Former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, who assumed the post of secretary general of NATO on 1 October, recently spoke at an event in Brussels organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a US-based think-tank. Not surprising for the NATO chief, he is calling for higher arms spending in Europe:

“I know spending more on defense means spending less on other priorities. But it is only a little less,” Rutte said on Thursday.

“On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems. We need a small fraction of that money to make our defenses much stronger, and to preserve our way of life,” he added.

While NATO members are spending more of their GDP on the military than a decade ago, that’s nowhere near the Cold War levels, Rutte argued, noting that the US-led military bloc will “need a lot more than 2%” if it wants to defend Europe against an allegedly aggressive Russia.

Spending billions on weapons will bring security, Rutte argued, and “without security, there is no freedom for our children and grandchildren. No schools, no hospitals, no businesses. There is nothing.”

He urged the audience to tell their governments that “security matters more than anything” and that they “accept to make sacrifices today so that we can stay safe tomorrow.”

“Tell your banks and pension funds it is simply unacceptable that they refuse to invest in the defense industry,” Rutte said. “Defense is not in the same category as illicit drugs and pornography. Investing in defense is an investment in our security. It’s a must!”

“NATO tells members to divert social spending to militaries”, 12 Dec, 2024, RT)

Since when do banks and pension funds invest in those naughty activities? Does Mr Rutte know something we do not? Leaving aside Mark Rutte’s clumsy, ill-considered rhetoric, there are of course the underlying economic hard realities. Speaking last week to Judge Andrew Napolitano on the latter’s popular Judging Freedom channel on YouTube, former British diplomat Ian Proud, who served in Russia, points out the following:

European countries of NATO already spend 3.3 times more than Russia spends on defense. If they increase their spending to 3% which Donald Trump is recommending that figure would go up to five times more than Russia. The question is how much more than Russia do you need to spend on defense before you feel safe?

Proud went on to say that this already bloated defense spending is primarily about “lining the pockets” of the big arms contractors in Europe and the US; it has has nothing to do with security. For this reason, Proud thinks that, Trump’s bombast notwithstanding, Washington will not pull out of NATO given that US defense contractors would lose billions of dollars every year in business from Europe. “Donald Trump is close to those defense contractors and close to the politicians who receive substantial campaign donations from those defense contractors”, he observes. (Source: Ian Proud - (fmr British Diplomat to Russia) : NATO Building An Arsenal)

While Europeans may have been enthusiastic about hanging blue and yellow flags from their windows to demonstrate their solidarity with and support for Ukraine, there are increasing signs that among the the public (in contrast to our deluded leaders) there is no appetite for military conflict with Russia. Here in the Netherlands, polling data recently compiled by the veteran pollster Maurice de Hond, who I cite regularly in these pages, caught my eye. De Hond’s poll published on his website on 15 December (“Eerste peiling na TK2023 met PVV op verlies”) presented the following statements, indicating the percentage of respondents who were in agreement:

• It is good that Mark Rutte puts this on the agenda so clearly (55%)

• The dangers are greatly exaggerated by him (32%)

• This approach only increases the chance of war (35%)

• The extra money needed should be found by lowering benefits and health care costs (20%)

• Pension funds should invest more in Dutch companies that make weapons (40%)

• The Netherlands should provide troops to fight in Ukraine (12%)

• This approach will lead to further destabilization in Europe (34%)

Most interestingly, De Hond broke down the reaction to the first statement by party affiliation and the graph below maps this to the fifteen parties represented in the Tweede Kamer, the Dutch Lower House:

The three columns on the left, representing voters most sympathetic to Mark Rutte’s sentiments, are the VVD (his former party), Volt, a pro-EU party whose electoral program promotes further European unification, and D66, an equally fervent supporter of the EU. No surprises here.

However, on the right side, more skeptical voters are represented by three parties (leaving the FvD aside for the moment) which reflect a populist groundswell against the established order: a relative newcomer, the BBB (Farmer-Citizen Movement), Geert Wilder’s PVV (currently the largest party in the Netherlands), and finally the SP, the Dutch Socialist Party, representing what you might call the traditional anti-imperialist Left. Together they hold 49 seats, 52 if you add the FvD, roughly a third of the Tweede Kamer.

The terms “populism” and “populist” are problematic; I don’t think they adequately describe the new realities. Moreover, within the context of mainstream narratives, these labels are used pejoratively; “populism” is a threat that needs to be combated and contained. Thing is, if you are against populism, what are you for? Increased elite control? It is our wretched elites who have gotten us into this predicament and expecting them to solve our mounting problems is a fool’s errand.

For now, let’s call these parties “anti-establishment” for the lack of a better term. Within this spectrum, those of a more rightwing character have gained considerably wider traction in Europe than those with leftwing leanings, though the latter does exist, most visibly in the form of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW. As such, one not agree with everything the anti-establishment parties of various flavors stand for, but if only with regard to NATO’s big push for vastly increased arms spending and unbridled militarism, their instincts are absolutely correct.

The European political establishment will try everything it can to resist this continent-wide shift in public opinion and voting trends, up to and including nullifying elections that produce “incorrect” outcomes, as we saw earlier this month in Romania. Ultimately such resistance will be futile,though it may take several election cycles for the system to be fundamentally reorganized.

As for Mark Rutte, the Ukraine project is an existential issue for NATO; the inevitable, forthcoming collapse of the Ukraine military will reveal to all what a paper tiger this obsolete entity has long since become. The bellicose and ill-considered rhetoric of this opportunistic and tone-deaf weapons salesman will hence only continue.

I wish my readers a pleasant holiday season!

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It was widely reported on social media in recent days, but in case you missed it: another pogrom just took place against Jewish people in Amsterdam. Seriously! At least, that’s if you believe the bellicose leader of the Zionist garrison-state: Netanyahu decries Amsterdam pogrom ahead of the 86th Kristallnacht anniversary. Various other of our feckless leaders piped up decrying this purported outburst of violent antisemitism directed against a group of friendly, peace-loving Israeli soccer fans who had come to Amsterdam to attend a match against the local team, Ajax. Netanyahu later announced that two military planes had been dispatched to “rescue” the beleaguered football fans, but this subsequently proved to be fake news. Even our hereditary monarch, Willem-Alexander, who is not all that bright, felt obliged to speak up: “We must not turn blind eye to antisemitism, says Dutch king after attacks on Israeli football fans”

As has now been exhaustively documented on social media, what actually happened was that on Wednesday evening, the day before the game, two hundred or so supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv went on something of a rampage in the city center, chanting racist slogans (“death to Arabs”), tearing down Palestinian flags hanging from houses, and roughing up a taxi driver. After the match, which Maccabi lost 5-0, the disgruntled fans returned to the city center to pick up where they left off the evening before. Several videos were posted by the very fine iPhone photographer Annet de Graf (love her collection of photos of Covid-era quiet Amsterdam) showing the Zionist hooligans fighting and raising Cain in front of Central Station and later gathering on Spui square. At a given moment, a number of Moroccan Amsterdammers, apparently friends and colleagues of the aforementioned cabbie, turned up to administer some “rough justice”, resulting in several of the hooligans taking unplanned swims in the canals. Although I don’t blithely condone such street violence, words and deeds do have consequences; that immortal phrase FAFO comes to mind.

These videos went viral and were cited by mainstream media in various countries as evidence of “unprovoked” antisemitic attacks on innocent Israelis. Annet called a number of them out of this, and in due time rectifications were made, but it was another one of those moments that brings to mind that old saying: “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still tying its shoes”.

None of this will come as a surprise to readers here. We all know how Zionist propaganda works, how instantly, over and over again, any kind of misdeed or inconvenient fact that emanates from that depraved and deluded society is immediately obfuscated by the playing of the “antisemitism” card. When we in the West hear this particular tune on the mighty Wurlizter we react in Palovian fashion, shutting down any capacity for critical thinking. But while the Zionist hasabara system worked exceedingly well in earlier times, it’s increasingly less effect in the age of social media, where centralized, top-down control of narratives no longer works. Moreover, propaganda built on lies doesn’t endure, the truth eventually comes out. Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. Assad gassing his own people. Hamas beheading babies… we now know better, right? In the past it may have taken weeks or months, even years, for the truth to be known, today can be a matter of hours, as we saw this week with this story. The mainstream legacy media undermines and destroys its credibility with every lie it gives credence to; they are digging their own graves, as are the politicians who dumbly, uncritically follow what they are led to believe is the party line.

If you’d like to read more about the affair, here are various other commentaries on Substack which I can recommend:

Palestine Will Be Free

Genocidal Israelis return home with bloodied noses from Amsterdam

I stopped watching football some years ago after growing completely apathetic to it and to the fortunes of the team I used to support. But living in a Muslim country totally in the grip of football fever at the time of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, I couldn’t help but watch the Moroccan national team’s matches. The Moroccans surprised everyone with their pe…

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a year ago · 214 likes · 45 comments · Palestine Will Be Free

Thomas Fazi

What really happened at the Amsterdam "pogrom"?

According to media reports, an antisemitic pogrom occurred in Amsterdam earlier this week, as Israeli football fans were hunted and beaten in the streets for no reason other than being Jewish. Western leaders — from Biden to von der Leyen to Trudeau — all rushed to express their support, suggesting that Europe is headed straight for a repeat of the Nazi…

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a year ago · 36 likes · 4 comments · Thomas Fazi

BettBeat’s Newsletter

Hunting Arabs in Amsterdam

This is Karim's translation of Peter Breedveld's blog article, originally written in Dutch. Please note that Dutch language and culture can be very direct; reader discretion is advised…

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a year ago · 21 likes · BettBeat Media

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I live in the historical Jewish Quarter (Jodenbuurt) of Amsterdam. A few steps away in the Nieuwe Uilenbergerstraat is the Uilenberger Schul, a small but beautifully preserved Roccoco gem dating from 1766. A block to the south is the massive, austere Portuguese Synagogue (1670-75), once the largest synagogue in the world. Across the street is the Great Ashkenazi Synagogue (1670-71), which now houses the Jewish Museum. A few blocks further up on Plantage Middenlaan is the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater which was used as collection point for deportations and is now a Holocaust memorial. Across town is the Anne Frank House, where the young girl’s Jewish family went into hiding and where she wrote her world-famous diary. The secret annex where the family lived is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Amsterdam, attracting some 1.2 million visitors a year.

In additional to these and other historical sites, there are various more recent memorials: the Auschwitz Memorial (nooit meer, “never again”) in the nearby Wertheim Park, (Jan Wolkers, 1992), In 2021 the Holocaust Names Memorial, designed by celebrity architect Daniel Liebeskind, was unveiled just up the street from the Portuguese Synagogue. That year another small monument was unveiled at one of the entrances to the Vondelpark, which, according to its creator, Niels van Deuren, was inspired by the words of King Willem-Alexander during the customary address by the monarch on Amsterdam’s Dam Square on May 4 (National Remembrance Day) the previous year in which he observed “Sobibor began in the Vondelpark. With a sign, ‘Forbidden for Jews’”. The title of the memorial is hence Sobibor – Wat doe jij (“Sobibor - What would you do?”) and consists of a mirror, inviting onlookers to gaze into their own souls, so to speak.

In the Jewish Quarter, as well as other 19th and 20th Century neighborhoods, you will also find numerous struikelstenen, (German, Stolpersteine), small brass plaques embedded in the sidewalks in front of houses where Holocaust victims had lived. They display the name, birthday, year of deportation, and the concentration camp in which they were killed. (The concept was created by the German visual artist Gunter Demnig, and there are now more than one hundred thousand of these simple sidewalk memorials in the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.)

I have focused on Holocaust memorials in Amsterdam because I live surrounded by them, but there was a large Jewish population throughout the Netherlands and there are of course memorials in many locations, perhaps the most notable of which is the former Nazi deportation camp, Camp Westerbork.

The process of what one might call the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance continues. On March 10, another museum dedicated to this tragic history was opened in Amsterdam, the National Holocaust Museum, directly across the street from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, about two blocks east of the Portuguese Synagogue. And therein lies a tale.

On that day, a Sunday, I left the house around 11am and encountered a crowd gathering on the Waterlooplein facing the Portuguese Synagogue on the other side of the Daniel Meyerplein, where the opening ceremony for the new museum was about to take place. The guest of honor was Israel’s President Herzog, who was photographed in late 2023 inscribing an artillery shell,“I trust in you”, and who also declared “there are no innocents” in Gaza. Herzog’s statements were included in the indictment filed at the International Court of Justice on 29 December 2023 by South Africa, ‘Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People’. The judges subsequently accepted the evidence and included Herzog’s “genocidal incitement” in their ruling. (“Israeli president accused of genocidal incitement will attend opening of Dutch Holocaust Museum”, 7 March 2024, The Rights Forum)

There were several small but noisy demonstrations that day, another one on the Plantage Middenlaan near the entrance the new museum, with loud chants intended let President Herzog know that his presence was not welcome. In short video clips taken outside the Synagogue as the guests of honor were leaving, one can hear the ruckus in the background. President Herzog would have heard the many expressions of anger and rage at his presence, but he clearly did not get the message.

In commentaries that followed, various individuals insisted that the chants that day were “antisemitic”. They were not. I was there, I didn’t hear a single word that could be categorized as “antisemitic”. They were anti-Zionist. It was reported that President Herzog had been invited the previous summer, before the events of 7 October, but apparently it did not occur to management of the museum at any point between that date and 10 March that perhaps the leader of a country charged with “genocide incitement” was not the most appropriate guest of honor for the opening of a museum dedicated to the Holocaust. Had he not been invited, there would have been no demonstrations, of that we can be certain.

Subsequently in May we had a brief outburst of student protests at several universities, including a short-lived encampment at the University of Amsterdam. There have been — and continue to be — numerous other small protests by activists. A few parliamentarians, mostly of Turkish or Moroccan background, speak out. But the overwhelming impression one gets is indifference. There has been nothing like the vast public outcry, the wave of indignation and “cancelling”, that we saw in the aftermath of the special military operation Russia launched in Ukraine in February 2022.

