Martin Wisse

Balkenende says: stop whining

Dutch politics
Published on

Balkenende as Harry Potter in a fake movie poster

The British might think that their prime minister is dour, but Gordon Brown has nothing on Jan Peter Balkenende, our national Harry Potter lookalike. He has been a national embarassement from the first moment he awkwardly moved into the spotlight, especially when meeting with foreign leaders, having the knack to even make Bush look good in comparison. You can be a Christian politician and still have a certain style and grace, as his fellow Christian-Democrat Andre Rouvoet shows. But then Rouvoet comes from a proper traditional protestant background, whereas Balkenende is sort of a retro-protestant, not so much a conservative as someone who wants to reinvent the past. A common accusation against Balkenende is that he wants Holland to move back to the fifties, but the fifties he wants us to move back to never existed; Balkenende himself was only born in 1956, so he never experienced the fifties personally. Instead he seems to have build up this idealised vision of a time when Holland was still Holland, with the family as the cornerstone of society, where everybody knew their place and there was a place for everybody, the churches were full on Sunday, brussel sprouts were the national vegetable and everybody worked hard and trusted their betters.

Therefore, unlike previous leaders of the CDA, e.g. Ruud Lubbers, who were largely pragmatic doers, Balkenende sees it as his job as prime minister to scold the rest of us into behaving. Which is why a few weeks back he started complaining that we complain too much in this country, that we should be pleased we are such a rich and prosperous country, grateful that most of us are quite well off. It’s ture that, to put it bluntly, we’re a nation of whingers, as anybody who reads the papers in the runup to and during a major football tournament — like the one which coincidently started this Saturday — knows. This is not a bad thing, unless you’re a moralistic sourpuss like Balkenende, who wants to see us as a nation of happy, uncomplaining worker bees. In my experience, the people who whinge the most about how cynical we are, or how distrustful are almost always snake oil sellers and Balkenende fits that pattern beautifully.

If he had his way, he would prescribe that new drug that makes you trust strangers to the entire Dutch nation, the better to sell his own plans. Apart from his fetish about politeness and respect he’s an empty suit, a hypocrite who obsesses over the motes in our eyes while ignoring the beam in his own, to speak in his own lingo. He worries about the lack of respect the police get while under his leadership we took part in the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, while at home the gap between rich and poor grew so much that we now have food banks in almost all major cities while CEOs get record salaries. No wonder he doesn’t want us to complain: he knows he is the number one target of our complaints.

Interestingly, a majority of the Dutch population does seem to agree with Balkenende that we complain too much. If we can believe the results of a poll doen by one of the free newsrags, sixty percent of us thinks others complain too much, though only nine percent thinks the same about themselves, because whent hey complain, they have good reason to. Myself, I think whinging is a human right and being slightly cynical and whingy makes you less vulnerable to snake oil merchants like Balkie.

No free speech for animal rights activists

Activism, Dutch politics
Published on

At least not in Zaandam, where a peaceful demonstration opposite a petshop was broken up by the police, who also arrested several of the people involved. As syou can see on the video below it’s clear that these activists were no threat to anyone, didn’t do anything criminal, just
leafletting, but still the police went in heavyhanded:

You do not need a permit to leaflet, you don’t need permission to demonstrate and while some cities demand advance notification of demos, even the lack of such a notification does not make it illegal –the courts have rapped the police on the fingers when they have used this excuse to break up a demo. There was no reason for the police to interfere here, yet they did. Why is that?

Because unfortunately and despite the electoral succes of the Party for the Animals, animal rights activists have the tide against them. In the post-9/11 world, the ploice and security services are suspicious of any kind of activism other than organising bake sales for the local church, and the long tradition of direct action the more radical animal rights groups engage in makes them an easy target. One example was the fight against a science park, which included animal testing facilities, under construction in Venray, where animal rights activists demonstrated at the homes of the managers of the project development bureau that was building the park. This company withdrew and the animal testing facilities didn’t get build, but once again the animal rights movement was seen to engage in terrorism, or something that looked a lot like it. Again, the activists did nothing illegal, but for many people less sympathetic to the movement’s goals, it all looked a bit dodgy. At the very least what happened in Venray is an example of the hardening attitudes within the movement, the willingness to use more radical methods to achieve things that couldn’t be achieved through other methods.

But this radicalisation inevitably brings a backlash, which is what I think happened on Saturday. Because there’s a heightened awareness of the radical nature of at least some segments of the animal rights movement, some police officers are less willing to cut the movement some slack, either because they dislike it more or because they genuinely believe it’s a threat, even in this situation. Which ties in neatly with the discussion I refered to yesterday, in that it shows the dangers for any radical movement in abandoning mass mobilisation for more direct, more agressive forms of protest. Relying on violence, or the threat of violence can lose you legitamicy, can mobilise the forces of the state against you, can isolate you from those that should be your supporters and can hurt less radical members of your movement, as we saw last Saturday.

