26,000 times a bleeding heart

The liberal mind loves to champion an unpopular cause, never more than when it can strike a moral pose.  So it is that just as the Dutch have finally determined to expel failed asylum seekers – 26,000 of them - Geoffrey Macnab in the Guardian “meets the film-makers staging a unique protest.”

In fact, the first person Macnab meets isn’t a film maker at all.  It is Joost Bosland, “a bespectabled, mild-mannered, fifty year old family therapist” from Den Bosch.  Maybe Macnab needs psychotherapy, he doesn’t say.  He certainly exhibits all the traits associated with compulsive, bleeding-heart liberalism.  Bosland, too, it must be said.  He is not remotely sympathetic to his own people, as if they exist purely as a giant human sponge that can absorb all the sorrows of the Third World.

Bosland is also blessed with a highly fertile imagination.  How many psychotherapists conceive an idea for a film series?  Not many, for which perhaps we must be grateful.  Bosland’s conception is a series of short films with the object of personalising the expulsion process.  It is, therefore, called 26,000 Faces.  Each film is to be two minutes long, filled with “children singing nursery rhymes or standing in a rain-swept playground” and such like.  Of course, in the Netherlands it rains all day and all night on every failed asylum seeker wherever he stands, and especially on his twelve children.  The weather system is so unfair to these tragic and deserving, intentionally stateless people.

Plenty of liberals think Bosland’s idea is deserving, too.  He contacted over one hundred Dutch film makers, and all but one wanted to help.  Can you imagine that many liberal film makers in a small country of 16 million inhabitants?  It’s a wonder they can find enough perceptions to challenge and enough prejudice to expose.  Especially if they only make a two-minute film every time – although, obviously, two minutes drastically reduces the need for rain.  Really, though, under the surface Dutch society must be very terrible to provide a living for one hundred liberal film makers.

But the really impressive thing about Bosland is not that he had the appetite to talk to the hundred liberals but the audacity to approach just one other … Theo Van Gogh.  I’m assuming this was done whilst Van Gogh was still around to shoot a film.  Bosland is a psychotherapist not a spiritualist, as far as I know.  Either way, Van Gogh turned him down in “predictably extreme fashion” according to the predictably ungracious Macnab.  The wild man of Dutch celluloid said the rejects deserved to be kicked out.  Can you credit that?  You can?  Oh well.  “But then,” says Bosland, “he said he thought it a disgrace that the government kept these people waiting for five years or longer. He did support our main goal, which was to give a face to these people.”

That’s Theo-Code for, “OK, give them a face … then kick them out.”

Politically, Bosland hopes to embarrass the Dutch government into repealing a controversial asylum law passed in February.  This clears the way to repatriate “failed” asylum seekers, ie those found to have no legal basis for their claim on Dutch society.  Seventeen films have already been made and premiered.  But as the expulsion list has not been drawn up yet, and as the expulsions themselves will go on for three years, it’s not clear whether Bosland’s film actors are really those who will have to go.  Of course, if Bosland is not a psychotherapist at all but is really just a gypsy fortune–teller that could explain everything.

This Guardian article reminds me of another one, no less objective, that I read in May.  It is an attack on Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang/Flemish Interest) by Caryl Phillips.

Black and either a socialist or a liberal, he believes in the inevitability of multiculturalism.  He also believes it is highly desirable.  To whom?  Well, obviously to black journalists.  Phillips ascribes no force or injustice to its arising.  The rights of the natives to be heard on the matter do not arise and have never arisen.  Dissent now, at this late stage, is extremism.  He, of course, is not an extremist.

Well, neither is he credible as a journalist.

He begins with the story of a Nigerian girl in a bar in Antwerp’s red-light district.  Her job is to sell her body to white men.  Of these Phillips writes, “many of whom are supporters of the far-right Vlaams Blok party”.  Has he done a survey, then?  Did he lay under the bed listening for the sounds by which he could identity yet enough Vlaams Blok member saying hello?  No, he just writes it because he wants to.  This, sadly, is what the Guardian calls journalism.

Phillips’ next stratagem is to besmirch the name of the 14th-century Flemish national hero, Jacob van Artevelde (see picture), whose statue stands in the centre of Gent.

Every Flemish knows the hero is immortalised swearing an oath of allegiance to King Edward III of England.  He is an enduring symbol of national pride and can be referred to as such by Flemish of any political persuasion.  But the statue provides an opportunity for Phillips to link Nazism to the Blok, and he does not let it pass.

The Guardian should choose its writers more carefully.  Perhaps a liberal Swede should be found to replace Phillips in future.  When the Wall Street Journal commissioned a world-wide survey on religion it found that, of all Europeans, those most critical towards Islam are: the Swedes (75%), the Flemish in Belgium (73%) and the Dutch (72%).  It seems that the Muslim failure to adapt to European customs and to be a little less violent is noticed by everyone eventually, liberal and conservative alike.

So, why can’t a few of Bosland’s friends document the gangs of Muslims who attack city bus drivers, fire-fighters and ambulance personnel?  Why not a few two-minute films on the gang rapes of native Dutch girls.  They are a commonplace in the Netherlands now, and it is commonplace also for the offenders to run away afterwards shouting, “Whore!”.

If Bosland insists on films about refugees, how about the subject of Dutch emigration?  The number of native people leaving the Dutch inner-cities is reaching record levels.  These are people forced to leave the cities they know and love, most commonly for the safety of their children.  Do these children, then, not sing nursery rhymes or stand in rain-swept playgrounds?

Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on Thursday, December 16, 2004 at 07:01 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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