Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
Eberhard van der Laan, the mayor of Amsterdam, died yesterday. Everyone has been paying tribute to him. This news story says that flags throughout the city were flown at half-mast today. Actually, flags were flown at half-mast throughout the whole country.
He will be missed.
Some officials know what public service means and fulfil their duties to the best of their abilities, serving the public good. And the people react accordingly.
Eberhard van der Laan, you’ve set an example to us all.
A rather good piece by Graham Bobby: The End of the Nightmare.
The only bit I would argue with is his penultimate sentence, asking us to pray for Trump. I rather think that, if prayers did any good whatsoever, they would be better spent on the rest of us.
That big red button is still there and must be getting more tempting by the day to Trump.
Tomorrow, the 15th March, we in the Netherlands go to the polls to vote for our political candidate of choice. Note that I didn’t say “to vote for our next government” – with 27 political parties to choose from on the ballot paper, it is inevitable that we’ll end up with yet another coalition government.
As well as the mainstream parties (8 or 11, depending on your definition of “mainstream”), the parties also include the “Non-Voters” party (12 candidates), the “Pirate Party” (with 37 candidates) and the “Jesus Lives” party (6 candidates). Somehow, I don’t think Jesus stands much of a chance. Perhaps he needs to hitch his wagon to the “Political Calvinist Party” – the evangelical Christian party, with their 30 candidates – not one of them a woman, because a woman’s place is of course in the home, and certainly not in politics. Yes, it’s the 21st century, but clearly not for some people.
And as usual, Geert Wilders has been generating more heat than light. His manifesto – actually a list of 11 bullet points covering less than one side of an A4 page – lays bare his anti-Muslim and anti-EU soul. He must be fully aware that he hasn’t got a hope of forming a government – few other parties will touch him with a bargepole in a coalition – and one suspects that he only does it to provoke. What is worrying is that his probable strategy – to pull the other parties to the right – appears to be working, at least in the case of the VVD, led by the current prime minister, Mark Rutte. Wilders appears to have goaded Rutte successfully into matching his rhetoric. Rutte is increasingly trying to appeal to Wilders’ PVV voters, and that’s a very dangerous, and populist, game.
Then we have Erdoğan butting in, and inflaming the passions of the Dutch citizens who have dual Dutch and Turkish nationalities. His “Nazi” rhetoric hasn’t exactly helped Dutch-Turkish relations of late, but then, one suspects, it wasn’t intended to.
And on top of all this, our newspaper, de Volkskrant, has been full of vox-pop pieces on floating voters, there seems to be a veritable flood of them. I confess that I am bewildered by the number of people who seem incapable of making up their minds. The choices are clear, at least to me. Tomorrow I’ll be following in my father’s footsteps and voting left-wing. He was a lifelong socialist, as am I, and believed in a caring society. My vote will be going to the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA), and to a woman. Sorry about that, Calvinists.
…and I’m sure we’re only at the beginning of Trump’s nightmare presidency. The Guardian editorial on Trump’s anti-Muslim orders nails it.
The words in the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal famously read:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Sorry, lady, but as far as Muslim refugees from countries where Trump does not have business interests are concerned, your lamp has just been doused.
I see Trump has begun as he means to go on. His first speech as President was, as Gary Younge says:
as crude and unapologetic an appeal to nationalism as one might expect from a man incapable of rising to an occasion without first refracting it through his ego.
This is not the triumph of democracy, but a tragedy.
A sobering article on responsible leadership in the age of populism. Worth reading. An extract:
The way today’s leaders increasingly rely on referenda, petitions and social media to legitimize their action suggests the emergence of a worrying trend of delegation of leadership and therefore responsibility.
In Britain, the Brexit referendum is a case in point, where those who put this issue to a vote and campaigned for the UK to leave the EU did not take responsibility for the consequences. The illusion that politics can simply collect people’s preferences and mechanically turn them into a reality threatens to override the idea behind political representation.
In a representative democracy, the mission of leaders should be to temper citizens’ input and emotional responses rather than to foster the violence of the majority. In other words, the relationship between representatives and represented must be ongoing and should entail judgement on both sides.