A storm in a socialist teacup

Activism, British left, socialism
Published on

Over at Lenny’s Tomb, Roobin set the cat amongst the pidgeons with his post on “the just-about-Gramscian theory of successful rioting” last Saturday, with both Louis Proyect and Andy Newman ridiculing it for sections like the one below:

The good news is, given preparation (the opportunity for which, of course, is normally denied), the average citizen can match a police officer blow for blow. A police officer has access to hand arms, in particular clubs, but the ordinary citizen can get and/or easily improvise these. The same is true of body armour and self-defence. The police have roadblocks, the people barricades. The police can use sturdy, powerful vehicles, so can the public. The police can use tools such as water cannons to disperse a crowd but a resourceful crowd can use similar devices to reverse effect. The police can use small firearms. Even in Britain it is not impossible for a member of the public to get hold of some. Any weapons won from the police in battle can immediately be used against them.

At first glance it does sound bad, the worst sort of pseudo-anarchist posturing, or “squadist juvenilia, as Andy called it. Louis Proyect was equally scathing, dismissing it as “complete idiocy”. And they would be right to do so, if it were not for one tiny detail: Roobin isn’t actually calling for fighting the police on their own terms, as the next paragraphs of his post makes clear:

he point is the police rely upon superior organisation and centralised control, not firepower. There are relatively few police officers in any country, never enough to deal with a general movement of people. This is one of the reasons why movements should be as numerous and broad as possible, to reduce the harm to life and limb to a minimum. When 2 million people are intent on using Hyde Park for a demonstration there is nothing the state can do to stop them (without seriously upping the ante).

When 125,000 miners go on strike (in albeit heightened circumstances), and are hung out to dry by union bureaucracy, the state is able to shift thousands of officers to mining areas to attack pickets and lay siege to villages, concentrating its all its power on its scattered, isolated
opponent.

In context it all sounds a lot less silly, doesn’t it? Roobin is making a quite uncontroversial, even obvious point here, which is the opposite of what Andy or Louis accuse him off. He’s actually arguing that you can’t use socalled black bloc
tactics against the police or the state, as they are better organised, better trained and have a greater legitimacy in using violence; instead socialists should organise en masse. Granted, the point could’ve been argued better, but I don’t think Roobin deserves this scolding from Andy and Louis, the more so because they seem to respond more to what they want to read, than what Roobin has actually written.

Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea

books and books review, history
Published on

Cover of Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea


Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea
Ernle Bradford
574 pages including index
published in 1971

I read Ernle Bradford’s book on the 1565 Ottoman siege of Malta, The Great Siege, some four years ago and enjoyed Bradford’s obvious enthusiasm and interest in the subject, though at times he made the siege sound a bit too much like a boy’s adventure. Other people seem to like it too, as not a week goes by without recieving hits on the review of it I did back. Apart from The Great Siege however I’ve never seen any other Ernle Bradford book, until Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea caught my eye on the Amsterdam library’s shelves two weeks ago. Bradford did a great job with his book on the siege of Malta, so I thought it would be interesting to see how he would do with a slightly bigger subject.

And subjects don’t come much bigger than this: the complete story of the Mediterranean, one of the most important areas in human history, from the earliest beginning to the present day. As the subtitle indicates, Bradford isn’t interested as much in the history of the various countries
and empires that have bordered the Mediterranean, as he is in the sea itself. He focuses therefore on the ebb and flow of human exploration of the Mediterranean, on how the traderoutes through it were established and fought over, on the maritine empires that were established on it, on how their domination of the sea led succesive empires to rule the countries surrounding it.

Read more…

Israel/Palestine: when did the NYT get a clue?

Israel/Palestine, Zionism
Published on

Because this article by Jeffrey Goldberg is surprisingly insightful:

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Other Israeli leaders have spoken with similar directness. The former prime minister, and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, told The Jerusalem Post in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state that might then become another Belfast or Bosnia.”

[…]

And the best way to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state is to reverse — not merely halt, but reverse — the West Bank settlement project. The dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates in their struggle against the fundamentalists of Hamas.

No, these ideas aren’t particularly shocking, radical or even progressive, but the fact that they can now be expressed in the New York Times, perhaps the cheerleader for zionism must be a good thing. For too long American zionism in particular has held to the idea that Israel could have its caek and eat it: have a greater Israel incorporating the Occupied Territories without having to deal with the Palestinians, the idea that the Palestinians could be bought off by a sham state. If it is no longer beyond the pale to demand a Palestinian state controlling the whole of the Occupied Territories, progress has been made. That said, I still believe even this maximalist two-state solution is least acceptable valid solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. My preference is still a new state, neither Jewish nor Palestinian but open to both.

I also think that the idea that in Israel there’s a greater range of debate possible on this subject, while true, should not be taken too optimistically. there are still incredibly strong political pressures against any Israeli politician being too accomedating to the Palestinians, or being too realistic in which Palestinian organisations are credible discussion partners. Some of these pressures are from imported superzionists from America or Europe, but there are plenty of domestic wingnuts as well. the main difference between Israel and the US is that the day to day reality of Zionist Israel is harder to ignore.