Cultural Suicide

Ian Buruma: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the limits of Tolerance

National Review, December 4, 2006

It’s far too soon to know if the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic will turn out to be a warning heeded in time, or if it will prove to be just another episode in the decline of a country wrecked by the mixing of multiculturalism with mass immigration. Judging by the nature of the debate ahead of Holland’s upcoming elections, judging by the departure of parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the safer, more welcoming haven of America, and judging by this perceptive, misguided, depressing, and (sometimes unconsciously) revealing book, it will be the latter. If Murder in Amsterdam is a grim read, it’s not only because of the events its author recounts, but also because of the way he recounts them. Born in 1951, a child of the Dutch upper-middle class (“blazers and pearls and Hermès scarves”), and now a professor at Bard College, Ian Buruma is a distinguished man of letters, a gifted cultural historian, a skilled writer of impeccably refined sensibility: It’s no surprise to see his byline occasionally popping up in The New Yorker. This background makes him both one of the best possible guides to van Gogh’s murder and one of the worst.

Buruma’s Dutch upbringing and well-traveled later years have left him nicely placed to help us understand a small, clubby country that can be tricky to penetrate and even more difficult to decode. With his help, we mingle with intellectuals, with politicians, and with Muslims, young and not so young, pious and not so pious. We meet Hirsi Ali herself, and we visit van Gogh’s parents, still mourning the brilliant provocateur that was their wild, loutish, infuriating, and endearing son.

When it comes to describing the two protagonists in this terrible drama, Buruma rarely misses a trick. His vividly drawn portrait of Theo is made painful, not only by our knowledge of the slaughter to come, but also by the hideous irony that a man astute enough to realize that the old easygoing Holland was under lethal assault was too careless, too stubborn, and too confident to realize that he too was in danger. Nobody would harm him, said blithe, foolish Theo: He was just “the village idiot.” But that familiar comfortable village had been torn down, replaced by a multicultural shantytown, yet another miserable utopia in which there would be no room for rowdy jesters, rude pranksters, or free spirits of any kind.

As for van Gogh’s murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, Buruma tracks his descent from minor misfit to holy warrior step by deluded step until that murderous November morning comes to seem inevitable, ordained, as logical as the carnage that concludes a Shakespearean tragedy. But if the how is made grippingly clear, Buruma leaves the why something of a mystery. Worse still, when it comes to suggesting how such horrors can be avoided in future, the best he can come up with is a bit more appeasement (he wouldn’t use the word, of course), yet more “tolerance” and acceptance of the fact that “Islam is a European religion,” a grand-sounding observation that is as obvious as it is unhelpful.

As always seems to be the case, some of the killer’s squalid why can be explained by personal inadequacies and, almost certainly, severe psychological problems, but to dismiss Bouyeri as Lee Harvey Oswald on a prayer mat is to miss the point. Buruma knows this perfectly well. He chooses to stress the unhappiness of the “immigrant” (Bouyeri is Dutch-born) marooned in a country where he will always be considered an alien. Fair enough, but it’s only part of the story.

Buruma has far less to say about the extent to which the Dutch themselves (or, more precisely, the Dutch elite) dug van Gogh’s grave. After all, these were the people who as a result of political correctness, indifference, and complacency did nothing to combat Islamic extremism. Not only that, but they went out of their way to vilify those who were prepared to do so (check out how Pim Fortuyn and van Gogh were described both before and after their murders). These people have spent decades denigrating their own history, their own culture, and their own traditions; to them, nationalism was among the gravest of sins. No wonder Bouyeri was unimpressed.

Buruma is too smart, and too honest, an observer to ignore these issues altogether, but his reluctance to spend much time on them shows that he has not moved as far from the attitudes of bien-pensant Holland as he would like us to think. Readers will look in vain for much sympathy for the ethnic Dutch, citizens of a state turned upside down with little discussion and less consent (raising these issues was “racist,” “Islamophobic,” choose your bogeyword) — omissions that go some way toward explaining why integration has been such a failure.

