The Netherlands have taken another step toward bringing political opposition under judicial control–another step towards identifying the Rutte gov’t with state power. This change comes by a law that’s mostly been ignored; the bill was a mere five pages, it is named "Law Extending Powers to Ban Legal Persons," it was submitted to the Dutch Senate on June 23, 2021, & entered into effect January 1, 2022. We in the Netherlands are living with a new reality we do not even notice. This new law gives powers to judges to ban & dissolve “legal persons” (associations) whose objectives & activities are contrary to "national security or the national legal order or the democratic rule of law or public authority” or which "instigate violation of human dignity, violence, hate, or discrimination”. The Rutte IV Cabinet, of course, has authority to define “national security” & all the rest, so this law effectively gives it—& the World Economic Forum whose interests it represents—arbitrary power to ban civilian organizations it does not like, a privilege unimaginable in a constitutional state. Humiliation & censorship are not enough: Opposition must be banned outright.
The Rutte IV gov’t, in identifying with state power, seeks to identify liberal-democratic opposition with crime, indeed with terrorism. The bill "extending powers to ban legal persons" is “extending” the category of "prohibited legal persons". This legal category was first established in 2001, after the 9/11 attack, when authorities in the United States & Europe were afraid of invisible enemies wielding catastrophic powers. National security, faced with suicide bombings, was believed to require new police powers to dig up & disband Muslim terrorist networks hiding among ordinary citizens. Civil rights would have to be curtailed, arbitrary power would have to expand to meet the crisis, & privacy would now & then regrettably be violated. 20 years later, the Dutch face no terrorist attacks, no deadly crises to require such police power. Nevertheless, instead of removing the dangerous state power once excused by emergency, the gov’t has created this new law to extend emergency power beyond criminalizing activities themselves—now, they have additionally criminalized the stated objectives of any legal person in which the state decides to take a police interest, by claiming it undermines public order & security.
The Dutch gov’t is in fact building an entire legal system to gain power over society. In addition to the emergency police powers extended through the new “ban legal persons” law, we now also have the complementary "Law on Civil Initiatives" of March 2, 2021, which is aimed at legal persons, organizations, or other partnerships that "promote a culture of lawlessness & lead to the systematic commission of criminal facts, constitute a severe violation of principles considered integral to the constitutional order, or disrupt, or could disrupt Dutch society or parts thereof." The “Law on Civil Initiatives” explicitly does not apply to political parties or church communities (although churches are in principle no longer protected against legal dissolution, given the new state powers legislated in 2001); but these nuances are missing in the “Law on Banning Legal Persons.” These two laws fulfill related purposes in an overarching strategy of prosecuting dissent. The “Law on Civil Initiatives“ covers organizations not directly involved in politics, & empowers the state to prohibit any kind of organization ranging from news outlets to the Hell’s Angels, whereas the “Law on Banning Legal Persons,” with its lack of clear restraints, allows for the more serious problem of dealing with opposition in parliament. The “Law on Civil Initiatives“ is somewhat more precise than the “Law on Banning Legal Persons,” but both presuppose a definition of law & order that (especially over the last two years) has proven as arbitrary & nebulous as that of “public health.“ Under these new laws, anyone who runs afoul of prevailing or convenient definitions is easy prey in court.
The Rutte IV Cabinet’s amassing of unconstitutional powers does not end at public affairs, however–indeed, it does not even begin there. The new legislation regarding legal persons is a courtesy compared to the gov't's endeavors outside of the law. In 2019, the cabinet oversaw the founding of the Regional Information & Expertise Center (RIEC), which you might call an illegal person. It is an unofficial partnership between gov't agencies, the RIEC, not legislated &, paradoxically, therefore untouchable in Parliament or in court. As has long been obvious in our pandemic age, the increasingly dictatorial concern with & power of “information” & “experts” leads to ever-growing administration. The experts in this case, however, are not medics & social science statistical modelers, but gov’t agencies from all departments of the Dutch state. Not the least among these is the ministry of Justice, whose objectives the RIEC (where the Ministry identifies justice with "security") aims to serve, after all. The purpose of this joint RIEC effort is to collect information on citizens’ interactions with different gov’t institutions & freely share it between agencies through elaborate databases, thus keeping close tabs on anyone who might defraud the system for the sake of gain. The affair raises the same concerns as the “vaccine passport” & its expanding legal scope: Today, each citizen is both a patient & a criminal. “Better safe than sorry,” to express the shared mindset in familiar terms. As the RIEC stands to citizens, so do the aforementioned two laws stand to public initiatives: Their purpose is to identify & neutralize “state-undermining” persons, preferably before they have undertaken any undermining.
