these mosques.” “The pope was absolutely right: Islam is a violent religion. Islam means subjection and conversion of non-Muslims. This interpretation is valid in the living rooms of problem youths, in the mosques. It is part of their community.” “A street terrorist in third repetition of offence has to leave the country. This will be a legal minimum punishment.”
Bart Jan Spruyt does not cooperate with Wilders any more, but not because of Wilders’ extremism or his views about Islam, but because Wilders does not want to cooperate with other right-wing parties.( NRC 26-8-2006)
Bart Jan Spruyt, the brain behind Wilders, insinuates in his book De toekomst van de stad that he can build his idea’s on the German constitutional law. The Nijmegen teacher of classical languages Anton van Hooff writes under the title Give me the German constitutional law extensively about the German law and about Wilders’ suggestion to remove article 1 from the Dutch Law. He underlines that the German law is inclusive, and not exclusive, like Wilders’ proposal. He writes: “Wilders’ goal with his so-called “Jewish-Christian tradition” is to exclude people, especially Muslims. […] Wilders’ attempt to define the Dutch culture is very crude. The Jewish element is after all only fully recognized because of Auschwitz.” ( NRC 8-4-2006) And I myself add: why Jewish-Christian tradition? Why can we not speak for instance about a common Abrahamic tradition?
The first article in the German constitution says: “The human dignity is untouchable. To protect and to respect her is the duty of all power of the state. ”And the second article: “The German people therefore profess to an immune and unnegatiable human rights a basis for all human community, peace and justice in the world.” The Burke and Wilders have nothing common with this article. Paul Cliteur for instance writes: ”If Hitler had received capital punishment or Bin Laden in the VS, then I would not have problems that. For some incorrigible people there just one thin left: kill, kill, kill, as Shaw said. These people cannot call upon an intrinsic human dignity.” [157] [for the incorrect quote of Bernard Shaw, see above]. For the German constitutional law human dignity is not something one can loose, not even some “incorrigible people." And apart from the German law: Michael Ignatieff put it into the right words: ”We care about rights because we believe that each human life is intrinsically worth protecting and preserving.” [158]
The Leiden professor of ancient Greek Ineke Sluiter writes about Wilders’ suggestion to eliminate equality from the constitutional law: “The danger of these kind of suggestions is surely complex, but one aspect hits the heart of the democratic process: the risk that out-of –proportion violations of basic rights will be accepted is increasing drastically as the violation is selective, that will say if the majority is not at risk at all to suffer. Under these circumstances the democratic majority will be easily ready to agree with measures claiming to ensure security on the cost of ‘small’ violations of personal rights and freedom… of a minority. […] if measures hit everybody to the same extend and still are found acceptable, they have a much higher legitimacy.” [159] In other words: if harsh anti-terror measures have to taken, they must be applied to everybody. This is a minimal demand.
The Amsterdam professor of political science Jos de Beus writes about Wilders’ extremism: “Wilders said to the paper De Standard, that immigrant youths who are criminals and act antisocially […] must be punished with withdrawal of their Dutch passport and deportation to their country of origin. Are the people who support Wilders really understanding what is prepared by him? My objection is not even that these suggestions are unfeasible under Dutch and international law. Also the threatening in his politics I let pass. My main objection is that Wilders tries to win voters with pal that only can be realized in totalitarian and authoritarian states. The British king could send criminals to Australian colonies, […] the tyrants of the 20th century [Lenin, Stain, Hitler, Mao) could empty or fill whole landscapes with people. A democratic leader wrestling with failed multicultural politics cannot, even if his name is Wilders […] The person who suggests that democracy and deportation of minorities are reconcilable, is an extremist. Not because the ‘scarf eater’ [ Wilders had said “I like scarves raw” M.T.] conquers power with undemocratic means, but because he, in the way of the ‘communist eater’ Joseph McCarthy [ Wilders is a McCarthy fan, M.T.], stands for a policy that only with undemocratic rules and competences can be made a success .” (NRC 29-12-2004)
2.6. The “clash of civilizations”.2.6.1. The European history of anti-Islamism2.6.2. Lewis, Huntington and their Dutch followersThe Leiden Burkeans (and Wilders) are direct followers of the philosophy of Ernest Renan, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. I will argue against the essentialist philosophy of these thinkers, and I argue that one has to look at historical and especially socio-economic factors. I am referring to the books of Erasmus-laureate Sadik Al-Azm. I state that the Burkeans are not interested in either Al-Azm’s ideas nor in the ideas of the former Leiden professor Nasr Abu Zayd who is working for a liberalization of Islam. Leiden professor Paul Cliteur is speaking denigrating about Abu Zayds work, by calling him a “post-modern word artist”. But in the question of the Danish cartoons, when accusing Islam of intolerance etc. he suddenly is using Abu Zayd to accuse Egypt (and ALL Muslims) of intolerance. Abu Zayd himself has rejected this kind of instrumental use of his writings. He says: “The press and even some intellectuals want me to parrot their ideas about Islam, which usually means casting Islam in a negative light.”[160] I try to show that young Islam-fundamentalists as well as the Burke-philosophy is a low-quality cut-and-paste of ideas. It is a pity that the Leiden professors do not want to support people like Al-Azm and Abu Zayd who try to reform Islam from within. I go on to explain and summarize the many things Islam and Western civilization have in common: modernization of society, religious traditions, philosophy, European history, and scientific development. There is absolutely no way that Islam can be constructed as intrinsically different, distant and hostile to Western culture. Buruma/ Margalit do not speak about a Clash of Civililizations, but of a “cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas”. [161]
John Gray : “American military intervention in Iraq was based on neoconservative fantasies about U.S. forces being greeted as liberators. […] The torture of Iraqi’s by U.S. personnel is an application of the Bush administration’s strategy in the war on terror. Tossing aside international law and norms of civilized behavior in this way is self-defeating. Not so long ago, the clash of civilizations was just a crass and erroneous theory, but after the recent revelations it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”[162]
2.7. Enlightenment fundamentalism2.7.1. The “liberal jihad”: shortcut-and-paste EnlightenmentIan Buruma in Murder in Amsterdam: “Ellian and others like him […] are sometimes called “Enlightenment fundamentalists”. This might sound like a contradiction. Thinkers of the Enlightenment, after all rejected all dogma’s. But Ellian’s penchant for denunciation in the name of freedom and democracy is marked by earlier more brutal experiences. “(p. 27) “Denunciation in the name of freedom and democracy” is not only promoted by Ellian but also by Cliteur, Spruyt, Spits, and others who have lived a secure and well-paid life. Thus biographical explanation is also a too short a shortcut.
