It wasn’t that the moviemaker wasn’t aware of it, more than once had he been threatened. “You dead!” shouted one Muslim immigrant at him, and the moviemaker had laughed him off: “Come back when you’ve learned some proper Dutch!”. On the November morning when the world was bracing for the American presidential election, and when the moviemaker had returned from dropping off his young son at school, someone turned up to do what so many had been threatening to do. And not only did he succeed; his Dutch was fluent enough to pen an elaborate suicide letter laced with threats and pin it with a knife on the body of the lifeless moviemaker.

It was the act that the Dutch had feared most and which they knew had been coming one way or the other. When maverick politician Pim Fortuyn was murdered two years before, the country breathed a sigh of relief that the killer was a local animal rights activist. A lone nut. And when Theo van Gogh’s killer was apprehended, only minutes after the murder, the Dutch justice apparatus was all too keen to hope it could somehow portray the murderer as another lone nut. The idea of a highly motivated and well-armed jihadist was almost unspeakable. So, for almost three days the contents of the suicide note were suppressed in the faint hope of averting the day of reckoning. A day on which more than three decades of failed immigration policies and multiculturalist experimentation would die.

But it was too late, even before the chilling note made its way into the media; the masses had taken to the streets in a phenomenal display of outrage, mourning and yes, probably fear. The fear was not so much the violence itself, although the prospect of regular decapitations and easily recruitable local suicide bombers along the canals wasn’t very encouraging. No, the fear was that the end of the Dutch dream had finally arrived. Now a real test of will was thrown in front of each and every Dutchman. The culture of live and let live, entitlement, fun under the sun, it was all way past its peak. And while some got it, some failed.

It’s not hard to compile a long list of those who failed, but let me highlight just a few. The Rotterdam Film Festival decided not to show the movie Submission which had contributed to Van Gogh’s death, confirming justified fears that free speech was now under serious pressure. The Dutch queen missed a royal opportunity to unite the nation by reverting to a hollow politically correct gesture and retreating to her palace soon after. Shortly after the killing she visited a youth center for immigrants, leaving some to wonder whose queen she actually was. And while the media struggled, it didn’t take long for some writers to start arguing that hard measures to curb jihadism and take on the integration of Muslim immigrants reeked of a return to Nazism. Not only did this group want to pretend that this was just a “political murder” rather than a religious one. No, some entrenched groups were all too willing to give in to the fear that the Dutch model had failed and started to fight desperately to resurrect it, at all cost, and against all logic.

Still, there were those that were willing to look fear into the eyes and face the enemy. The deputy prime-minister declared without hesitation that jihad had arrived in the Dutch streets and some fairly drastic counter-terrorism measures were soon unveiled. And the decades of failed integration policies were finally addressed by a zealous minister who quickly earned herself an iron lady nickname. Her agenda was ambitious: deporting radical imams, mandatory integration tests for immigrants and rapid deportation of illegal aliens, all measures that were no longer taboo. In doing that a clear sign was given that a debate initiated by a gay professor, an unruly film director and a Somali immigrant was now sufficiently mature to be taken on by mainstream Dutch politicians. The fact that two of these initiators had been murdered and that one has to spend the rest of her life under very tight security may have had something to do with that.

And that brings us back to Theo, the man on the bike, the father, the errant moviemaker, the jester, the drinker, the womanizer, the man so full of life that he could not bring himself to see that it would soon be over. His death allowed fear to engulf the Dutch street and to create two groups, the fearing and the fearless. Neither group has so far been able to come up with a real strategy for the future of the troubled nation which – as we’ve seen in Paris this week – will become part of the battlefield called Europe. Theo was one of the few to see it, say it, and die for it.

NOTE
I’ve written an awful lot about this affair and now, one year on, it is not easy to distill all the significant aspects into one post, so I encourage you to flip through the archives, here. My personal favorite however was the one which translated some of Theo van Gogh’s writings that had appeared on his own weblog. It gives you a flavor of his ideas, his humor, and his intellect. Read the whole thing if you want to do something for Theo van Gogh today.