It’s also pretty clear that the author of Murder in Amsterdam, like so many other secular Europeans, has little idea of quite how dangerous truly fundamentalist religion can be. It’s telling that Buruma can find time to grumble that “conservatives” have appropriated the idea of the Enlightenment as a last redoubt from which they can defend their (presumably reprehensible) values. That’s a shot that’s not only cheap but also aimed at the wrong target. Standing up for reason is too important a task to be regarded as something reserved only for Europe’s Left or, for that matter, its Right. It’s going to be hard work and, yes, it may be a little uncomfortable at times: Café debates, ecumenical babble, and generous welfare payments won’t be enough to do the trick. Voltaire would have understood this. So, I’m sure, does Buruma; he just can’t face admitting it.

Holland’s establishment consensus is so stifling that it ought to be no surprise that the most prominent dissidents have emerged from outside the mainstream: the immigrant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now in exile); the homosexual, Pim Fortuyn (murdered); and the clown, Theo van Gogh (murdered). It ought to be no surprise, but maybe to Buruma it is. To read his descriptions of all three is to detect a certain distancing, a touch of disapproval, and perhaps even a little distaste. They rocked the boat, you see, in a way that was not very Dutch, no, not at all.

No Fear or Loathing

National Review, August 29, 2005

I was somewhere around Oudezijds Voorburgwal, on the edge of Amsterdam’s Red Light District, when I knew that the drugs would never take hold. My vision was bad, but then it always is; my judgment was no worse than normal; and my usual bleak mood was no better. I had absolutely no interest in tie-dye, Hermann Hesse, granny glasses, world peace, the teachings of the Buddha, or a flower in my hair. I was a loser Leary, a deadbeat De Quincey.

It had all seemed so much simpler just a few hours before. I’d been sitting in an old café on Spuistraat discussing the state of Dutch politics (bad) over a few Dutch beers (good) with my friend Henk. Sixteen biertjes later (between us, between us), it was time to move on. Henk was saying something feeble about a heavily pregnant wife, had to be by her side, baby due any moment, and I, well, I felt the call of investigative journalism. Holland’s reefer madness had to be checked out. Thoroughly.

Cannabis is not exactly legal in the Netherlands. But it’s not exactly illegal either. Finding out exactly what the country’s policy of tolerance (gedoogbeleid) means is about as easy as following stoner logic, but its result is that in certain cities so-called “coffee shops” are allowed to sell small amounts of cannabis (a maximum of five grams at a time) to their customers. Coffee shops are licensed; they pay tax and are regulated: Alcohol is rarely on offer, hard drugs are strictly forbidden, and even soft drugs cannot be advertised. No minors are permitted on the premises, and you have to be 18 before you can graze on the grass (the drinking age in the Netherlands is 16). Finally, in a last, faint, despairing echo of the country’s Calvinist past, a coffee shop can be closed down if it’s a “nuisance.”

And in recent years, many have been. As always, when anything bad happens, France is involved. Concerned by the number of their nationals traveling to the Netherlands to stock up on pot, both France and Germany have been putting pressure on the Dutch to close down the coffee shops, or at least insist that only Dutch citizens be permitted to use them. For the most part, the Dutch have paid no attention, but the purchase limit was reduced to the current five grams (from 30) and other regulations were more strictly enforced. According to the possibly reliable Smokers Guide to Amsterdam (“an unbiased view of Amsterdam for casual party people”) the number of coffee shops in the city fell from 480 in 1990 to 279 in 2001. Once the less permissive center-right Christian Democrats came to power in 2002 this crackdown went further still. A little over 200 coffee shops survive there today.

But that was more than enough to choose from. Even after I had, um, weeded out the coffee shops with names that were either too redolent of the 1960s (The Doors, Flower, Kasbah, the Kashmir Lounge, Mellow Yellow, and Pink Floyd), too scary (Lucifera, Ruthless, Stud, and Xtreme), too derivative (Rick’s Café), too tactless (Midnight-Express), or unacceptably dependent on puns (High School, High Time, Highlander, and Highway), a wide selection still remained. Some were too seedy, others too hip; the place I eventually found was relaxed and welcoming even if some of the people there appeared really, really surprised to see me.

