Nicholas Sarkozy’s hard landing in Sunday’s first round of the French presidential election reduced another important event in European affairs to background noise. Namely, the imminent collapse of the Dutch government.
For all intents and purposes, that effectively fell on Sunday, together with Sarkozy’s stock with the French electorate.
We know that Francois Hollande, a dreary back room party apparatchik is now a shoo-in, with the blessing of Goldman Sachs, the EU, the CIA, in fact the entire globalist rat pack.
So why the heck should anybody give a damn who runs the land of wind mills and clog dancers?
Well, that very same rat pack mentioned above. And ‘Hollande’ and ‘Hollander’ is certainly one of those cute rhymes of history that strikes a neat chord now and again.
For years the industrious Dutch ran one of the most impressive enterprises in Europe. It remains an important manufacturing economy (think the Philips electrical giant) and boasts a mighty agricultural complex based on the industrial-scale food production of dairy products, vegetables and glasshouse crops.
Rotterdam Europort is far and away the largest and busiest in Europe, the gateway to the vast European network of canal and river freighting systems.
For eternity no-one questioned the credentials of the hardworking Dutch as first class Europeans. Yet the forthcoming and inevitable snap election will turn on the rapidly swelling Euro-skepticism of possibly a majority of Dutch voters.
The present government crisis is in essence all about the rapidly changing Dutch attitude to the ever more intrusive and over-bearing European Union.
Dutch nationalism, which everyone thought died a natural death years ago, is suddenly the flavor of the hour which politicians of all stripes must now treat with immense sensitivity. And this, by the way, in a country where practically everyone speaks at least three tongues, followed by English and German.
Gone are the easy-going days of free love, freedom, hash cafes and Amsterdam’s fabled Red Light district with its gaudy shop-window quick sex for sale special offers.
The shutters are going up there, as with the famous ‘brown cafes,’ with the result that prostitution and dope are progressively driven underground, which breeds criminality as seen in the United States and elsewhere.
So what went wrong in this apparently blissful landscape of peace and plenty? Is it really the case, as one journalist wrote recently, that the Dutch are undergoing a collective nervous breakdown? And if so, why?
Put simply, the Netherlands is a textbook case of globalism run amok and the bitter blow-back of the ‘war on terror.’
Although not exactly pacifists, politicians prudently steered the famous Dutch ‘hairnet army’ away from foreign adventures, until her leaders stepped up to the full NATO plate of humanitarian interventions.
The reward was a bitter harvest of recriminations and scandals over the performance of Dutch troops in the Balkans which pictured the Hollanders as hopelessly unskilled and unprepared for real conflicts – and not least a tendency to pick up on the wrong side.
The blackest episode of the Balkan escapade, the massacre of eight thousand Muslim men and young boys after Serbs over-ran the besieged town of Srebrenica in July 1995, is considered as at least partly the fault of Dutch troops. It is certainly true that a force of 400 soldiers, part of the UN peacekeeping contingent, made no attempt to deter either the Serb onslaught or the subsequent atrocity.
The subliminal storyline, though never explicitly stated, implies that the Dutch force stood aside out of a sense of general animosity towards Muslims. This, in turn, was traced to the rising tensions at home to the flood of Muslim immigrants pouring from the old Dutch colonies in the Far East.
In terms of saints and sinners, it is worth recording here that at exactly the same time the United States was importing Afghan ex-Mujahedeen fighters with links to Al Qaeda, blooded in struggles against the Russians, supposedly to correct the balance between the Serbs and Muslims.
America’s imperial envoy, the late Richard Holbrooke, described this convenience as ‘the pact with the devil.’
This was classic Orwellian double-speak, given that Al Qaeda was a US-created and funded guerrilla force (meaning ‘the base’ or ‘the database’ in Arabic). Call in on the movie Charlie Wilson’s War to check up on that.
The former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, came clean with the facts about Al Qaeda before one of those useful heart attacks put him permanently out of action during a hike on a Scottish mountain in 2005.
The Srebrenica massacre pre-dated the formal declaration of the ‘war on terror’ after 9/11, but nonetheless had a devastating impact on race relations in a small country such as Holland.
The implosion of the reign of tolerance which had been the cipher of the Dutch in their homeland for so many years dates exactly to this single atrocity.
A decade later, with immigration now the festering main topic at the summit of the national agenda, Pim Fortuyn, the openly gay parakeet regarded as prime minister in waiting, was gunned down leaving from an election broadcast at a radio station in the city of Hilversum.
His alleged (and as I argue in my forthcoming book, most unlikely) assassin was a committed non-violent protestant eco-campaigner with a passion for legal actions, who had never been associated with the immigration issue, one way or the other.
Fortuyn, on the other hand, was unwillingly to buy pricey toys like the American Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter to amuse the Dutch air force. Likewise, with his own handpicked list he was an entryist threatening the cozy establishment cabal.
Eighteen months later, the rabid anti-Muslim filmmaker Theodoor Van Gogh (a member of the iconic family tree) was brutally stabbed to death, and practically decapitated, by a Muslim activist who was under constant scrutiny by Dutch intelligence – until just before the murder.
