Theo van Gogh

"I am the village idiot, they won't hurt me."

Ian Buruma on Theo van Gogh, from Frontpage Interview: "Van Gogh was a filmmaker, columnist, and professional provocateur, who lived to stir things up. Born in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, he was a child of the 1960s: hedonistic, anti-authoritarian, secular. But he was also in some ways a typical product of Dutch Calvinism. Bluntness, even crass insults were elevated to being virtues, signs of honesty. Tact, to him, was a form of hypocrisy, more typical of Catholics. In his battle against hypocrisy, he was indiscriminate. He denounced Jewish writers for drawing attention to themselves by referring to the Holocaust. He denounced Christianity in general. He denounced social democrats for being soft on Muslims. He denounced Muslims for being like the Nazis. He denounced the social-democratic mayor of Amsterdam, a Jew who tried to find common ground with non-violent Muslim citizens, for behaving like Nazi collaborator. And all this in the spirit of the village idiot. Unfortunately, Bouyeri, a radicalized revolutionary Muslim, failed to see the humor in van Gogh's insults to his faith, and murdered him. The immediate reason was "Submission," a short film, written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and directed by van Gogh."

Articles and Interviews

[1] Article about the murder of Theo van Gogh (2004)

[2] Article about the inflammatory nature of van Gogh's work (2007)

[3] Also featured on the page on Ian Buruma, this video is of Buruma's book reading (on Murder in Amsterdam) and discussion of Van Gogh's life up to his death

[4] Van Gogh's Film Submission

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This page was last modified 21:25, 7 May 2008.