Journal: News & Comment

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Political violence in peaceable nations

Earlier today, someone walked up to Pim Fortuyn, a bizarre nationalist politician in the Netherlands who was both anti-immigrant and openly gay (as well as on track to gain significant power in next week's Dutch elections), and shot him dead. On my side of the globe, someone fire-bombed the high-school office of Nancy Campbell, a Vancouver vice-principal who is married to the current premier, Gordon Campbell.

I dislike the policies of both Mr. Fortuyn and Mr. Campbell, and probably wouldn't like either man personally either. But avoiding assassinations and Molotov cocktails is what distinguishes kinder societies such as the Netherlands and Canada from brutal regimes worldwide, whether ostensibly democratic like Kenya, defiantly dictatorial like Burma, or even democratic but caught in the throes of history, like Spain or Israel.

Both stories shocked and dismayed me. Pim Fortuyn and Gordon Campbell may each have different sorts of reprehensible ideas. Yet Fortuyn still did not deserve to die, and the staff and students at Churchill Secondary should not face the risk of having their school torched. I'm ashamed that such things could happen in our countries.

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