Do you remember Pim Fortuyn? Possibly not, because, unlike Jo Cox or Martin Luther King, you’re not really supposed to. He was the gay Dutch politician shot in the head back in 2002 for daring to express sceptical thoughts about the likely negative consequences for men like him of allowing large numbers of Muslims to flood into his nation, post-9/11. A large number of his countrymen evidently agreed with Fortuyn’s pessimistic assessment of Islam as being “a backwards culture”, as he seemed set to win big in the upcoming Dutch general election – until, that May 6th, he got some free bullets in his head, JFK-style.
As the event becomes gradually lost in the mists of time, most people, logically enough, tend to misremember that Fortuyn was perhaps shot by a mad Islamist, but this is incorrect. In fact, it was a nutty far-Left animal rights activist who did for him (hadn’t he heard how halal cattle are slaughtered?) Pim’s true killer, Volkert van der Graaf, who heart-wrenchingly “struggled to explain his veganism at dinner parties”, viewed Fortuyn as a threat to minority rights, which, ironically, was just what Fortuyn was arguing himself about Islam.
Van der Graaf: Generator of Controversy
In 2003, Van der Graaf got 18 years behind bars, but was released in 2014 anyway, because that’s just how fake judicial sentences work these days. When he originally failed to get the life sentence demanded by prosecutors, observers booed, stamped their feet and left the courtroom. He has since been allowed to emigrate somewhere more congenial to his tastes (Tehran? Islamabad?), whence he is obliged to submit a semi-regular “written report on his progress” to Dutch probation services, which presumably goes something like this:
Dear Insp. van der Valk,
Just to let you know: still haven’t brutally killed anyone else of ‘populist’ opinions who deserves it lately, not even Geert Wilders. Hope to keep it up!!!
Best,
Volkert xxx
According to completely unbiased Dutch media reports about his lenient parole conditions, “far-Right MPs said the decision was scandalous”. Of course, no normal people could ever have objected to this wholly reasonable and not-at-all overly-soft measure, could they? Only evil fascists would care one teeny, tiny, iota about punishing a man who had quite understandably murdered an Islamophobe.
As Fortuyn had been relentlessly demonised in the mainstream Dutch media as supposedly being a far-Right extremist – as so many flamboyantly homosexual liberals who selfishly object to being thrown off tall buildings by Taliban-types are these days – some of his supporters blamed the press and TV for his murder. According to this interpretation, journalists were guilty of generating an atmosphere in which a suggestible idiot like van der Graaf could essentially end up being brainwashed into thinking that, by popping a bullet in Fortuyn’s skull, he was doing humanity a favour by wiping out the next Hitler before he could begin converting all the mosques into gas chambers.
“The media did it!” chanted crowds outside the Dutch Parliament building as the death of their vanished hero Pim was officially announced. As they did so, one hard-Left agitator on the scene pulled out a poster of Mr. Fortuyn and tore it up before the crowd’s eyes. In the years since, I strongly suspect this individual may have gone on to occupy a prominent role within the U.K. journalism industry.
Jumping the Gun
If the media really did ‘do it’, as the crowds back in 2002 asserted, then has history just repeated itself over in Slovakia, where the country’s currently bullet-ridden Prime Minister, Robert Fico, has just narrowly survived an assassination attempt of his own? According to his supporters, Fico’s assassin was also primed to pull the trigger by unrelenting media demonisation of the victim. Personally, I much prefer to blame the actual perpetrators for such crimes, not newsmen, but there is little doubt Fico generally gets a bad press.
Full details are as yet unclear, but the alleged shooter, who has already been named in early reports as a 71-year-old amateur poet and former security guard named Juraj Cintula, is said by some sources to be a Left-winger of some kind, albeit not an eco-nut like Volkert van der Graaf. According to one source, he was “constantly described as a radicalised Left-wing, ultra-liberal thinker by those who knew him closely” whilst another called him “a Left-wing militant with a passion for poetry”.
Yet to glance through many major mainstream news sources, you would be forgiven for thinking, at least at first glance, that Cintula was a leading far-Right activist, having as he apparently did links to ultra-nationalist paramilitary groups, who objected to outsiders coming into the country. Like a non-gay Pim Fortuyn, it appears Mr. Cintula wished to protect “the inhabitants, the country, tradition [and] culture” from invasion by unassimilable outside forces. But how does that square with his simultaneous alleged status as a “radicalised Left-wing, ultra-liberal thinker”?
