Voices of moderation and reason are being drowned out by the demagogues

Fortuyn's death is linked to the unreasoning hate that is tearing the world apart, and that we seem barely able to acknowledge

Before his assassination on Monday, Pim Fortuyn was barely known of outside the Netherlands, except perhaps as a name on a list. This list includes Jean-Marie Le Pen of France, Jörg Haider of Austria, Umberto Bossi of Italy, Pia Kjaersgaard of Denmark, Filip Dewinter of Belgium, Christoph Blocher of Switzerland, Carl Hagan of Norway, Ronald Schill of Germany, and our own, happily puny, offering to demagoguery, Nick Griffin.

The list, of course, is of the right-wingers who have been making electoral gains in Europe, united in their nationalism, their hostility to immigration and their rejection of the European Union. The list came to prominence with the shock emergence of Mr Le Pen. Any illusion that the cynical but overwhelming re-election of the unworthy Jacques Chirac might still the tide of unpalatable fact that has been gushing over our continent, has surely died with Mr Fortuyn.

Even Mr Fortuyn's body, laid out on the road where he was shot – and laid out on newspaper front pages – is a signal that our notions of civilisation are mutating horribly before our eyes. What happened to the consensus which held that the corpse should be given the dignity of privacy, the details of its display under the control of mourning loved ones?

Who knows? But it appears to have gone. Only consensus maintains taboos of any kind. What taboos remain intact as we gaze at this man, eyes closed, mouth open, head and chest stuck with bloodied gauze, hands swathed in clear plastic bags, perfect, shiny shoes reminding us that in life, for him, presentation meant much? What consensus do we really subscribe to?

The question is stunningly apposite, because Mr Fortuyn was all for standing against consensus. Like the other people on the list, Mr Fortuyn was hostile to "consensus politics", pleased to be heard "saying the unsayable", and keen to promote himself as an individualist and a maverick.

Those of us keen to cling for dear life – literally it now seems – to the sort of consensus Mr Fortuyn was so enthusiastic about jettisoning, are breathing sighs of relief that the putative assassin does not "look Muslim". What hideous, knee-jerk hatreds that might have fanned in this nightmarishly volatile world of ours.

It is hard to speculate on motive here, because Mr Fortuyn was a figure who did not conform to Britain's notions of left and right. He stood against fundamentalist Islam as a threat to gay rights, women's rights, sexual freedom and liberal attitudes to drugs. There could be all sorts of supposed reasons in the mind of the individual who actually shot Mr Fortuyn. But whatever the particulars were, the wider view must link Mr Fortuyn's death to the unreasoning hate that is presently tearing the world apart, and that we all seem barely able to acknowledge.

History will now write that Mr Fortuyn would in all probability have gained the balance of power in the national election next week, and may have become the Dutch prime minister. We'll never know now. But it is worth remembering, in this context, exactly how next week's election had come about. The Dutch government had resigned after a damning report on its country's disastrous UN peace-keeping intervention in Srebrenica. A small force, acting alone, had failed to stop the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in 1995. Whether the guilt lies with them, for trying, or with the rest of the world, for leaving them to try alone, is a moot point.

Nevertheless, against a European background in which Muslims were being ethnically cleansed, Mr Fortuyn felt it appropriate in 1997, to write Against The Islamicisation of Our Culture, which became a huge hit in the Netherlands after 11 September. His initial political successes came after the atrocities, in local elections in Rotterdam, which has a disproportionately large Muslim population.

Therefore Mr Fortuyn's personal success – if not his murder – was intimately linked to the fortunes of Muslims both as victims and as villains at least as much as it was to the more specifically nationalistic patterns that have been emerging in the rest of Europe. Mr Fortuyn was characteristically far right in his portrayal of all Muslims as villains.

I think it is true to say that it is characteristically far left to portray all Muslims as victims. (How else can one explain the unseemly haste with which some commentators urge us to believe that strapping explosives to your children and sending them off as human terrorist bombs is under some circumstances excusable?)

Neither of these stances is correct, of course, but both encourage the same disastrous consequence – which is to view Muslims, in their villainy, or in their victimhood, as scapegoats, a homogeneous mass of non-folk instead of a widely divergent group of people. God knows we are aware of where such hatreds lead us.

Even Mr Le Pen, that long-standing anti-Semite, expressed himself recently as willing to alter the terms of his hatred and switch his hate to Muslims from Jews. Of course he was lying. But his lie told one truth – which is that there are far more votes in open anti-Islamicism these days than in open anti-Semitism.

The transfer of hate, at least for appearances sake, from Judaism to Islam, makes sense, even though the situation in Israel might suggest that one stance opposes another. For the die-hards, and the demagogues, all hate is grist to the same chaotic mill. Mr Fortuyn may have hated Mr Le Pen and his anti-Semitism, but his brand of hatred is the same old product in a different package.

In a prescient piece last Sunday, William Mcllvanney wrote in a Scottish broadsheet about the dangers of believing that by expressing such widespread revulsion against Jean-Marie Le Pen, France and Europe had metaphorically assassinated him. In the piece, which was paradoxically headlined "Too late to shoot the messenger of hatred", he said: "He did not cast the votes. He elicited them. If there is a sickness, he didn't create it. He revealed its presence."

These wise words seem to me to reach the heart of the issue, which is all about how worldwide conditions – not just European conditions – are becoming more and more suited to the success of demagoguery, less and less open to voices of moderation or reason. Whether one blames the ineffectuality of modern Western politics, the darker consequences of globalisation, the fallout from Maastricht or the tribalism of humanity, one thing has to be faced. Hatred, resentment, jealousy, blame and anger are stalking the earth, with each act of violent retaliation provoking another. Perhaps Mr Fortuyn believed that his patina of sophistication might have protected him from the uncivilised culture of blame and brutality he was sowing. Instead, someone laid the blame at Mr Fortuyn's door, and our close-up of this dead man has invited us all to become more brutal. It is an invitation we must strenuously resist.

d.orr@independent.co.uk