Oh Those Crazy Cloggies

Comic strips on strike

Published on July 4, 2011

Blast, the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics

As I posted about a week ago, the current rightwing supported by racists Dutch government is putting through radical cuts on the arts. Though these measures have already gone through parliament, resistance against them hasn’t ended. And although comics in general barely get any government support anyway, that doesn’t mean cartoonists aren’t engaged with this struggle. Which is why today a dozen or so odd comic strips in as many daily newspapers had the same message.

Shit! The spending cuts on arts are also hitting us! Ehh... I see no difference

Each participating comic drew its regular cast as stick figures, with some variant on the slogan “the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics”. Participants include Peter de Wit’s incredibly popular sarky psychiatrist Sigmund (top), as well as Fokke & Sukke (bottom), Mark Retera’s Dirkjan and many others. It’s of course unrealistic to expect this protest to change many people’s minds, but it is a good way to show the disastrous consequences of the slashing of art funding even to people with little use for art. Everybody reads the funnies after all.

Holland is getting more and more shitty to live in

Published on June 29, 20114 Comments

The last ten years have been a very disappointing decade for the Netherlands, politics wise. We started the decade with a clapped out coalition of neoliberal technocrats completely failing to respond to the rise of the first charismastic, populist, Islamophobic demagogue the country was blessed with. He promptly got shot, the backlash catapulted his party into government but their incompetence doomed them almost immediately. Their legacy lasted much longer however, collapsing the vote of the traditional big parties, with a large part of the electorate becoming swinging voters, going for the party that most satisfied their gut instincts this election, opening up space for more populist parties. In itself this was not a bad thing, was it not fueled as much by a healthy dose of xenophobia as a visceral hatred of politics as usual, with various politicians trying to make lightning strike twice. This is not without dangers, as a national firebrand is stabbed to death for his views on Muslims

Fast forward a few years and governments and we’re back into a much worse economic crisis and an even worsely fractured political landscape. We’re now ruled by a rightwing minority coalition of neoliberal technocrats who use this crisis as an excuse to sell of everything the state owns not yet sold by previous governments, as well as ram through all the ideologically driven spending cuts it had been wanting to see through for years. To do so, it has to depend on a racist party, throwing them a bone every now and again, which doesn’t help make the country any nicer to live in. Both developments on their own are bad enough, but acting in concert as they do makes them incredibly dangerous.

Several stories coming out this week underscore how bad things are getting. First, there’s the ongoing saga of the ban on ritual slaughter of non-stunned animals, which has now been passed by parliament, which uses the guise of animal welfare to taunt religious Jews and Muslims. Then there was the minister of interior affairs who stated that the multicultural society was finished and would no longer be subsidised, followed by a colleague of his own party saying yesterday that “the fear of many Dutch people for foreigners is justified”, followed by the xenophobes overtaking him on the right by stating that third generation immigrants, the grandchildren of the people who actually immigrate to Holland, are still dirty foreigners and not to be trusted. Meanwhile the first wave of spending cuts have moved effortlessly through parliament, as arts funding is slashed and the public broadcasters see massive budget cuts as well.

It all doesn’t make for a nicer country to live in.

Rightwing hobbies

Published on June 26, 20111 Comment

Total cost of Dutch culture budget v total cost of JSF

So we got ourselves a rightwing minority goverment in the Netherlands a while back, who now rule with support of the racists aka Geert Willders and his “Freedom Party”. Wilders thanks his success by pandering to the worst prejudices of the socalled common man, while the government thanks its succes to pandering to Wilders. Which explains why while the government tries to sell us on how Maturely they are trying to handle the Very Serious Task of getting Holland’s finances back in order in the wake of the bankers’ crisis, the sort of measures they come up with is to slash the culture budget. As the picture on top shows, the total amount of money the government spents each year on culture is roughly 450 million euros: a lot of money, but nothing compared to the 7,6 billion euros it would cost to buy the F-35. So why is that sacrosant when cutting the cultural budget is only penny ante stuff?

Because stopping money being “wasted” on opera, theatre and other “leftwing hobbies” as Wilders put it, is a goal in itself for this government. It keeps Wilders and its voters happy, can be spun as showing how serious the government takes the budget deficits and pisses off the leftwing opposition. Who cares that it doesn’t help achieve its nominal goal as long as white elephants like the F-35 are kept fully funded but does destroy a lot of cultural capital?