Holland has descended into a neocon madhouse, chasing the coattails of the US and the UK in the desire of politicians and intelligence services to spy and snoop on the everyday thoughts and habits of the citizenry. One prominent politician even called for nothing but Dutch to be spoken in the streets.
Listening posts are routinely attached to lamp-posts and other street furniture. Privacy heads for the dustbin (sound like any other Western nations to you?).
All this snoop-i-tecture is attributed to the grotesque fiction promoted as the ‘war on terror.’ The petroleum is supplied by the hyper-inflated immigration scare. As one survey after another confirms, far from radicalized suicide bombers in the making, most Muslim immigrants seek nothing more than a good Dutch partner to marry and start a family.
[Editor’s note: I believe it is worth pointing out that this is in no way limited to Dutch Muslim immigrants. In fact, as I have previously reported, Muslims actually stand against violence against civilians more often than Christians do. Of course, as I always try to point out, anyone who claims to be a Christian and supports such thing is no more a Christian than I am a sentient clod of dirt hacking away at my keyboard.]
It is thus an irony indeed that the prominent political activist who would have every Muslim thrown out of the country is the direct cause of the latest crisis.
The villain of the piece is Geert Wilders, the current kingmaker of the endlessly complicated jigsaw of Dutch coalition politics. On Sunday he walked out of the austerity conclave, leaving the government without a compass.
Despised as he is by the establishment cronies, his Freedom Party effectively renders it impossible for any party to assemble a coalition government without his consent.
When he is not bashing the immigrants for the upsetting the traditional Dutch way of life, he launches virulent attacks on the EU. There he is possibly on to a winning card.
Anyone will tell you that the Dutch people take an intrinsic pride in their consistent success in out-performing far larger rivals.
The Dutch are natural entrepreneurs, their nearest historical rivals being the British, hence their frequent quarrels over the spoils of maritime commerce and trade.
Now they are forced to swallow the bitter Made in Brussels austerity medicine at a time when even this vibrant economy has slipped (like most of Europe) into recession.
Wilders screams for Holland to scrap the forced Strasbourg goose austerity diet and clear out of the Euro.
He is just a step away from saying ‘and the EU too’ but is sufficiently cute to realize that once out of the Euro, then the country is effectively out of the EU.
Have you noticed how often the establishment gangs routinely abuse ‘nationalists’ and ‘populists’ while happy enough to wear the same clothes when it suits them? There is no more glaring example than Dutch mainstream politicians.
Every man-jack has a pet recipe to take the heat out of the immigration issue, while the populace see it as nothing more than sticking plasters.
Now Wilders, the real-time Flying Dutchman, thickly maned with a cultivated disheveled appearance, has latched onto an issue that will likely resonate at the polls, whenever they are held (as of course he intends).
The Dutch people may not in the last resort be all that hot-blooded about resurrecting the banished guilder, but they are definitely and clearly articulating the growing sense of unease at the remorseless appetite for supra-national power emanating from the global citadels of power.
My sense is that this mood is spreading. The organized looting of one country after another to inflate the institutionally crooked bankocracy and unrequited bond-holders, conducted at the expense of massive redundancies and social unrest, must in the end earn an appropriate Newtonian response (that is, an equal and opposite reaction).
There is no consensual focus as yet, but the breakdown and overall redundancy of traditional party politics and camps everywhere you look is part of the same process of detachment attributable to widespread weariness and disillusion with the entire culture of remote mission control.
The EU now effectively manipulates the internal political machineries of Hungary, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Greece and Ireland. It is well on the way to doing the same in Portugal and Spain.
The great union of Brusselian levelers will soon count on an obedient servant in France, in place of the quixotic and noisy Sarkozy.
In this scenario the self-serving establishment crews regard self-declared ‘populists’ like Geert Wilders, the far-right Marine le Pen in France, the UK’s anti-EU Independence Party, Italy’s comedian political guerrilla Beppe Grillo, as perpetual outriders, white noise the system can drown out at will. A practical arrangement of collective banishment is difficult to achieve, so other means may be devised.
Pim Fortuyn, who threatened to upset the placidity of Dutch ‘polder politics,’ paid the highest price for stepping out of line. So did the Austrian Freedom Party leader Jörg Haidar whose strange car crash in 2008 put an end to the prospects of an off-radar proto-fascist slipping into government.
So, is the return of old-fashioned independence and pride in one’s own country out of place?
This is a difficult call. Of course it is easily tarnished with jingoism and cheap patriotics. In many minds the concept is moreover closely tied with authoritarian forces such as National Socialism and resurgent fascism that is visible all around us.
But surely, is it not the globalists who are the articulators of fascist-minded top-down imposed solutions to all problems?
In the circumstances, where then is the social cement that might be found to answer the genuine concerns of millions of Europeans concerning an imperious might which has seized control of their lives? Namely, reoccupying nation states.
I wish I knew, but the Hollanders may yet offer a clue. The implosion of the single European currency might be the starting place.
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