The Leiden Burkeans give intellectual support to the rightwing populist Geert Wilders, who explicitly called himself a fighter for the “liberal jihad”. Together with Burke-director Bart Jan Spruyt (who is connected to Leiden University by his friendship with the Leiden Burkeans, and by his Leiden PhD) Wilders wants to defend civil liberties by abolishing them. This way they play the game of the Islamic fundamentalists: they subdue to a claustrophobic discourse, where there is no place for a variety of perspectives. Ian Buruma about Dutch neo-conservatism and Enlightenment: “The conservative call for Enlightenment is partly a revolt against a revolt. Tolerance has gone too far for many conservatives. They believe, like some former leftists, that multiculturalism was a mistake; our fundamental values must be reclaimed. Because secularism has gone too far to bring back the authority of the churches, conservatives and neo-conservatives have latched onto the Enlightenment as a badge of national or cultural identity. The Enlightenment, in other words, has become the name for a new conservative order, and its enemies are the aliens, whose value’s we can’t share.“[163] Ian Buruma goes on saying “Perhaps this was a necessary correction.”- but I want to argue why this is much too harmonious an interpretation.
The two Leiden professors Ellian and Cliteur have to be considered as Enlightenment fundamentalists. They are fundamentalists, because they have shown repeatedly to interpret texts as one-dimensional. They believe that there is only one way to understand texts, and especially, that there is only one way to read the Qu’ran, and that is: the way the Muslim fundamentalists read it. I argue that by disqualifying Abu Zayd as “post-modern word artist” Cliteur takes more or less the same fundamentalist attitude that forced Abu Zaid to leave his country, Egypt. I contrast Cliteur’s view of Abu Zayd with the view the Leiden rector Breimer expressed in his welcome speech for Abu Zayd (who held a honour professorship as Cleveringa-professor in 2000/2001) on 27 November 2000: “Your [Abu Zayds] first step was taken in 1987, when you proposed that the interpretation of texts in the Koran should be based upon an understanding of the historical context in which they were written. This was not proposed in order to raise doubts about the character or the source of the script, but quite the reverse, in order to let the text speak its true meaning to the people of today. This second point, namely that the historical approach to sacred texts does not diminish the value of the Koran as the Word of God, was elaborated in your second step. The third step, quite inevitably, is related to the question of how the Revelation must be read, if it is to be related to its proper context. What are the implications of not giving the text its literal meaning, that is, literal in terms of our present-day cognitions? And if the meaning must be inferred, who has the authority to do this, what degree of freedom in the interpretation will be permitted, and how do we deal with the problem that ancient times can only be a metaphor of today? The fourth step is a discussion of the Islamic thinker Shâfi’î, who lived about 200 years after the beginning of the Islamic era. Shâfi’î started to use the Sunna and the Koran as equivalent sources of jurisprudence, which, if I follow your thinking correctly, leads to a clear illustration of what may go wrong when the socio-historical contexts within which texts originate are neglected. Your next step, quite logically, illustrates the dangers of fundamentalistic reasoning, in which the meaning of texts is no longer adapted to the cognitions of present-day believers, thus enabling some religious leaders to use religious sentiments for their political objectives.” Of course, Cliteur may be critical of Abu Zayd’s work. But Abu Zayd is not a post-modern word artist. He is a believing Muslim. Post-modern word artists …. are in fact the young radical Islamic fundamentalists who have constructed a cut-and-paste-Islam from internet-texts. But Cliteur and his Leiden colleague Ellian consider the fundamentalist cut-and-paste-Islam as the one and only possible and real Islam. Actually: the neoconservative ideology of the Burke Foundation, is very much a cut-and paste ideology, that is abusing the texts that it is claiming. Also I try to show, that the Enlightenment fundamentalists do not like Kant, and his maxim “Sapere aude!” “Think for your self!” . They do not like critical thinking. They want an authoritarian state and they are not interested in minority rights. Ellian generalizes and stigmatises the Islamic faith with his daring statement: “Islam is nothing more than a structural misfit dominating all aspects of education, culture, economics, politics and manners for already 1400 years. It resembles plague: where there is Islam, there also is poverty, failing development, illiteracy, oppression, corruption, frustration and especially: violence.” Buruma/Margalit in Occidentalism: “The idea that organized religion is the main problem might come naturally tot the newly secularized, disenchanted Western intellectuals, but that […] is off the mark. For some of the most ferocious enemies of the West are secular, or at least pretend to be. Religion is used everywhere, in India no less than in Israel, the United States and Arabia, for reprehensible political ends. But it does not have to be. It can be a force for the good. In the Middle East, it might offer the only hope of a peaceful way out of our current mess. […] Organized religion has a place, in offering community and spiritual meaning to those who seek it. ”[164] […] In my opinion the Burkean version of enlightened thinking is an example of this dangerous one-dimensional rationalism and authoritarian enlightenment. For instance. Paul Cliteur explicitly prefers Fredric The Greats (an authoritarian enlightened monarch) quote “Everybody must try to be happy in his own way” above Kant’s important critical essay Was ist Aufklärung (What is enlightenment?). [165] Cliteur is right, that Fredric the Great was tolerant against other religions[166] especially against