Yesterday, 7 October, there were a number of “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations planned at various train stations around the country. These activities were characterized as “facilitating antisemitism” by public figures such as Dilan Yeşilgöz, the current leader of the VVD, the center-right party formerly led by Mark Rutte, now secretary-general of NATO. The Zionist settler-colony, we are led believe, was and remains the victim of 7 October. Only it and its sympathizers should have been allowed to mark the day. Israeli victimhood always comes first.

I will stop here. In a subsequent post I will try to answer: Why this profound and disturbing cognitive dissonance?

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ADSM is a global leader semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines are crucial for producing advanced chips, giving the Veldhoven-based tech company what is effectively a monopoly on the high-end of the market. Its current market capitalization of around €300 billion makes it the third most valuable enterprise in Europe, and it is perhaps the sole example of European leadership in digital technology. China is the largest market for semiconductors in the world, so not surprisingly, Chinese microchip companies are in turn ADSM’s largest market.

This unique and enviable position has placed ADSM directly in the crosshairs of the US government, which is desperately trying to kneecap China’s technological progress by limiting its access to high-end chips and semiconductor technology. In 2019, under pressure from the Trump administration, the Dutch government blocked sales to China of ADSM’s EUV technology. In November 2023, the Biden administration further tightened restrictions on sales of advanced semiconductors and the machines to manufacture them to China under newly enacted the Chips Act. ASML was told to stop servicing certain equipment it had previously sold to Chinese customers, as these machines now fall under the US’s new export restrictions. (“Understanding the latest US restrictions on chip exports to China”)

I have been following this story for some time, and so the following podcast of savvy economics and finance analyst Sean Foo (based in Singapore, I believe) naturally caught me eye. He picked up on comments made in Washington last week by the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, Dirk Beljaarts, in which he pushed back against US efforts to force ADSM to abandon the Chinese market. Sean sardonically observes that one of ASML’s smaller customers, the US, is insisting the company dump its largest customer, China, thereby in effect committing economic suicide:

A brief news item at Reuters quotes Beljaarts as saying:

"The Chinese are an important trade partner, as is the United States and many other countries in the world, and we have our own economy to upkeep and to make sure that our companies can do business as freely as possible."

"We know that ASML is a crown jewel for the Netherlands, which we are very proud of, and from our perspective, it's important that the company can operate as freely as possible within the boundaries that are there. And what we discussed primarily is how we can further progress the cooperation between the two countries."

(“On US visit, Dutch politician talks importance of ASML, China trade”, Reuters, 23 September 2024)

We probably should not make too big a deal out of this story, it is simply a public position statement. The interesting thing for me is the timing. On 1 October, the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte assumes the post of the secretary-general of NATO. Don’t let the “North Atlantic” in NATO deceive you, this “defensive alliance” is broadening its scope to encompass that vast part of the world it calls the “Indo-Pacific” region:

This week’s NATO summit in Washington left no mistake that China is now a focus of the alliance: The final communiqué, approved by all 32 NATO members, called China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war against Ukraine, expressed concern over its expanding nuclear arsenal, and accused Beijing of conducting “sustained and malicious cyber and hybrid activities” and employing “coercive tactics and efforts to divide the Alliance.” Lest there be any doubt that NATO has China in its sights, NATO reaffirmed that the “Indo-Pacific is important for NATO” and promised to continue to deepening cooperation with its Indo-Pacific partners—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, also known as the Indo-Pacific 4 (IP4)—on matters of shared security concerns involving China as well as Russia and North Korea. Put simply, NATO dispensed with the diplomatic niceties and fired a warning shot across the bow.

(Is NATO Making a Strategic Blunder?, Stimson.org, 13 July 2024)

The European Union’s unelected president, Ursula von der Leyen, recently re-appointed to a second five-year term, has also emerged as a China hawk:

Warning of growing ties between Moscow and Beijing, she presented a new vision for Europe’s relationship with China, a country that, she argued, holds enormous economic and geopolitical leverage over Europe.

That must change, von der Leyen asserted. With the framing of de-risking, not decoupling, she outlined a future for Europe’s greater economic independence. Learning the lessons from Europe’s overreliance on cheap Russian energy, Europe’s dependence on China for critical materials used for the green transition and digital technologies could not stand.

(“Ursula von der Leyen set Europe’s ‘de-risking’ in motion. What’s the status one year later?” Atlantic Council, 24 July 2024)

This is the milieu in which Mark Rutte will henceforth be ensconced. With structural fissures beginning to appear within both the European Union and NATO monoliths, there will be mounting pressure to preserve the increasingly tenuous “unity” that must at all costs be maintained. Crisis-manager, behind the scenes wheeler-dealer, and herder of cats par excellence Mark Rutte will need to vigorously impose the party line, and if his predecessor is anything to go by, the more hawkish and belicose he does so the better. Given this situation, what kind of a look would it be if behind his back the Dutch tech bros in Veldhoven are allowed to go off the reservation and continue to do business with the “enemy”?

The ironies abound. During his long tenure in office, Rutte worked tirelessly to serve the interests of the big Dutch multinationals (he himself did a stint at Unilever before entering politics). He expended extraordinary amount of political capital, presumably under the influence of an insider lobby group, on what came to look like a personal crusade to abolish a tax on corporate dividends, a move that would have favored a small number of foreign investors. But that was then, this is now.

There are growing signs neocon-infested Washington is preparing to pivot way from its focus on Russia and the Ukraine conflict to concentrate on what the neocons insist is the inevitable war with China (in 2026, 2028?). The US wants keep Europe firmly in its camp, and the wholly captured NATO/EU bureaucracies are the means to do so. If this means crashing the economies of the EU, so be it, corporate priorities be damned. How far Europeans (and figures like Mark Rutte) will go along with this mad and disastrous scheme remains to be seen. As complete as the “vassalization” of the Old Continent may seem, there is no such thing as stasis in power relations given the dialectical nature of the world; sooner or later the tide will turn, and we will see what remains of our once vibrant economies.

Whatever the fate of ASML, the Chinese are not standing idly by. The country is dilgently assembling its own domestic semiconductor supply chain, up to and including an alternative to ASML:

A newly revealed patent from Chinese lithography systems maker Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment (SMEE) shows how domestic firms could progress in the local advanced lithography tools market despite US sanctions.

The “extreme ultraviolet [EUV] radiation generators and lithography equipment” patent, filed in March 2023, was published publicly on Tuesday and is still being vetted by the China National Intellectual Property Administration, according to a record from company registry website Qichacha.

The patent shows how SMEE is progressing in EUV lithography, which is considered the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese semiconductor industry. Despite years of efforts, SMEE remains behind ASML in reliably mass producing lithography gear that can be used for processes at the 28-nanometre level and below.

(“Chinese chip making shows progress with new EUV patent from domestic lithography champion”, SCMP, 12 Sep 2024)

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A short time ago I was watching a livestream of The Duran, a geopolitics and current affairs podcast that periodically invites various sages for open discussion. The guest on this particular broadcast (“US elections and economic policy”, 22 August 2024) was Chris Martenson, the co-founder of the news and finance platform, PeakProsperity.com, where he offers libertarian takes on the failings of the Western-led economic system and suggests ways in which we can weather the oncoming storm (he’s something of a “prepper”, as they are called). To his great credit, Martenson was an early and outspoken critic of Covid pandemic policies, thanks in part to his professional background in the life sciences.

In the course of the discussion with Duran co-host Alexander Mercouris, Martenson criticized the excessive money-printing of the US government. Around the 17:37 mark he states that the root of the problem is “a very interventionist, dare I say politburo-style, central planning cabal running things. It's called the Federal Reserve”. He then adds: “If you want something done inefficiently and ineffectively, the government is your top choice”, that the Biden administration is pursuing “actual Marxist communist policies.” If you believe Chris Martenson, communism is sweeping America and Joe Biden is leading the way!

To anyone familiar with modern libertarianism, especially of the flavor espoused in the United States, this is all par for the course, nothing unusual, not worthy of further attention, and so I would normally not dwell on the matter… except for one thing:

Martenson’s interlocutor, as mentioned above, was Alexander Mercouris who in addition to the his regular joint podcasts with co-host Alex Christoforou and occasional guests, also produces a daily podcast on his own, which for the past two and half years has focused in great detail on the conflict in Ukraine. Early on in Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO), he observed that the conflict was evolving into a war of attrition, and was taking the form of what he dubbed “aggressive attrition”. The Russians were overwhelmingly focused on grinding down Ukraine’s military capabilities. (Putin said as much at the start of the SMO: one of the stated goals was the “demilitarization” of its western neighbor. In such a war of attrition, Mercouris points out, as have various other objective, independent-minded observers, most notably Brian Berletic and Scott Ritter, that the odds overwhelming favor the side with the greater military-industrial base. And in this case, it is of course Russia.

Those familiar with 20th Century Soviet history will know that under the leadership of Stalin, who saw the storm clouds on the horizon gathering, the USSR underwent massive, centrally planned industrialization process in the course of about twenty years, far faster than preceding industrialized countries. This enabled the USSR to survive the onslaught in WWII by an initially far more industrially and military powerful opponent, Germany, at tremendous human cost of course, some 27 million Russians died. That military-industrial capacity was maintained through the Soviet period, through the disastrous 1990s, and it survived, more or less, into the 21st Century. Not only did Russia keep these vast factories and industrial plants in reserve, it had the technical knowledge, the manpower, the resources, and supply chains to re-activate them in the post-2014 period, when it become clear that a conflict with NATO was on the horizon. (Critics of the Soviet system may point out that central planning didn’t work so well in other facets of economic life. No question about that, the Soviets were unable to adapt a once very successful system to changing times, a mistake China has studiously avoided.)

In nearly every program he makes these days, Mercouris talks about how Russia’s military industrial output is soaring: artillery shells, armored vehicles, massive glide bombs, all the rest, including now military drones (he reported the other day that Russia is now producing 4,000 a month). This output dwarfs that of the US and Europe. Even if the West started ramping up production now it would take years to catch up, if ever. As Brian Berletic puts it so succinctly time and time again, it’s the difference between Russia’s purpose-driven vs. the West’s profit-driven system. As the very fine political analyst Aurelien wrote earlier this week on his Substack:

Russia has confirmed itself as the dominant military power on the continent of Europe, and this is not likely to change. Its armed forces are of a size and quality that the West cannot begin to match, its military-industrial complex is enormous by western standards and is capable of producing military technology on a scale and to a quality beyond anything the West can consistently manage. (In the end, western military technology has turned out to be OK, but not much more.) This will not change because (leaving aside social and political problems) the West no longer has the scientific and technological base, the skilled and educated workforce or the industrial capacity to match those of Russia. Moreover there are certain technologies, like high-velocity long-range missiles, which the Russians have invested in and the West has not.

(Excerpt from “No End Of A Lesson.” 25 September 2024)

At this juncture, one would like ask Mr Martenson whether he thinks that Russia’s experience is anomalous, that it cannot be used to justify any form of centrally planned government spending. Perhaps he would argue that Russia would nonetheless be better off with a privately owned and operated military-industrial complex. Perhaps he thinks the Western shortcomings in this regard are likewise due to “government interference” and could be corrected by expanding private ownership of military-industrial production.

Or perhaps he would say that military spending should be the exception to the rule. At which point, one would like to ask whether there might be other exceptions. For example, does Martenson, who lives on a 180-acre property in rural western Massachusetts and will, like most Americans, rely on an automobile to get around, think that the US interstate highway system, construction of which was begun in the 1950s by the federal government, has also been an “inefficient and ineffective”, something that could have better been left to the private sector? And what about the once much vaunted and venerated public networks of higher education, such as the University of California and the State University of New York? Looking back further in economic history Martenson will be aware of the seminal role the Erie Canal (1815) played in the economic development of the early American republic, opening the Great Lakes and the US Midwest to economic development and transforming New York City into a major hub of trade and commerce. Had the Erie Canal been a more effective undertaking had been undertaken by the private sector rather than the government? Perhaps Martenson would make some exceptions: military spending, infrastructure, education, that’s OK. Maybe public utilities as well? Thing is, now we are talking about vast swathes of modern economies, suggesting that the libertarian small-government dogma is a utopian fantasy.

So we would then arrive at the point where we accept that government spending, that central planning, can work and can be extremely effective, if done correctly (as wasn’t the case in later years of the Soviet Union). Who knew? Actually, we did, once upon a time, in what now seems like a forgotten age. In the period spanning roughly the late 1940 to the late 1970s (what the French call Les Trente Glorieuses) we in the West had flourishing mixed economies characterized by public ownership of key enterprises, long-term government investment, and a vibrant private sector. Not “free markets” (there is no such thing), but managed markets. The bitter irony is that around the time the Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution gained traction and ushered in the neoliberal era, China under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping went in exactly the opposite direction, embracing the kind of mixed economy model that had served us so well (with some key differences of course, such public control of the central bank and the financial system). The mixed economies of the West encountered some bumps in the road towards the end of the 1970s, to be sure, but instead of tweaking the system, embarked upon a wholesale dismantlement of it in a fit of ideological “free-market” fervor that continues to this day. China has boomed over the past forty years, raising some 800 million of its citizens out of poverty, while we in the West have stagnated and gone into decline, our once vibrant if imperfect democracies devolving into what now best be described as “liberal oligarchies”.

Libertarianism, like anarchism, is essentially a Utopian project. The end-point we all want may ultimately be compatible, but the paths differ. While I admire certain principled libertarians like the venerable Ron Paul (I am always interested in what he has to say), so much of American libertarianism seems to based on romanticized notions of the “rugged individualism” of American pioneers taming and civilizing a land without people (sound familiar?). Perhaps this mindset was appropriate in post-colonial, pre-industrial America for waves of immigrants fleeing the hidebound conventions and rigidly hierarchical confines of the Old Continent, but it is patently unsuitable for dealing with the manifold challenges we face in the modern industrial age.

I turn to the example of the success of Russia’s centrally-planned military-industrial complex not because I wish to glorify militarism in any form, far from it, but because it is so timely and revealing. We are approaching the end game in the Ukraine conflict. Ukraine’s Western backers are becoming increasingly desperate and frantic. The Ukraine project cannot be allowed to fail, we must fight to the last Ukrainian! But the bullets and ballistic missiles are running out (as, tragically, is the human cannon fodder). Delusions of grandeur, of hegemony, of omnipotence are meeting a hard, cold reality; a stark and graphic demonstration of our loss of industrial might. Decades of short-sighted, delusional economic policy is now being laid bare for all to see. Privatizing, downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, rent-seeking, endless austerity — all the many tricks in the neoliberal toolbox have been ruinous for us. It didn’t need to be this way.

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It’s been confirmed:

Acting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been officially appointed as the next NATO secretary general, replacing the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg, the US-led military bloc has announced. Rutte will take up the post on October 1.

The decision to appoint the 57-year-old veteran politician, the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history, known for his staunch support of Ukraine and consensus-building skills, was made on Wednesday by NATO’s main political decision-making body.

(“NATO confirms new chief”, RT, 26 June 2024)

Some of us saw this coming. A tweet of mine from January 2023 flagged a meeting with Joe Biden at the White House during which this comical and revealing photo was taken:

Given that NATO has for more than two years been actively engaged in a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, you might think that its secretary general would need to have at least a modicum of military knowledge and experience, but Rutte is wholly unencumbered in this regard. To be fair to him, neither had his predecessors, Jens Stoltenberg and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, both of whom were characterized by their stridency and mindless boosterism. The secretary general of NATO is a political post, obviously.

I’ve seen some comments on social media that Rutte is cut from the same cloth as those two, but I don’t think this is entirely accurate. Mark Rutte is not an ideologue, far from it; he is first and foremost a careerist and an opportunist, someone greatly skilled at bureaucratic wheeling and dealing. He may occasionally make an intemperate remark, but that would more likely reflect the contingencies of a given moment rather than his true beliefs, insofar he has any. Rutte got the job not because he has ideas or vision, but because he is a good crisis manager; he knows how to put out bureaucratic fires. Don’t ask Mark Rutte for a long-term strategic plan to ensure stability and peace in Europe based on solid, non-threatening relations with its neighbors. He won’t have one.

The RT piece cited above speaks of his “consensus-building skills” and this refers to his success in building governing coalitions — four times — in the course of his fourteen years as the leader of the center-right VVD party. However, whether the skills he developed in pulling together and leading coalitions within the rarefied, concensus-oriented political culture of the Netherlands will be sufficient to deal with the fracturing NATO alliance is the big question. NATO’s protege Ukraine, a de facto member, is losing the war. Important NATO member Turkey is distancing itself from the debacle, Hungary is dissenting as well. Neither Italy nor Spain want further escalation. French president Emmanuel Macron, who recently proposed crazy schemes to try to reverse Ukraine’s sinking fortunes on the battlefield, has been dealt a punishing defeat in recent elections. The Biden administration primary interest now appears to be try to prolong the inevitable denouement of this tragic, wholly avoidable conflict until after the November elections. The EU’s new foreign minister is the strident Russia hawk Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, one the intensely Russosphobic “Baltic chihuahuas”, will be pulling the EU and NATO in a destructive direction with no diplomacy in sight.

Mark Rutte may think he has made a brilliant career move, but I think he has been handed a poisoned chalice.

I’ve written extensively about our now former prime minister in this space. If you would like to read more, you might start here:

In other news…

Apropos of parliamentary elections last November, which resulted in yet another agonizingly long negotiation, it appears we finally have a new governing coalition, and the new Cabinet will be sworn in this week. I will try to put together a short piece on that development over the next few days.

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When Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) unexpectly came out first in the Dutch Tweede Kamer (Lower House) elections held on 22 November, they won 37 of 150 seats. While a decisive win in the context of the highly pluralistic Dutch electoral landscape, it was obviously far from an absolute majority. That meant negotiations with other parties to obtain the necessary majority to form a government (or rule as a minority coalition, also an option, albeit a more tenuous arrangement). This can be an arduous, protracted affair. As winner of the election, the PVV was entitled to select the informateur , the individual tasked leading the negotiations, and Wilders tapped Ronald Plasterk, an interesting choise, given that he's been long associated with the Dutch Labor Party, not a natural ally of the PVV. But Plastkerk defies easy categorization, having become, as columnist for the most widely read national daily newspaper, De Telegraaf, a staunch critic of contemporary liberalism and the modern “left”. (As an aside, Plastkerk is also candidate for prime minister, for which he appears to enjoy considerable support both among the public as well as the negotiating parties, but that is a topic for another day).

In any case, Plasterk was reported on Monday 29 January as saying the negotiation process is a bumpy one (my translation):

Especially on finance, [Plasterk] said, the parties differ: "Money, because it affects everything, is always an important issue." The VVD is pushing for austerity, while the PVV is fiercely against it.

(“Plasterk: stevige gesprekken, vooral over financiën”, NOS, 29 January 2024)

It is worth emphasizing that it is not immigrants and immigration policy which is the stumbling block, but finances. While Wilders may be best known, notorious if you will, for his inflammatory and illiberal Islamophobic rhetoric in the past, the PVV campaign platform included a raft of what one might call “left populist” economic measures, such as raising the minimum wage, designed to bring some relief to the economically beleaguered citizenry, in particular PVV's provincial electoral base. The Dutch have seen their purchasing power and general economic stability steadily deteriorate under fourteen years of the profoundly neoliberal regime of Mark Rutte and is coping with inflation, high energy bills, and astronomic housing costs.

None of the PVV's proposals are remotely radical; there’s no talk of nationalizing the banks, leaving the eurozone, or anything of the sort. In fact, it would represent at best a modest retrenchment to social democratic model of the postwar years. But anno 2024, that's too much; not that it doesn’t make economic sense, but because it is coming from an icky populist like Wilders. The increasingly authoritarian EU bureaucracy and its running dogs in the Hague cannot be seen to yield to “populist” demands. When Mark Rutte's VVD was in power and interest rates were at zero (or even in the negative), the sky was the limit in terms of spending to keep the VVD's coalition partners happy and (most importantly) Rutte in power. Tens of billions were earmarked for the megalomanical “green transition” ambitions of the rabidly pro-EU D66 party upon whom Rutte heavily depended. Billions and billions were to be spent on dismantling agriculture and commercial fishing, in a sense deindustrializing the country, yet more billions dedicated to building vast wind turbine farms in the North Sea.

But that was then, this is now. As Plastkerk indicates above, the VVD is calling for austerity. Raising the minimum wage? Ho maar. That's a bridge too far. Wilders must be kneecapped, he cannot be allowed to deliver on his populist economic proposals, however modest they may be. In case you think I may be reading too much into this, see the following news item that appeared around the same time:

Officials in Brussels have reportedly drawn up a secret plan to sabotage Hungary’s economy if Viktor Orbán decides this week to again block a €50bn support package for Ukraine.

The plan, reported by the Financial Times, reflects the fury mounting across European capitals at what one diplomat called the “policy of blackmail” being pursued by the Hungarian prime minister, who leads the bloc’s most pro-Russia state.

The FT said the strategy involved targeting Hungary’s economy, weakening its currency and reducing investor confidence.

(“Secret EU plan ‘to sabotage Hungarian economy’ revealed as anger mounts at Orbán”, The Guardian, 29 January 2024)

Stop and think about this for a moment. The EU bureaucracy wants to sabotage the economy of one its own member states, ultimately with the goal of provoking regime change, because its leader, Victor Orbán, exercises Hungary's right to vote against a joint EU policy decision, and harebrained one at that, namely funding for non-EU member state Ukraine in a doomed and disastrous effort to prolong the military conflict with Russia (Orbán rightly describes this as throwing good money after bad). The charge by an unnamed diplomat that Orbán is blackmailing the EU is a sterling example of confession by projection. The EU has a long and sordid history of strong-arming and blackmailing its member states, the case of Greece in 2015 being the most egregious, as painstakingly detailed by Yanis Veroufakis in his memoir from that time. Geert Wilders does not enjoy the same large absolute majority that Victor Orbán does in Hungary, hence the methods deployed to contain him may be less dramatic: death instead by a thousand (bureaucratic) cuts. If Wilders is going to be able to achieve anything concrete, he will have to choose his battles very wisely and stick to his guns.

So here we have the EU of today: enthusiastic support for rabid ethno-nationalists and fascists (the real thing) in Ukraine and in Israel as they pursue genocidal campaigns against their respective Untermensch, while utterly demonizing at home anyone who shows the least interest in preserving democratic sovereignty, cultural identity, and pursuing national self-interest. Marine Le Pen, Victor Orbán, Geert Wilders — whatever their faults and shortcomings — are not the “extremists”; the extremists have been those mainstream politicians like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron (and Mark Rutte) enabling the slow but steady destruction of our modern nation-states based the once sacrosanct Westphalian principles, facilitating the emergence a corrupt and wholly unaccountable authoritarian technocracy in the form of the current EU.

Meanwhile in The Hague, coalition negotiations appear have to collapsed last week, with one of the four negotiating parties precipitously bailing. We face yet another interminably long interregnum as we lurch from one crisis to another, effectively rudderless. Mark Rutte continues to go through the motions as leader of the caretaker government, but clearly he has moved on. Word on the street is that he wants to move up the ladder in Brussels by becoming the next secretary-general of NATO. Hence, to preserve Mark Rutte's job prospects, Wilders must be contained; it would be a bad look for NATO's next head honcho to come from a member state fraught with populist rumblings.

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That a growing populist backlash in Dutch politics was in the pipeline was obvious. The only real surprise was that it took the form of Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV). In Tweede Kamer (Lower House) elections held on 22 November, they pulled in 37 of 150 seats, leaving the recently-formed merger of Labor and Greens trailing considerably behind with just 25 seats. Within the context of the deeply pluralistic Dutch political system, the PVV victory was considered a landslide. Given that it was wholly unexpected in many quarters, it also came as a bombshell.

For those paying attention, however, the writing was on the wall. In March of last year in, a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (“BoerBurgerBeweging”, BBB), swept Upper House elections, a major upset for the status quo. Subsequently an additional challenge to the incumbent parties began emerging in the form of Pieter Omtzigt, the highly regarded former Christian Democrat (CDA) parliamentarian who left that party earlier this year to establish his own, the New Social Contract (NSC). The latter pulled in twenty seats, making the fourth largest party, only slightly behind outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD, which came in third with 24 seats.

Leaving aside the specific composition of the new Lower House, and what kind of governing coalition will emerge in due time, it is abundantly clear that big changes are afoot. For one, some 108 seats changed hands, beating the former record set in 2002 of 92 seats. More important, the mainstream, so-called “centrist” parties that formed the four successive ruling coalitions under Mark Rutte lost around half their seats. As pollster Maurice de Hond points out, the mainstream parties are imploding; until recently they together pulled in around 80% of the vote, with the remaining 20% going to fringe parties. That ratio is now nearly reversed. The center-right Christian Democrats (CDA), which back in the 1950s once enjoyed absolute parliamentary majorities (something unthinkable today) and not only here but in many other Western European countries played such a central role in defining postwar politics, has been reduced to a pitiful five seats; one imagines that the once equally stalwart Christian Democrats in Germany and elsewhere must be nervously looking over their shoulders. Likewise, had the once mighty Dutch Labour party not joined forces with the Dutch Green Party, it too would probably have faced a similar fate.

Back to Geert Wilders. Who is he? Many if not most of you will have heard of him; he has been well-known (infamous if you prefer) figure on the political landscape for at least two decades. If you don't know who he is, this short profile posted on RT might be helpful:

Wilders’ began his political career as a member of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Following the assassination of Pim Fortuyn – a popular politician and critic of Islam – in 2002, Wilders made a series of speeches condemning multiculturalism and Islamic immigration. When the VVD endorsed Türkiye’s bid for EU membership in 2004, Wilders split from the party and formed the PVV.

In a manifesto published two years later, Wilders called for a moratorium on all non-Western immigration to the Netherlands, a ban on the founding of new mosques, and a tax on the wearing of the Hijab by Muslim women.
Wilders went on to call the Islamic Prophet Mohammed “the devil,” the Quran “a fascist book” that should be outlawed, and Moroccan immigrants “street terrorists.”

Wilders’ hardline positions and proclivity for political stunts – including his hosting of a ‘Prophet Mohammed cartoon competition’ in 2019 – have led to death threats from extremist preachers and terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda. He was placed under police protection in 2004, after plans for his assassination were discovered, and to this day he is watched 24/7 by armed officers.

(“Who is Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch election winner?” 24 November 2023)

One could offer an objective analysis of a country’s immigration policies and critique them from a traditional Left perspective (undermining the economic bargaining power of labor) or from the Right (the effect on social cohesion and national identity). But that is not what Wilders does; he uses hyperbole and media stunts for self-aggrandization. Like Donald Trump, he’s rhetorically gifted, he has a way with words and is adept at puncturing conceits of the powerful. Verbally, he’s a fighter, and that can be, to a degree, a good thing in a politician. His demagoguery has proven successful, at least within certain demographic, making him a permanent fixture of the Dutch political scene. But it has also prevented him from gaining real political power, making him, as is so often the case with these kinds of figures, his own worst enemy. Other parties have refused to work him, saying that his demonization of Islam is discriminatory and unconstitutional. There has been a cordon sanitaire around the PVV. Until now.

So what happened in November?

I don’t want to dive too deeply into the weeds of domestic politics, so I’ll try to summarize as succinctly as possible. First, outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte apparently saw his fourth coalition was weak and failing, and he decided to pull the plug over a relatively minor detail of asylum policy (family reunification), calculating the his party, the VVD, would thereby be able to “own” the issue in the subsequent elections. It proved to be a fatal miscalculation. Rutte’s successor as party leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz, equivocated in the run-up to the election as to whether the VVD would continue to refuse to work with the PVV, thereby inadvertently partly legitimizing Wilders his party. Also, while Wilders was excluded early election debates, he was included in later ones. One in particular, organized by SBS on 16 November, was seen by pollster and data guru Maurice de Hond as a “gamechanger”; the moment when Wilders came in from the cold. He was no longer simply the protest vote of earlier elections, but had became a viable “strategic vote” for many, a viable option. And so he received a last-minute groundswell of support which caught just about everyone but sharp-eyed Maurice de Hond off guard.

The morning after the election, the cosmopolitan professional class, which encompasses virtually the entire mainstream media culture, gasped in horror and clutched their pearls, wailing that Dutch “democracy” was now threatened by an ominous force outside their control. In Amsterdam, a bastion of Labour/Green radical progressivism, a Dutch flag was flying at half-mast on the Montelbaans tower near where I live. This is a public building, like a church, and I found it petulant and churlish gesture.

At this point, it needs to be said: Wilders and the PVV is characterized by much more than just inflammatory anti-Islam rhetoric. In fact, Wilders appears to distancing himself from the latter the closer he get to the levers of power:

Dutch election winner Geert Wilders has abandoned three controversial anti-Islamic legislative proposals that critics have deemed unconstitutional, as his Party for Freedom (PVV) continues negotiations to form a governing coalition, according to a PVV statement on Monday.

(“Dutch election winner walks back Muslim ban”, RT, 9 January 2024)

Whether this is pragmatism or opportunism, I leave for you to decide. Perhaps Wilders remains a dedicated Islamophobe, but his party does not have an absolute parliamentary majority; far from it, hence they must compromise to achieve anything, obviously.

As part of its election campaign the PVV proposed a number of economic measures to restore the steadily deteriorating purchasing power of the citizenry, such as raising the minimum wage, abolishing sales tax on food, raising rental subsidies, and abolishing health care deductibles. Although the PVV may, conventionally speaking, espouse conservative cultural ideas, in terms of economics it embraces decidedly leftwing populism, very similar in fact to the electoral program of the Dutch Socialist Party (SP), which pulled in only four seats in November.

As the leading party, but one without an absolute majority, Wilders’ PVV is entitled to initiate negotiations to form a coalition. That process, which can take months, is now underway. At this point, it does not look likely that Wilders himself will take on the role as prime minister, but rather remain party leader in the Tweede Kamer. While further speculation about the contours of what the next coalition would most likely be in vain, one thing is clear: the establishment, by which I mean the Dutch state bureaucracy, the mainstream media, academia, corporate networks, the EU, and of course the NATO, will strenuously oppose this populist “onslaught” and do everything in their considerable power to marginalize Wilders and discredit the PVV. It isn't that he represents a genuinely profound threat to security and prosperity, it is simply that, like Donald Trump, he cannot be wholly trusted and controlled. Since the end of WWII, the Netherlands has been a charter member of the European unification project, with very close ties to the UK, and enjoys what one might describe as a kind of honorary status as “sixth eye” among the Five Eye alliance. As such, the Atlanticists can ill afford to be defeated in Holland; though not a large and significant player in the European context, its “loss” to the growing nationalist tide would be a profound symbolic blow.

Likewise, in Brussels, the EU establishment may preach “diversity” against a backdrop of rainbow flags, but it does not brook any even marginal dissent from the Party Line. It wants nation-state leaders to dispense with any sentimental notion of national sovereignty; they must be wholly onboard with every detail of the ever-expanding EU agenda. As such, Brussels has considerable means at its disposal to coerce compliance. “We have tools”, as Ursula von der Leyen ominously instructed Giorgia Meloni, when the latter’s right-populist party swept recent elections in Italy (“EU's von der Leyen delivers veiled warning to Italy's right wing”, 23 Sept 2022). As Europe faces a mounting economic crisis that may well go beyond just another cyclical recession, there is talk emanating from Brussels of the need to return to austerity, to begin enforcing again the budgetary and deficit restrictions (the so-called Maastricht criteria) which limit budget deficits and public debt (the were temporarily lifted during the Covid crisis). That means any efforts by not wholly supine, compliant governments to pursue their own agendas will be hamstrung by economic policy. In view of this, the PVV may well not succeed in delivering on its economic populism. It is entirely possible, and even likely, that Geert Wilders and his party will be sandboxed, isolated, and ultimately discredited by being thwarted from delivering concrete results. But here as elsewhere in Europe, the populist genie is out of the bottle. It make take several electoral cycles, but Europe's wretched and dysfunctional political class, distrusted and discredited, is headed inexorably towards the dustbin of history. How this will take place and what the outcome will be will vary from country to country, but the general trajectory is clear.

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As generally anticipated, Mark Rutte’s governing coalition, colloquially known as Rutte IV, finally collapsed on Friday 6 July. The proximate cause was a disagreement over asylum-seeker policy, one of a number of festering crises that the fragile four-party coalition had notably failed to address. At the recent annual meeting of Rutte’s own party, the center-right, economically liberal but (somewhat) socially conservative VVD, the prime minister — and leader of the party — came under increasing pressure to commit to meaningful steps to tackle the problem. After many months of “fruitful” discussions (aren’t they always?), the coalition ran aground over the specific issue of family reunification. The pro-family Christian Union considered its inclusion in any agreement as non-negotiable. This comparatively minor issue was ultimately the battle that Mark Rutte the politician chose to make his last.

On Monday, Rutte announced to much surprise that he would remain as VVD party leader only until the election, after which Holland’s longest-serving postwar prime minister would be leaving Dutch politics for good.

There is much speculation that this was all a calculated move, that the particular issue is one with which the VVD hopes to shore up its flagging political capital rather more contentious matters where the stakes could be far higher. The Green and Labor parties had a no-confidence vote in the pipeline that had it passed would have sidelined Rutte, hence perhaps he headed for the proverbial exit to preempt that. Only a week earlier, sensing his coalition was on the verge of collapse, he had declared himself full of energy and optimism, was ready for fresh elections and would seek a fifth term in office. His surprising announcement might just be a head-fake and he will circle back around and pick up the pieces later. We shall see.

We are told that the earliest new elections can take place is at the beginning of November, for reasons not entirely clear. In the past the coalition-forming process takes on average three months; however, last time it took an agonizing nine months and the new coalition was made up of exactly the same four parties as the previous. It was essentially an exercise in ministerial musical chairs, no one’s idea of progress to be sure, but perhaps that was precisely the point.

So, if the past is any indication, the new parliament and the new Cabinet of Ministers will be installed in February or March, seven or eight months from now. The cabinet is now officially demissionair, caretaker status, a situation that probably suits Mark Rutte just fine, given his lack of interest in truly governing. He can continue to occupy the Torentje, the prime minister’s office, he can head to Brussels to sit at the Big Boy’s table (European Council), and exercise the other prerogatives of power with little or no accountability, exactly the way he likes it.

It must be said though that the timing for yet another prolonged interregnum could not be worse. The various lingering scandals and crises that I’ve mentioned previously on these pages continue to haunt the public sphere; inflation is booming, neighboring Germany (our most important trade partner) heading into recession, the energy crisis likely to flare up again as winter approaches. The hugely destructive and divisive farming crisis festers ever onward, long-running negotiations with the agricultural sector having recently collapsed with no agreement.

Then there is the conflict in Ukraine, which Mark Rutte insists is “also our war”, as he dutifully signs off on shipping Patriot missile systems (maybe F16s as well?) to that tragic and doomed country. The NATO alliance is looking increasingly fragile; the internal contradictions of the EU project are becoming evermore apparent. Lacking competent and decisive leadership, we remain paralyzed, like a deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck. We clutch at straws, blaming Vladimir Putin for our woes, pretending America is our ever-trustworthy friend.

In an earlier post, I compared Mark Rutte with Angela Merkel, both being exceptionally skilled at political intrigue, the dark art of gaining and holding on to power within our antiquated parliamentary democracies. Both were successful not because of clear ideological convictions and vision but precisely because of the lack thereof. Mark Rutte clung to power by forsaking interests of his electoral base, the petite bourgeoisie of the VVD, and embraced what the British political analyst Matthew Goodwin calls “radical progressivism” of the cosmopolitan elite. Syp Wynia, the veteran journalist who I frequently turn to for insights into Dutch politics, put it this way in a commentary published over the weekend (my translation):

[O]ver the course of the past decade, the Rutte cabinets became more and more cabinets that conformed to the agenda of a relatively small, hip, urbane, cosmopolitan and Europhile elite captivated by sustainability, diversity and woke.

As part of a bargain to stay in power, Rutte went along with earmarking jaw-dropping sums to fund the obsessions of these idealistic middle-class urbanites dedicated to saving the planet with missionary zeal while blithely indifferent to the material underpinnings of our modern societies. This “fashionable” agenda has certainly not been in the interests of Rutte’s electoral base within the VVD, nor for that matter that of the once mighty Christian Democrat (CDA) party, which likewise gradually turned its back on its electoral base among the Dutch farmers and is now facing inexorable electoral extinction.

Leaders such as Rutte and Merkel suck the oxygen from the room, so to speak. Just as no strong leader emerged within the German CDU to take her place, the VVD has no compelling replacement for Mark Rutte. Such leaders don’t build movements, they build influence networks; strong, independent-minded, principled individuals are squeezed out of the system to be replaced by pliant parliamentary foot soldiers. They likewise cultivate a kind of controlled opposition which is as inclined to wheeling and dealing as they are. This brave new world of post-modern depoliticized governance doesn’t work in the long run and is in the process of disintegrating.

Signs are emerging of an authentic opposition, in the Netherlands as in other increasingly shaky liberal democracies. In a future post I’ll discuss a bit more the evolving contours of that opposition.

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Discussing the Ukraine conflict and the drone attack on the Kremlin on his blog “Indian Punchline” last month, retired diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar observed how profoundly Europe has lost its way (emphasis mine):

This will probably show up in history books as a historic failure of European leadership and at its core lies the paradox that it is not France but the German government that has aligned itself closer with the US in the Ukraine war and risking an intra-European “epoch of confrontation.”

Even otherwise, these are fateful times, with the political middle ground already shrinking in France and Italy and is much weakened in Germany itself in the wake of the pandemic, the war, and inflation. Importantly, this is only partly an economic story, as the decline of the centre and the de-industrialisation in Europe are closely related and the social fabric that supported the centre has come unstuck.

Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, has been relatively lucky so far. It benefited from cheap labour from east Europe and cheap gas from Russia. But that is over now and the decline of German industry is foreseeable. When society fragments, the political system also fragments and it will take progressively greater effort to govern such countries. Germany and Italy have a three-party coalitions; the Netherlands has four parties; Belgium has a seven-party coalition.

(“Zelensky regime’s fate is sealed”, 4 May 2023)

In this post, I would like to look more closely at the process of fragmentation that he refers to above. In Europe's parliamentary systems, where parties rarely to get absolute majorities, shifting multi-party alliances are the rule. So what's behind the instability today? What's making our governance systems so fragile?

To offer some insight into how this works in here in Holland, which in our case is ruled by a coalition of only four parties (poor Belgium!), I turn once again to the independent Dutch commentator Syp Wynia, who I have cited previously in these pages.

Wynia recently published a commentary, “In Nederland wordt al tien jaar niet naar de kiezer geluisterd” (For the past ten years the voters have been ignored), in which he unpacked for us how the increasingly dysfunctional coalition-forming process works in practice. From his excellent site, Wynia’s Week (my translation):

There is hardly any relationship between the elections and what happens afterwards,. At 9 p.m. the ballot boxes close and what happens after that is a black box. That box remains closed for months, without the citizens having the slightest idea of what goes on inside. It also takes longer and longer before that box is opened. Last time it took nine months. You can't say what cabinet plans emerged then was a result of the elections.

This has become a pattern, especially during the Rutte years: formations take longer and longer, the voter gets further and further out of the picture, and what plans are put together in the formation is not recognizable as a follow-up to the election debates or as a response to citizens' concerns. The cabinet formation takes place in its own bubble in The Hague, which has become detached from the country.

While plans for the Netherlands are made in this bubble in The Hague without citizens — and also most of the people's representatives — having any idea about it, there are privileged interest groups that do have access to the formation discussions. This can involve both 'right-wing' interests — large corporations — and 'left-wing' interests: pressure groups for nature, climate, the environment, slavery [acknowledgement of injustices of the colonial past, ed.], development aid, 'gender', asylum seekers and trade unions. Those do get their due. Whether the same goes for the country's citizens remains very much to be seen.

In other words, the process is largely if not entirely driven by lobbyists working behind the scenes. One might endorse a given lobby, such a trade union or a environmental group, and thus favor the outcome, but the entire process remains opaque and highly arbitrary. What results from the “sausage-making” has at best only passing resemblance to a public mandate.

Worse, the so-called coalition agreement (coalitieakkoord) that results has in recent years become increasingly lengthy, specific, and even contradictory. This comes about the because the leading party (in our case the center-right VVD) needs three other parties to obtain a majority and hence an enormous amount of wheeling and dealing takes place behind the scenes to come to some kind of agreement. This produces an inherently fragile system, reflecting the ever-deepening fragmentation.

To keep this delicate arrangement in place, the governing parties rigidly adhere to the coalition agreement; it becomes in effect binding. This gives the parliamentary debates a certain ritualistic character. It isn’t for the lack of opposition; you do hear opposition parliamentarians (several of whom are outstanding) making at times eloquent appeals. But time and time again, the governing coalition votes in bloc, and this applies not only within the coalition but within the parties themselves; “kadaverdiscipline” is strictly maintained, party members who dare to deviate from the “party line” are sanctioned..

Calls are increasingly heard for the abandonment of this rigid adherence to governing accords, that it gravely undermines the ability for parliament to exercise its supervisory capacity, but the system remains intact. Perhaps the most prominent critic of the current system is eminence gris of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA), Herman Tjeenk Willink, who has served as informateur and seen the coalition forming process first-hand:

Restoring the right balance of power and counter-power "requires a different kind of coalition agreement," Tjeenk Willink said. ''We cannot do it the old way and then just preach more dualism. A buttoned-up coalition agreement puts the opposition on the sidelines and hinders counter-power."

“Tjeenk Willink gooit het roer om: dunner regeerakkoord, niet praten over poppetjes”, AD, 7 April 2021)

The process is now reading a nadir of dysfunction; the four governing parties sharing power are seeing their approval ratings plummet in polls. Long overdue, real, broad-based opposition is emerging, so that means tip-toeing through the tulips to keep the faltering enterprise alive. A collapse would mean fresh elections, and they know that may very well finally seal their political fate, as regime change finally comes to The Hague.

If you live in a parliamentary system in circumstances similar to those of the Netherlands, which, as M. K. Bhadrakumar observes, is the case in most Western European countries, you will probably see something that resembles this. Naturally the process, the issues, and the outcomes may be different but the general contours should be recognizable.

There is however one additional factor at play which is specific to Holland. As I detailed last year, Mark Rutte is now the long-serving prime minister in the postwar era. Currently leading his fourth coalition, referred to as Rutte VI, he has proven to be a master at manipulating the coalition-forming process to serve his ends, which, as always, to gain and remain in power, whatever the cost. In the beginning of 2021 his third coalition, Rutte III, collapsed due to devastating critique of childcare support scandal, casting him in a very bad light indeed, with much criticism, including from his coalition partners. The sense of desperation for meaningful change in leadership and direction was palpable, yet after the subsequent elections and an agonizingly long coalition forming process (no less than nine months this time around), Mark Rutte rose like a phoenix from the ashes with his forth coalition, the exactly same partners (apparently they must have collectively held their noses), back to business as usual. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose never seemed more apt.

Last week, apropos a parliamentary inquiry the Groningen gas crisis (the earthquake damage) that was scathingly critical (vernietigend) of the governments actions (or rather, lack thereof), parliamentary hearings were held during which we saw the passionate, emotional appeal of a parliamentarian from Groningen, Sandra Beckerman (Socialist Party), who has been campaigning tirelessly since entering in the Lower House in 2017 to see that the Groningers are adequately compensated in a timely way for their broken homes and broken lives. She bitterly reminded Rutte of his past promises to “do the right thing” for her constituency, his abject failure to live up to his word and take action to break though the ghastly and inhuman bureaucratic logjams detailed in the parliamentary report that produce the institutional cruelty so characteristic of the neoliberal age.

During her impassioned reproach, one sees Rutte sitting stony-faced, shuffling some papers, reading text messages on his phone, eventually responding in the form of perfunctory, desultory comments, how he “didn't realize the seriousness of the situation until 2018”. He says what he needs to say, but he exhibits a narcissism, a lack of empathy, a profound indifference to genuine public sentiment that precludes a meaningful response to this and other scandals and crises which continue to fester. He clings fervently to power in The Hague, but is incapable offering real leadership. “To govern is to chose”, but Rutte can not, will not make hard choices.

‘To govern is to choose’. It was Pierre Mendes-France’s maxim when Premier of France in 1954-5, cutting through the morass of postponed decisions left by weak coalition governments and negotiating the withdrawal of French troops form Indo-China. Good government means taking decisions, even when they are hard decisions.

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In the former Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe are said to have chafed under the yoke of a system (communism) imposed from above and controlled from the center. After its collapse, they bolted to the West in pursuit of freedom and prosperity, where they were greeted with open arms in the form of EU membership. Or so the conventional narrative would have us believe.

As, however, ever more power becomes centrally concentrated in the authoritarian, viscerally anti-democratic EU super-state, with its ever more heavy-handed efforts to forge “unity” and impose conformity from above, one wonders whether some may now be thinking that they may have leapt from the pan into the fire. Is this really what our neighbors in Eastern Europe bargained for?

As it turns out, at least one prominent Eastern European leader has been sounding the alarm for a very long time. He’s Václav Klaus, who served as president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013.

In a recent podcast, Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris had a brief discussion with the former president, in which the latter made an number of exceptionally salient points about our current trajectory. Klaus is a prolific writer, as I discovered as I explored the articles in the English-language section of his website. For example, he wrote the following in an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal in 2010:

After the fall of communism in 1989, the Czech Republic wanted to be a normal European country again as soon as possible, after being excluded from participating in the post-World War II European integration process for 41 years. The only way to achieve this was to become a member country of the European Union. We had no other choice, but the communist experience was still too "fresh." We wanted to be free and didn't want to lose our freedom and our finally regained sovereignty. Many of us were therefore in favor of a looser form of European integration, against the so-called deepening of the EU and against the creation of political union in Europe. People like me understood very early that the idea of a European single currency is a dangerous project which will either bring big problems or lead to the undemocratic centralization of Europe. My position was clear: With all my reservations, we had to apply for EU membership, but at the same time we had to fight against projects such as the euro.

(“The Euro as a Non-Optimum Currency Area”, Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2010)

In the discussion with Diesen and Mercouris, Klaus relates that such sentiments made him very unpopular in some quarters. When the Czech Republic joined the EU in 2004, relates Klaus, “people congratulated us by saying: Welcome to Europe! But I said: we were already European.” For far too many people, Europe is identified with the EU, he says. Europe the civilizational and cultural entity is conflated with a still very young institution. Klaus makes the point that it is necessary to make a strict distinction between the two. Understanding the difference between the EU and Europe is fundamental for any serious discussion of the issues, he says.

In 2009 President Klaus gave a speech in the EU parliament speech in which he called for an open debate on what it meant to be European. Many MEPs got up and left. “ I was considered anti-European,” Klaus says. “They hate me in Brussels.”

For Klaus, the EU in its earlier form, the European Economic Community (EEC) was something positive, cooperation was to be welcomed, it enabled the free flow of people and capital. That changed in 1992 with the increasing thrust towards political unification as defined in the Maastricht Treaty, even more so with the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. Klaus said he resisted signing Lisbon, but came under tremendous pressure to do so, by Brussels, the more powerful member states, and what he describes as “powerful Left intellectuals” in the Czech Republic. The country finally did ratify Lisbon, the last EU member-state to do so.

Diesen raised the issue of sovereignty and nationalism. “We cannot talk about nationalism, it has a bad name, very negative associations”, Klaus replied. But a careful parsing of his subsequent comments indicated that is a matter of terminology for him; the term “nationalism” is tainted by ugly historical antecedents, but he is all in favor of advocating for the nation-state and resisting supra-national entities.

Change will not come from Brussels, we must change the political culture of the individual member-states, says Klaus. We need a return to traditional politics, a return to ideologically well-defined political parties. We currently have institutions that look like political parties but which do not have coherent ideas and policies. Millions of people might agree with the three of us, but we have no political voice. We must restart politics at the individual member state level. It is the only way forward.

Hungary, says Klaus, is in a different situation and the one clear exception; it is a country with a genuine leader backed by a real political party, a party with a clear constituency.

The first president of post-Soviet Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, hated political parties, says Klaus. He cultivate institutional power based NGOs and other instruments of civil society. That cannot work. Traditional political parties are the only game in town. “No other institutions can aggregate political power.” Klaus says that he was responsible for re-introducing political parties after fifty years of communism.

Klaus states that “communism was wholly discredited in Czechoslovakia after May 1968”. It was easy to abandon an discredited system, he says. Where are we now in terms of the credibility of the EU political project, Klaus asks. “Not 1989, not 1968. Maybe 1961 or even 1951.”

In this brief discussion, Klaus and his interlocutors do not have time to address the Ukraine conflict in any substantial way, but let me simply add this: Russia’s military incursion into its neighbor is clearly fracturing the highly tenuous and profoundly illiberal effort to impose political unification on the EU member-states. Every crisis in recent years has been the opportunity for a power-grab by Brussels and this one is no exception; the misguided and largely failing efforts to impose an EU-wide energy policy is but one example. Klaus saw very early on where this is going; he was and remains absolutely right.

Václav Klaus’s critique of the EU political project I find compelling, his ideas in the realm of economics less so. Exploring his website, I came across a comment in which Klaus expresses his great admiration for Milton Friedman:

To my great regret, Keynes is the winner of the day, not Milton Friedman. This is something I did not expect, but that is the new reality. Friedman, not Keynes, was my hero in the dark days of communism and it is frustrating that in the bright days of “the brave new world” of the EU and of “liberal democracies”, Keynes is back on the pedestal.

(“Keynes is the winner of the day, not Milton Friedman”, Claudio Grass, pro aurum, November 10, 2022)

If Klaus and others of his persuasion in Eastern Europe felt that the system was not an organic development that arose within their societies, but rather imposed from above, and that, as anti--communists frequently claim, it was rigid and oppressive, I for do not feel entitled to question or dismiss this point of view. I did not grow up in the Soviet Union and did not have any direct experience with the system, aside from a few hours spent one afternoon in East Berlin in the late 1980s before the fall of the Wall. However, I have seen firsthand how liberalism over the past three or four decades gradually destroyed the prosperity of the United States, where I was born, and the really pernicious impact it has had on European society. During his time, Milton Friedman was probably the best known proponent of the profoundly fundamentalist free-market ideology that served as the intellectual framework for the Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution.

To denounce and renounce one purportedly rigid ideology (communism) only to embrace another (neoliberalism) hardly seems like progress to me.

By way of contrast, I would like to mention a compatriot of Václav Klaus, the late journalist Andre Vltchek, who sadly died in 2020. He was younger than Klaus, but in his youth would have shared some of his impatience with the communist system and his yearning for the “freedoms” of the West. His life however took him in a different trajectory; he became a dedicated and vociferous anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Shortly before his death, he wrote a very moving essay about how he felt that he had been profoundly deceived about the West as a young person; it is painfully sad to read: “How we sold Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia for plastic shopping bags” (June 19, 2020). As readers may know, he traveled widely and was a prolific writer, and among other topics, he wrote extensively about Indonesia. His vivid, horrifying descriptions of the truly dystopian environmental degradation of Sumatra remain permanently engraved in my mind, as do his descriptions of Jakarta, a massive city choked by traffic with virtually no public services. Vltchek came to see Indonesia as a poster-child for wholly unfettered, “freemarket” capitalism; the logical endpoint of the system that Milton Friedman so fervently espoused. I wish I could ask President Klaus: how is it that you could see so clearly the faults of the old system but not the egregious shortcomings of the current one?

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In a post here several months ago, I detailed the strenuous efforts by Mark Rutte’s governing coalition to anchor the emergency measures deployed during the Covid crisis in the country’s public health law. This despite the fact that these have yet to be subjected to proper risk/benefit analyses, which should be a prerequisite before such draconian curtailments of basic civil liberties are deployed again in potential future health emergencies.

Both this controversial legislation, colloquially known as the Pandemiewet, as well as the far-reaching pension reform act, which I described in my previous post, had been passed by the Dutch Lower House in recent months and needed only to be ratified by the Senaat, the Dutch Upper House. As I detailed previously as well, elections held on March 15 for this legislative body resulted in a major upset for the governing coalition, with a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), coming out of nowhere to win a landslide victory. This not wholly unexpected development made the fate of that legislation uncertain. Would a dramatically reconfigured Upper House give its stamp of approval for both packages?

We will never know. Mark Rutte’s government managed to push them through the Upper House at the eleventh hour. According to the NOS, the final distribution of seats has now been agreed up on and the new configuration will meet for the first time on 13 June, but the government preferred not wait. Although Rutte’s coalition did not have a majority in the outgoing Senaat, it could rely on its faithful, ever opportunistic running dogs in the Labor Party and the Green Party to supply the needed votes, and so it managed to narrowly skirt a potential debacle.

Our political class will know that public confidence in the government and general the direction things are going has plummeted in recent years, that sixty percent of the electorate no longer support the Cabinet and want new elections. Were this country led by serious, principled politicians who understood the need to obtain a broad consensus when taking momentous decisions and confirm they have a genuine mandate to do so, postponing the Upper House votes on this controversial legislation until the new configuration had been seated would have been a gesture of good will, an attempt to restore at least a modicum of public confidence and trust. But of course, if we had such leadership, we wouldn’t be in these dire straits to begin with.

It should now be crystal clear: our shallow, opportunistic governing class thinks purely in transactional terms: we have our legislative agenda, we have the parliamentary votes; public sentiments be damned. “Democracy” is purely a matter of process for them; the means justify the ends. They view the citizenry with a mixture of fear and contempt.

The Dutch Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (General Intelligence and Security Service) came out a short time ago with a report on what it deemed “ anti-institutional extremism“ that received a lot of coverage, and it warned that a “narrative of the evil elite” is gaining traction that could pose long-term problems if this continues. Such a message will of course cause our cosmopolitan bien pensant class to wring its hands and clutch its pearls, and call urgently for even more draconian “anti-disinformation” measures to keep the Deplorables in line. Interestingly though, the AIVD also partly blames the government for situation. These anti-institutional narratives

are reinforced and facilitated by grievances with regard to actual government actions, such as the benefits affair or other personal frustrations with the government. People don't feel taken seriously. This is reinforced by it happening over and over again.

[T]he government itself has a whole slew of instruments at its disposal for 'restoring trust' with society the report concludes: “Show and communicate reliably. That is crucial.” Communication about political decisions, policies and events will continue to be important, reinforcing public perception that decision-making has been transparent and dissent has been treated seriously.

(“AIVD over kabinet: opstappen”, Indepen, 30 May 2023).

I for one believe that a whole lot more is needed than just clear communications; we need a profound reorientation of policy towards addressing the bread-and-butter issues of primary concern to the public. It is however nonetheless remarkable that the government’s own internal security services, Holland’s FBI if you will, is partly laying the blame for the dramatic fall in public trust and confidence on the government for its opaque, insular operating style. The message will of course go unheeded; our political class lacks what US political analyst Garland Nixon calls “strategic empathy”, the ability to understand the perspective of the other when negotiating. Think of it as a kind of institutional narcissism. Rather than listen to the growing discontent, they will circle the wagons. Mark Rutte, master negotiator, will continue to wheel and deal, throw a few bones to the dogs, to ensure he maintains his vice-like grip on power. That may work for the present. But for now long?

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In the aftermath of 2007/8 financial crisis, some of the more astute critics of our economic system made forceful and persuasive arguments, as some of you may recall, that neoliberalism had been comprehensively and definitely discredited by the unseemly spectacle of investment banks collapsing due to their own egregious financial misdeeds. These critics may have been right, but the Dutch parliament never got the memo. On Tuesday 30 May, the Upper House, the Senaat, put the final stamp of approval on a long-awaited and far-reaching reform of the private (supplementary) pension system. The most notable change is the transition from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans, in which collective funding is replaced by individual accounts (similar I believe to the 401(k) scheme introduced years ago in the US). By breaking the solidarity inherent in the collective funding model it is a quintessentially neoliberal strategy, one that reflects that (in)famous comment by one of the leaders of the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that there is no such thing as society, only individuals; men, women, and families.

The Dutch private pension system is huge, worth €1.5 trillion (yes, with a ‘t’), which some say makes it the largest in the world. The Dutch like to save and they are very good business people, so perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. Under apparent pressure from the EU and big finance lobbies, plans to overhaul the system have been many years in works; After years of negotiation, the new arrangement has been given its blessing by parliament and is due to go into effect in 2027. Benefits will henceforth be adjusted annually based on changes in economic conditions and estimated lifespan, hence some critics call the new system a “casino pension”. Political economist Ewald Engelen pointed out on Twitter that that the change is a direct assault on peoples’ collective social security:

from [defined-benefit] to [defined-contribution] means a massive shift of risk from employer to employee and thus an equally massive deterioration of employees' pension rights.

Engelen is one of the sharpest commentators on economic affairs we have, and he has observed in the past that the Netherlands is the most neoliberal country in Europe (continental Europe of course, the UK has of course gone even further). So perhaps this course of events was predictable.

There were a growing number of voices urging parliament at the last minute not to ratify the pension reform, of which perhaps the most prominent is Pieter Omztigt, the independent parliamentarian who, unlike nearly all his colleagues, actually has some understanding of the complexities of the pension system; pensions was part of his parliamentary portefeuille as a member of the Christian Democrat party, which he left last year. In several strongly-worded posts on his personal blog, he urged the Upper House not to approve the legislation. ('“Een nieuwe pensioenwet in de oude Eerste Kamer: doe het niet!, 10 mei 2023, “De duistere voortekenen van de pensioenwet”, 29 mei 2023)

I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds of this complicated topic, so let me just offer a brief summary of some of his main points:

• The €1,5 trillion is to be divided up among some 20 million individual accounts.

• According to the the Dutch Central Bank (DNB), 75% of the pension funds have not successfully completed internal audits during the past two years, hence, according to the DNB, "Insufficient control over data quality could result in participants' pension entitlements not being accurate, complete or traceable."

• No appeal process will be allowed. Everyone — current and future pensioners alike — will migrate to the new system with no say in the matter.

Despite (or perhaps because of?) the lack of a formal appeal process, Omtzigt and others anticipate decades’ of legal challenges concerning hundreds of billions of euros, potentially, say some critics, overwhelming the justice system.

Here’s the paradox: Holland, despite a number of festering crises and a general decay in the public sector, remains for the most part a stable, functional society. This sense is reinforced spatially and visually thanks to a highly ordered physical environment (careful and meticulous urban and rural planning). It's an environment that you might think would condition a measure of instinctive conservatism: the system appears to be mostly working, let’s not break it. In reality however it produces a kind of fatal complacency. Reflexive self-satisfaction and normalcy bias assures us things will continue as usual, the system is infinitely stable, hence some big, complex technocratically-driven change will work out just fine. They always do. Except increasingly they don’t.

Making predictions is something I’m loathe to do, but nonetheless, based what we’ve seen in recent decades, here is how I think this is likely to play out:

The new system will prove, if at all feasible, far more complex and expensive to implement than expected, hence inevitably there will be delays and postponements. A committee of experts (the familiar suspects from the management consultancy world?) will assembled to study the situation; whatever misgivings they (privately) may have, they will succumb to the sunk cost fallacy, remain captive to various institutional interests, and recommend nonetheless moving forward with a few tweaks. The new system will eventually be rolled out in fits and starts. Problems will ensue. The parliament will dither and fail to respond. It will have neither the will nor the means to solve the problems. If worse comes to worst, they will shrug their shoulders and say: Sorry, but Brussels made us do it. Blaming the EU is the eternal get out of jail for free card of the hapless, feckless European political class.

(This of course presumes the “business as usual” that we’ve come to know and expect from Mark Rutte and his coalition. In due time we quite likely get a different parliament and a different cabinet, which may operate differently, but the systemic rot is very deep and there may be real limitations in how far they can go to change course, at least in the short term.)

In closing, an anecdote: some years ago I was corresponding with an old friend who for many years was a tenured full professor on the faculty of the humanities department of a prominent liberal arts college in the US. I knew that she was approaching the age of 65 and asked her lightheartedly whether she had any plans to forsake the classroom for a life of leisure in some sunny climate. She replied bitterly that her institutional 401(k) “casino pension” had been wiped out in the 2007/08 crisis and that for economic reasons she would need to work until she was 70 (which in the intervening years she duly did). I wonder how many Dutch people, who so fervently cherish stability and security, as do people everywhere, will find themselves in such circumstances in the future? Does the citizenry have any idea of what their government has just done?

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From a commentary posted over the weekend at that stalwart bastion of British anti-wokism, Spiked Online:

Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa, I due Figaro, showed her influence in stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.

[…] On 17 June 2020, Vaughn was teaching a class via Zoom on musical theatre. An unidentified participant, whose name and image were blacked out, asked her, out of the blue, how she could justify having produced Franz Lehár’s allegedly racist operetta, Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles), several years earlier. (The racial sin, in this case, was allegedly against Asians.) Vaughn cut the questioner off for raising an issue irrelevant to the current discussion.

The fuse was lit. A Manhattan School of Music student petition was immediately forthcoming. Vaughn must be fired because she is a ‘danger to the arts community’, it thundered. The petition resurrected a meme from the time of the Lehár production: that Vaughn had cast a black singer as a butler, thus supposedly proving her racism. For good measure, the petition threw in unspecified ‘reports’ of ‘homophobic aggression and body shaming’. The petition quickly garnered 1,800 signatures. Phoney Instagram accounts under Vaughn’s name suddenly appeared on the web, containing fake inflammatory material

Vaughn’s colleagues, cowering from the mob, let her twist in the wind. Almost none came to her defence. Vaughn was fired and replaced by a black male.

(Heather MacDonald: V“The cancellation of classical music”, Spiked Online, 20 May 2023)

This reminds one of some of the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which were attempts to “cancel” those vestiges of traditional Chinese society considered feudal and reactionary. As unfortunate as those episodes may have been, we also know from long-time China watchers such as (“Mao's Five Revolutions”) and Ramin Mazihieri (“A necessary revolution in discussing China’s Cultural Revolution: an 8-part series”) among others that important achievements were nonetheless made in rural development in China during that (for a few) tumultuous time. The picture is, as always, never black and white. In subsequent decades, desecrated temples were rebuilt, old Confucian texts resurrected and taken to heart again, various figures apologized to and rehabilitated. At this point it’s up to the Chinese people to decide with historical hindsight what the final reckoning is. As Ramin Mazhieri wrote in one of his many blog posts on the topic, revolutionary spirit in society ebbs and flows.

As for our wretched cultural revolutions, I for one however cannot think of a single redeeming aspect of what are essentially reactionary projects disguised with the very thinnest veneers of progressivism. The current dismal wave will eventually run its course, as did previous iterations, such as the fervent anti-communist McCarthyism of the 1950s, but one can only wonder: how much of our collective cultural heritage will be permanently lost, how many lives and careers ruined? I shudder to think.

Thankfully, all is not (yet?) lost. On Saturday evening I attended a live satellite broadcast from New York’s Metropolitan Opera of Don Giovanni. Ya know, that tawdry spectacle glorifying a serial sexual predator composed by vulgar class-reductionist Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was a stunning production, thankfully free of manifestations of #metoo or other encrustations of political correctness, unencumbered by strenuous efforts to make the work “hip” and “relevant”. Some of our cultural institutions seem better able to resist the onslaughts of self-destructive fads better than others; the Met is one of them. Although the ultra-woke mania originated in the US, it has permeated European cultural life, so much so that I find so many European opera productions unwatchable, including, alas, those at the Netherlands Opera and and Ballet here in Amsterdam. The irony is that whereas our cultural institutions are heavily state-subsidized, the Met, I believe, relies on wealthy private patrons, and it would seem these old money types writing the checks don’t have much patience for transitory fads amounting to little more than cultural vandalism. During the Met broadcast on Saturday, there was the usual chatter during the intermission with cast members, and some discussion of the theatrical director, Ivo van Hove (from Belgium), and his “concept” of the work. Whatever it may have been, at least he didn't interfere too much with Mozart; he had a light touch.

As those of you familiar with the work will know, Don Giovanni is a study in the fatal charms of sexual attraction, the contradictions and perils of romantic attachment to the “wrong” type of person. One character, passionate and love-sick Donna Elvira, spends the entire opera excoriating the errant nobleman for seducing and casting her aside, at the same time begging him to repent and return to her. Here as elsewhere in life, ambivalence, contradiction, irony abound — inescapably messy things that don’t have a place in the humorless, fundamentalist worldview of those self-righteous, censorious guardians of morality, our indefatigable social justice warriors.

Reflecting the ever fertile and felicitous cross-currents of cultural exchange which have not — and one prays — will not be destroyed, the Zerlina in this production was the Chinese soprano Ying Fang, who turns out to be a wonderful singing actress; this was her second production on the Met. I leave you with a photo of her I found on the site Opera Online:

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In my post discussing the recent (15 March) elections for the Dutch Upper House, the so-called Senaat, I spoke of the huge upset for the ruling coalition as being yet another earthquake hitting the Netherlands (not just Groningen this time, but the country as a whole). In his analysis of the situation, veteran pollster and data guru Maurice de Hond deployed the very same metaphor — and took it a step further. Using, as he said, the figure of speech popular in California, the contours are taking shape for a “Big One”, one of those massive earthquakes which strikes the West Coast of the US (and the Pacific Rim as a whole) from time to time, wreaking the kind of immense havoc that the 1906 earthquake did to San Francisco.

Based on his polling data, De Hond says that the massive electoral shift that took place during the Upper House elections will in due time be replicated in the more important Dutch Lower House, the Tweede Kamer. In the Dutch parliamentary system, elections for this parliamentary body determine which parties form the Cabinet (the prime minister and the various the ministerial posts). Reflecting the historically pluralistic character of Dutch society, elections here are based on the principle of proportional representation, with no single party these days obtaining an absolute majority. In fact, we are going in the opposite direction, with ever more fragmentation.

Very generally speaking, the political landscape of postwar Western Europe has been dominated by center-right Christian Democrats and center-left Social Democrats. This has also been the case in the Netherlands, with minor variations: a once populist, moderate Left (D66) and conservative Liberals (VVD) at different times participating the power-sharing arrangements, with the latter, Mark Rutte’s party, dominating the system for the past decade or so. This postwar configuration is now collapsing, in the Netherlands as well as the rest of Western Europe. In each country, specifics will obviously not be identical, nor the outcome, but the general trajectory is clear.

Here in the Netherlands, what are the new contours to which Maurice de Hond refers? Well, to begin with, the newcomers on the block, the BoerBurgerBeweging, “Farmer-Citizen Movement” (BBB), hitherto a one-woman faction in the Tweede Kamer, not only won a landslide victory by grabbing 17 of the 75 seats in the Senaat, making it the largest party in that legislative body, it has since been polling at nearly twice as high as the ruling VVD party in the Tweede Kamer (34 seats vs 16), a figure that has remained more or less at this level since the March election. BBB swept into power not simply on the basis of votes from Holland’s beleaguered farmers, it enjoys widespread support throughout provincial and rural areas, hence the vote served as a powerful warning to the political establishment: the status quo is no longer acceptable to vast swathes of the electorate.

But there's even more bad news for our ruling elites. Parliamentarian Pieter Omtzigt, who has been in the Tweede Kamer since 2003 as a representative of the Dutch Christian Democrat Party (CDA), resigned from the party last year and now serves as a one-man independent faction within the Lower House. Thanks to his dogged, tenacious efforts to hold Mark Rutte’s government accountable in parliament and his sober, principled public persona, he is by far the most respected politician in country. Maurice de Hond has calculated that this one individual polls at 38 seats in potential Tweede Kamer elections. However, were Omtzigt and Caroline van der Plas, leader of the above-mentioned BBB, to joint forces, they would together pull in some 53 seats, more than a third of the total, what would dramatically reconfigure the political landscape in The Hague. From what it appears, Omtzigt and Van der Plas are both open to forming a joint ticket, but they are keeping their cards close to their chest and nothing has yet been announced. I will return to Pieter Omtzigt in a future post.

Looking at the historical data, Maurice de Hond says a swing of 100 seats between the parties is “unprecedented”, with the record so far dating to 2002, when 92 seats changed hands. Together, the governing parties now count only for 40 seats, a loss of 38 since 2021. In other words, Mark Rutte’s coalition only has half the support it had during the last round of voting, a dramatic fall in confidence.

De Hond, who publishes updates on his busy website every Sunday and are a must-read for those interested following these things, is now reporting that more than sixty percent of the Dutch (an astonishing figure) want to see the coalition collapse and think it’s time for new elections. Mark Rutte fatigue has truly reached the terminal stage. Under his (mis)leadership, none of the festering crises here (the childcare support scandal, compensation for Groningen, a nationwide affordable housing crisis, skyrocketing energy costs, out-of- control immigration, the war on agriculture and fishing) are being adequately addressed. A short time ago, Pieter Omtzigt issued a stern remonstrance in the Tweede Kamer, if the ruling coalition is unwilling or unable to tackle these problems, then it is high time for them to step aside and let others have a go at it.

Mark Rutte continues to preside in The Hague, projecting his sunny, optimistic, ordinary-guy-next-door, “let’s get the job done” vibe as though nothing has changed, giving every indication that he intends to stay put for the indefinite future. But the writing is on the wall, or if you prefer, the ground is clearly shifting. Apropos of the March elections, independent commentator Syp Winia said it was a very clear signal from the voters, and that in response the governing coalition had only two choices: change course or hold elections; muddling onward, our prime minister's default strategy, ultimately will fail. Observers whose judgement I trust say the Cabinet is unlikely to last through the summer and that most likely we’ll have elections in the fall.

