Saturday was quite a day for carousing, probably the year’s peak, at least for Amsterdam, for while the yearly Gay Pride Canal Parade which I treated in my previous post was proceeding, something called Dance Valley was going on as well – also yearly, consisting of tens of thousands congregating in an area of farmland called Spaarnewoude, just west of Amsterdam, to spend the day gyrating to electronic music coming out of huge speakers.

“Nothing really wrong with that,” you might say – and some of you might even add “. . . especially if that diverted some impressionable youth from otherwise spending their Saturday watching the homosexuals do their thing on Amsterdam’s canals!” True enough, were it not for one particular “impressionable youth” so diverted: our very own Prime Minister, Mark Rutte! The Algemeen Dagblad has the story: Mark Rutte dances along at Dance Valley, complete with pictures and even a brief video of the PM swaying along with the crowd. (I would embed it here, but it’s not all that interesting.) He’s the dude with the shades and the open-necked white shirt, who apparently likes to pose with chicks (with shades). Well, he is only 44, but he heads the VVD, the right-wing businessman’s party, so you’d think he would at least wear a tie!

For the sake of any of you who might gain satisfaction anew from the fact, let me repeat here my observation from that earlier post that the Canal Parade (and therefore Dance Valley, only about 15km to the west) had to deal with repeated interruptions of heavy rains and thunder/lightning. Also, from the AD article, Rutte has attended Dance Valley before, as recently as 2008, when he lost his telephone and so had his friends treated to rude SMS messages from same. But he wasn’t Netherlands head-of-government then.

                          

Here in the Netherlands we can only sympathize and send assistance, financial and otherwise (which I understand we’ve done to a great degree). However, something similar might very well be in store for us soon, according to today’s article in the Algemeen Dagblad with the pleasing title Tsunami wipes out Netherlands population in 2012. That at least is the message of doom being put forward by the “Watchers of the Night,” a religious group out in the provinces who are already preparing for catastrophe by making themselves economically self-sufficient, laying in substantial stores of food and water.

What is their reasoning? you may very well ask. Well, it seems to involve some combination of Revelations, Nostradamus, and that Mayan thing you might have heard of that predicted doom for the planet in 2012, and they are by no means the only ones thinking along these lines. Many of this ilk see Japan’s earthquake/tsunami together with the widespread Middle East unrest as a sure sign that the prophecies are correct and there will be even worse to come next year. Even for the Netherlands.

                          

The “hook” to Van der Laan’s speech, as it were, was the fact that it has now been 65 years since the end of the war – that’s the standard retirement age, at least within Europe, so why don’t we finally put WWII out to retirement as well? With this, the ex-politician was giving voice to what many in Europe surely have always thought in secret about the War (especially those too young to have lived through it): for how long will we have to keep paying respect, keep letting it influence our lives? It’s a very pertinent question, especially when applied to Germany and the issue of when, if ever, the guilt for what that nation perpetrated will finally be washed away and made irrelevant through the eroding effect of all the passing years.

But forget that: Van der Laan is a Dutch ex-politician, not German, and he was speaking at a ceremony held in one of the two Dutch capitals. So his argument about putting WWII “out to pension” is along Dutch lines, and so not about guilt but just about the fact that it still comes up as a subject so much in public discussions. His implication is that it’s just not very relevant anymore for most public dialogue, maybe even harmful (e.g. calling people “Nazis”); his implication might even be that he agrees with the roughly 1-in-5 of the Dutch who believe that Liberation/Remembrance Days should be celebrated once every five years, not every year.

Interestingly, there was another explicit angle to Van der Laan’s speech which even points to some degree in a contradictory way, for he called at the same time for more proper research to be done on the War. OK: So the common, uninformed people should talk about the War less, while researchers should look into it more. In fact, one reason he offered for upping that research effort was to revise any idea that Dutch behavior under occupation could be characterized as a slappe houding, i.e. spineless. Sure, the Dutch were the European champions – other than Germany itself – in ensuring that their Jews were delivered to the Nazi gas chambers. (About 75% of Dutch Jews met this fate; that particular number, however, is nowhere to be seen in the AD article nor, one supposes, in Van der Laan’s speech itself.) But they had excuses: it was more difficult for Dutch Jews to make their way to lands where they would be safe; the Netherlands simply had more policemen employed than, for example, Belgium, and these participated in the German Jew round-ups while those in Belgium did not.

