Here is a rather discouraging post from GOV about the state of the Netherlands and the extent to which it has allowed itself to fall under the spell and authority of irrational leftism. As I read it however, I am not at all sure how much worse this is than Canada or the U.S.A. at many significant levels. Thank you Baron Bodissey for editing and posting this in the original.
Eeyore for Vlad:
by Baron Bodissey

Several weeks ago a Dutch reader sent us a set of essays by an expatriate Dutch writer named Arthur Legger. I forwarded two of them — one from The Wall Street Journal and the other from IFPS — to our Flemish correspondent VH, and asked his opinion of them.
As regular readers know, VH is very well-informed on both Belgian and Dutch affairs, and documents his opinions copiously using multiple sources. His reply to me was so thoughtfully pessimistic that I was taken by surprise — VH has an invariably sunny and optimistic disposition, but his outlook for the Netherlands was startlingly gloomy.
With his kind permission, I have merged and edited two of his emails into the essay below. My questions to VH have been interpolated in italics:
The “traditional Dutch liberties” that according to the WSJ existed from 1997 until 2005 had in fact already ceased to exist since the immigration flow started to boom in the mid-1970s. Many non-left-wing and conservative Dutch people learned to be careful after that, to go with the flow, and to share real opinions only with the most trusted friends, and in private.
In the eighties a politician was convicted for stating: “When we have the chance, we will abolish the multicultural society”. And when Frits Bolkestein of the VVD expressed his critique of multiculture and mass immigration in parliament in the early 1990s, a very silent electorate rewarded him with a substantial increase in votes, only to be betrayed by Bolkestein being kicked upstairs to Brussels, to the EU…
In Arthur Legger’s excellent essay, he quotes Dr. Hans Daudt: “Via the main political parties the traditional regent families are still in power.” That, however, may be only partly the case with the royalty and its entourage.
For among that “entourage” is the multicultural elite, and they influence each other and hold power. Princess Maxima — who in 2002 was introduced to the ins and outs of Dutch society by extreme left-wingers and multiculturalists and ex-DDR admirers like Andrée van Es (now Secretary General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs) and Paul Rosenmöller (ex Pol Pot propagandist who, as a GreenLeft, easily got away with that) — once stated to Gretta Duisenberg (maybe the most notorious Arafat- and Hamas-admirer and anti-Semite in the Netherlands) that Dutch identity does not exist. Duisenberg: “One time Princess Maxima was there at a reception, and I passed by her, and she called me and said: ‘I want to say that I really admire you’.”
That is how bad it is with the Netherlands. Continue Reading →

