Politics
is so confusing.
Australia’s
Minister for Immigration
Chris Bowen seems not to intervene in issuing a visa for Dutch politician GeertWilders. After delaying the decision since August (normally a visa application
for Dutch citizens is processed within three days) he appears to allow Mr
Wilders to enter the country after all. Mr Bowen described Wilders as a “far
right politician”, an “extremist”.
What
does “far right” mean?
Well, he
gave a speech at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver. That’s
right-wing, I guess.
He also
criticised the European Union for telling the Dutch to finance cash-strapped
nations such as Greece and Spain during a recent election campaign video. That
is reminiscent of Austria’s Freedom Party (FPOe) with its own Euro-skeptic platform.
But
wait – the FPOe has roots that go back to Nazi Germany. Geert Wilders’ Freedom
Party on the other hand is against Islam which Wilders compared to Hitler’s
totalitarianism.
So
Austria’s FPOe is on the extreme right because it is echoing the Nazis, but
Wilders is also on the extreme right because he is against anything that
resembles a similar oppression.
But he
doesn’t like the EU because it is pouring money into failing economies, does
he? Yet the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany is now hearing legal challenges against the country’s role in recent bailouts, and that doesn’t
seem to be a right-wing plot. What is at issue there sounds rather close to
what Wilders expressed in an open letter to EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem.
Greece’s
socialists for that matter don’t like the EU’s austerity measures either, in
Spain the Socialist Party lost votes because of the country’s involvement in the Iraq war and the election win of the conservatives there means Spain
is now more firmly nestled within the EU.
Going
through the speeches by Geert Wilders on his Weblog one gets the impression
he is for free speech and the general liberalism Dutch society is renowned for.
But of course, he is from the extreme right.
It does
seem the label ‘right-wing’ has moved away from the historic-political
background it used to be associated with to a generic term for simply ‘bad’. A
description that relied on ascertainable detail has been replaced by context and
becomes defined, if that is the right word, by the ambiguous moment of this or
that experience. In other words, we are talking about post-modernism.
‘Right-wing’
then is a derogatory tag, nothing more.
Comparing
contemporary Dutch law – which Mr Wilders supports - with its Islamic counterpart
– which he doesn’t - becomes especially poignant when considering the ongoing
attempts at abolishing the death penalty around the world. While Islamic
countries differ in its application, capital punishment continues to exist in
all Islamic jurisdictions and is strongly defended, as William Schabas explains
in his article “Islam and the Death Penalty”.
All this
leads to an intriguing question: could it be that the venom directed against
Geert Wilders by politicians in countries like Australia points to a certain
subliminal animosity held by the latter towards a liberalism which includes gay
marriage, nude bathing, drug laws, euthanasia etc, all of which are not
condoned by them but many are loath to discuss openly?
Could it be that they favour Islam with its rigid conservatism because
it allows them to condemn such freedoms by proxy?
