Friday, June 18, 2010

a reply to nonsense

This week I got an email with the speech held by the Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders with the title "Who lost Europe to Islam?" (click here to read it).

So I thought I have a few things to say about that. I have to. Because there ought to be a limit to any shrewd speech and because there is much more need for common sense than ever:

Besides the fact that I'm always very suspicious when someone calls his party "Party of Freedom" as SB in Italy calls his one "Partito della liberta'"... I really have to say that I do not see any point in this right-wing populism based on nothing else than exclusion, fear and let's say distilled hatred. There is no vision, there is no positive definition of the future, it's just a policy of being against, of rejecting change and future and of mindless search for enemies everywhere. We heard the very same topics a million times in any environment of migration: they are different, they have other values, they will destroy us. In fact those populists are simply exploiting fears to obtain personal power and they are nothing more than the rejuvenated version, the sad legacy of the National Socialist Freedom Parties of the 20s, the Schwarzenbachs in the 60s, of the LePens and Lega Nords in France and Italy.

It is crazy to believe that migrants will "have strong desire for assimilation" as he puts it, if this is the hostile environment of their daily life. If he'd believe only one ounce of how I believe in the West and in the ideas and achievements of the West (Freedom, Equality, Human Rights, Individualism etc.) he would not dare to believe that a retrograde minority of extremist religious leaders will inevitably lead the world to a backlash. He'd invest his political capital to embrace migrants and seize the opportunity to teach the young generations - no matter whether from Amsterdam, Bern or Rabat, in our schools about the beauty of our freedom and of the appeal of our core values. The only sad truth is that the "let's call it policy" the geert wilders (they do not really deserve capital letters) of this world propose would lead inevitably to a self fulfilling prophecy of a doomed tomorrow.

At the end of the day, if others may convince masses with in our view retrograde ideas and a medieval vision of the society, well, then it is not really their great achievement but our utter failure.

photo source: http://1.bp.blogspot.com

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