Culture Shock

BAS CZERWINSKI/AP

One of the thousands of mourners who marched through Rotterdam

Something blacker than mere mourning descended over the Netherlands last week. The murder of populist politician Pim Fortuyn drove thousands of dazed citizens into the streets in shock, anger and a cataclysmic sense of loss that went beyond one life to encompass the nation itself. A man who just weeks earlier was hotly disputing comparisons with French nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen seemed in death to have bizarrely taken on the luster of his avowed idol, John F. Kennedy. His new window on a harder-edged Dutch future, disturbing to some and promising to others, slammed shut before it ever really...

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