Memoires 1979-A

[p. 7]

Inleiding

Recently I was invited by the television company Het Gesprek to join the host Frits Barend on the programme Dossier BVD.

The programme is designed to take a retrospective look at guests who had appeared on the now legendary show, Barend en van Dorp and Willem Oltmans had been a frequent guest. Clips were shown, discussed, and questions followed. Once again the re-occurring theme reared its head. ‘Would Willem be remembered as a great journalist or as a charlatan?’

Without presumption I say that I probably knew Willem better than anyone else, and the word ‘charlatan’ does not enter my vocabulary. I saw Willem as a man who hated lies, hypocrisy and cover-ups. His diaries, meticulously notated, and which he himself referred to as ‘my brain’, speak for themselves. Willem was also capable of being Spartan with detail when the noted facts were painful to him.

19th of May 1979, thirteen years exactly to the day that we first met, he writes of a painful incident and refers to it simply as ‘a sort of rape’. I was the subject of that rape and the same uninvited, explosive sexual attack was forced on me again two weeks later in the home of his mother. We never spoke of it, and so I find it a revealing characteristic of the complex Oltmans brain that he chose to acknowledge his darker sides and demons, albeit without any emotion.

Willem was impressed with the study of ancient Greek homosexuality as written by Professor K.L. Dover, and identified with the rite of passage between the older and the younger man. The erotic association between the role model and the pupil regarded as a ‘compound of an educational with a genital relationship’. Ideally the beautiful young man should inspire love, but not give himself to his lover. Even Aristophanes, known for his conservatism, would never describe love between men as ‘unnatural’, placing modern religious ideologies with their violent aversion to homosexual love, under a critical spotlight. Oltmans found anything pertaining to organized religions repellent and described evangelist Billy Graham as an ‘American ayatollah’. Esquire magazine called Graham ‘Christ's American Son’, prompting Willem to write that it was all very sick and not something uplifting to read over breakfast.

[p. 8]

Given the situation today with the Roman Catholic Church embroiled in sex-scandals rocking its archaic and institutional foundations to the core, one wonders what Willem's comments would have been? With his distinctive sardonic smile he would no doubt have been inclined to quote Nietzsche, ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. However he did not die, but simply degenerated into vice’.

I recall a conversation I had with the great social anthropologist Dr Margaret Mead, during which she said, ‘Peter, the Vatican needs a bomb’. That was many years ago and now the boil is finally beginning to burst. What would Willem's vision have been about the rising tide of Islam, the fall of the Dutch government and the ensuing political chaos? The party's endless cacophony of confusing arguments, the lack of leadership and the national identity dwindling under the pressures of absurd political correctness.

The list is endless and at times like these we could all benefit from a dose of Oltmans sanity and to hell with the cynics who sneered at his wisdom and doubted his sincerity.

Willem was acutely aware that we have all, in larger and smaller degrees been brainwashed and robotized by political slogans and misinformation. This struck a certain fear in him and he spent many hours in discussion with his close friend Professor Delgado whose views on robotization were alarming. Delgado reinforced Willem's apprehensions that the tremendous force of communications and educational media were forming or deforming our neutrons, our thoughts, our behaviour and our biology.

Perhaps Willem's obsession with the brain made him forget that we also have a heart. That love, in all its senses, seems to have eluded him is touchingly referred to in his diary when he writes that even on his birthday he received no kiss from his mother.

Had his mother ever kissed or hugged him, might he have seen the world through different eyes?

As a journalist and writer, Willem's house was always home to a thousand books, so it would be impossible to single out a favourite. But Freud's The Future of an Illusion was one he often read and quoted. Freud's idea of maturity appealed to Willem.

Between infancy and maturity one should gradually free oneself of the gods and kings and myths and see them for what they really are. Vehicles to evade reality.

As Willem wrote, ‘Physics, chemistry and natural laws reign in the universe, not Zeus and his associates’.

‘History is a set of fables agreed upon’ Voltaire

Peter van de Wouw, Amsterdam 2010