The article lists 10 personal qualities that should be present in a responsible leader. The person who will assume the role of the next President of the US in a few days time would appear to lack all of them.
A good article by Naomi Klein in the Guardian today on why America’s voters’ heeded the siren song of Trump. The core:
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.
For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.
Trump says what they want to hear. Whether he can deliver it is probably akin to asking how many angels can dance on a pin.
Back in May, I feared for a world where both a Brexit and a President Trump would be facts. Now, my worst fears are realised. We seem to have sunk to a new low, and there ain’t no light at the end of the tunnel. As I said last August, I ponder on how much the world has gone to hell in a handbasket in this year of our lord, 2016. I truly wonder whether we shall live to see the dawn of 2018.
Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
That was Donald Trump’s proud boast. Well, it certainly was amazing, but perhaps not in the way implied by Trump. This report on the convention by Eliot Weinberger makes for truly terrifying reading.
As the world lurches ever closer to the possibility of there being a President Trump, I ponder on how much the world has gone to hell in a handbasket in this year of our lord, 2016. I wonder whether we shall live to see the dawn of 2018.
Here’s a good summary of the mess that the UK has got itself into, and why extricating itself from it will probably take years. Normal service will not be resumed soon. I particularly liked:
Q: I thought Boris said we could stay in the single market and get rid of freedom of movement.
A: He was either lying or he didn’t understand what he was talking about. Probably the first. The single market is a series of rules. His plan was like saying that you’re going to visit Paris but not abide by French law. It was nonsense.
And now he’s Foreign Secretary…
Another interesting point is that David Davis is now the “Secretary for Exiting the EU”. He is at least a serious politician, but there’s also a rather delicious irony in his appointment – he is currently suing the UK government at the European Court of Justice so as to enforce EU law. Curiouser and curiouser. Welcome to Wonderland.
Britain has been on something of a roller coaster ride in the last few weeks, and I’ve been looking on in fascinated horror. My worst fears were confirmed when a majority of compatriots chose the nuclear option, otherwise known as Brexit. With the resignation of Cameron, I fully expected Boris Johnson to fulfil his long-held ambition of standing for Leader of the Conservative Party and becoming the next Prime Minister.
The first shock was when Michael Gove turned round and metaphorically stabbed Boris in the chest with his declaration that he, Gove, would be in the race after years of denying that he had any ambition to become PM. A real “Et tu, Brute” moment. The second shock was when Johnson subsequently declared that he was withdrawing from the race.
Then the other candidates in the race declared themselves, and what a sorry bunch they were. The only candidate of worth being Theresa May, and while she is very capable, I’ve never been a fan of hers because she seems to have had a humanity bypass when it comes to dealing with immigration questions. Fortunately, the others fell flat on their faces, quite spectacularly in the case of Andrea Leadsom, with her denial of having played the motherhood card against the childless May. Unfortunately for Leadsom, the audio recording of the interview proved her denial worthless, and she withdrew from the race.
So Theresa is triumphant, and is now ensconced as Prime Minister. She’s gutted Cameron’s Cabinet – sacked Gove, and Stephen Crabb has resigned (or was he pushed?).
And then, and then, she announces that the new Foreign Secretary is to be Boris Johnson…
Just when we thought that things couldn’t get any worse, BoJo’s back, and as Foreign Secretary, no less. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry – and it would seem that that’s a common feeling shared by governments around the world.
Oh lord, give me strength.
So my fellow Brits voted for Brexit. I am depressed beyond words. A sad day for the EU and a glad day for the 51.9% of Little Englanders thumbing their noses at Johnny Foreigner.
Yesterday, a British Member of Parliament was stabbed and shot. Her name was Jo Cox. I am numbed by the news. This column by Alex Massie in the Spectator puts into words my feelings at the moment, please go and read it. A sample:
When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.
Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.
All the demonisation of the “other”, whether they be immigrants, Muslims, or the EU by the likes of Nigel Farage and his ilk does have consequences. We have an even nastier example here in the Netherlands in the form of Geert Wilders.
My father was a politician, and was a member of the Manx parliament. Like Jo Cox, he always fought for the underdog. It would have broken his heart had he lived to have seen the events of yesterday.
