I was going to write today about going to see "Il Prigionero" and "Bluebeard's Castle" yesterday at the Netherlands Opera, directed by Peter Stein. I'm not going to because something much more disturbing than luke-warm stage direction has happened here in the Netherlands.
Yesterday Dutch MP Geert Wilders won a larger share of the vote here than ever. I don't understand, I'm really at a loss. In American it has become popular now to throw around analogies of Nazi Germany, and compare political figures to Hitler. Honestly it has started to lose its meaning. This man, however, really, in tangible and literal ways, embodies the beliefs and policies of Hitler and the early Nazi party. He over-compensates for weak mental faculties and several disturbed psychology with hate speech against the Islamic world that for some inexplicable reason is resonating with the people of Holland. He wants a permanent ban on all mosques that preach in arabic, and a five year ban (surely we can't trust it would end after five years...) on the builidng of any mosque of Islamic school. He wants a ban on all immigration from non-Western countries, and all Muslim immigrants returned to their native countries. But, most striking, he wants the first clause of the Dutch constitution changed to indicate the superiority of Western, Christian, and Jewish cultures over Islamic culture, which he calls retarded. This rhetoric and his demeanor come closer to Hitler than anything witnessed since that time. And he is winning, people love him here (he was the 2009 politician of the year!). He is so clearly not mentally equipped with context, intelligence, compassion, or even stability, and yet...
I don't know. I'm very sad and very frustrated today.
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