Muslims, but in this respect Cliteur is definitely not a follower of Fredric The Great. Roy Porter: “In their Dialectics of Enlightenment the German philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno have argued, that that it was thus no accident that ‘reason’ so often went hand-in-glove with ‘absolutism’. For reason and science far from promoting liberty, encourage an absolutist cast of mind, by assuming an ‘absolute’ distinction between true and false, rght and wrong, rather than a pluralistic diversity of values. Along similar lines, the French thinker Michael Foucault has contended that Enlightenment principles and absolutist policy fused. In the name of rational administration, to promote cruel social policies. For instance, various kinds of social misfits – the old, the sick, beggars, petty criminals and the mad – were taken off the streets, lumped together as an ‘unreasonable’ social residue, and locked up in institutions. Here what purported to be ‘enlightenment’ action was in reality repressive. Postmodernists have accused the Enlightenment of promoting the absolutism of imperialist reason, while masquerading as tolerant and pluralist. Thus, it is not good enough simply to applaud enlightened intellectuals for attempting to tackle social problems; we must also assess the practical and ideological implications of their policies.[…] As it is well known, Jean-Jacques Rousseau long ago contended hat much of what other philosophes were commending in the name of reason , civilization and progress, would, in reality, render mankind only less free, less virtuous, and less happy. ”[167]
I do not agree with Roy Porter, when he writes: “The Enlightenment is what sets Date and Erasmus, Bernini, Pascal, Racine and Milton – all great Christian writers and artists- on one side of the great cultural devide, and Delacroix, Schopenhauer, George Eliot, and Darwin on the other. Romanticism, one might suggest, is what is left of the soul when the religion has been drained out of it. As the Enlightenment gained ground, it spelt the end of public wars of faith, put a stop to witch-persecutions and heretic-burnings, an signalled the demise of magic and astrology, the erosion of the occult, the waning of belief in the literal physical existence of Heaven and Hell, in the Devil and all his disciples. “[168]
[I will discuss this later, but for now see the remarks above by Horkheimer/Adorno and Foucault. ] There has been much objection to the term Ënlightenment fundamentalism”, for instance by the former Leiden, now Utrecht professor of philosophy, Herman Philipse. But also the British-Jewish historian Jonathan Israel rather speaks of “radical Enlightenment” ( concerning Hirsi Ali, but the same is true for Ellian and Cliteur). But the softer (?) term “radical Enlightenment” does not keep him from being critical: “I find it wrong when people say that Dutch people have to defend their Enlightenment heritage against religious immigrants. This way you create xenophobia and racism. The fact that these people are newcomers or that they are Muslims, does not matter. What is important, is, that these people support the core values of tolerance, democracy and individual freedom. It does not matter what their background is. One should emphasise that we share the world with others and that humankind is the basic unit. […] (Trouw, 6-5-2005) Jonathan Israel is defending Hirsi Ali as a “radical“ thinker in the tradition of Spinoza, but he does not realize that she and her allies from the Burke Foundation and from the American Enterprise Institute are really not at all fighters for tolerance and caution like Spinoza was.
2.7.2. The inconsistent criticism of Enlightenment in Kinneging and SpruytThe conservatism of Kinneging and Spruyt is much more in line with the Enlightenment than one would think after reading their attacks on the Enlightenment. In many ways these conservatives have not, as they state, a negative but a very positive view of man and man’s possibilities. Kinneging believes that a person can control herself if she tries hard enough. Ratio can and has to control emotions, and culture has to rule over nature. [169] Also, neither Kinneging nor Spruyt reject technological progress . They embrace economic liberalism, a philosophy closely related to Enlightenment. {…}
2.7.3. In Voltaire’s footsteps
In the footsteps of their French predecessor Jean-Claude Barreau, author of De l'islam en general et du monde moderne en particulier, Ellian and Cliteur try to break taboos and to force a debate. Like Barreau, Ellian and Cliteur call on Voltaire. Barreau had already in 1991 attacked Islam in the name of Voltaire, who, as he happily stated, had said “terrible things about Islam”. (NRC 8-2-1992)
Cliteur and Ellian often compare themselves explicitly to Voltaire. Cliteur has only very recently done this implicitly, by writing : “Why should criticism from within [Islam] and from outside [Islam] exclude each other? Why should Luther not be supported by Voltaire? “[170] Since Cliteur often refers to Voltaire to defend his (Cliteur’s) point of view, we can translate also his “Luther” into a real person: it is a good guess that Cliteur was thinking of Nasr Abu Zayd since Abu Zayd is a well-known reformer of Islam, who sometimes is called a new Luther and is a Leiden professor as well, who has been mentioned before in Cliteur´s articles and books. .
It is interesting to discuss the similarity and differences of Cliteur’s and Ellian’s ideas with the ideas of Voltaire. At a first glance, the comparison between these two professors and Voltaire seems at least a little bit grotesque. At least, when it comes to Cliteur´s acclaimed cooperation with the reformers of Islam (Voltaire cooperating with Luther) : this cooperation does not exist. Cliteur has never tried to go into a direct dialogue with any Islamic “Luther”, to the contrary, he is very negative about reformers like Nasr Aby Zayd. Cliteurs publicly repeated intention to stigmatize Islam, and to polarize society, his support for Islam-bashers like Robert Spencer make him not a partner of reformers but at least a counteragent, if not a Schmittian “Enemy” of Islam.