Administration & punitive powers
The deeper problem, however, is not that of paranoid authorities: The “Law on Banning Legal Persons,” in identifying the aims of civil initiatives as sources of danger, is making a judgment of principle. Where the definition of “state-undermining” activity is already a tendentious matter, the prohibition of substantive goals of legal persons, in following through all implications in the former, is of a different order altogether: The principles & aims of Rutte IV are above any form of public discourse that could question its legitimacy, lest our questions & doubts bear fruit in organizations & actions. That, in the words of our own former health minister Hugo de Jonge, "words matter" is a view that has prevailed for some time. Here, however, we are no longer speaking about controversial statements, but political speeches in Parliament that question the policy & legitimacy of the current gov't. With a mere stroke of a pen, our Cabinet has created an opportunity to shift power from Parliament to the judiciary.
The transformation of politics into administration has been going on for some time both in the US & Europe: The European Union itself, as gleefully described by Luuk van Middelaar, rapidly developed from a trade association into a de facto autonomous policy-making body, where Parliamentary representation is but a formality. “Europeans” owe their new universal digital ID to these people—we ourselves had no say in it. Whether regarding Covid, climate policy, sovereignty, or sexual identity, the West has seen many a sleight of hand like the ones I am reporting on in the 21st c. The gov't’s responsible have increasingly drawn criticism from what in elite circles & public discourse is called "populism" with equal measures of trepidation & disdain.
I expect that “populist“ parties will be the targets of this new state power to outlaw dissent. There are many such voices in Dutch public discourse that oppose the status quo. In the media, alternative broadcasters & publishers have crawled out of the woodworks over the last two years, & have already felt blows here & there. For examples, the Covid-policy skeptic & activist Willem Engel from Viruswaarheid (Virus Truth) is dealing with charges of “instigation of violence against governing authorities” as of the time of this writing. Another example: Blue Tiger Studios, both a news network & book publisher, was branded a terrorist-supporting organization by the NCTV (National Coordinator Terrorism & Safety) in 2020. Co-founder Rypke Zeilmaker has suffered violent police arrests on two different occasions. The number of victims will multiply.
The Weakness of Political Dissent
So far in the Netherlands, the courts have proved much more powerful in stifling dissent than have elections & parties proved able to foster serious political organization, deliberation, & action to secure the consent of the governed to a more democratic way of life, with respect for the citizens rather than the threat of the law. The Dutch Party For Freedom or PVV (currently, 17 seats of 150 of the Dutch House of Representatives) has long been the largest opposition party; politically, it’s a European right-wing party & its existence over the last 15 years should suggest it’s a part of the civil & political life of the country.
Yet its founder & leader, Geert Wilders has been walking in & out of “hate speech” trials for the last decade or so—his spiritual predecessor, Pim Fortuyn was shot in the streets by a mad left-wing animal-rights activist in 2002. Wilders’ most recent case, running since 2014, concluded on the verdict of guilty on one of the two charges: Wilders was declared guilty of “group insult,” but innocent of “instigating discrimination & hatred” on account of his café speech after the 2014 municipal elections in The Hague & Almere. “Do we want more or fewer Moroccans?” went Wilders’ rhetorical question; “trick question,” ruled the Supreme Court. His party is unserious, but Wilders has proven consistent & slippery. It would be unprecedented to move from decades-long legal harassment of public opinion leaders—Wilders’s is the third largest party in Parliament—to banning, but the “Law On Banning Legal Persons” provides useful new powers for such a future trial.
Who will defend political dissent, an essential part of liberal politics, from these new prosecutorial powers? The PVV, unfortunately, is a cockamamie party. Wilders, by no means the most charming or imposing presence in the Dutch Parliament, eventually earned the nickname “Peroxide the Clown,” in reference to his bleached pompadour. He lacks for noteworthy accomplishments, other than surviving two decades’ worth of assassination plots; the liberal majority dismisses him as a demagogue voicing & arousing the prejudices of the uneducated lower classes. His party, accordingly, has a reputation only for inconsequential sideline grumbling, capable at most of insulting certain people now & then, only to petulantly insist on its right to do so. The PVV is large & long-lived, the most prominent & contemptible traits of coalition parties, but it lacks talent & prestige, & therefore lacks a political vision to ground its popular rhetoric criticizing the vision of our new administrative authorities.
