Remembering Political Scientist Meindert Fennema: An Obituary

• Thick Verkuil

  editor online

The political scientist Meindert Fennema passed away last night in his home in Amsterdam. He had been ill for some time. Fennema was 77 years old.

Former professor Fennema, who was affiliated with the University of Amsterdam throughout his career, was a flamboyant figure who often took contrary views. For example, in 2009, in the first HJ Schoo lecture, he stated that freedom of expression should also apply to racists.

According to him, it is wrongly thought that ideas can be combated by banning them. In reality, it leads to wholly arbitrary cases of prosecution and sentencing and thus to the undermining of the rule of law and democracy, he argued.

Entirely in line with this, he later decided to guide PVV MP Martin Bosma with his promotion, “because racists also have the right to obtain a doctorate”. He referred to his own supervisor, who guided him even though he was a communist at the time and a member of the CPN, “and that was an association of mass murderers after all”.

Fennema grew up in Zeist, in a Frisian family. His father was a judge in a slaughterhouse, his grandfather Gerrit Fennema was an anarchist involved in the first agricultural workers’ strike in Het Bildt, in North Friesland.

Meindert apparently inherited his stubbornness and rebelliousness. This was already reflected when he signed on at the age of 18 after high school on a ship of the Holland-America Line. He later wrote a book about it, in which he talked about things like the perverse effect of tips, the sharp division between the gay and straight worlds on board and about his love affair with a wealthy girl from Mumbai.

When he went to university, he joined the Utrechtsch Studenten Corps, which at the time was perhaps the most conservative and elitist student association in the Netherlands, completely out of line with his environment.

He also wrote a book about Really wrong, in which he compared the corps to the CPN which he later joined. Both were strange sects in his eyes, but where the CPN was completely intolerant and narrow-minded, the corps was “a thoroughly liberal association, despite its old-fashioned and sometimes repugnant traditions”. Significantly, when he turned his back on the corps, it was a pity and he always remained welcome. People who broke with the CPN were barred as “traitors.”

Fennema, like many others, joined the CPN because of his aversion to the Vietnam War and because he fell under the grip of the ‘democratization movement’ at the universities. In Amsterdam, he was one of the students who took up arms against professor of political science Hans Daudt, who defended the professors’ ‘rule of supremacy’ against the students’ claims to co-determination.

The students won, but it didn’t make things any better because, as Fennema later saw, they wanted to replace the reign of professors with “a totalitarian form of direct democracy”.

Fennema remained a member of the CPN until this party was dissolved and then joined GroenLinks, for which he was a member of the municipal council of his hometown Bloemendaal. There he befriended Martijn Bolkestein, cousin of former VVD leader Frits Bolkestein, with whom he formed a coalition and later published the book Village politics wrote.

Earlier he had already befriended Frits Bolkestein himself, with whom he felt related because they were both cross-thinkers and corps balls. Bolkestein himself did not acknowledge the latter, incidentally.

His friendship with Bolkestein was one of the reasons for his most remarkable book, the Wilders biography Geert Wilders. Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Wilders did not cooperate. Due to a lack of sources, Fennema empathized with Wilders and made up what the PVV leader would have thought and felt over the years.

Wilders had become a member of the VVD party in 1990, the same year that Bolkestein became party leader. According to Fennema, the two looked alike, Bolkestein confided in him early on and leaned on him. Wilders admired Bolkestein and tried to be near him as much as possible.

Fennema wrote it down beautifully, but it didn’t make much sense. Party employees at the time state that Fennema made it all up and, according to Bolkestein, Wilders was “just a party employee”.