Rightwing bloggers have been quick to take up Pym Fortuyn, the ‘rightist’ politician murdered yesterday in the Netherlands, as the latest bloody cudgel to smack around those of us on the Left.
Fortuyn’s apparent assassin was a member of a ‘vegan animal rights group’ — which somehow makes the asssassin a member of the Left. Sorry Professor Reynolds, but he’s no fellow traveler of mine.
Read Gwen Jones, or Ken Macleod, and you’ll find that ‘back to nature’ isn’t a real part of the Left. They are just another anti-modernity movement, consignable to the same rubbish bin as radical Islam and the Christian Right.
I don’t know what Fortuyn said to make him a target of a Luddite, but he did have the audacity to say that the type of Islam practiced throughout the world was incompatible with a modern, progressive state. Try s/Islam/Evangelical Christianity/; and you’ve said something those of us on the Left have been saying about the US for years. Is the Right sure they want to claim Fortuyn as one of their own?
And for those of us on the Left? Islam isn’t a friend. Luddites aren’t our friends. Remember that.
