Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Geert Wilders in his own words, in English

Bruce Bawer, an American born literary critic, author, translator and former columnist for The Advocate, has posted a 30 minute long interview of Geert Wilders at the Human Rights Service website. The video is also available at the sevenload.com website, and also at Geert Wilders' own blog. Wilders does most of the talking, and it's all in English.



Bruce Bawer is probably best known as the author of A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. If you are unfamiliar with Bawer, click here to go to the bio on his website. Below is an excerpt from that:
We live in a time when many people feel obliged to affix ideological labels to the names of writers. Over the years, I've seen just about every possible label from across the political spectrum attached to my name. In fact I've always considered myself a centrist or classical liberal and I've always been a registered Democrat, though for a time in the 1980s I usually didn’t protest when others labeled me a "neo-conservative." At the time, my understanding of this term was that it identified me as a social liberal or libertarian, a cultural humanist, a believer in aesthetic and literary values, and a strong adherent of democracy, fervently opposed to Communism as well as to any other brand of tyranny at either end of the political spectrum. When after the fall of Communism the neoconservative movement, robbed of its major antagonist, began to align itself more explicitly with tyrants of the right and to make homosexuals its new #1 enemy, I felt obliged to sever some of my professional connections, a process that coincided roughly with the gestation, writing, and publication of A Place at the Table (in which, among much else, I record my enthusiastic vote for Bill Clinton in 1992).

1 comment:

Ellen Catalina, LCSW said...

Bower seems like a highly interesting person- I wish he would team up with Wilders to get him to see that he doesn't have to perpetuate the "Judeo-Christian vs Islam" dichotomy or advocate banning the Koran!

Bruce is the voice of reason in all this. I am curious what he thinks of Wilders trial, I am sure he sees it for the farce that it is.

Wilders was also virtually imprisoned by the Dutch government in 2005, forced to live in a military barracks in order to not be killed by extremists. What I read said he was allowed to see his wife once a week.

Kind of crazy that he was denied entrance to England as a "danger". I read the speech he was going to deliver to the House of Lords- Wilder claims the House of Lords invited an associate/advocate of Al Queda to deliver a speech there, but rejected Wilders based on his supposed "danger to society" I will have to investigate that and see if it's true. Nothing surprises me anymore.