[ The following text is only a rough sketch and has to be completed and refined]
2.7.2.1 Similarities between Cliteur’s , Ellian’s and Voltaire’s ideas - The philosophes (as Roy Porter called them) where “men of the world: journalists, propagandists, activists, seeking not just to understand the world but to change it” (Porter, The Enlightenment, p. 3) - “They often popularized – to get through to the people.” (Porter, p.4) - “The philosophes […] were contemptuous of dreamers with their heads in the clouds: they championed what Marx were later to call ‘praxis’” (Porter, p. 6) The Burkeans claim ‘praxis’ for themselves- even if that claim is wrongly made. They are certainly are contemptuous of dreamers and are certainly no thinkers with a highly theoretical analysis. - Cliteur, like Voltaire, admires Frederick the Great of Prussia. Porter: “Certainly, Frederick held advanced views (he was flagrantly irreligious) and he modernized the administration of his kingdom. Yet, despite the façade of sophisticated humanity, Frederick’s Prussia – a militarized , war-hungry state indifferent to individual civil and political liberties – resembles a perversion of the true goals of ‘the party of humanity’ rather than their fulfilment. [….] When rulers and administrators heeded the promptings of ‘reason’, it was to increase their power and enhance their authority in ways which often penalized the poor, weak and inarticulate.” (Porter, p.7) Compare to the Burkean ideal of an authoritative, top-down organized state. - “The new social sciences developed by the philosophes were highly critical of Christian conceptions of divinely appointed government, and of feudal hierarchy and subordination. But ( with a few exceptions, such as Rousseau), they did not provide anything like such a searching critique of commercial society, with its sanctification of private property and individual interests. In many ways, the Enlightenment hymn to ‘progress’ turned a blind eye to the equally biting inequalities and oppressions of the new commercial and industrial order [..] “ (Porter, p. 20 ) - “[…] the relative silence of these intellectuals [Voltaire en Diderot] when confronted with the internally oppressive and externally bellicose policies pursued by both autocrats [Frederick and Katharina], leaves many questions to be answered.” ( Porter, p.23) - “The likes of Voltaire depicted the peasantry as barely distinguishable from the beasts of the field. Their point in making such unflattering comparisons was to criticize a system which reduced humans to the level of brutes; but such comments betray a mentality for which the true question was not popular participation in government – that did not see a high priority- but whether people were to be ruled wisely or incompetently.”(Porter, p. 24). - “[…] the Continental philosophes of the ‘High Enlightenment’ never mad their prime demand the maximization of personal freedom and the reciprocal attenuation of the state, in the manner of later English laissez-fair liberalism.” (Porter, p. 26). “It was the thinkers of Germanic and central Europe above all who looked to powerful, enlightened rulers to preside over a ‘well-policed’ state. By this was meant a regime in which an efficient, professional career bureaucracy comprehensively regulated civic life, trade, occupations, morals and health, often down to quite minute details.”( Porter, p. 27) “For some, notably Voltaire, Diderot and d’Holbach, the emancipation of mankind from religious tyranny had to be the first blow struck in a general politics of emancipation, because the individual possessed by a false faith could not be in possession of himself. (Porter, p. 29) . - “Above all, Voltaire was the anti-Christ of the Enlightenment, battling throughout his career against the demons of false religion. Ever ready with an anti-clerical jest, his early campaigns were waged largely in the cause of religious tolerance ( he particularly admired the peaceful English Quakers) and were directed against the Church Militant, and its more outlandish beliefs and practices. Over the decades, his antipathy grew fiercer, and he directed his ferocious moral passion against the evils Christianity had perpetrated through wars of religion, burning heretics, executing so-called ‘witches’, etc. In place of the Christian creed and church, Voltaire hoped to install what Gay had called ‘modern paganism’. “ (Porter, p. 30) cf. Cliteurs book title Modern Papua’s where he is arguing that we need to become modern Papua’s , i.e. a closed society. - “Voltaire railed with restless, relentless ferocity against all religion, as though God ( ho after all did not exist) had done him some personal injury. His reiterated rally-call Écrasez l’infâme was extended beyond the Pope, beyond the organized churches, to practically all manifestations of religiosity whatsoever.” “And the very slogan Écrasez l’infâme itself echoed the bloody war-cry of the crusader, only this time that of the ‘philosoph militant’ ( Porter, p. 31, p.36f.) - “Many Enlightenment theorists in any case expected that a well-constituted society would possess a ‘civic’ religion upon the model of ancient Rome, a faith to foster patriotism, community spirit and virtue. [….] Voltaire was notoriously convinced that it was essential that one’s servants – one’s wife, too – should be pious, otherwise, lacking the fear of God, such people would steal the spoons or be unfaithful.” ( Porter, p. 32) cf.: Ellian is often speaking in terms of a civic religion. Election day is to him a “sacred moment”, that fills the individual with a “mystical pleasure” and is a day, where a nation is “forged into a real unity”.[171] The Dutch commentator Sjoerd de Jong says in a critical column: “The sad paradox here is, as well with Ellian as with Hirsi Ali, that an intense love for the secular society is expressed in ill-fitted terms ( inauguration, forging unity, mystical happiness). These are the terms of unconditional bounds, forceful monoculture, intolerant secularism and uncompromising ( thus in the end apolitical ) opinions.” [172] - “The church, as outraged philosophes saw it, had thus been not merely mistaken or unscrupulous, but positively evil. […The philosophes quoted] the Roman poet Lucretius: ‘tantum religio potuit suadere malorum’( how great the evil which religion induces men to commit).”(Porter,p. 35.) - “Philosophes demanded an end to censorship […] Yet in their turn, they also ironically mirrored the clergy they were aiming to supplant. They too formed their cliques, their ‘holy circles’; often they too cultivated a taste for secrecy […] “ ( Porter, p. 36) - “Amongst the values dearest to Enlightenment writers was cosmopolitanism. Claiming that reason, like the Sun, shed the same light all the world over, the philosophes commonly insisted that there was a single universal standard of justice, governed by one normative natural law – and indeed that thee was a single uniform human nature, all people being endowed with fundamentally the same attributes and desires […]” ( Porter, p. 47) - “Many of [the philosophes ] , conspicuously Voltaire, grew rich.” (Porter, p. 54) - “[…] the legacy of the Enlightenment was thus the emancipation of the European mind from the blinkers of dogma. If so, the ultimate impact of the Enlightenment would best be characterized as radical. Yet this is too simple and doubts arise. Ideas never run far ahead of society. And so much of the daring, innovative thought of the eighteenth century was quickly recycled to become the stock prop of the established order of the nineteenth. The brave new Enlightenment sciences of man – analysing social dynamics, population growth, and wealth creation – became the positivistic ‘dismal sciences’ which were soon to provide perfect ideological fodder for governments eager to explain why capitalist relations were immutable, why poverty was the fault of the poor. ” (Porter, p.68).
