The ‘woke’ debate rages on in newspaper opinion pages, on social media and in right-wing podcasts. The idea is that a progressive minority wants to combat social injustice such as racism and misogyny by superimposing its own intolerance: that of censorship, cancel culture and political correctness.
In contrast to the United States, where identity politics is much more influential on the left and right, this polemical debate has barely taken root in Dutch politics. After the murder of Pim Fortuyn, who had elevated radical freedom of expression to a political ideal, parties have briefly smelled it. For example, the VVD and the PVV started a ‘freethinkers’ space’ in the House of Representatives in 2008, but the plan died a quiet death.
JA21, Joost Eerdmans’ young right-wing party, which according to polls is growing strongly, is trying to become the one and only ‘anti-woke party’. The scientific institute of JA21 organized a woke conference in Amsterdam on Sunday, which, according to the announcement, was dominated by “the worrying development” of “woke thinking”. For example, the party tries to give political form to what is currently outsourced to the opinion climate – the podcast by Veelo and Brussen, the articles by Wierd Duk in The Telegraphor some pieces on GeenStijl.
Imposed ‘wokism’
According to podcast maker and presenter Roderick Veelo, “a revolution” is underway in the Netherlands and “wokism” is being imposed by governments and companies on unsuspecting citizens. “Certainly 80 to 90 percent of working Netherlands” is already involved, he warned on Sunday at the conference in the Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. Not for nothing, he said, is the most popular part of his TPO Podcast (with Bert Brussen) so ‘the woke week’, where they collect all the madness about the phenomenon.
According to senator Annabel Nanninga, who has been writing about the subject on the website GeenStijl for years, speakers from ‘the other side’, the identitarian-left camp, were also invited, but they declined. “Only Twitterers with strangely colored hair and three followers reported from that side.” As a result, the speakers at the conference all had more or less similar views on the freedom of speech that would be under threat, the alleged stifling of left-wing censorship in universities and in the media, and the pressure on radical freedom of expression. .
However, the vulnerability of this debate on the right soon became apparent. Being an antiwoke does not relate well to the freedom of expression that is also professed on the right. The Leiden professor of philosophy of law Andreas Kinneging was annoyed, he said, at “discussion stoppers such as the accusation of racism, discrimination and hate speech† He said: “I appeal to everyone to stop using those words.” Nanninga: „What, are we going to ban words? This is where the horseshoe model is at work.” (The idea that political extremes touch.)
The speakers also differed heatedly on the question of whether or not there is institutional racism in the Netherlands. If institutional racism exists, don’t the woke activists on the left really have a point with their radical agenda? Or can you be anti-racist and still be anti-woke? The conference didn’t work out.
Also read this interview with Joost Eerdmans: ‘I made a mistake in Baudet’s agenda.’
Institutional racism
Publicist Zihni Özdil (former GreenLeft MP who strongly opposes left-wing political correctness) called the Allowance scandal proof of institutional racism by the government, “a postmodern roundup”. Former presenter of ON 1 Talitha Muusse said she “has experienced a lot of racism and exclusion that I would call fundamentally unjust”. She doesn’t want to make a “caricature” of the woke movement, she said. You also come across intolerance on the right, and intolerant on the left, especially in a small bubble on Twitter.
Andreas Kinneging denied that there is such a thing as institutional racism. Tax office officials, he said, are “nice decent officials who like to do what the minister wants. There is no racist in between.” Everyone does profiling, he thinks, including the woman who walks up to him in the evening and prefers to cross the street, even though he is “a lovely man”. “Are civil servants racist then?” he asked Muusse.
Muse: “Of course. That is part of this room too.”
Kinneging: “The Dutch are about the least racist people. Compare it with the Turks. They are very racist.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 21, 2022
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