Category: Society

Really, we are in for four years of this?

This week, Marianne Edgar Budde, the bishop of Washington delivered a sermon in front of President Trump urging him to show mercy towards LGBTQ+ and migrant communities. The president condemned it as ‘nasty’.

I’m not a Christian, just an atheist by nature, but it’s a very good sermon. It speaks truth to power. No wonder Donald Trump hated it and described her tone as “nasty”. The fault lies with you, Donald.

The recent riots in Amsterdam are being treated by the media and the Dutch Government as antisemitic. Wilders, in particular is doubling down on this. Frankly, what I saw was football hooliganism turned up to 11 by external events. This was not a “pogrom”, this was a riot – on both sides. And for the mainstream media (and Wilders) to cast it in purely antisemitic terms is both damaging and immoral.

Addendum 15 November 2024:

Here’s a balanced report on the events from The Guardian; however, the damage has been done and Wilders must be delighted as a result…

The news that Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sower of hate, is to become the next US President is beyond depressing to me. As far as I can see, it means nothing but bad news on many fronts for the next four years. Only the Musks of this world will benefit, the rest of us are likely to be heading to Hell in a handbasket.

Many years ago, I had a T-shirt made for myself that bore the text: “Never underestimate the power of large groups of stupid people”. I should have kept it.

“I’m fairly confident that our institutions will hold and we will show once again that we have a resilient democracy in 2024” – well, I’m not confident at all, at all. If he loses, Trump will declare the results invalid. It’s as certain as death and taxes.

The Big Lie 2.0

When the policy document of the new coalition government in the Netherlands was published a month ago, I predicted that we would be in for a bumpy ride.

Now that names are being put to the Cabinet posts, my prediction is becoming a dead certainty.

The first bump in the road was happily experienced by Wilders himself. He had proposed his PVV party member Gidi Markuszower for the post of Minister of Asylum and Migration, but the Dutch Security Service has said that Markuszower has failed his security check, and so Wilders has had to withdraw his nomination and has proposed an alternative candidate.

Markuszower, by his past public pronouncements, comes across as a particularly nasty piece of work who views those seeking asylum as merely “fortune seekers” and has held forth tirades against them in parliament e.g. the “ordinary Dutch man and woman” is being “replaced” by asylum seekers and that the current policy on asylum is “a crime against the people” and those responsible for it must face a parliamentary tribunal. He is on record as saying:

 ‘Het is walgelijk dat Nederlanders door de eigen overheid worden vertrapt, maar dat gelukszoekers uit Afrika en achterlijke Midden-Oosterse zandbaklanden door diezelfde overheid worden vertroeteld.’

‘De jungle van Afrika komt massaal hiernaartoe.’

‘We hebben te maken met roedels van zogenaamde ‘bontkraagjes’, groepen van jongeren die hier eigenlijk niet thuishoren.’

‘Ze trappen op het hoofd en beuken en rossen door. Hun slachtoffers kiezen ze zorgvuldig uit, vaak Nederlandse kinderen dus, die hier wél thuishoren. Nederland is van ons, maar de straat is inmiddels van hen. Dit is gewelddadig racisme, waarbij autochtone jongeren in elkaar worden gemept door allochtoon tuig.’

In translation:

“It is disgusting that Dutch people are trampled on by their own government, but that fortune seekers from Africa and backward Middle Eastern sandbox countries are pampered by the same government.”

“The jungles of Africa are coming here en masse.”

“We are dealing with packs of so-called ‘fur collars’ [a derogatory term for male youngsters of supposed Moroccan background], groups of young people who do not actually belong here.”

‘They kick on the head and keep pounding and pounding. They carefully choose their victims, often Dutch children, who do belong here. The Netherlands is ours, but the street is now theirs. This is violent racism, where native young people are beaten up by immigrant scum.’

Wilders has now proposed Marjolein Faber for the post, and she’s not much of an improvement in my eyes: in the First Chamber (the Senate) she has accused the current cabinet of treason because of their policies on mass immigration.

Then we have gems such as Reinette Klever who is to be the Minister for Foreign Trade and Foreign Aid. Presumably she’s been chosen because she wants to scrap all Foreign Aid. She’s written that asylum seekers bring “TB, hepatitus, polio, cholera, typhoid and other exotic diseases with them”. She left politics in 2017 to work in her husband’s business, but then since 2022 has popped up as a TV-commentator in the broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland (Unheard Netherlands) – the Dutch equivalent of Fox News or GB News – so you can imagine what that’s like…

Wilders claims that:

‘Nederland moet een land worden waar u zich weer thuis voelt, een land waar u een goede boterham verdient zonder te veel belasting te betalen, een land waar u ’s avonds veilig over straat kunt zonder beroofd te worden, een land waar de ouderen en de gehandicapten het goed hebben.’

‘The Netherlands must become a country where you feel at home again, a country where you earn a good living without paying too much tax, a country where you can walk safely on the streets at night without being robbed, a country where the elderly and the disabled are doing well.’

Laudable aims, Mr. Wilders, but the end does not justify your means to achieve it.

The real giveaway is that phrase “where you feel at home again” – in other words, white, Christian, and not from any other ethnic or religious background or country. As I said last month: this is not in my name, Mr. Wilders.

An excellent piece by Lewis Goodall.

I feel very uneasy about developments at the moment. It’s as though Dutch society is like the frog sitting in water that is slowly being brought to boiling point.

When I first came to the Netherlands in 1983, the country had a reputation for tolerance, an openness and a “live and let live” attitude to life. Over the years, attitudes have hardened and polarisation increased to the point where I scarcely recognise the country I first encountered.

We’ve just had a general election, and to my utter dismay, the far-right populist party of Geert Wilders has gained the most seats in the Dutch parliament. This is the man who has called Moroccans “scum” and whose manifesto proposes a ban on Islamic schools, mosques and the Qur’an, a ban on the wearing of headscarves in government buildings, and tight immigration and border controls. These include restoring Dutch border controls, detaining and deporting illegal immigrants, and reintroducing work permits for intra-EU workers. He is no supporter of the EU. The icing on the cake is that he appears to also be a climate change denier who ignores climate problems.

It remains to be seen whether he can persuade other parties to join him and form a coalition government with sufficient majority to govern. If he does, then it will be a right-wing coalition. The future does not look bright for tolerance and social solidarity in the Netherlands.

I despair.

The last time I used this quote from Iain M. Banks was for the events in Paris in 2015.

And now Hamas have adopted the tactics of IS to horrifying effect.

Unfortunately the state of Israel appears to be prepared to inflict the same terror on the inhabitants of Gaza, 50% of whom are children.

As I wrote in 2015, 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.

This year’s Tory Party Conference had more than enough moments of speakers sounding unhinged, not to mention the presence of Nigel Farage looking like the cat that got the cream.

If it wasn’t Suella Braverman channelling Enoch Powell and his appalling “Rivers of Blood” speech, then it was Mark Harper embracing the conspiracy theories swirling around the excellent goal of 15 minute cities.

However, for empty rhetoric Penny Mordant takes the prize…

What was she smoking?