“When Frits Bolkestein returned to the Netherlands after a sixteen -year stay abroad for Shell in 1976, he turned out to be so alienated from his homeland that he didn’t even know what a sandwich was,” wrote Green Amsterdammer-Journalist René Zwaap thirty years ago in a hilarious article. The VVD leader at the time simply hated the sixties because he had not been there, Schaap argued. “While on behalf of the Royal Oil over the plains of Ethiopia and Somalia and the pampas of El Salvador and Honduras, Bolkestein was an irreparable backlog compared to social-psychological developments in his homeland and the rest of Western Europe.”
This piece was very Vilein, but it is true that the Bolkestein, who died this week, had to have nothing of the revolutionary sixties vibe. Until well after the fall of the wall, he fought against the fellow trailersthe left -wing intellectuals that the Wandaden of Stalin, Castro and Mao had just talked or triggered. Although former communists such as Elsbeth Etty and Max van Weezel in the bundle Everything had to be different (1991) had already gone extensively through the dust, called Bolkestein in Unprocessed past (1995) again to public penance, and warned in his Magnum Opus The intellectual temptation (2011) Once again for the totalitarian tendency of left -wing intellectuals. Even the publicist Arnold Hekkerers, who is not known as left, was surprised in the late 1990s NRC Handelsblad About ‘the stubbornness with which Bolkestein continues to attack communism and his’ useful idiots ‘:’ After all, his right is so monumental that he could have left the further handling to the historians. You would almost say he misses his opponents. “
Yet I do understand Bolkestein’s anti-topitarian fanaticism. It remains astonishing that so many people denied reality for so long. Many left -wing intellectuals did not leave the CPN until the 1980s, ten years after the appearance of The Goelag Archipelin which Alexander Solzjenitsyn described the Russian criminal camps. Stubburily they maintained that communism, apart from some excesses, was in essence the right way.
The question is: why did they do this? That question is still topical, because it is a tendency that people will never unlearn, and who, now many ‘critical thinkers’ the actions of Trump, Musk and Vance, are again visible.
Logical explanations were of course the human tendency to belong to a group, and the blissful simplification that ideologies have to offer. “The world was simple for the fellow trailers: every blessing of the Russian, Cuban or cultural revolution was attributed to Stalin, Castro or Mao, while everything that disappeared without mercy in the United States or any other imperialist state was written, “said journalist Bart Dirks in the late 1990s de Volkskrant.
But there was another reason: the compelling nature of a binary system. According to the political consensus, as a Westerner you should choose America and capitalism: otherwise you healed with the enemy. But what if you had fierce criticism of America and capitalism? In the cold war thinking it was logical to choose the other side, and to see a few things through the fingers. As Anet Bleich wrote in Everything had to be different: “That so many people – including I – have given communism the benefit of the doubt for so long, I think on a form of one -dimensionality: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
You can now see the same thing in the American Cultural War, in which some are so disgusted by ‘Woke’ that they have to choose the other side, even though it is now normal to support dictator Putin on that side and to call the democratically chosen Zensky a dictator . Again, everything is denied or just mentioned, or seen as the lesser evil compared to the pernicious ‘left -wing globalism’. And although we do not have such a binary system in Europe as in the US, the debate threatens to be polarized here along the same lines. Anyone who starts as a critic from the left can just defend an authoritarian regime a little later.
How do you stay critical of the status quo without becoming a fellow traper? That question can now also be asked. How do you criticize the weapon industry without getting bogged down in Russian propaganda, such as ‘Ukraine has provoked the war’? How do you defend the freedom of expression without ending up in the camp of JD Vance, the man who reads the lesson about free speechbut in their own country forbids and forbids journalists the access denies? How do you discuss boundaries on migration without joining Elon Musks Hysteric and lying campaigns for European Radical-Right parties?
The gap must continue to be fought: the space to think for yourself, to go against the taboos and modes of the day, without falling for a ‘counterculture’ disguised authoritarianism.
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC