Meanwhile, somewhere out in the Empire...
By Hans Vogel
On the day Obama was elected 44th president of the United States, a bizarre incident took place in the Netherlands, one of the Empire's most obsequious vassal states. The police invaded the home of a 10-year old boy and impounded his computer. The reason? The boy had left a message on Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's Hyves site (a Dutch version of Facebook). The message was not exactly friendly: “let's kick off Balkenende's ugly head”. Through the boy's IP-address, intelligence and police quickly identified and located the author and took immediate action.
The above incident would hardly be worth noticing if it were not for its wider implicatians and true meaning. Not only does it say a lot about the present-day political climate in the Netherlands, but it is eloquent proof of how freedom of speech has all but disappeared from Europe. The current attacks on the freedom of speech all over the continent, either through anti-defamation and anti-discriminatory laws or through arbitrary and intimidating police actions is the last stage of a broad offensive against civic freedoms that has begun in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Balkenende administration, one of the clumsiest and most mediocre in Western Europe, was put together in 2002. Balkenende, an unattractive and uncharismatic person if there ever was one, was put forward by the Dutch ruling class to fill the void left by Social Democratic prime minister Wim Kok, who after eight years in office decided to step down. None of his heirs apparent seemed able to fill the void left by Kok. To the utter horror of the ruling class, it was the outsider Pim Fortuyn, a charismatic populist with no parliamentary track record who had the best chance to become the next prime minister. Though Fortuyn had always been categorized as a right wing extremist, no one could be sure about his policies once elected. Fortuyn threatened to upset the entire system, riding on a huge wave of enthusiastic popular support.
Nine days prior to the parliamentary elections of May, 2002, however, Fortuyn was assassinated, supposedly by the proverbial deranged lone gunman. It is highly likely the killing was ordered in the utmost secrecy by the highest echelons of the Dutch government: Fortuyn, an avowed homosexual, was doubly dangerous to the system since he openly talked about his sexuality, making him invulnerable to blackmail. Fortuyn had also earned the bitter enmity of the Bush administration. Two days before he was killed, Fortuyn had a three-hour interview with US ambassador Clifford M. Sobel, who fruitlessly tried to convince him to stay in the Lockheed Joint Strike Fighter program. One of the main planks of Fortuyn's platform had been to get out of the JSF project, to abolish the air force and the army and to entrust the remaining Dutch Royal Navy with national defense. Some have therefore suggested the US government was responsible for Fortuyn's murder. Foremost among these was Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh. Coincidentally, van Gogh himself was murdered in 2004 just before the movie thriller he produced on the Fortuyn/JSF affair went into premiere.
Fortuyn's improvised political party, founded only a few months before the elections and bankrolled by a group of ambitious real estate tycoons longing for political influence, scored a landslide victory winning 26 seats in parliament (out of 150). The party was invited to join the government, but its lack of experience proved fatal: after only a few months in office, the government was brought down in a concerted effort by the established parties to isolate and neutralize Fortuyn's party. At the early elections of 2003, Fortuyn's party was reduced to eight seats and in 2006 disappeared from parliament altogether. Within four years, the biggest threat to the Dutch ruling class had been effectively eliminated.
Balkenende, a colorless, unknown Christian Democrat, was pushed forward in 2002 to become prime minister. As if acting on orders received from above, the main stream media, including of course the state controlled radio and television stations, immediately began to build up Balkenende's image, attempting to turn around his total lack of charisma and instead make it look like charisma. During his first term as prime minister, Balkenende was routinely compared with Harry Potter. To some extent, the media succeeded in this magical transformation giving Balkenende, now leading his third coalition government, a very modest and ever so fragile popular appeal.
Domestically, Balkenende has presided over the further dismantling of the welfare state, increasing the tax burden for the poor and the middle classes, while handing out lavish tax breaks to the corporate world. By systematically invoking the 1995 anti-discrimination clause in the Dutch constitution, the Balkenende administration tries to suffocate popular discontent that tends to focus on the one million-strong muslim community. On the other hand, by condoning the violent excesses of muslim (mostly Moroccan) urban street gangs in the ghettoes of dozens of Dutch cities, the Balkenende administration only contributes to the further growth of public dissatisfaction. Today, there is widespread contempt and loathing of the government, causing nearly 150,000 Dutchmen (nearly one percent of the population) to leave the country each year and settle abroad. Another 150,000 are moving out of the big cities to smaller towns located near the German and Belgian borders, unwilling to be subjected by the government's destructive social policies.