For a long time, the PVV seemed to be the full capacity of Dutch nationalism. As with America’s eight years of Obama, the End of History was taken for granted; here too, 2016 saw the country scrambling. Not only did the USA, the spearpoint of progress, falter: In the Netherlands, too, the nationalist right wing reared its ugly head, with the political debut of Thierry Baudet, a handsome & witty young man, well-read, confident, & boldly declaring every doggone thing the liberal Dutch dreaded hearing. Baudet quickly caught the attention of the public with his wing piano, Venus bust, & sophisticated taste in other matters, including architecture. He would quote Hegel, he would allude to Spengler—he boasted the tutelage of the late Sir Roger Scruton. His Forum For Democracy party (FvD) was supposed to become the leadership of an effort to resurrect the West in the Netherlands, effected by well-educated young patriots wishing to reclaim their future from the clutches of globalism.
Where the right wing of the past could be dismissed as “xenophobic,” the establishment would now be countered by the Scrutonian charge of “oikophobia;” debates about immigration & Islam, accordingly, now saw the reintroduction of “Western values“ by a “classically liberal“ & “culturally Christian“ party. With climate policy, feminism, & transgender issues, too, the prevailing understanding & policy were now being condemned more boldly than had hitherto been seen in Parliament. FvD is tech savvy as well: Following the usual villainizing media coverage, the party created its own news channel & social media platform to broadcast its views. Worse yet, it seemed like people were really voting for them when the party had risen to eight seats in 2021.
It is no accident, of course, that the FvD grew in 2021; no other Dutch party decried epidemic policy in stronger terms, from masks to lockdowns to vaccine mandates & adverse events, & all the corruption & conspiracies involved. This earned their MPs frequent muting of the microphone, as well as scolding by the minister of health & various other MPs. Public discourse reached a fever pitch on May 5, 2021, when the Dutch celebrate their liberation from the Nazis in 1945: The FVD published its “freedom poster,” comparing current gov't policy to the German occupation. Baudet himself faced a court case later that year for tweets that compared the QR vaccine pass to the discrimination in the runup towards the Holocaust, & the verdict forced him to delete them & to refrain from ever making the comparison to the persecution of Jews again, on pain of 25,000 Euros per tweet. The settling of the truth & legitimacy of public speeches in court brings us back to the original subject: The Forum for Democracy’s statements on public health policy & gov't corruption (culminating in frequent invocation of “tribunals”) are exactly the sorts of things the “Law On Banning Legal Persons“ can help end.
Another straw on the camel's back was the arrest of a man bearing a torch in the street in front of MP Sigrid Kaag’s home, the D66 party leader (the second largest party, part of the government coalition). The torch incident followed the uncovering of various World Economic Forum documents (by an FvD MP), which implicate Kaag as a major player in Davos acting against Dutch national interest. It was concluded by Christian Union party leader Gert-Jan Segers & Christian Democrat Hugo de Jonge (minister of health at that time) that this otherwise harmless & confused individual has been spurred on by FvD rhetoric on gov't covid policy, corruption, & treason. The media &, accordingly, a significant part of public opinion, agreed. That conservative parties are being accused of hate speech & incitement to violence is in itself nothing new—the trouble for us dissident Dutchmen is that we will soon see the law take the plaintiff’s side & abandon any notion of fair justice.
Enlightenment faltering
The disposition that drives this shift in politics recognizes something true about public speech, or rhetoric: It encourages & inevitably involves conflict, which can turn violent, even unexpectedly. Rhetoric is, of course, essential to any sort of political endeavor, the mutual persuasion involved in authoritative public choices, decisions, & the justification & understanding of the actions that follow. In a democracy, however, public speech is both the means & setting of political competition. Any party that competes is promised a chance to rule, but no safety from constant counterproposals, grumbling, & even accusations.
The premise of our democratic politics comes from the Enlightenment: Private individuals are understood politically as citizens, constantly involved in public affairs they understand as their own through organizations & representation, & all this complicated institutional arrangements is ultimately supposed to be safeguarded, at best, by a constitution appealing to Nature & its God, or, worse comes to worst, by positive authorities appealing to public health. But keeping body & soul together in a human being has proven remarkably difficult. As our bodies are vulnerable to the epidemic, our souls are held to be even more easily corrupted by misinformation, hateful passions, & conspiracy theories that might undermine the state. Meanwhile, the state now understands its job to require reinterpreting our being & perhaps recreating it in terms of race, sexual desires, or health, & finally, into the different official regulations that claim to be the sole protectors of the individual’s survival.
