Preliminary Research Interests...

Watching Fitna, I was struck by the way in which Wilders references the Dutch WWII experience as a tool to evoke an emotional response. Given the long history of the Netherlands as such a tolerant community (as Ran Hennes says,Amsterdam was known to Jews as "the City" and Murder in Amsterdam discusses theJewish synagogues built in the area) and the juxtaposition of this tolerance with the events of the Holocaust and the Dutch inability to integrate or protect the majority of its own Jews and Jewish refugees from Germany/Austria, the the Holocaust is especially relevant for the Dutch people.

In Fitna, Wilders first lingered on a "God Bless Hitler" sign and he made a point of emphasizing Muslim hatred of and violence towards Jews, which I felt drew on the collective Dutch experience in WWII and the inability to protect the Jewish people (perhaps he is suggesting that because the Dutch wereunable to save the Jewish victims of Nazism, they have an obligation to save theJewish victims of Islam? I don't want to draw unsupported inferences, I don't know whether that was his intent...) Beyond the role of the Dutch "tolerance" in the fate of its Jewish people, Wilders claims that like Nazism, Islam is an ideology to be defeated.Once again he evokes the communal memory of the terrible events of the Holocaustin order to rally support for his cause.

I am interested in researching how the media/propaganda/other sources do this--how they use the memory horrible catastrophes--specifically those of WWII, the most relevant and horrific point in Dutch history-- to rally people, especially in the context of integration/immigration issues. Itseems like a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it seems like the memory of the Holocaust should make the Dutch MORE tolerant towards minorities and religious groups, but on the other it can be used as ammunition against another group. It's especially interesting to me because as Americans were/are so physcially removed from WWII--we did not live through it and truly experience its horror-- it is not as poignant/relevant for us (although perhaps it should be) and is not a tool used to evoke emotion and memory in our media.

This is obviously a very sensitive subject, and I am not sure how I would approach it. I would want to look at media sources (papers, movieclips, commercials etc.) but I would also want to look in less (or more) direct places-- street art, the Anne Frank museum and other formal commemorations/monuments of WWII, and other places in Amsterdam I do not yet know of. I would want to somehow gauge a reaction to this sources as well from a people and nation who had experienced WWII, but I am not sure how I would do this... And ideally I would want to study how the Holocaust/WWII experience is invoked in the current immigration debate, although this may be too political...