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The era of pim fortuyn? Are we on the threshold of a world where cruelty, repression and postmodern consumer culture will live openly side by side?

Article Excerpt
Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male--a boys' own thriller about an honourable man captured while preparing the assassination of a dictator--is forgotten now, but in its day it encapsulated in the neatest possible form the question of the twentieth century: would you, if you had had the chance, have killed Hitler? Not Hitler at his height, when his power and evil were intertwined, but earlier, when his capacity could not yet be known. Would it be moral to kill someone based on the fairly certain knowledge that they would do great evil if given the chance? Or does a basic rule against anticipating that kick in, no matter how potentially lethal the outcome of inaction? Or is such inaction a form of cowardice, of hiding behind an abstract moral ruling to avoid doing what should be done?

Volkert van der Graaf seems to have believed so, for in 2002 he posed himself the 'would you kill Hitler?' question and answered in the affirmative, when he assassinated the charismatic Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn had been the moving force behind what could be called--in so far as such a label is useful--a radical Right party contesting the Dutch elections, and it was clear to many that he was its central motivating force. A cosmopolitan homosexual academic who clearly modelled himself on Michel Foucault--especially in the category-defying emphasis on energy and force, independent of any clear goal--Fortuyn's one master strategy was the formation of a government that would restrict...

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