- ”Voltaire portrayed Mohammed […] in the ugliest colours of cruelty and fanatism, as if he wanted to fuel the Islam-bashers among his nowadays followers who by the way are not really are as enlightened as he was. (Ger Groot, De Groene Amsterdammer, 8-9-2006) Ever since Christians have be studying Islam as a religion - the translation of Koran of Cluny in 1140 and Monte Croce’s “Refutation of Koran” in about 1300 - Islam was condemned as “morally abject” .”This went on until the late 18th century. In spite of better translations of Koran by orientalists like Adriaan Reland and George Sale, Voltaire depicted Mohammed in his tragedy Mohammed as an ordinary impostor.“ (Ton Crijnen, Trouw, 24-10-2001) Ellian and Cliteur defend a picture of Mohammed that is in line with Voltaire’s criticism of Mohammed. But according to e.g. Tom Crijnen and Koert van der Velde Mohammed is described in the ancient books as a pragmatist, a man with an understanding of man’s weaknesses, his own included. This is one of the reasons why millions of people are attracted by Islam. “ (Trouw, 14-12-2001). Sjoerd de Jong: “Useful criticism of religion- nowadays mostly Islam- is something totally different from scolding under the umbrella of Voltaire. In these days everything that is bashing religion is linked to Enlightenment. That has the advantage that everybody who wishes to call Mohammed a pedophile can think of himself as a hero of rationalism. But de sources of this kind of criticism does not stem from Enlightenment, but from Middle Ages.[…] “ NRC 6-4-2004
2.7.2.1 Differences between Cliteur’s, Ellian’s and Voltaire’s ideas
- Voltaire campaigned against legal injustice. The Burkean have fought for their neoconservative celebrity-friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but they have so far not taken up a fight for unknown or poor people who have been experiencing legal injustice. Ellian did his best to argue the case of Hirsi Ali in a way, that could not be transferred to the case of other refugees (his juridical arguments, by the way, turned out to be wrong. He argued that Holland would be confronted with a constitutional crisis if Hirsi Ali should dot have been Dutch while being a member of Dutch parliament. This is not the case, as other Leiden jurists have shown.) - “The philosophes fought for “fairer laws, milder government, religious tolerance, […] and last not least, heightened individual self-awareness. “ (Porter, p. 5) - Voltaire’s motto “Épater les bourgeois’” (outrage the bourgeoisie) does not apply to the Burke-philosophes, since they are giving a voice to what the majority of the Dutch bourgeoisie ( defined as money-oriented middle class) thinks and wishes. - “The philosophes mocked narrow-minded nationalism along with all other kinds of parochial prejudice”. ( Porter, p. 47) This is absolutely not true of the Dutch Burkean philosophes , who are very narrow-mindedly concentrated on Holland . Their desire to import American values or French laïcité does not make them open-minded. - “ [The philosophes] were concerned less with blueprints than with analysis, less with conclusions than with questions. What is the nature of man? What is the basis of morality? Is man a social being or not? “ (Porter, p. 65) - Voltaire was positive about other than European cultures especially the Chinese. ( Porter, p. 66) - Ian Buruma: “[…] there is a difference between the anticlericalism of Voltaire, who was up against some of the most powerful institutions of eighteenth-century France, and radical secularists today battling a minority within an already embattled minority. “[173] 2.7.4. Critical enlightenment: emancipation2.7.5. Pragmatics as a “third enlightenment”
In his Amsterdam Spinoza lecture 2001 Enlightenment and Pragmatism, Hilary Putnam speaks about a “third enlightenment”: the pragmatist enlightenment, that not has fully happened, and that is worth struggling for. “Like the two previous enlightenments [the Platonic enlightenment and the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment] the pragmatist enlightenment is willing to be nonconformist, and willing to advocate radical reform. Like the eighteenth century enlightenment, it rejects Plato’s meritocratic model for an ideal society […] [174]
Burkeans do not have any affinity with pragmatism.
Paul Cliteur has published an open letter to Richard Rorty in a recent (2005) inexpensive compendium of Philosophy, that is being sold in drugstores throughout the Netherlands. This way, Cliteur has publicly chosen Rorty as a kind of negative anchoring point for himself. Rorty himself is also published in the same volume, with his article “Solidarity or objectivity” in a Dutch translation. Rorty’s pragmatism is a typical example for a philosophy that is rejected by all Burkeans. They do not go into any theoretical discussion of pragmatism, for pragmatism is the same for them as postmodernism and multiculturalism. For Burkean thinking there is nothing worse than “multiculturalism” or “postmodernism” which they always describe as being free from values. Rorty gives a very differentiated argumentation for a post-modern pragmatism. Rorty’s arguments can excellently be used against Cliteur. The Burkeans do not only argue directly against ”postmodernism” ( or, like Kinneging, neglect pragmatism totally) , they also show in the way they argue and behave an absolute lack of pragmatism. Pragmatism means the fact that speech-acts are considered to be acts. But this is not recognized by Burkeans, who feel free to say whatever they want to say. They do not want to take into account the violent effect of words. Pragmatism in politics ( e.g. Amsterdam major Cohen ) or in science ( the WRR-reports about Islam) are met with open hatred and contempt by the Burkeans, with Ellian as the front fighter.
Cliteur describes his own approach ( and the same is true for the other Leiden Burkeans) as explicitly Cartesian and dualistic. Rorty’s “anti- representationalist” approach is, in line with Dewey and Davidson, “non-Cartesian” “holist through and through”.
2.7.6. Enlightenment and liberal religionThe Enlightenment fundamentalists Ellian and Cliteur reject liberal religion, especially liberal Islam. Paul Cliteur: “[…] The project of liberal Islam certainly is bankrupt. […] In spite of all elaborate pacifying words of Abu Zaid, Mohammed Arkoun, An-Na'im and P.S. Koningsveld. It seems that was is called “liberal Islam” is an utopia that will have to waited upon for several hundred of years.” (NRC 22-12-2001) According to Cliteur may liberal Islam may not be supported by government measures. Only secularism may be supported by government.
[ more about Cliteur and Arkoun: religion and science are not compatible according to Cliteur in his Leiden oration where he is turning himself against Mohammed Arkoun]
In two articles Paul Cliteur is giving an extensive argumentation against liberal religion, especially Islam. He is attacking Nasr Abu Zayd. I will look into the content and the form of Cliteur’s argumentation in these articles and discuss the work of Abu Zayd in relation to Cliteur’s criticism. Cliteur is showing his own fundamentalist position by agreeing with the Muslim fundamentalists about the heretic nature of Abu Zayds work which to Cliteur is nothing more than interpretative nihilism. Cliteur is trying to bring Abu Zayd into discredit both as a Muslim and as a scientist.