Perhaps my suit, tie, and shirt (Jermyn Street, since you ask) were to blame. Or was the problem my age, a Cruise-Holmes span away from that of the pretty young waitress? Maybe it was just that I quite clearly didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t brought any tobacco with me, or any rolling papers, or even a lighter. The menu was meaningless, but vaguely alarming. White Widow? Bubblegum? Domina Haze? Manali Crema? I felt confident that AK47 was not the way to go, but as for the rest . . .

“Have you ever smoked?” asked the young, young, young waitress, anxiously.

“I was at university during the 1970s,” I replied ambiguously, plagiarizing Newt Gingrich.

She laughed, and I bought five pre-rolled joints for twenty euros — dope for beginners, I suspected, a trip with training wheels. I smoked them quietly in a corner, reading The Economist (what did you expect, High Times?), while the other customers sat across the room, puffing on Bubblegum, occasionally glancing over at this misplaced Methuselah and his Economist and wondering, probably, whether the BTK killer had been caught after all. After an hour or so, nothing seemed to be happening. The joints smelled like 1967, but their effect was 1957. Had years of legal intoxicants taken their toll, or had I simply been had? Supplementing my sad-sap spliffs with more potent space cakes (“once you’re on the ride,” cautioned the Smokers Guide, “there’s no immediate way off!”) seemed unwise. It was time to go. So I did.

If space cakes were unwise, Amsterdam’s “smart shops” look really dumb. These stoner apothecaries, a more recent arrival, sell not cannabis, but a wide selection of nature’s naughtier productions: herbs, mushrooms, cacti, and odd, unidentifiable fungi of the type that usually means trouble in sci-fi movies too low-budget to spring for a proper alien. Some of their offerings may not work at all: To believe in a “natural Viagra best boiled in vodka” took, I felt, brains more thoroughly boiled in vodka even than mine. Others may work all too well: After some Salvia, “your balance is completely lost; gravity pulls you in amazing ways.” Oh, okay.

But Holland as a whole has not lost its balance. There’s no room to recite all the arguments here, but if the coffee-shop experiment has not worked quite as well as some of its boosters claim, its critics have fared even worse. Per capita cannabis consumption in the Netherlands is estimated to be at the EU average, and rather below that prevailing in these Altered States of America; and the Dutch, of course, have avoided much of the destruction, despair, and cost of the drug wars. Disappointingly for drug warriors, there’s no evidence either that easy access to cannabis has acted as a “gateway” to more dangerous pastimes: The incidence of heroin consumption is far less than in the U.S. Overall, Holland has one of the lowest rates of problem drug use in Western Europe.

If there is an objection to the coffee shops, it’s aesthetic. Owing to them, Amsterdam has become to cannabis what Bourbon Street is to Hurricanes. This fine old bourgeois city is in danger of turning into a euro-Kathmandu, a druggy destination overwhelmed by day trippers (literally), cannabis kitsch, and counterculture dreck — which could end up destroying the typically civil Dutch compromise that has made this experiment possible.

And then there are the town’s proliferating cannabis snobs, like wine bores only, somehow, even more irritating. You can read what they have to say (Nepal Temple Balls have, apparently, a “buzzy, chatty high that makes you zone”) on coffee-shop menus and in numerous guidebooks. Or go and hear for yourself. I joined the crowd downstairs at the “Cannabis College” on Oudezijdes Achterburgwal to gaze at some outlaw botany and listen to the mumbling, muttering, meandering Yoda who was its custodian. I could take the interminable, rambling discussion of the merits of one plant over another, but when he started referring to them as his “girls,” I knew that it was time for something else: A good, stiff drink.

