Spiegel has an interview with Ian Buruma in which he discusses the latest controversy surrounding Dutch politician Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam movie. It was an instructive read. The most interesting part of the interview is Burama answers when asked whether Wilders should be compared to Jean-Marie Le Pen (the French Far Right leader) and Jörg Harder (the Austrian Far-Right leader) and whether the Netherland’s guilt over its brush with Fascism made it a liberal and tolerant society for decade:
I would compare him in the sense that he taps into the same feelings of resentment and fear. The common man feels the threat of Muslims moving into his neighborhood, whereas the elite live in leafy suburbs and don't have to confront these issues. Immigration and the Muslim issue in particular has become the focal point of a much larger sense of anxiety which has to do with the European Union, globalization, erosion of the authority of the nation-state and economic uncertainty. That general sense of insecurity and resentment makes a country very vulnerable to the kind of populist demagoguery that you get from people like Wilders and Pim Fortuyn before him.
Still, while Holland may have had a National Socialist Party in the 1930s, there has never been a true right-wing tradition and people are very suspicious of it today -- and the fascist tradition seen in right-wing movements in Austria or Germany has not been apparent in the politics of Wilders or Fortuyn. Their demagoguery is based on the idea that we live in a free country and our liberties are being threatened by foreigners.
[…] It [the guilt of the Dutch’s brush with Fascism) did a lot to drive tolerance, but it also stifled necessary debate -- and in that regard people like Theo van Gogh had a point. As soon as people started talking about the potential problems of integrating large numbers of non-Western immigrants in Europe in the 1990s, they were quickly denounced as racists, with people evoking the war in a knee-jerk reaction. By the same token, other people, including van Gogh, suggest that anybody who makes accommodations to Muslims in Europe (who these detractors call the "Islamofascists") is tantamount to a Nazi collaborator. This kind of response also silences the debate.