It may well be that Cintula’s motives are mixed, or even incoherent. Like most of the British media, my prior knowledge of Slovakian politics is basically nil, and what counts as Left- or Right-wing there may not necessarily transfer easily across to a U.K. context. On economics, if not culture, Robert Fico is what we may broadly understand as being on the Left, and as such has often been described as a “Left-populist” by some commentators in the past. Nonetheless, it was evidently felt that a simple, easily-understood party line had to be taken on it all anyway, the line in question being as follows: Fico, like the equally non-PC Pim Fortuyn, was a borderline crypto-fascist who deserved to eat lead.
The Left Is Always Right
Just look at the tone of coverage of the event in the U.K., where the victim was constantly described as being ‘polarising’. How can any politician, of whatever ideological leanings, not be ‘polarising’?
Nonetheless, ‘polarising’ was the key adjective used in almost all early coverage of the attack. Sky News said things like Fico was a “populist” who was “very divisive in the EU” due to, for example, his staunch anti-immigration stance and outspoken nationalism, and therefore “it’s not surprising this sort of event might take place”. Did Sky News ever opine it was “not surprising” Jo Cox got stabbed back in 2016 because she was being “very divisive” by advocating mass immigration and publicly supporting Remain during the Brexit referendum? No, because that in itself would of course be just more ‘divisive’ rhetoric, whereas demonising someone of opposing, anti-EU, political leanings is merely a reflection of what the media think constitutes all normal right-thinking opinion.
The unspoken media subtext this time around, perhaps, is that Fico, as something of an anti-EU firebrand, and therefore supposedly ‘far-Right’, somehow had it coming: I thought the Left were none too keen on ‘victim-blaming’ these days? Depends what kind of victim it is, I suppose.
A major logical problem with this narrative, of course, is that, if Fico was indeed shot for being excessively Right-wing, as much initial reporting appeared framed to initially imply, then it would actually only make sense if he was shot by an opposing Left-winger. But this would create problems, as it would then obviously make Left-wingers look like the violent bad guys here. Thus, the alleged would-be assassin has instead to be presented primarily as a Right-wing ultra-nationalist who, for some strange reason, tried to shoot dead a politician who was every bit as anti-immigration as he himself appears to have been. Most media outlets were eager to reproduce social media images of Cintula meeting anti-immigrant paramilitaries from the ‘Slovenski Branci’ movement in uniform:
It is not illegitimate to publish such photos: they are apparently real, and may indeed turn out to point to his motives. Yet if so, then the basic consequent line of ‘Right-winger shot by Right-winger’ makes little narrative sense, at least from a propaganda viewpoint: ‘Right-winger shot by Left-winger’ does make narrative sense, but fails to impart the ‘correct’ desired message, so is automatically jettisoned by most outlets in favour of the former. For example, another public social media post of Cintula celebrated the birthday of noted far-Left paramilitary leader Che Guevara – and yet I could only find one single media outlet (Sky News, ironically enough) which mentioned this fact, someway down its analysis of the man’s previous online activities.
Maybe the most honest line to impart would be “We don’t know why this man did it, TBH, maybe he’s just mad”, but this would be to miss an excellent opportunity to demonise the Right – even if this opportunity would involve demonising both the victim and the alleged perpetrator alike as being borderline fascists, in the hope most viewers or readers don’t stop to actually think about this weird paradox properly. Fortunately, as the story involves Slovakia, a country most Westerners couldn’t give the slightest tiny shit about, the vast majority of consumers will basically just skim past the story after glancing at all the exciting images of a man they’d never previously heard of being brutally shot, whilst simultaneously and uncritically absorbing the intended media message that ‘all Right-wingers are bad and violent’.
Rivers of Mud
There seems to be something of a truth-muddying media-myth being promulgated at the moment, to the effect that acts of extreme political violence are only ever committed by members of the Far-Right, as with Jo Cox; a theory which might meet with some resistance from the ghost of Pim Fortuyn (or indeed of Leon Trotsky), I would imagine.
