I saw her on TV, September 10 in the talk show Pauw and De Witand immediately got homesick: to her and her voice, seriously and yet willing to laugh if the laugh was not a farce. The best prime minister we never had – such a person is immediately a premiere in the Netherlands.
What if she had been killed, and not the American radical-conservative activist Charlie Kirk, of whom I had never heard before his death, and that post Mortem was immediately declared sacred by the American president?
I only knew after that deadly shooting what the ideas were of Kirk, whom he had published so enthusiastically, a whole series of positions against abortion, against Martin Luther King, “An awful person”against LHB-Plus and against transgender people in particular, before a free, unsuspected possession of weapons. Not exactly my dream political program, on the contrary. But the shock and the anger that followed were not only at Kirks supporters. The Democratic leaders immediately expressed their horror and the eldest son of Martin Luther King, who was of course also familiar with Kirk’s burdensome words about his father, Vermande and said: “We must learn non-violence, or we may face non-existence(So the need to learn non -violence, or otherwise the chance to completely disappear.)
Political violence as it was most likely used against Kirk, the victim knew in two ways: the body is taken out of rotation, to say the cru, and the precise ideas of the murdered do a little less. Initially, the only acceptable reaction is after such an attack: horror. Only later can it be about the political views, as Charlie Kirk himself proved by judging Martin Luther King so mercilessly.
Wasn’t Kirk but Kaag was murdered, I would have hit double: I know Kaag as a politician, and I sympathized with her program: not even so much with that of D66 as with her views as (former) party leader. She was more than that party, I thought, she rose above that. At the same time, there was an active ‘Kaaghaat’ during her career in Dutch politics. She was threatened, had to be protected, and all those things I admired in her were reason for just as many people to hate her, the obsessive.
It remains an enigma: how the same person, who is seen by you as an exemplary, evokes so much anger and contempt with others. And vice versa: with life I saw little in Pim Fortuyn, but after his death I had to understand the untold loss of his followers, which I could at most follow in their grief.
I did not have to endorse their revenge fantasies: ‘The bullet came from the left’, that entire arsenal of political accusations, in which a scapegoat had to be designated and eliminated.
The same now happens to an intensified extent in the United States, with that clear culture of a two -party system, with a polemizing president, and a large democratic block that can be designated as an enemy as a whole. As a collective perpetrator.
It takes me so much effort to realize that my enthusiasm for Kaag is not essentially different than the preference of the Charlie Kirk supporters for him.
The Magic formula ‘Agree to Disagree“Is not enough. There must be a movement against one’s own heart in and against one’s own passions: because that makes the unsentimental difference between a functioning democracy and a civil war.
Stephan Sanders is an essayist.