Cliteur does not believe in a liberal Islam, he wants to reduce Islam to its fundamental aberration. In his Leiden oration Cliteur goes explicitly against Mohammed Arkoun, by stating that there can not be any reconciliation between science and religion. The Nijmegen professor of history Peter Raedts wrote an interesting article about science and religion. In the context of the controversial Islam-speech by Pope Benedictus, he writes that within Christianity there always has been two different traditions concerning the relationship between ratio and belief: one that believes [my emphasis, M.T.] in reconciliation between ratio and belief, and one that does not. In his Regensburg-speech the pope has created the impression that within Islam there is no tradition of this reconciliation between ratio and belief. But this is certainly the case: “[.] in Bagdad there was a influential school of Islamite scholars, who studied Greek philosophy and science and tried to bring this into accordance with their belief. Many names could be mentioned, but I keep to Avicenna en Averoës. […] And it is no coincidence that I mention these names, because these two theologists have been studied by Middle age Western theologists, who tried to reconcile ration and belief. The pope should have mentioned our obligation to the Islamite school in Bagdad. “ (NRC 18-9-2006) It is no coincidence that Paul Cliteur who rejects the reconciliation of ratio and science also rejects the holder of the Averoës- ( Ibn-Rushd)-chair Nasr Abu Zayd as a scholar and as a believing Muslim.
Ellian and Cliteur do not go into dialogue with liberal Muslims. Ellian prefers to go into debate wit the radical Imam Fawaz from the Hague – this way he can demonstrate how radical “the” Islam is (de Volkskrant, 2-3-2006) . Cliteur declares liberal Islam as bankrupt. But liberal Muslims exist, and they are active, not only within the Academia: the Amsterdam imam Mohammed Ben who strictly is telling youths to stop violence, radicalization and criminality ( de Volkskrant, 18-9-2006) or the theologist Mohammed Ajouaou, who helps to get extremist youths back to liberal Islam (NRC 11-9-2006). Cliteur denies that religion, in that case Islam, can have a cognitive function. The Amsterdam sub-mayor Achmed Marcouch says about “the prophet’s first law”: “Read! Learn! This is the key to civilization.”( de Volkskrant, 18-9-2006)
2.7.7. Triumphant secular humanism
Ian Buruma:”The war between Ellian’s Enlightenment and Bouyeri’s jihad is not a straightforward clash between culture and universalism , but between two different versions of the universal, one radically secular, the other radically religious. The young Moroccan-Dutch youth downloading English translations of Arabic texts from the internet is also looking for a universal cause, severed from cultural and tribal specificities. The promised purity of modern Islamism, which is after all revolutionary creed, been disconnected from cultural tradition. That is why it appeals to those who feel displaced, in suburbs of Paris no less than in Amsterdam. They are stuck between cultures they find equally alienating.”[175]
“But not every pious Muslim is a potential terrorist. To see religion, even religious orthodoxy, as the main enemy of Enlightenment values is misleading. Attacking religion cannot be the answer, for the real threat to a mixed society will come when the mainstream of non-revolutionary Muslims has lost all hope of feeling at home.”[176]
“This [truly humanistic culture] culture is an ethnos which prides itself on its suspicion of ethnocentrism – on its ability to increase the freedom and openness of encounters, rather than on its possession of truth.”[177]
2.7.8. Citizenship as enforced assimilation
Burkeans want to say good-bye to the pluralistic model. “Long live the mono-cultural constitutional state!”, Ellian and Cliteur call out. The strong state they favourite asks for subordination. Immigrants have to assimilate. Citizenship to the Burkeans means shared norms and values, as well as the celebration of national culture and identity. Social cohesion demands, as Ellian says in his Leiden oration, “that we strive from a scattered today to a shared tomorrow”. Not everybody agrees. The Leiden professor of political sciences Herman van Gunsteren pleads in his new book Vertrouwen in democratie (Trust in democracy) for diversity instead of monoculture. If one desires high quality decisions in democracy, one needs to observe a number of crucial conditions, one of them being diversity. But he also points out that a multicultural society can cause problems, which is the case if there is no exchange of information between independent individuals. If, in a multicultural society, groups are isolated without confrontation and exchange democracy cannot function. Intelligent self-organisation ( and democracy can in the best case be intelligent self-organisation) is stagnating without enough diversity – but also without enough exchange. Van Gunsteren pleads for a policy of “keeping things together” – a quote from the Amsterdam mayor Cohen ( whom Ellian hates with his whole heart because of his integrating attitude, and whom he calls a “Great Ayatollah” who better should leave for Teheran). “Keeping things together” Van Gunsteren translates into the more sophisticated words: “to fairly give a format to a shared destiny”. (p. 129)
Van Gunsteren writes about practical measures that create citizenship: “The mix of mechanisms that ensure citizenship can vary depending on regime and can change during time. Recently in the Netherlands the emphasis has changed on four issues: 1. Where is the private version of a good life given expression? Invisible behind closed doors or acknowledged in the public space? 2. Is there space for a multicultural society or does every citizen have to subordinate under Dutch culture? 3. Where is citizenship being learned: with practical experience, or via courses and exams? 4. Does loyalty extend to all citizens , or only to people of the same attitudes?
With all four issues the emphasis recently has changed to the second alternative, that is, to a policy of identity , assimilation, learned integration, and same attitudes. The question is if these rules and institutions generate enough diversity.”(p.132f.)
The present government [Balkenende] has – in agreement with the idea’s of Ellian/Cliteur- a new policy to promote Dutch citizenship. This way, according to Van Gunsteren, it participates in an identity policy which is o in accordance with a neutral state. Citizenship then means more than obeying the laws and speaking the language. It also means subordination to the Dutch culture. What culture is, is to be shown by courses and exams, and in the ideal powerful people who demonstrate Dutch etiquette. In this vision, a citizen must behave ‘normal’. The deviant person is no good. He becomes an object of attention and care. Especially not, when in the security state ‘risk citizens’- people who according to specialists repreesent danger – are suspect. Seen from the perspective principles of self-organization the limiting of diversity means a serious loss of the self-organizing capacity of democracy. (p. 139) “The present emphasis in Dutch society on Dutch citizenship, on sense of public responsibility, and on assimilation is leading to a discipline of nice-ness which implies a stagnation in a for self-organization necessary diversity.(p. 141) “The emphasis the binding values for citizens, on ‘ clinging together’, has a shadow side. Bad people, people who are different or do not care are placed outside the circle of citizens. They are maybe citizens, but no good, acceptable citizens. The lack public responsibility. They do not correspond to the image of normal, acceptable citizen. An alternative to this ideal of the government Balkenende [ and of the Burkeans, M.T.] is a more processual and conflictual vision of citizenship as the core element of peaceful self-organization.. This vision takes trust as a by-product of the possibility of mistrust. Fellow citizens not have to want the best for each others. It is enough if citizens do not behave like enemies, but are prepared to fight as counteragents within a field of agreed upon rules..”(p.143) 2.8. The core of neo-conservatism : fear of decadenceThe core of the philosophical ideas of the Leiden fundamentalists is what they call “decadence” and “nihilism” in modern society. I will explore these concepts in depth, and study Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk and other relevant authors who are cited by the Burkeans themselves. I also try to connect the Passage-controversy, which also concerns “decaadence” and “degeneration”, to the fear of decadence by the Leiden researchers. 2.8.1. “Decadence” and “nihilism”
“lack of confidence” Buruma, p. 29 2.8.2. The historical tradition of anti-decadence: fascism, communism, fundamentalism2.8.3. The terrible SixtiesThe aversion against the Sixties is the red thread in the philosophy of the Burkeans. This connects them with the American neoconservatives. […] 2.8.4. Acceptance of decadence and nihilism: Post-modern morality2.9. Good bye to social welfareThe Burkeans explain everything from “culture”. They do not want study social-economic factors, and are very hostile to even very humble forms of “social engineering”.
