The Road to Serfdom, Session 8: The Courage to Make a New Start
As collectivist ideals devolve into tyranny, there is a loss of moral values, honesty, and responsibility.
Douglas Murray, writing for The Free Press, has shed light on the roots of the recent pogrom against Jews in Amsterdam:
On November 2, 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the city center, in the morning, while bicycling to work. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, then 26, explained in a note stabbed into van Gogh’s stomach that van Gogh’s film Submission was guilty of “blasphemy”—it criticized Islam’s treatment of women—and he threatened that van Gogh’s colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Jews, and other nonbelievers would meet a similar end.
Hirsi Ali, who now lives in the United States, had immigrated to the Netherlands from Somalia. Murray describes her as “a model citizen who had worked hard, learned Dutch, graduated from university, and been elected to the parliament—all within a decade of having arrived. She had put her faith and trust in the liberal values that the Netherlands, like many European countries, embodied.”
If you haven't yet encountered Hirsi Ali, here is a recent Free Press interview with her on antisemitic violence.
Her Substack is a very worthwhile read.
Following the murder of van Gogh, Murray recounts that “Dutch politicians and other elites seemed to blame” those like “Hirsi Ali for the issues they were trying to bring attention to.”
Murray continued, “There was this implication that, if they had just kept their heads down and not been so provocative—if they hadn’t been so intolerant as to suggest that Islam and liberalism might be incompatible—things would have been different.”
The liberal values that had drawn Hirsi Ali to the Netherlands were eroding. Murray reports,
But liberal values require strong leaders to defend them. And Verdonk [the Dutch Immigration Minister] and other Dutch officials were weak. Instead of being provided with adequate protection, Hirsi Ali was forced to jump from one safe house to another, with neighbors complaining that she drew the unwanted attention of Islamic extremists. (As I wrote in the Dutch press at the time, it was interesting that, once again, the Dutch were informing on the girl next door.) Ultimately, Verdonk informed Hirsi Ali that she planned to revoke her citizenship.
There was a sigh of relief among some in the Dutch elite. The woman who had warned that there were people in Dutch society who refused to assimilate, who threatened the country’s way of life, had kicked up a lot of controversy. Now, she was gone. No Hirsi Ali, no controversy.
Think about the relevance Murray's remarks have for America in 2024. Like Dutch elites, American elites would prefer to keep America's problems under wraps. They want those who question "woke" policies to be silenced, canceled, and censored.
Hayek warned that planners and intellectuals wouldn’t care about, “injustices inflicted on individuals by government action in the interest of a group are disregarded with an indifference hardly distinguishable from callousness.”
“Our century will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred.” If that sounds like something someone could have said today, it is actually taken from Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals, a book published in 1927.