A final word about Maurice de Hond: for as long as I can remember he has been an household name in Holland, enjoying a tremendous reputation as a pollster. All that changed during the pandemic. He was highly critical of government policy, arguing, based on his data analysis, that the aerosol-born virus could not be stopped by the litany of measures imposed (face masks, social distancing, compulsive handwashing, vaccination passports, etc), that one measure that would demonstrably lower the infection would be improving indoor ventilation. His dogged questioning of the consensus, which he continues to this day, such as with the very concerning issue of ongoing excess mortality rates, means he has been categorically “excommunicated” by the media establishment.

To mark his 75th birthday De Hond published a memoir in February about which he was interviewed by De Andere Krant, one of the thriving alternative news sites (and a printed newspaper in this case) that is filling in the void left by the increasingly discredited and irrelevant legacy corporate media, De Hond spoke bitterly about his exile from the weekly mainstream TV news shows, where he was formerly a fixture. “The media have degenerated from watchdogs of democracy to lapdogs,” is his pithy observation. “They are now trapped in their own narrative, but cannot — and will not — go back.”

A note to my readers: when I started this Substack around a year ago, I wanted to offer a mix of Dutch-specific commentaries as well as tackle topics not limited to the Netherlands. I am for two reasons reluctant to dive too deeply into the weeds of Dutch politics: one, I’m not sure how much of interest this would be to non-Dutch readers, and two, more importantly, even though I have lived here for many years I’m not always certain I fully understand the political landscape here, which even on the best of days can appear Byzantine and opaque to relative outsiders like myself. True, the domestic politics of most countries probably look Byzantine from the outside, but nonetheless the historically enduring legacy of what I could call the silo system (probably not a perfect translation of “zuilen”) has produced a Dutch political culture with a lot of moving parts. To those Dutch people reading along here, I hope you will chime in with comments, corrections and/or clarifications if I ever miss the mark. Dankjewel!

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Anyone who has lived in an EU country for any period of time will be able to point to positive aspects of EU membership. Whatever your thing — environmental policy, consumer protection, regional development, labor rights — there's something for everyone. In this respect, EU developed considerable, arguably vast influence as a “normative power”. What is that exactly? Here's a helpful description written by a French lawyer, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, who specializes in international law. Note that it was published in December 2021, on the eve of the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict (edited slightly for length and style, emphasis mine):

Europe defines itself as being a power whose influence isn’t rooted in its military force, but in its capacity to set rules or behavioral norms that have an international outreach. Indeed, as early as the 1970s, what was to become the European Union was already viewed as being a ‘civil power’ by international relations theorists.

European Union’s influence [is] in the international crafting of norms. Influence is the social and political power of a person or group which allows it to direct the course of events and to induce changes in an indirect and non-coercive manner. Normativity is a ‘freely accepted process of harmonization of players’ preferences in order to advance common interests by strictly adhering to a certain number of rules.’ The normative influence of the European Union can be broken down into three parts. First, the ability to enact its own law and to enforce it within its territory, and even beyond (extraterritoriality); second, the ability to influence the content of norms (legal, technical) resulting from an international negotiation process within various multilateral fora; and third, the ability to serve as a voluntary normative model within the international community.

it is through the crafting of common norms, resulting from a peaceful and negotiated resolution of the conflicts having arisen between historically hostile Nation-States, that the European project emerged, to safeguard the peace on the Old Continent.

(From: “Europe as an international normative power: state of play and perspectives”)

Cohen-Tanugi goes on to discuss at length how this normative power has been developed and deployed, citing “competition law” as one area in particular where the EU has had significant (international) impact. Surely most if not nearly all of us would agree that the EU’s system of legal and technical norms has been generally a Good Thing, something that has to some degree supported regional and international economic development. (The EU's disastrous neoliberal economic policies are of course a separate matter.)

However, if such norms, viewed perhaps somewhat narrowly in the domain of the transactional, have been a positive contribution, in recent years the EU has gone beyond establishing and promoting “norms” to promulgating (and enforcing) “values”, more nebulous terrain with a pronounced moralistic character. Norms are useful and practical, values are… virtuous. We've gone in this respect from a utilitarian outlook to what has become, quite frankly, a Manichean world view, much to our detriment and that of our neighbors.

Nonetheless, the notion of “safeguarding the peace on the Old Continent” as Cohen-Tanugi expressed it above, remains something understandable and pervasive. In the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, a common argument made by Remainers went something like this: The EU has been good for A, B, and C, and whatever its faults we need it above all to keep the peace in Europe. Even if you live outside the EU and have never set foot on the European continent but know something of the endless series of battles and wars that plagued this part of the world during the past millennium, institutions dedicating to keeping the peace would would seem like a very good thing to have. Thankfully, that concern does indeed remain first and foremost in the minds of our wise and enlightened leaders. Apropos of the Ukraine conflict, we hear them saying things like this:

Dialogue and negotiation are the only viable way forward. […] All relevant parties must stay calm and exercise restraint, truly act in the interests of their own future and that of humanity, and jointly manage the crisis. With rational thinking and voices now on the rise, it is important to seize the opportunity and build up favorable conditions for the political settlement of the crisis. It is hoped that all parties would seriously reflect on the Ukraine crisis and jointly explore ways to bring lasting peace and security to Europe through dialogue.

Except that wasn’t a European leader. These eminently wise and sensible words were spoken by Xi Jinping during his recent telephone call with Zelensky initiated at the latter’s request. (“President Xi Jinping Speaks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the Phone”, Minister of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China, 26 April 2023). Commenting on this highly unusual development, Alexander Mercouris quipped on a recent podcast that the last time an Asian power had intervened in such as way in European affairs was probably 400 BC, when the Persians mediated between Athens and Sparta.

The sad truth is that Europeans leaders, albeit on a national level or most egregiously on the EU level, with only one significant exception (Hungary’s Victor Orbán), have shown no such wisdom, instead opting for unrelentingly militarism and hostility to Russia. In fact the EU’s de facto foreign minister, Josep Borrell, has been insisting since the very beginning of the conflict that it can only be resolved militarily Ursula van der Leyen repeatedly states the EU and the collective West will continue to back Ukraine militarily “as long as it takes”. A short time ago, Borrell announced plans for the EU to fast-track delivery of a million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine, although given Europe's lack of manufacturing capacity it remains unclear over what time time-frame this will occur, presumably not in time for Ukraine's much-ballyhooed spring (or is it now summer?) offensive. At this point, the EU has for all intents and purposed merged with the belligerent and militaristic NATO.

At this point, you might interject and say: yes, but Russia is not part of Europe. The EU was only designed to keep the peace within Europe. Well, first, Russia is not part of the European political system but it is most clearly part of cultural and civilizational Europe. Second, Russia has long looked westward for inspiration and ideas, considered itself European and once even considered joining NATO (“Putin Says 'Why Not?' to Russia Joining NATO”, Washington Post, 6 March 2000). Third, and perhaps most important, security is indivisible, as both the Russians and Chinese repeatedly point out; the security of one cannot be achieved to the detriment of another. NATO membership of Ukraine (and Georgia) were long-stated red lines for the Russians. We all knew this, no?

At no point in this sorry saga did the EU undertake any meaningful effort to actually keep in the peace on the European continent. In 2014 under then European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso pushed forward an exclusive EU association agreement that precluded Ukraine’s further participation the the CIS Free Trade area, thus sparking protests in Kiev, bringing down the government of Viktor Yanukovich. This resulted in a coup that ushered a rabidly anti-Russia, pro-Europe regime which broke the hitherto delicate and fragile balance maintained between eastern and western Ukraine. The EU recognized the new regime. Ethnic Russians in Donbass and Crimea recoiled in horror.

Although the EU was itself not a signatory to the Minsk accords (Germany and France were), it apparently made no effort to push the leadership of those two EU countries to ensure the deal was implemented, thereby keeping the peace. It has repeatedly been said by various observers that had Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron placed a telephone call to the Kremlin in December 2022, when Russia issued its urgent call for a new European security architecture, to signal that Ukraine would never join NATO would have prevented Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Perhaps the Russians would have wanted something more substantial, in writing — but the point should be clear. Likewise, in April 2022 during talks in Istanbul Ukraine and Russia appeared to have reached a provisional peace settlement, but Boris Johnson was apparently dispatched by his neocon handlers in the Anglo-American Deep State to order Zelenksy to scuttle the deal. EU leaders said or did nothing. They let the conflict continue.

On Tuesday 10 May 2023, the very day when the Russians were celebrating the 78th anniversary of their hard-fought, bitterly-won victory over Nazi Germany, saving Europe, as it were, from itself, a moment when the country is once again fighting the recrudescence of Nazism in Ukraine, Von der Leyen traveled to Kiev, where she righteously declared Ukraine is "the beating heart of today's European values".

We are cursed with leaders who eschew realpolitik and old-fashioned diplomacy, forget or ignore recent history, and vacuously preach values. That's all they can do.

Whether you think Russia's military intervention was unjustified or whether you think that country was provoked, as I do, every day this war of attrition continues Ukraine’s soldiers are killed and wounded, its economy ruined. To paraphrase that perhaps apocryphal comment from the American general in Vietnam, our EU leaders are destroying Ukraine to save it.

The idea the EU keeps the peace in the Old Continent is a myth that has now been categorically and definitely consigned to the dustbin of history.

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The internal contradictions within Europe’s major institutions are becoming ever more apparent. The European Union, NATO, the single currency zone are looking increasingly fragile. This is a topic I have touched on previously and continue to return to here.

In this post, I would like to share a brief, highly subjective timeline of the EU. It’s not intended to be definitive in any sense, rather more anecdotal in character.

When I started living in what was then the European Community nearly forty years ago, it seemed like a mostly benign entity which one might best describe as a “free trade zone with benefits”. I say benign advisedly, in the sense that, yes, back in the 1950s, when unification of Europe stated to take shape in the early European Coal and Steel Community at the height of the Cold War there was clearly an implicit political agenda at play, namely the goal of the US to anchor West Germany clearly in the West and prevent any kind of meaningful rapprochement (particularly in the economic sphere) with the Soviet Union. However, as the project of European integration proceeded, equally clearly there were various interests at play, Cold War thinking would not have been the sole motive to drive the project forward.

I’m going to start with the mid-1980s, when I moved to Amsterdam.

1986: In the third expansion round of the EC, Spain, Portugal joined. Harmonization was, as I recall, a buzzword at that time. The new members were to be gradually integrated into the system in ways that would make them equal partners, living standards, wages, and per capita income would in due time be harmonized, thereby ensuring no member enjoyed outsize competitive advantage. Whether the reality lived up to the promise, one might well ask, but that was the general idea at that time.

1990s: I was a subcontractor in various R&D projects that received European funding; that meant regular meetings in Brussels and contact with EU bureaucrats. I learned a new term: subsidiarity. That’s the principle that decision-making should be decentralized to the greatest possible extent. Even then, I’m not sure how much it was practiced, but they did preach it. It’s a word Ursula von der Leyen I daresay has never once uttered in her entire adult life.

Late 1990s: As the decades-long preparation for the introduction of the single currency, the euro, were being undertaken, one heard critical voices. Here in the Netherlands, the euroskeptic Socialist Party (SP) warned that it was a bad idea. I don’t remember the exact arguments made, but they would have been prescient. We later learned from figures like Yanis Varoufakis, who chronicled in his book on the European financial crisis, that at the time those pushing the single currency knew there wasn’t sufficient political cohesion to form a proper economic union, but they thought that the single currency would in fact cultivate that. That opposite has turned out to be the case; the single-currency straitjacket is gradually driving the currency union apart. We also learned from Varoufakis that Germany was originally skeptical of a shared currency, but France wanted it, and that was the quid pro quo for France agreeing to German reunification.

2005: Referendums were held in the Netherlands and France on the proposed EU constitution, a document which euroskeptics at the time, including the above-mentioned Dutch Socialist Party, pointed out was not similar to other such constitutions, a brief summary of general principles, but was in fact a detailed blueprint for a neoliberal economic regime. I voted in the referendum against the constitution, as did a majority of voters here, as did a majority in France. But in both cases, the referendum was apparently not binding, only “consultative”, hence could be ignored. A third referendum was held in Ireland, which was similarly rejected by a majority of the voters, but that referendum was binding. This meant that the referendum had to be held a second time which allowed the voters to be propagandized properly informed about the virtues of the constitution and vote correctly this time, which they dutifully did. Brussels subsequently abandoned the idea of holding of referendums, and the proposed constitution was, with cosmetic changes, rebranded as the Lisbon Treaty. It was signed in 2007 and came into effect on 1 December 2009. Whatever doubts I had previously had about the direction the EU was going in were only magnified by those proceedings, which left a bitter taste in my mouth. There is much more to be said about the Lisbon Treaty, but for now I will only say that it appears to have greatly accelerated the EU’s current disastrous trajectory.

In 2004, Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland joined. Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary kept their national currencies, the rest joined the eurozone. In 2007 Bulgaria and Romania joined while keeping their national currency. At this point, harmonization appeared to more narrowly bureaucratic than fully economic; that in reality the new members were intended as supplies of cheap labor and enlarged markets for the rest of the EU, Germany of course in particular. The latter’s persistent Drang nach Ost had been satisfied this time around by relatively peaceful means.

2015: the Greek crisis. You all know how it went: German and French banks had huge exposure to Greek debt. The EU lent money to Greece to pay them back. Greece was then hung out to dry by the EU, essentially reduced to a debt colony. There was no solidarity, only opportunism. Within the Eurogroup, as Yanis Varoufakis documented, the European finance ministers imposed a policy decided behind closed doors dictated by Germany. There was no real deliberation or genuine democratic decision-making. It was the clearest indication that a kind of silent coup had taken place, that the once relatively benign free-trade zone had morphed into something much different — something frankly quite toxic.

Here we are in 2023. What has the EU become? I struggle with a label. How about: authoritarian neoliberal technocracy? Authoritarian because it is actively, viscerally anti-democratic. Neoliberal because of the reigning economic doctrine that amounts to essentially permanent austerity and ever-increasing inequality. Technocratic because of the rigid, anti-social adherence to abstract models and mechanistic thinking.