2.10 Striving for a patriarchal society
2.11. A double moral standardThere is a huge gap between the high demands the Burkeans make, and the way the Burkeans themselves are behaving. They are polarizing society and are consciously risking a spiral of violence. In vain one is looking in the Burkean publications for any insight of the problem of hypocrisy or the problem of a double moral standard. Andreas Kinneging, the author of Geography of God and Evil ( a title that reminds of George Bushes “Axis of Evil” ) has, as it seems, never heard that people like to build up a façade of virtue and hide behind this façade ( read Shakespeare; and as a jurist with high standards: start with Measure for Measure!)
The Rotterdam lecturer in philosophy Ger Groot : “Sometimes ‘decency’ is indecent. Showing off ones virtues lets others feel how poorly they can satisfy high standards. Bourgeois moral can become hypocritical and is often a master of self-denied aggression.”[178] Nowhere in
Kinneging publications one finds any reflection of the fact that many
murderers (for instance Nazi’s and communists) had a nice marriage and family
and liked to give speeches about MORAL , especially the moral of marriage and
family. Nowhere there is any reflection of the fact how thin the layer of
culture is in so-called cultivated people , and how easily barbarism can be
provoked in “decent” people (see Milgram) . Kinnging puts much emphasis on a classical ethic of virtues, with high virtues like Honour and Courage. A much simpler, down- to earth-model of virtue was put forward by the sociologist Kees Schuyt, who with Robert C. Gorden and Primo Levi asks for “every day virtues”. These small “every day virtues” comprise for instance good observation, conscientious and precise use of language ( especially important in these times of polarization and generalization) , a feeling for measure and limits, creativity, the courage to make mistakes; remembering and recording memories, humor and playfulness. These small virtues are a base for a critical thinking but they do not encourage a feeling of one’s “superiority” nor do they offer a base ( like classical hero-virtues do) for polarizing and stigmatizing behaviour.
2.12 Towards a non-dogmatic criticism of fundamentalism
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[2] Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam,p. 247, quotes de Volkskrant, 27-9-2005.
[3] Rolf van der Velden van het Researchcentrum voor Onderwijs en Arbeidsmarkt van de Universiteit van Maastricht de Volkskrant, 9-6-2006.
[4] NRC 14-6-2006.
[6] Van Houtum, Boedeltje, Graauwman, in: NRC 6-9-2006.
[7] Erkenntnis und Interesse, p. 400.
[8] Richard Rorty, Solidarity or objectivity?, p. 24.
[9] Richard Rorty, Solidarity or objectivity?, p. 13.
[10] Richard Rorty, Solidarity or objectivity?, p. 23.
[11] Richard Rorty, Solidarity or objectivity?, p. 23.
[12] Filosofisch Elftal, . 76.
[13] Voorbij de onschuld, p. 17f.
[17] Gertrud Sperl , Die liberale Bewegung, Fischer Kolleg Das Abitur-Wissen Geschichte, Hrsg. Friedrich Schultes, Fischer Taschenbuch 1973.
[18] (with a foreword by Erich Fromm) Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1970; review in the New York Review of Books 15/3 , 1970, Neil Ascherson, Communist dropouts.
[19] Cf. “De derde weg”, Peter Derkx, H,J Pos, 1898-1955: Objectief en partijdig, p. 158ff.
[20] In: Brieven van een Pers, p. 40.
[24]“Friday 31th of march 2000, lunch with a bunch of smart scholars […] , all of them disciples of Andreas Kinneging, who also was present, organized by Joshua Livestro, who now is my personal assistant in Brussels […] the topic of the conversation was liberalism, postmodernism ( and what to do against it) and the loss of self- confidence of the European elite. “
[25] “Friday 16th of januari 2000, lunch …] with Joshua Livestro, Andreas Kinneging, Paul Cliteur, Hans Kribbe, Michiel Visser and some other academics about the eternal topics Enlightenment – Romanticism- Nationalism, 1968 and so on.”
[26] Grensverkenningen, p. 280
[28] http://www.hpdetijd.nl/kring.php?editie_id=87 Labuschagne denies this by the way.
[29] Murder in Amsterdam, p.64.
[30] http://www.burkestichting.nl/picture_library/pdf/multiculturele2.pdf , no pagenumbers.
[31] Het liberalisme en de deugden, In: Boren in hard hout, Prometheus 1998
[32] (Burke, ‘A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, in: Further Reflections on the Revolution
in France, Indianapolis 1992, p.69)
[33]
Reading Kinneging one really can hear the banker from Mary
Poppins: “A British bank is run with precision/ A British home requires nothing
less!/ Tradition, discipline, and rules must be the tools/
Without them - disorder!/ Catastrophe! Anarchy! -/ In short, we have a ghastly
mess!”
[34] p. 43, see also the chapter about the Burke Foundation and Carl Schmitt)
[35] Geografie van Goed en Kwaad, p 478, note 59.
[36] The Enlightenment, p. 20.
