Go Back to Where You Came From by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Go Back to Where You Came From by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Author:Sasha Polakow-Suransky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781787380417
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2017-10-15T22:00:00+00:00


12

THE RISE OF WHITE IDENTITY POLITICS

Thierry Baudet is the slick-haired sophist behind the Dutch new right. He runs a think tank called Forum for Democracy, which has now transformed into a political party. His group helped support the successful April 2016 referendum against an EU association agreement with Ukraine, earning his party the label “pro-Russian” in some circles.1 He has referred to Bashar al-Assad as the only solution in Syria. “Once the neoconservative folly in Syria is over and we just restore Assad to power, and [sic] things will go quiet, which is what we should do,” he argues. As for the refugees, “they can go back,” he says breezily.2 His website features photos of him lying atop pianos, he boasts of his time studying with the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton at Oxford, and he has been named the most important public intellectual in the Netherlands—by himself, but apparently no one else.3

Baudet is dismissive of politicians. “They are incredibly stupid people.… They are essentially brain-dead,” he told me in April 2016. “I think their lives are incredibly trivial and their brains show incredibly little activity.”4 In late September, Baudet declared his intention to become one. And in March 2017, he and a colleague from his new party won two seats in the country’s 150-member parliament.

His work often reads like a repackaging of foreign ideas for the Dutch market.5 Baudet wrote a book called Oikophobia (Greek for “fear of one’s own home”), a treatise on self-hatred expressing ideas very similar to his professor Scruton’s own essay on the subject.6 He also once studied under Paul Scheffer before tacking sharply to the right, and some of his writing on the importance of borders has strong echoes of his onetime mentor’s work.7

Baudet relishes attacking the left for abandoning its own ideals. “It’s so obvious that the Muslim immigrants bring with them a whole set of premodern values … which are at odds and in conflict with so many things that the left has been fighting for,” he argues. But rather than merely denounce the left’s well-known hypocrisies on issues from the Rushdie affair to the Khmer Rouge, he goes further. Baudet believes the left never even cared for ideals like women’s rights. “They were tools to destroy something. They were actually not in favor of feminism; they were just against the patriarchal society,” Baudet argues.8

He goes on to cite the heavily footnoted but academically tenuous work of the PVV’s second-in-command and the brain behind Wilders, Martin Bosma. In 2015 he wrote a book denouncing the Dutch left’s support for the anti-apartheid movement on the grounds that the movement’s objective “was to destroy the stronghold of the West” in South Africa, as Baudet puts it. Bosma’s book argues that South Africa’s white Afrikaners—who ruled over a disenfranchised black majority for almost fifty years—have in the democratic era been reduced, as the books title states, to “a minority in their own land” and that the native Dutch will face a similar fate as a Muslim great replacement usurps Holland.



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