MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL ARTS

On March 25 I have become a Dutch citizen. Ironically enough, my naturalization coincided with the heated dispute about what is wrong with the Dutch integration process, in the aftermath of the Geert Wilders film. I have lived in other foreign countries and know from my own experience that the Dutch have moved much farther in the struggle for better integration of the newcomers than the neighboring societies and especially than Scandinavia. This is why I had not feared a cartoon rally here like the one in Denmark , where the soil is much more favorable for casting bones. Yet I have my own concerns, caused by the fact that The Netherlands, too, make part of the new, media saturated world, where image has evolved and can serve as the deadliest weapon.

Read this column in Russian in the Gazeta 24

I can' t stop admiring the sagacity of late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who had warned long ago that our life would no longer swirl around the real, but around the images we ourselves created, the images that have no real prototypes backing them. Empty images, copied and repeated an infinite number of times and therefore yet emptier. Muslims aren't fond of imagery. This once again proves that the creators of today 's most highly circulated icon of evil – the cinematographically directed images of the 9-11 attacks – have very little to do with true Islam. And it is not that everyone takes Geert Wilders seriously in Holland, neither have many people here read Baudrillard or the Koran. It is just that in Holland, it is customary to do what's efficient. To be rude and act in a manner provoking a definite conflict isn't.

In October last year a young Dutchman named Arie R. had taken a drop too much and yelled out in a decent place that Her Majesty the Queen is “a very indecent word”, and that he was “going to put a pistol to her head”. He was sent to serve a four-month sentence in jail last week . Such a verdict has been unheard of in our little kingdom since 1966. And what happened last week is symptomatic, because the more multicultural a society becomes, the more active the integration process, the more decency and correctness it requires from its partakers.

We had spent months prior to Wilders' film in the unpleasant anticipation of a conflict, which we did not want to waist our time on . The inexistent images were powerful enough to arouse agitated debate , and as a result, we had grown tired of those images before they appeared. There could have appeared no film at all just as well. Wilders , a one - man party leader (the party that no one except Wilders can even join), like an actor in a one-man show, who had already warned all the magazines that during his performance he would have sex on stage, had already received a maximum share of attention in the course of his scandalous advertising campaign. And oh God, isn't it a drag to actually have to go on stage and do the show. Especially if it is not your first one, and once you get down to business everything looks much less exciting than can be described in the announcement.

“We did not even have the guts to cause a proper international scandal”, De Telegraaf complained. Self - criticism is also a popular thing here, practiced even by Wilders. The day after his film was released Wilders publicly gave the local Muslims some credit for how reserved their reaction on Fitna (“The Crucible”) was. They have stood the crucible. The Muslims said they even saw some positive elements in the release of the film – the leaders of the local Islamic organizations were all invited for an open and sincere talk with the Dutch government, which does not happen that often either.

Yet our Wilders, married to an immigrant, by the way, is not that simple. Gaining some fame as a “ kind villain”, who had threatened to kill first and changed his mind later, is not that bad, is it ? He decided against ripping a page from the Koran – “rip it out yourselves”, he said. Where the real danger hides is should this image populism become a trend among the politicians – it is after all in the regimes of a different sort that cinema has been described as the most important of all arts. The problem is that many immigrants come from such regimes and may take images for granted. This is why I see media education, media manipulation analysis as an essential part of integration training, even if it is some more accessible read than Baudrillard that would be included in the compulsory program.

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