Pure pandering. And to add insult to injury, not only are the budgets slashed, the value added tax paided on art and other cultural products will be upped as well, from six to nineteen percent. Except on porn. Because wanking is a rightwing hobby…

Srebrenica: why humantarian intervention isn’t

Published on May 26, 2011

The arrest of Ratko Mladić today has put the Srebrenica massacre back in the spotlight. It was the greatest warcrime in postwar European history and it’s our national shame. Srebrenica is the reason why I stopped believing in humanitarian interventions: here finally there had been a clearcut case, a chance to stand against the same sort of evil we had been liberated from fifty years before and we fucked it up.

In Srebrenica Holland had the opportunity to prevent genocide, but instead we enabled it. For fifty years we’ve grown up with the stories about World War II and the moral choices our parents and grandparents had to make, for fifty years we had known that we would’ve made the right choices, that we would have been part of the resistance, as every book, movie and television series told us we would’ve been. Yet at the first real test, the first chance for us to prevent the same sort of evil we had read so much about, we fucked up. Our commanders liked the Serb leaders much better — so cultured and European — than the not quite civilised Muslim combatants. Our soldiers were glad to trade in their guns and bullet proof vests for a chance to go home and tried to think too hard about the men they were supposed to protect. Our politicians spoke of a tragedy and a crime but were firm and insistent that the Netherlands were not to blame, that “our boys” had “done their best” and that there had been nothing more that they could’ve done. It would’ve been better had we not been there.

Had we not been there to establish a safe haven that wasn’t, had we not been there to give people a false sense of security, all those Bosnian Muslims wouldn’t have been trapped there and some 8,000 men and boys might still be alive today. At the very least they wouldn’t have been trapped unarmed and been handed over to their murders so easily. Our humanitarian intervention only make things worse and since then I’ve always been convinced it almost always will.

More Dutch comics awards

Published on May 19, 2011

flyer for the Benelux Beeldverhalenprijs

I hadn’t heard of the Benelux Beeldverhalen Prijs, but apparantly it’s a competition sponsored by Dutch newspaper NRC Next, the Dutch Fund voor Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds voor Beeldende Kunsten, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst (FBKVB)) who also sponsor the Marten Toonder Award and comics publisher De Vliegende Hollander (at least, they did so last year; couldn’t see if they were involved this year). The five best entries are published in NRC Next this week, with the top three also winning cash prizes of 1,000, 500 and 250 euros respectively. This year there were some 84 entries, down from the 112 last year. The top fifty entries will be exhibited in Art Gallery 37PK in Haarlem.

I found out about this award through a small newsitem on the FBKVB website, which sadly does not list the winners. It’s strange how little I could find online about this year’s award, when the winners are already being serialised, even at NRC Next‘s own site. A missed opportunity.

First page of Spruitjes, bier en leverworst drawn by Jeroen Funke

Compare this with the Jan Hanloprijs, a biannual literary award founded in 1999 in memory of poet and prolific letter writer Jan Hanlo on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, to honour essay writers. This year the Hanloprijs added a media essay category to its two existing ones (for best original essay and best essay collection) “to promote the idea that the qualities of a good essay are not limited to prose” and chose comics as the inaugural medium, thanks to the support of the FBKVB.

According to Michael Minneboo ( Dutch) fortytwo cartoonists entered a comic essay for the award on the theme of “senses”, based around a Jan Hanloo quote stressing the importance of senses other than sight. An anthology of the ten entries the jury liked the best was published in a print run of 500 copies. Which sadly is not available commercially, a shame, as the list of participating creators is quite strong: Bas Köhler, Gerrie Hondius, Albo Helm, Jeroen de Leijer, Sam Peeters, Wouter Gresnigt & Kasper Peters, Milan Hulsing and Margreet de Heer, with the winner being Jeroen Funke (one part of the Lamelos collective), who got 1500 euros for his troubles. He won with his strip “Spruitjes, Bier, Leverworst”.

While both the Benelux Beeldverhalenprijs and the Jan Hanloprijs handed out awards this week, only the latter had the nous to actually announce who the winners were. Or at least to do so in a way that I could easily find out who they were….