This idea seems to have been around for a while, even in fiction. In 1970, a trash-thriller appeared in British bookstores, Who Killed Enoch Powell? by Arthur Wise, in which the hugely popular, but also hugely hated (or ‘polarising’, if you will), anti-immigration politician in question was blown to smithereens by a bomb whilst giving a speech in Yorkshire.
To judge by synopses, the answer to the titular question of who actually killed Enoch is ‘the far-Right’, who exploit the situation to engineer their own rise to power by blaming Leftists/non-whites for the outrage, thereby gaining public support to stage a popular fascist coup.
The awkward fact is, however, that in real life, Powell was indeed the subject of numerous intimidatory threats of violence against his person – but, naturally, as with Nigel Farage today, they came not from the anti-immigration Right, but the pro-immigration Left. Throughout the 60s and 70s, ‘Disembowel Enoch Powell!‘ was as common a student Trot placard slogan as ‘From the River to the Sea!’ is today. Black radicals marched through the streets bearing such signs alongside an effigy of Powell in a coffin, which they then proceeded to remove and burn. During one university speech, a protester placed a fake bomb on the stage where he was speaking (albeit a kind of comedy one, like from a cartoon), before Enoch was eventually forced to flee. So, the real-life Left threaten Enoch Powell, then we get a book in which the fictional Right are blamed for exploiting the fact.
Today, a sequel to the book could be called Who (Nearly) Killed Robert Fico?, to which the official answer would no doubt likewise be “An evil Nazi, it could be no other”. And yet, the very existence of books like this, which fantasise about Right-wing bogeymen being killed, would seem to suggest that Leftists, too, are actually capable of acts of extreme violence towards political opponents, not just Rightists.
I have no objection to authors writing stories about the murder of any given public figure they like. It’s fiction, after all. But, strangely, it only ever seems to be stories about Right-wing people getting murdered which end up getting published. ‘Divisive’ and ‘polarising’ figures existed on the Left during Powell’s own time in politics too, you know. And yet, I don’t remember major publishers ever having released any airport thrillers with titles like Who Stabbed Tony Benn? or Who Set Barbara Castle’s Head On Fire?
Such an unbalanced literary situation continues today. I find there are several novels and short stories by Guardianista-types imagining the violent murder of Donald Trump currently available on the market (How It Ends by Zoe Sharp was even printed in the New York Times), but none from reputable publishers treating Joe Biden similarly – although maybe that’s just because Joe’s pending appointment at Dignitas renders any sniper’s bullet wholly unnecessary anyway.
Just as the NYT was happy to print a tale about the killing of Trump, so in 2014 our very own Guardian was happy to print one called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983, by Hillary Mantell. “Rejoice,” concludes Mantel’s story, once Maggie is no more. “Fucking rejoice.” Given the general tone of their coverage, you could be forgiven for concluding that’s precisely what the average Western journo these days thought about the shooting of ‘far-Right’ Robert Fico too, just like with poor Pim Fortuyn before him.
Forget the actual killings and attempted killings of public political figures in any of these cases, whether real or imagined: the true opportunity not to be missed is for a spot of light character assassination instead.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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Are you amazed by this? I don’t expect this thing to end until at least 2023. And i do expect them to force people to either take the vaccine or be in effective house arrest.
I agree with Boris when he says that we must work “to reclaim the things we love, to see our families and friends again, to return to our local pubs, our gyms and sports facilities and of course our shops”. But following the idiotic leadership of his government of morons is not going to achieve that.
“He confirmed that he will be getting an Oxford-AZ jab on Friday.”
Why? He’s already had the gold standard vaccine – the virus.
Yes, so the fairy tale goes.
Boris Johnson’s big lie in, and lying; Part Two
There’s an article at this site called “The Real Science of Covid”. But there was no result for the term “ACE2” when I searched the piece for it (and I wasn’t going to waste my time reading it).
SARS-COV To ACE2 Binding And The Dangerous Covid-19 Truth
Lockdownsceptics.org, I hear that the “vaccines” are beloved here, so I guess this is a daft question. Are you going to cover how the AstraZeneca vaccine product is being retested? What does that involve exactly? Can’t you find out from your Tory chums?
“Covid-19 Vaccine” Adverse Reactions; Part Three: more AstraZeneca equals more damage