[37] On the Burke-website an article by Spits is quoted and it is stated: “Mr. Spits is employed as German philologist at Leiden University and is actively taking part in the student program of the Edmund Burke Foundation.” http://www.burkestichting.nl/nl/stichting/nieuwsbrief4.html , see also for Spits’ curriculum vitae http://www.duits.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=125&c=74 . In this curricululm vitae his many publications in German anti-Semitic right-wing papers are not mentioned. For this see http://www.gebladerte.nl/11148f73.htm
I know Jerker Spits personally from my own German studies at Leiden University (1996-2001); he is in fact the link between my education as a Leiden German philologist and my critical interest in the Burke Foundation.
[38] (Liberal Reveil, nummer 6, 2002, p. 200)
[39] A. Maas, G. Marlet en R. Zwart, Het brein van Bolkestein, Nijmegen, 1997, p 39.
[40] Het brein van Bolkestein , p 38.
[41] Marjolein Februari, de Volkskrant, 6 -5- 2006
[42] Rob Hartmans, De Groene Amsterdammer, 22-9-2001.
[43] Paul Cliteur, Weg met het cultuurrelativisme, In: Jaffe Vink, De terugkeer van de geschiedenis. Cliteur here defends the social-darwinist Herbert Spencer.
[44] Pim Fortuyn en de multiculturele samenleving, In: Civis Mundi , vol. 43 (2004), afl. 2, p. 82
[45] Amerika bombadeert het Kwaad weg, de Volkskrant , Reflex, 19-4-2003.
[46] de Volkskrant, Reflex. Note: this article cannot be found in on-line archive, only on microfiche. Probably the authors have prohibited the on-line publication.
[47] In: Filosofisch Elftal, p. 88., also Trouw 11-5-2005.
[48] Brieven van een Pers. p.140.
[49] Huib Pellikaan en Sebastiaan van der Lubben, Ruimte op rechts, In: Waterstof, Waterlandstichting, 13-10-2006.
[51] De Groene Amsterdammer 26-4-2006.
[52] Murder in Amsterdam, p.25 f.
[53] Murder in Amsterdam, p. 157 f.
[54] De Volkskrant 15-7-2005; quted after Ian Buruma Murder in Amsterdam, p. 24.
[56] The open society and its enemies, p 200f.
[57] Buruma/Margalit, Occidentalism, p. 54.
[58] Buruma/Margalit, Occidentalism, p. 58.
[60] Raymond van den Boogaard, NRC 11-8-2006, p. 22.
[61] Grensverkenningen, p. 18, 114.
[62] Grensverkenningen, p.280.
[63] That day played my flute in front of the Pieterskerk, as my way to oppose to him. “Flute” and “whistle” is one word in Dutch….The University administration had ordered a special security guard to watch me. ( The security report is part of the 1000 pages file of my trial. These 1000 pages contain also my research in the controversy Christoph Hein, my internet debate with Paul Cliteur, my Cleveringa-lectures 2003 and 2004 as well as my satirical Dutch/German dadaistic text collage The Discovery of Hell …a baffling Secret University Service file….) . The security guard reports, that I played my flute and he could not find that I did anything wrong.
Two days later I also played my flute as a protest to the fact that Antonin Scalia was invited to open the new Law building, the building where now Bolkestein , Kinneging, Cliteur and Ellian have their office.
[64] Weekly Standard, October 4, 2004 issue: When Bernard Lewis speaks, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/685ozxcq.asp
[65] For the Lewis-quote see also Christopher Caldwell.
[66] Murder in Amsterdam, p. 29.
[67] Dick Pels, De inkt van de geleerde…Waterstof 6-2005 Zie www.waterlandstichting.nl
[68] Margalith Kleijwegt en Max van Weezel, Het land van haat en nijd, p. 120
[69] Murder in Amsterdam, p.64.
[70] Bolkestein en Arkoun: Islam en de democratie, p. 50.
[71] Macpherson, Burke, p. 16
[72] Macpherson, Burke, p. 4.
[73] Macpherson, Burke, p. 2 ff.
[74] Macpherson, Burke, p. 5, 61.
[75] The Enlightenment, p. 20.
[76] Macpherson, Burke, p. 3..
[77] Trouw, 8-2-2003
[78] Lof van conservatisme, p. 12
[79] de Volkskrant, 19-4-2003.
[80] Diederik van Hoogstraten in his review of The Right Nation - Conservative Power in America, de Volkskrant 29-10-2004.
[81] Ronald van Raak, In de naam van het volmaakte, p. 38 ff.
[82] Citd after Benno Barnard, 17-12-2004.
[84] The Enlightenment, p. 64.
[85] In : Ongewenste goden, p. 262.
[86] p.282, cf. Marcel ten Hooven, Ongewenste goden, p. 35.
[87] In: Ongewenste goden, p. 35.
[88] Abu Ghraib, The Politics of Torture, p. 50.
[89] In: Abu Ghraib, The Politics of Torture, p. 50.
[90] Cited after Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience.
[93] De staat als jaloerse god, In: Ongewenste goden, p. 229.
[95] Een donkere spiegel, p. 767 f.
[96] de Volkskrant, 22-5-2006. Ellian is suddenly opposed to the principle “order is order” and to his former best friend Rita Verdonk.. This is good news, because earlier both Ellian and Cliteur have opposed strongly to “nonconformists, civil disobeying, outsiders, whistle blowers” “the darlings of the seventies” (Cliteur in Tegen de decadentie, p. 159f. )
[98] Een donkere spiegel, p.767.
[102] Harry Polak, de Volkskrant 15-6-2006.
[103] Harry Polak, de Volkskrant 15-6-2006.
[104] de Volkskrant, 22-9-2005.
[109] De islmisering van onze cultuur, p 9.
[110] Occidentalism, p. 106.
[111] In: Filosofisch elftal, p. 143.
[112] In: Filosofisch Elftal, p. 88., ook Trouw 11-5-2005.
[113] Brieven van een Pers. p.140.
[114] Brieven een Pers, p. 143 f.
[116] “November Eastborne address” 18-11-1968, cited after Martin Barker, The nieuw racism, p. 39.
[117] Trouw, 16-11-2004.
[118] Socialisme & Democratie 12, 2004.
[119] Een donkere spiegel, p. 770.
[121] Occidentalism,p. 108 f.
[123] In: Ongewenste goden, p. 274 f.
[124] A BBC-interview 21-3-2006 with Wilders can be seen and heard on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/4833890.stm
[125] Lof van het conservatisme, p. 8.