Phoenixes are traditionally said to arise from flames, and so it is with Rotterdam’s new Fenix Museum of Migration, which opened on Friday, May 16th to much interest from local white liberals—and, one may safely imagine, to overwhelming indifference from most local non-white immigrants who tend to prefer spending their Fridays attending the city’s thirty new mosques instead.
This May also saw the 85th anniversary of the massive Nazi bombing and burning of the major Dutch port, with the converted warehouse building in which the Museum is housed being known as the ‘Fenix’ ever since it was rebuilt from the ashes after the war ended. As the Nazis were not notably keen on mass migration (excluding when they were the ones doing the migrating across borders themselves, with tanks and artillery), the symbolism of hosting the Museum in the Fenix building was as clear as it was heavy-handed.
Have suitcase, will travel
The Netherlands currently has a coalition government dominated by the party of staunchly anti-immigration Geert Wilders, often libelled by the Dutch Left as some kind of white supremacist ‘neo-Nazi,’ even though the man is actually mixed-race, having a white Dutch father and part-Indonesian mother. (Wilders announced that his party is leaving the coalition government on June 3rd, after this article was written. Ed.)
By glorifying the Netherlands’ current—and largely unasked-for—status as a nation of immigrants, the Fenix museum staff clearly hoped to fend off widespread public support for Wilders’ announced “toughest immigration policy ever” aiming to uphold a “never again” stance against Nazi-era atrocities like the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 Dutch Jews. Hanneke Mantel, the museum’s chief curator, said its contents would act as a “counter-narrative” to the “dominant” anti-immigrant narrative currently spreading like wildfire across the EU—a fancy way of saying the whole thing is all just propaganda.
One of the Fenix’s key exhibits is a maze constructed of 2,000 suitcases sourced from members of the general public with an immigrant past, presumably intended to evoke the common Jewish fear, post-Hitler, that, should things ever take a turn for the worst in Holland anew, the nation’s Semites may have to pick up their trunks and flee for their lives once more.
Yet, if they ever do, it seems unlikely that it will be evil antisemitic white supremacists they will be running from, but the very ‘vulnerable’ immigrants the Migration Museum is intended to sycophantically worship in the first place.
Stairway to heaven
Although the Fenix is billed as a ‘museum,’ museums typically serve to remember the past—yet the Netherlands, like the rest of Europe, has no genuine past of non-white mass immigration beyond the last few decades. So, despite its completely inaccurate name, the Migration Museum functions as a modern art gallery stuffed full of slavishly pro-globalist marketing materials disguised as ineptly executed paintings, photographs, and sculptures made by sainted foreigners. Instead of celebrating Europe’s past, this particular ‘museum’ acts only to celebrate its curators’ desired future—one in which Europe is no longer Europe at all.
The museum is an inherently hollow enterprise. Its chief attraction is not the exhibits, but the building itself. At its center is a silvery, semi-external chrome staircase called The Tornado. It twists in a double-helix pattern, meant to symbolize the twisted path many migrants (particularly the illegal ones)take to enter the Netherlands. The staircase leads to the roof, where visitors can look out over the cityscape.
The Tornado staircase, designed by the aptly named Chinese firm MAD Architects, offers sweeping views as visitors climb it. Fenix Director Anne Kremers claims these vistas will help visitors “broaden [their] view on migration.”
Fenix staff could do with broadening their perspective on the issue themselves. In their unrealistically utopian worldview, mass immigration appears to have no downsides, only endless benefits. According to Kremer, the Fenix functions as an agent of “soft power,” disingenuously saying that “It’s not a political statement”, before immediately contradicting herself by admitting that “Our goal is to enrich your view of migration.” That is a political statement, though, isn’t it?
The art of lying
How will visitors’ views of migration be ‘enriched’ once inside? By looking at incredible exhibits like a 1998 black-and-white photograph of a Chinese man in his underpants eating fast food from a bowl in New York City, self-explanatorily entitled A Newly-Arrived Immigrant Eats Noodles on a Fire-Escape.
Or by viewing a special video installation called Construction Story: Get to Know Alan and Remsley, in which two cheap-labour immigrant workers imported from Curaçao to build the Fenix “reflect on their experiences in the Netherlands.” It contains fascinating and profound experiences such as the fact that, each morning, Remsley gives Alan a lift to work and in return “I bring an egg for him. It has become our ritual.” Feeling enriched yet?
You surely will when you set eyes upon Yinka Shonibare’s haunting installation Refugee Astronaut IX, in which “A lone figure carries a net bulging with belongings—a teapot, a game, a lamp—hastily gathered … in search of a new home on a safe planet” after his original home world of Earth has been destroyed by climate change, no doubt triggered by wicked white industrial capitalism.
So immigrant-enthusiastic are these people that they even want visitors to consider extraterrestrials as potential legitimate future entrants into the Netherlands. Omar Imam’s Space Refugee consists of a video recording (not even the original model) of his laughable 2019 sculpture of that same name, a “whimsical piece” that depicts “a father-daughter duo, Omar and Bianca, on intergalactic adventures, accompanied by a huge purple lollipop.” The ET refugees fly through the universe on a giant space-hopper, the intergalactic equivalent of today’s Mediterranean rubber dinghies. Imam explains he wishes to depict immigrants as being superheroes, like Superman.
Prepare to meet your Rötterdämmerung
Another outspoken fan of open borders is Israeli-Jewish artist Efrat Zehavi. She spends her days wandering the streets of Rotterdam, sculpting crude plasticine golem-like figures of random passers-by of all creeds, colours, and ethnicities. Her chosen medium, she claims, symbolizes the idea that, in an age of no borders, human beings have become infinitely malleable and interchangeable blobs of deracinated globalist mush—Renaud Camus’ perceptive concept of UHM or ‘Interchangeable Human Matter’ made squishy pseudo-flesh.
As Zehavi optimistically explains: “Children’s clay is not hard; it is always soft. And you can still change it after ten years, like your identity.” But are the endless foreign immigrants’ identities really always quite so plastic as Zehavi fondly imagines?
I seem to remember that, in November last year, following a football match between Ajax Amsterdam and Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv, Holland suffered its first mass anti-Jewish pogrom since the days of the Nazis, in which Israeli fans were beaten, thrown into canals, and forced to shout “Free Palestine!” upon pain of death … crimes perpetrated by non-white Muslim immigrants of the precise kind now being celebrated by ideologically blind Left-wing artists (even some unconsciously suicidal Jewish ones) in the Fenix Migration Museum.
Far from rejoicing in such attacks, unlike some cowardly Dutch politicians who preferred to stay quiet, Geert Wilders promptly posted revelatory footage online of Islamist rioters throwing bombs at a tram filled with Maccabi supporters whilst yelling the slogan “Cancer Jews!”—much like the actual Nazis once did.
If the Fenix Museum is ever looking for another video installation that may genuinely act to broaden visitors’ views on migration, maybe they could get in touch with Mr. Wilders and ask him if they could show that?