I’m dreading the EU Referendum – I can’t help feeling that my fellow Brits will choose to leave the EU…
And then, to top it all, the Americans will probably plump for President Trump.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
Nicholas Whyte, who lives and works in Brussels, gives his reaction to the terrorist attacks in Brussels yesterday. Go and read it – it’s worth it. A sample:
As with any awful event, there’s a temptation to grasp for easy explanations. I will give in to that temptation. It seems to my jaundiced eye that, dreadful as they were, yesterday’s attacks were botched. Maelbeek is actually the wrong metro station to attack – both Schuman, the stop before, and Arts-Loi, the stop after, would surely be much more attractive targets, being much busier intersections on the network (and also both recently renovated as prestige architectural projects). Only two of three planned explosions in the airport happened, the third attacker apparently losing his nerve and running away. To adopt a Trump-ism, these guys were losers.
This happened because they are losing. Less than a week ago, a major figure in the terror movement was arrested in Brussels; perhaps yesterday was revenge for his arrest, perhaps it was rushed into because they were afraid he would start talking (or knew that he already had). On the ground, their allies and sponsors are losing territory and resources in Syria and Iraq. I wrote a week ago about violence as story-telling, in the Irish context. This is an attempt to write a story about the weakness of our interconnected world, attacking places where people travel and meet, where many nationalities and cultures join together and build together.
It is a narrative that must not and will not win.
Amen to that.
Here we go again, more deluded fools with guns and explosives murdering innocents, followed by a statement from IS that is “written in the standard, sententious style of Isis and other militant pronouncements and is framed by a worldview that has become wearily familiar over recent years”.
The late Iain M. Banks summed it up well in his novel Against A Dark Background:
Sorrow be damned and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.
Amen.
It would appear that the Catholic Church is not happy, not happy at all, about the result of the Irish referendum supporting same-sex marriage.
First we had the Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin saying that the church needed to take “a reality check” and “not move into denial”. The church, he said, had lost its connection with young people, and needed to work to reconnect with them. Now while some liberal Catholics have seen this as an outbreak of common sense, it was very clear to me that this was a brilliant piece of equivocation on the Archbishop’s part. While to liberal Catholics it could be interpreted as recognising that the Church has to change, for the rest of us it was perfectly clear that his message was: “our attempt to indoctrinate Irish youth has failed, and we must redouble our efforts – marriage can only be between a man and a woman for the sole purpose of procreation”.
Luckily, we now have the Vatican’s number two, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, making it crystal-clear for us all. He is quite clear that Ireland’s vote was “a defeat for humanity”, adding that he was “deeply saddened” by it, and that the answer for the church is to “strengthen its commitment to evangelisation”.
Let’s just ponder that for a moment: a vote for equality and recognising that love can exist between two people of the same sex is seen by the Catholic Church as “a defeat for humanity”.
I truly wonder what goes on in the minds of the leaders of the Catholic Church. And for all the posturing of Pope Francis, I really do not expect him to correct Cardinal Parolin. He may equivocate, but he is unlikely to contradict the cardinal. Let’s wait and see; a miracle might yet happen.
Addendum: Grania Spingies has an excellent commentary on the Catholic Church’s position over at the Why Evolution Is True web site. In summary:
And it’s a vote for sanity, equality, and same-sex marriage… I’m delighted, and not a little surprised – I had thought that reactionary forces, e.g. the Catholic Church, would have been able to make a greater dent in the majority view. It is clear, from the results, that rural areas are further behind, but hopefully, with this result, attitudes will begin to change in the country as a whole.
Well done to all the “Yes” campaigners, and thanks to all those who voted Yes.
Back in 2010, I wrote about my misgivings about the fact that the Netherlands was considering banning the burqa. Fast forward to now, and the government has indeed now proposed a ban on wearing the burqa in certain places, including in courts, schools, townhalls, and on public transport.
I remain unconvinced that this ban is going to help our samenleving (literally: living together, but usually translated as society). Kenan Malik’s words at the time about the ban remain as true today as they were back then:
The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.
As I wrote at the time:
While I have qualms about why women should choose to wear the burqa, the answer is not to ban it. The answer is to make it as ludicrous as a codpiece, and that must emerge from the women themselves.
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