This dysfunctional system does not produce positive outcomes for a broad majority of Europeans. It is broken and will eventually fail. It cannot be reformed, because that would require democratic process, something specifically designed to be excluded from the system.

There is a great deal more to be said about all this, and I will be addressing various aspects of the current situation in future posts.

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“Russians like to visit Belarus for nostalgic reasons,” my acquaintance V. once told me. “It reminds them of life in the former Soviet Union.” V. was an emigre who had left Belarus for the West after the collapse of the USSR and settled in the Netherlands, becoming an IT specialist. Though he had received an excellent university education (Minsk was a high-tech mecca during the Soviet era), V. didn’t have much good to say about Belarus; he spoke quite disparagingly Alexander Lukashenko, who has led the country 1994, and who for years the Western legacy media has referred to as the last dictator of Europe. In supposedly modern and progressive Europe, Belarus is portrayed as an anomaly, an anachronism. Although V. had wholly internalized the cultural chauvinism of Western Europe, occasionally he unconsciously revealed a different truth, a more complex reality, such as with the comment above.

Belarus — miraculously — was never subjected to the shock therapy inflicted on various other of its Eastern European neighbors, which wrought so much destruction, particularly in the case of Russia. Belarus remained a stable, orderly society where not much seemed to happen. Elections would come and go, pro-Western, “pro-democracy” protesters would criticize Lukashenko’s seemingly unwavering hold on power.

During elections in August 2020 what appeared to be a Western-backed “color revolution” flared up, the goal of which would have been to hive off yet another country on Russia’s perimeter, thereby ostensibly further weakening the latter’s geostrategic position, the enduring obsession of US/UK neconservatives. In any event, Lukashenko prevailed. After a long period of maintaining a delicate balance between the West and Russia, the event seems to have catalyzed him into seeing that the country’s long-term interests lie with closer integration with the East, as do the long-term interests, hitherto yet to be fully acknowledged, for Europe as a whole. A spate of agreements has been announced indicating increasingly closer ties, including full implementation of the Union State treaty signed in 1997. Earlier this month, Russia agreed to station nuclear arms in the country, something that was greeted with dismay in the West (RT: “Russia gives ally nuclear strike capabilities”, 4 April 2023).

In a recent podcast, London-based geopolitical commentator Alexander Mercouris discussed Lukashenko’s recent visit to Moscow and long his meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. According to Mercouris, Lukashenko had previously resisted closer integration with Russia because he disagreed with many aspects of the Russian economic model, “it was far too neoliberal.” The Belorussian leader wanted to protect the enormous industrial base retained from Soviet times, notably the giant Minsk Automotive Plant (Maz), which produces the large trucks that Russia still imports in large quantities.In the past, moving too close to Russia might have threatened the viability of Soviet-era factories and the economic position of their workers, who are an important part of Lukashenko’s electoral base.

The Ukraine conflict and Russia’s break with the West have caused the Russians to adapt their economic policies to the new realities. Russia is intending not only to preserve its own Soviet-era state-owned industries but to expand them with additional investments. In other words, says Mercouris, the Russian economic system is starting to look more like that of Belarus. For Lukashenko, this makes Russia a more attractive partner than in the past. “The Russians are moving closer to him,” is Mercouris’s conclusion. “As he would see it, they’re coming home.” (Alexander Mercouris: “UK MoD Admit s Bakhmut Crisis, Russia Storms Pervomaiskoyev, Encircling Avdeyevka; Macron Fails”, 7 April 2023)

Within the rabidly Russophobic Western legacy media, which largely parrots the neoconservative line, Putin is suspected of harboring “revanchist” ambitions, that he wants to recreate the Soviet Union. Nothing he has ever said actually indicates this, and from all appearances the current Russian leaderships in fact feels first and foremost relieved not to have to shoulder the responsibilities and economic burdens of maintaining its former satellites. The precise form of future Russia-Belarus integration is not yet wholly known, but it is clear that it is being taken for strategic reasons by two sovereign states and Belarus in particular stands much to gain — Lukashenko’s careful stewardship of its Soviet legacy is now paying off. The end of Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union was considered by many in the West as the ultimate triumph of free-market economics and liberal democracy. That supposedly grand victory is now evaporating before our eyes.

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On his marvelous Here Comes China Substack, has been publishing some fascinating posts on Mao Zedong. In a recent piece, he focused on Mao’s exceptional skills as a military strategist and tactician, but towards the end Godfree touched on economic policy:

Convinced that China needed foreign investment, Mao sent President Roosevelt a plea he repeated to Truman and Eisenhower, “China must industrialize, which can only be accomplished by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict”. 

When they ignored him, he was philosophical^, “Some people refuse to understand why we do not fear capitalism, but, on the contrary, develop it as much as possible. Our answer is simple: we have to replace foreign imperialist and native feudalist oppression with capitalist development because that is the inevitable course of our economy, and because both the capitalist class and the proletariat benefit. What we don’t need is not native capitalism, but foreign imperialism and native feudalism”.

Godfree’s Newsletter

Commander Mao

Inwardly, I often smiled at the extravagance of Mao’s claims, which then seemed more naive than Gandhi’s hopes of conquering the British by love power. There he sat, with two pairs of cotton pants to his name, his army a minuscule band of poorly armed youths, facing a precarious existence in the most impoverished corner of the land. Yet he spoke as if h…

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3 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Godfree Roberts

Here in the West, we tend to take a very binary view of these things: you have either socialism or capitalism. If a society allows private enterprise, it is obviously capitalist, or so the conventional thinking goes. Mao clearly understood, and so should we, that the issue isn’t solely who controls the means of production but the social relations that arise. If one class of people (native or foreign) uses ownership of the means of production to exploit others, that’s antagonistic and destructive. Modern China allows extensive private enterprise, but there are clearly strict limits on how far economic power may be allowed to translate into political power and social influence. In our degenerate Western liberal democracies, whatever modest limitations we may have once had in this regard have been largely if not wholly dismantled, hence our “democracies” have devolved into vast influence-peddling networks that are profoundly corrupt, manipulative, and ultimately self-destructive.

Though Mao was clearly able to entertain the apparent contradiction of pursuing socialism while embracing what he called “native capitalism”, we in the West remain perpetually confused by exactly what kind of system China has. If China is successful in economic terms, that’s because it is not socialist, but capitalist! When China does something that we in the West consider “illiberal”, such as pursuing Zero Covid, that’s because it is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship! Or that because China maintains public ownership of certain industries, it is pursuing “state capitalism”, a vague and unscientific term. If the primary contraction within capitalism is antagonistic social relations, then public ownership solves that. Other contradictions may arise, such as bureaucratization, but that is another matter.

Likewise, we hear a lot these days about the growing relationship between Russia and China, in particularly apropos of Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow last week, which seems to have been a watershed event in ways with which we are only slowly coming to grasp. Economic ties between those two countries is growing with leaps and bounds, and we are routinely told that this happening despite that China is socialist while Russia is capitalist. The two countries clearly have different models of governance, but in reality both have mixed economies (combination of private and state-owned enterprises) and engage in centralized long-term economic planning, something we in the West used to do, but in the neoliberal age is considered obsolete. When was the last time you heard a Western politician discussing seriously the need for what we once called industrial policy? Long-term strategic planning? We don't do that anymore.

Moreover, as economic ties grow, the Russian economic system is likely to become more similar to the Chinese, without the explicit ideological framework of the past. Brussels-based analyst Gilbert Doctorow, who lived and worked in Russia for many years and continues to follow mainstream Russian media, draws our attention to recent comments made by Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, which consistently polls around 20%, making it the largest opposition party in the Duma:

But the most interesting point Zyuganov had to make related directly to the visit of Chinese President Xi on the first three days of this week. The outcome of that visit he saw in the historic commitment of Russia and China to work in tandem to create a multipolar world order, while ensuring the prosperity of their peoples and the flourishing of their respective “civilizations.”  In this context, he urged Mishustin to consider that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has long had special relations with the fraternal Communist Party in China. His people know officials in the provinces across China. And his party stands ready to advise the Government on developing close relations with China.

When approached by a television journalist after the parliamentary session, Zyuganov repeated his point about the coming “socialization” of the Russian economy, reintroducing practices that had proven successful in the days of the Soviet Union.

This might sound like the wishful thinking of a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist living in the NeoLiberal Russia that Yeltsin ushered in and Putin never really ushered out. But given the exigencies of war, the Russian economy is in fact being remade not just by enormous orders placed with the military industrial complex for munitions and weapons systems , but also through massive subsidies being held out to businesses to produce subassemblies and components essential to replace now sanctioned supplies for ships, aircraft and whatnot.

These changing realities in the domestic economy align very nicely with an ever closer Chinese partnership. One had to note Putin’s remarks to President Xi at the very start of the State Visit, when the two sat in armchairs and exchanged pleasantries in front of the photographers. Putin congratulated Xi on his recent reelection which he said reflected the high appreciation of the Chinese people for what the country has achieved under his stewardship. Putin went on to say that the economic achievements in China have been stunning, to the point that “one can envy them.”

In the couple of days since, Russian television journalists have expanded on that comment as praise for the competence of the entire Chinese political and economic management.  All of this points to the “socialization” of Russia that Zyuganov so hopes for.

(Gilbert Doctorow: “How the close partnership with China is changing Russia’s domestic politics”, 23 March 2023)

In the coming years, Russia and an increasing number of other countries will turn to China as an economic role model, eventually we in the West as well. Not because socialism. Or because capitalism. Simply because it produces better outcomes. It works better.

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We had another earthquake in the Netherlands this past week. The epicenter of this one, however, was not in Groningen, it was throughout the entire country. Nor was it caused by an earthquake — but rather by an election.

On Wednesday 15 March, the country went to the polls to vote for the Senaat, the Dutch Upper House. A relatively new party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (“Farmer-Citizen Movement”) (BBB), hitherto a one-woman faction in the Tweede Kamer, the Dutch Lower House, won a landslide victory by grabbing 17 of the 75 seats in the Senaat (it previously held none), making it in one fell swoop the largest party in this legislative body, thereby torpedoing majority control that the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte had hitherto enjoyed. The four ruling parties continue to control the more important Tweede Kamer, where the government’s day-to-day legislative business is handled, so Rutte’s fragile coalition remains in power, at least for now.

The state-funded media organization NOS published a page with election results, and the interactive maps make for some interesting study. Here’s a screen capture of the map with the breakdown per municipality:

The olive green are municipalities where the BBB triumphed, and as you can see it is virtually the entire country, the exception being the large cities (Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, Eindhoven, etc) where the Green Party or Mark Rutte’s center-right VVD held sway.

In context of Dutch politics, this was a massive earthquake. Clearly those who turned out for the BBB were far from only disgruntled farmers. On the alternative news channel BlckBox.tv, veteran polling guru Maurice de Hond said last week that the BBB landslide clearly represented a protest vote, with vast swathes of the Dutch electorate “giving a fat middle-finger” to Mark Rutte’s government. BBB leader Caroline van der Plas exudes a certain earthy, no-nonsense charm and authenticity that is almost entirely absent among in today’s political class; whatever limitations the BBB movement may have, it is entirely understandable why she served as the vehicle for growing public discontent with the direction the country is going.

It is by some calculations the most abrupt shift in electoral politics since WWII. Perhaps the biggest loser was the center-right Christian Democrat (CDA) party, which, as in so many Western European countries, dominated the political landscape during the entire postwar era. Except in the more religiously inclined Bible Belt, the CDA has traditionally been the political party of the provincial farming world; its increasingly uneasy alliance with the cosmopolitan center-left, fervently pro-EU D66, which is pushing a radical environmental agenda, has proved to be an utter disaster. Unless the once mighty CDA drastically changes course, it is headed towards extinction.

Independent journalist Syp Wynia commented on what in particular motivated the BBB voters:

A poll by Ipsos for NOS gave some further insight behind the election results. Sixty per cent of voters wanted to send a signal to the current cabinet with their vote. Fourteen per cent still wanted to show support, but for 46 per cent it was disapproval that drove them.

And by their own admission, what did voters dislike? The answer is disconcerting for those in power in The Hague. It covers all the issues on which Rutte’s fourth coalition government is (not) distinguishing itself (nitrogen, immigration, climate), but at the top of the list is 'incompetence of ministers'. It may partly be due to the wording of the question, but the contempt is nonetheless palpable.

“Hoe de Rutte-wolk het deksel op de neus kreeg”, Wynia’s Week, 18 March 2023

This is damning but wholly unsurprising, given the pitiful caliber of recent and current occupants of Cabinet posts, nearly all of whom shine in their mediocrity and conformity. Those who show so much as a trace of character and independence of mind have no place, such as Monica Keizer, who was summarily sacked from her Economic Affairs post for questioning the Covid orthodoxy during the pandemic.

Where do we go from here?

Despite protestations from Christianne van der Wal, Cabinet Minister for Nature and Nitrogen Policy (yes, for real), that “we must stay the course”, that the nitrogen-reduction targets must remain immutable, something will have to give. Syp Wynia observes that the governing coalition will either change course or the governing coalition will collapse and there will have to be new Tweede Kamer elections.

In a piece published by De Andere Krant on the eve of the elections, investigative journalist Eric van de Beek, who has been doggedly pursuing the MH17 case, examined and compared the parliamentary voting records of the opposition parties. He came to the conclusion that the only party that offered consistent opposition to the Cabinet was the rightwing-populist Forum for Democracy (FvD), which was the big protest vote of the 2019 Senaat elections, but this time around fared very poorly, falling from ten to just two seats. In her voting record the Tweede Kamer, BBB’s Caroline van der Plas may have pushed back on the government’s attack on agriculture, but she backed most other policies, including the government’s disastrous support for Ukraine in the ongoing conflict.

There is clearly widespread, ever-growing discontent with the general direction things are going in the Netherlands, with a number of simmering crises, including but certainly not limited to the deeply unpopular war on farming. But the opposition remains incoherent and fragmented, a state of affairs that the ambitious and opportunistic Mark Rutte adroitly continues to exploit.

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