This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders:
https://benderstranslations.substack.com/p/vrijheid-is-grappig
Freedom Is Funny
Foreword
by Jurgen Eissink
In the onstage conversation following his lecture On Liberty (Enschede, April 17, 2010), György Konrád—before a highly animated audience that was barely listening anymore—continued reflecting on the difference between life in the Eastern Bloc and that in the free West. Gazing at and beyond the audience and the interviewer, Konrád concluded, as if suddenly grasping two decades of liberation, and I believe he thought of it on the spot:
“Freedom is funny.”
Martijn Benders demonstrates in this book that the humor has largely worn off: a Christian faction with the goal of homogenizing cultural expressions has managed to seize control of the Dutch Foundation for Literature. There is reason to fear that their proselytizing has not stopped at literature: the once-renowned visual arts venue in my hometown sought to make visitors aware of the body they inhabit.
Such a practical application of Cartesian dualism perfectly aligns Christianity with everything woke, yet a backward ideology should not be allowed to stifle arts policy.
In 2018, the six Dutch National Cultural Funds and the Dutch UNESCO Commission decided to enforce diversity: everyone must be able to participate, and everyone must attend. Writers, artists, and dancers were henceforth lumped together and labeled makers—doers and laborers tasked with shaping this new festival of humanity.
Such an approach is tailor-made for Christianity, the religion of self-destruction: the individual must die to achieve altruistic perfection—a society in peace. In a kingdom of carnival games, where everyone dutifully follows the prime minister as he unconstitutionally bestows the title of queen upon a princess, such developments naturally pass without any commotion.
The Vijftigers were, in a sense, a Protestant gospel choir led by a former SS officer—I mean, no Catholics were welcome there—so one could see it as progress that a professor from Nijmegen is now also allowed to contribute to the suppression of individual voices. But I would rather not see a hegemony of Christians and wokies around the literary fund. Under such a reprehensible alliance, Willem’s Reynaert would have no chance of a grant, or Bruun would suddenly be a woman in a bear suit.
Listen to the Australian poet Les Murray, who wrote in 1996:
“Only one group in Western society has the subtlety to feign acceptance of artists’ claims at face value, and treat them seriously. This is the Enlightenment tradition in culture and politics, which lays claim to the allegiance of all non-conformists, all the disaffected and alienated, all depressives whom it can feed with exploitable, rather than private and chaotic, terms of victimhood. To avoid its own ugly or mendacious terms for itself, I call this movement the Party of the Sinless. In its large empowering poem someone else is always to blame, be it men or parents, repressive agents or capitalism, reactionaries or fascists, and the defeat of these demons will bring Freedom. In more sophisticated presentations of the Sinless world-view, philosophical devices are offered for draining authenticity or meaning from any belief or allegiance at all, but attempts to turn these on any part of Sinless ideology itself are punished with the usual weapons of ostracism, exclusion from institutions controlled by the Sinless or from advancement within them, loss of social and sexual life, loss of reputation and career.”
Do not be a member of the Party of the Sinless. Do not rekindle the pyres.
Freedom is funny.
J. Eissink
Diepenheim, October 6, 2023