Activism Vs. Rational Thought: The Netherlands’ Case
Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim-immigration activist, who, like all activists, is easily susceptible to the foolish weakness of reducing all reality to his favorite cause, has led his Freedom Party to victory in the Dutch election, and will be the country’s next prime minister. That might be favorable news if you were viewing the situation entirely through the lens of concern over Western civilizational suicide entailed by the unlimited and unassimilating immigration from the Muslim world that is exploiting the ruse of multiculturalism to undermine freedom and civility in the advanced world. But, due to the psychological weakness of activism noted above, it is not such favorable news if you are not a fan of or apologist for Vladimir Putin.
Upon his election win, Wilders — a friend of Mark Steyn, who flew over the cuckoo’s nest several years ago — announced that he wishes to fight against “hysterical Russophobia,” that he understands “Russia’s” feelings “after the NATO encirclement,” and that, in regard to its current dispute over territory and security with NATO, “Russia is right.” The basis of Wilders’ nonsense is revealed in his claim that the Dutch could learn a lot about “patriotism” (read “resistance to immigration”) from Russia. The narrow cause becomes the rationalization of everything; such is the activist mind.
Typical of a member of the International Putin Bootlickers Club, you will notice that Wilders carefully emphasizes that the war in Ukraine, and all of Putin’s other claims and aggressions against the semi-free West, are “Russian” concerns, such that opposing “Russian” interests here constitutes failing to understand “Russia’s” perspective, or even to exhibit “Russophobia.”
That Vladimir Putin is a brutal and conscienceless dictator who has thrown tens of thousands of young Russian men to cannon fodder deaths in the name of his own megalomaniacal fantasy of rebuilding the Soviet empire, whose rule has no legitimacy even according to the (summarily-overturned) laws of his own country, who has repeatedly attempted to foster nostalgia for the Soviet era as a signal of his empire-building dreams, who arrests and/or poisons all opponents, who actively meddles in the politics of other countries to create popular upheavals and chaos in the world — none of this is to be mentioned or acknowledged. No, for the IPBC membership, from Wilders and Marine Le Pen to Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson, the key to all discussions of Putin’s brutality and aggression is to avoid ever using his name in connection with any of his misdeeds. Rather, everything he instigates, every absurd claim he makes, every tension he heightens through his military threats and action, is to be described as “Russia’s response,” “the Russian point of view,” or “Russia’s legitimate interests,” while every criticism or condemnation of Putin’s tyrannical aggression and disdain for civilized order is to be branded “anti-Russian attitudes” or “Russophobia.”
No tyrant who rules by overwhelming the laws and imprisoning his potential opposition can be identified with his people and his nation, as though he were they, and his power-expanding maneuvers an expression of their interests. And in general, everyone understands this obvious fact, and thus distinguishes the Communist Party from the Chinese people, Kim Jong-Un from the North Korean people, Nicolás Maduro from the Venezuelan people, and so on. But somehow, and with remarkable and remarkably predictable exception, Vladimir Putin is almost never mentioned at all by the faithful membership of the IPBC, but his acts, statements, and slaughters are consistently defended, or relativized where flat-out defensibility is too awkward even for a bootlicker, in the name of “Russia,” or “the Russians.” As though he were they, and they he.
But he is not, and they are not. But since fools like Wilder and Le Pen, Carlson and Peterson, will never ask them, nor consider rationally why they don’t hear more overtly from them, they continue blithely on their merry way, justifying and qualifying mass murder and nuclear threats against the Western world these same frauds are supposedly so worried about, and justifying these murders and threats in the most morally grotesque manner possible, namely by masking a bloody tyrant’s power lust behind the alleged “concerns of the Russian people.” The Russian people, by and large, surely deserve far better than that, far more respect for their dignity and rationality than that. But I suppose that since their “populist” hero, Uncle Vladdy, doesn’t give a damn about the lives and dignity of the Russian people, his international sycophants and worshippers need not lose any sleep over sharing his disdain for a hundred and forty million Russians who might have wished for a better life, after all their country has been through, but instead find themselves lorded over yet again by violence, the suppression of opinion, and the steady, involuntary sacrifice of thousands of their sons’ and brothers’ lives.
To hell with Geert Wilders, and all his friends and likeminded simplifiers. Just another demonstration of all that is worthless and destructive in the activist mind, regardless of how seemingly reasonable this or that cause might be in theory.