How Enlightenment Dies

National Review Online, November 12, 2004

Amid all the weird, wild wailing in Manhattan, amid the hot air and hysteria in Hollywood, amid all the crazy-lady shrieks of mainstream-media anguish (yes, Maureen, I'm talking about you) and the banshee howling of liberal complaint, Americans heard one overarching theme from the disappointed and distraught left—one meme, one fear, one insult that finally spoke its name. Jesusland (that's what they call it now) had won. The America of Jefferson and Madison had fallen, delivered by Karl Rove into the hands of ranting theocrats, holy rollers and the monstrous ghost of William Jennings Bryan. Writing in the New York Times, an overwrought Garry Wills had this to say:

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

The title of his article? "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out."

Oh really? If it was the fate of the Enlightenment for which Mr. Wills feared, he would have done better looking some 3,000 miles to his east, to lovely, wounded Amsterdam, a city once famed for its brisk, North Sea tolerance, a city that now mourns the death of an artist killed for speaking his mind. On November 2, the very day of the election that was to so sadden Garry Wills, an assassin in Amsterdam murdered the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh—shot him, stabbed him, and then butchered him like a sacrificial sheep. Van Gogh, you see, had transgressed the code of the fanaticism that has now made its home in Holland. And for that he had to die.

The movie that doomed Van Gogh was Submission, a ten-minute film shown on Dutch TV earlier this year. A collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and Muslim apostate who is now a member of the Dutch parliament, the film is a caustic attack on Muslim misogyny. Back in September, Marlise Simons of the New York Times described some of its scenes thus:

As she begins to pray, the woman looks heavily veiled, showing her eyes only, but her long black chador turns out to be transparent. Beneath it, painted on her chest and stomach, there are verses from the Koran. More women appear. A bride is dressed in white lace, but her back is naked. The Koranic verse that says a man may take his woman in any manner time or place ordained by God is written on her skin. The images roll on, now showing a woman lying on the ground, her back and legs marked by red traces of a whip. The Koranic verses on her wounded flesh say that those guilty of adultery or sex outside marriage shall be punished with 100 lashes. There are chilling sounds of a cracking whip; there is the haunting beauty of the Arabic calligraphy and soft music.

In a country in which Muslims account for nearly six percent of the population, there was predictable outrage from predictable sources. Ayaan Hirsi Ali added more death threats to her already substantial collection (she has been living under police protection for some years), and Van Gogh gathered a few of his own. Despite that, he declined the help of the cops. They hadn't, he pointed out, managed to save the rightist politician Pim Fortuyn from assassination back in 2002. Besides, he argued, who would think it worth their while to gun down the "village idiot"? And so this appalling, brave, obnoxious, and foul-mouthed provocateur, an opponent of religious intolerance whatever its source—an ornery chain-smoking contrarian who relished describing himself as a "professional adolescent, a die-hard reactionary"—carried on writing, filming, grumbling, grousing, and cursing.

With a horrible—and ironic—appropriateness, Van Gogh's final film was an investigation into the murder of the equally truculent Fortuyn, a killing that he blamed partly on the demonization of Fortuyn by "leftwing, politically correct...politicians." Like Fortuyn, he too was to die for his views and like, I suspect, Fortuyn, in those final terrifying moments Van Gogh would, despite his often-expressed fears for Holland's future (and, half-seriously, his own), almost certainly have been astonished that matters had really come to this—that the Netherlands had fallen so far. Forget the victim's evocative name (he was the great grandson of the painter's brother); even his mode of transport—the bicycle he was riding when the assassin struck—conjures up images of Holland, of the practical, somewhat earnest civilization that nurtured him: a kindly, almost painfully fair civilization so sensitive to the rights of the accused that the full name of the alleged murderer still cannot be officially disclosed; a tolerant, decent civilization that finds itself now threatened.

And who better to explain that threat, than B, Mijnheer B, Mohammed B? After, allegedly (we must, I suppose, use that word) shooting his victim, B started to stab him. In a last attempt to save his life, a desperate Van Gogh reportedly pleaded with his attacker: "We can," he said, "still talk about it." Talk. Dialog. Reason. In response, savagery. The murderer sawed through Van Gogh's neck and spinal column with a butcher knife, almost severing his head. And that, Mr. Wills, is how Enlightenment dies.