The nebulous “freedoms” of such a creature are deemed selfish & vain by our regulators. They are thoroughly unscientific & inadequate to the urgent task of facing the crisis that the modern individual is born into: Perpetual flight from death. It goes without saying, then, that administrative authorities would seek to limit the individual’s capacity to escape from what they consider the fundamental political project into private freedoms that could undermine it (consider the worldwide ire against promoters of “vaccine hesitancy”). Against our privacy stands the promise of our indestructible public “realm of freedom” at whose gates we are asked, in a mockery of Christianity or Buddhism, to give up our freedom so as to gain it. Only when we can consent to our owning nothing will we be happy. Dissident speech, in promoting organization & self-gov’t to defend ourselves against this unlimited authority to recreate us, emerges as the fundamental act of political conflict or violence—indeed, the greatest of all betrayals.
The Crisis of The Dutch Republic
The Dutch republic was once an impressive, if small, polity, of great importance in the European wars that accompanied modernization, the arrival of liberalism in politics, & the dominance of commercial regimes. Now, it is as nothing. To speak of Dutch affairs in Dutch terms, one could say that in the centuries of our modernity, the General States have overpowered the Provincial States & the stadtholder (the regent who served the feudal lord/king as de facto head of state); economics, now universal, has supplanted (local) politics & war. The Netherlands were built on those three pillars of general, provincial, & monarchical authority. Their tension, with the resulting public debate, gave the incipient Dutch republicanism its character. But Dutch character was not only determined by commerce & republican politics, it also had to do with religion. William “I will maintain” of Orange was not only a fiery warrior-statesmen the people wanted to have as king, however: In the midst of the religious wars & the persecution of the age, the prince’s conversion to Calvinism is inseparable from his other deeds. The conversion of William of Orange, & his efforts to separate the Netherlands from the Catholic monarchy of Charles II of Spain, brought more of Calvinism into the Netherlands, & with it came a sobriety and resignation that profoundly moderated a nation born in & from a revolt.
Moderation should sit comfortably with the tension between different levels of organization that make up Dutch politics, & I can well imagine that many of my readers would wish that the phrase “just act normal” would carry the same weight in their own countries as it does in the Netherlands. However, this political tension has decreased with the relative success of the Netherlands, & the sobriety & resignation have lulled the country into mediocrity, &, with the humiliation of the German occupation, perhaps also nihilism.
Post-War, the Netherlands became a “society of pillars,” a situation already established in the 19th c., when the country was divided over public schooling, whether it was to be ecumenical or confessional. To be a Dutchman in this “society of pillars” was to mind your own business, whether you were a Catholic, Protestant, socialist, or liberal. Each would vote for his party & stay in his lane with respect to all affairs. This uncomfortable equilibrium was shattered in the ‘60s, opening the way to further splintering within Parliament according to unpredictable, unstable versions of liberal, Democrat, Protestant, Catholic, Socialist, Labor, Conservative politics, seemingly promoted or demoted by the whims of the electorate. In practice, the tendency to splinter & the reluctance or inability to organize serious, enduring parties has led to the success of the Liberals, Labor, & Christian Democrats, the largest parties of the last three generations. Their disposition, it turned out, agreed well with that of the true deus ex machina of the ‘60s, the European Union, itself a Dutch initiative in part. The Dutch Republic no longer has a reason to exist, or has lost its spirit, & the situation now is very similar to the origin of the republic, when the excesses of the ecclesiastical & aristocratic authorities were commonplace. Instead of a corrupt Catholic monarchy, we have the habits of mind of a decayed Calvinism helping along an incredibly moralistic & cruel administration. The mysterious divine will that Calvin emphasized is unmasked as an abysmal Fate, a quantifiable science of death that everyone must obey in order to live, & live in an open society. Such a society is undoubtedly a chimera, as is the panic-stricken public discourse it endeavors to control, but it guides elites & dominates political life. What, then, can public speech accomplish in the Netherlands today?
The Dutch must somehow be reacquainted with the poles that make up their politics, first & foremost, the provincial & municipal gov’t’s, which bear most on ordinary people’s lives & are therefore the easiest for people to understand, even in the face of the regime’s ironclad objections against personal freedom. Only once we begin to retreat from the further-alienating private identities & promises of metaverse freedom can we begin to make sense of our own lives, & our public affairs. It is love of life & the question of the virtue that make it worth living—it is possible that the current crisis & the threat of a cruel state will help the Dutch restore politics. As good Dutchmen recoil from the madness of the “new normal,” we may yet catch that precious glimpse of the Nature that, more than any suffering inflicted on us, could allow us to reconsider our old notion, from the Dutch philosopher of democracy, Spinoza, that “experience has shown all types of State that can be conceived.”