[Vaandeldrager]

Goede beschrijving van de meeste recente politiek-maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen in Nederland : Meanwhile, somewhere out in the Empire... by Hans Vogel.

In Nederland zelf zien wij een dergelijke tekst niet verschijnen.

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.