The killer then concluded the desecration by using another knife to pin a letter onto Van Gogh's corpse. This letter, which is addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is a frenzied blend of superstition, anti-Semitism, and, as this extract shows, morbid obsession:

There is one certainty in the whole of existence; and that is that everything comes to an end. A child born unto this world and fills this universe with its presence in the form of its first life's cries, shall ultimately leave this world with its death cry. A blade of grass sticking up its head from the dark earth and being caressed by the sunlight and fed by the descending rain, shall ultimately whither and turn to dust. Death, Miss Hirsi Ali, is the common theme of all that exists. You, me, and the rest of creation cannot disconnect from this truth. There shall be a day where one soul cannot help another soul. A day with terrible tortures and torments, a day where the unjust shall force from their tongues horrible screams. Screams, Miss Hirsi Ali, that will cause shivers to roll down one's spine; that will make hair stand up from heads. People will be seen drunk with fear while they are not drunk. FEAR shall fill the atmosphere on that great day.

And what's in store for the rest of us?

"I deem thee lost, O America. I deem thee lost, O Europe. I deem thee lost, O Holland."

These, regrettably, do not appear to have been the words of a lone lunatic. A total of nine men, all of Middle Eastern or North African ethnic origin, have so far been arrested in connection with Van Gogh's murder. There is the usual, and not unconvincing, talk of shadowy international terrorist connections, perhaps even with al Qaeda. Meanwhile, two other Dutch Muslims have been detained in connection with the Internet posting of a video promising "paradise" for anyone who managed to behead Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician outspoken in his opposition to immigration.

Mass immigration, of course, played a part in creating the social pathologies that cost Van Gogh his life, but its effects were exacerbated by official Holland's embrace of multiculturalism, a dogma that made integration impossible and alienation a certainty. Crucially, the Dutch appear to have abandoned teaching the mutual tolerance, however rough-and-ready, that is essential to the functioning of a free society. Instead they opted for the walking-on-eggshells sensitivities of multiculturalism, and a state of mind in which open debate, if someone somewhere could deem it offensive, was a danger, not a delight. In a country that was drawing many of its immigrants from traditions where notions of tolerance had little or no part to play, the consequences should have been obvious. If liberal democracy is to survive in all its noisy acrimony, all of its citizens—even the most disaffected, even the most devout, even the B's—need to develop a thick skin. In Holland, nobody showed them how. To Van Gogh, multiculturalism was farcical. And for Van Gogh it was a farce that turned lethal.

In the aftermath of Van Gogh's murder people behaved in ways that were thoughtful, thuggish, moving, and almost certainly quite futile. There was tough talk from the government, an outbreak of arson attacks on a number of mosques, and a spontaneous 20,000-strong protest in central Amsterdam: The crowd banged pots and pans, the crowd blew horns and whistles. The noise symbolized Dutch freedom of speech and had been requested by the Van Gogh family. Silence was not the way to honor their Theo.

But for the responses to this crisis that give the best clue as to what will happen next, look elsewhere—perhaps to the decision by two Dutch TV stations to abandon their plans to broadcast Submission, or, perhaps, to the objections expressed by some leading politicians to the deputy prime minister's declaration of war against Islamic extremism. "We fall too easily into an 'us and them' antithesis with the word war," complained one, the leader of the Greens—words beyond parody that Van Gogh would have enjoyed parodying, had he lived long enough to hear them.

Or go, perhaps, to Rotterdam, and stare at a wall. A few days ago, a local artist reacted to the news of Van Gogh's killing by painting a mural that included the words "Gij zult niet doden" ("Thou Shalt Not Kill"). Fair comment, you might think. Apparently not. The head of a nearby mosque complained. The police showed up and city workers sandblasted the inconvenient text into oblivion. Rotterdam's mayor has since apologized, but the damage had already been done.

"Thou Shalt Not Kill." Erased, obliterated, unacceptable. Much like Theo van Gogh.