Are you confused here as I am? That first excuse (harder to get elsewhere to safety) sounds somewhat reasonable (but applies just as much to Belgium), but the second one about the policemen does not. Anyway, “[o]ur parents and grandparents were just as sturdy/robust [NL: flink] as those in other lands,” is Van der Laan’s conclusion. Indeed, his own parents were apparently active in the Dutch Resistance; but otherwise I do think he is trying to put an artificial gloss on the whole WWII situation. Again, the number is 75%, Mr. Van der Laan. Still, you’re probably right when it comes to your two non-polemical proposals: it is likely time to push WWII back further into history when it comes to public observance, but let’s do have some more historical investigation as well. I wager that that 75% figure will still stand up to that pretty well.

                          

But a new piece from the Dutch Algemeen Dagblad (Thousands of arrests for Expo Shanghai) brings an altogether new and sinister tinge to this. It’s not just those arrests, totalling 6,042 from the massive police-sweeps conducted so far, and said to be for the offences of “theft, gambling, prostitution, sales of pornographic materials, drug trafficking, and swindling practices.” It’s also the bodyscan machines that the authorities plan to place at each of the 870 entrances to the Shanghai metro while the Expo is going on (1 May through 31 October) – and they’ll be looking not just for weapons but for anything they don’t happen to want people to have. And then there’s the security guards that will be riding in all the buses for which those Sichuan sweeties will have sold you a ticket.

He doesn’t live there anymore, but when he did James Fallows of the Atlantic painted a convincing picture of a Middle Kingdom that, far from being some monolith state of worker-ants bent on world domination, was actually still rather poor, somewhat diverse rather than uniform, and very messy in daily life as people there actually had to live it. Still, this “Chinese Treatment” stuff also convinces me – together with their infamous Internet “Chinese Wall” – that the Communist Party authorities over there are hell-bent to recreate George Orwell’s Oceania.

                          

How instructive? First of all, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen in a place like Sweden, due to the much stricter gun-control there, but mainly because of what people assume is a more non-violent culture that doesn’t lend itself to that sort of thing. (Although one shouldn’t forget how Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was gunned down on a Stockholm street back in 1986, in a murder that is unsolved to this day.) Secondly, the authorities did manage to track the proto-perpetrator down – even behind the veil of supposed Internet anonymity – and detain him before he could actually perpetrate. What does this say about how genuine this supposed “anonymity” on the Internet actually is – and how genuine should it ultimately be allowed to be, when lives are on the line? Thirdly: Were lives truly on the line? How can anyone tell whether the suspect really meant to do what he declared he intended to do? That must still be unsure – you commit a crime only by doing it, not by only thinking it or even announcing it. (The latter probably constitutes a crime in itself, but of a different sort and one calling for nowhere near as much punishment as actually killing.)

Anyway: in the final analysis we seem to have here in Sweden one pole of a spectrum whose other pole is Seung-Hui Cho and 32 people shot at Virginia Tech. Where do you, and the society where you live, want to be on that spectrum? “At the pole of the Swedish incident that was prevented in time” may not truly be the answer, given the injury to privacy rights that was an important part of that episode.

                          

That’s just the problem: Porsches do “gulp,” they don’t just “slurp.” But up to very recently no one really cared about what sort of MPG a Porsche would get – if you had to worry about that, then you certainly could not afford the car in the first place. In these energy-conscious times, however, that’s not allowed anymore: everyone has to worry about MPG, says the US government, and that includes Porsche. Or eventually it will, at least, for the American authorities did grant Porsche an exception to the requirement put out last year that all autos sold in the US meet minimum MPG requirements – that in exchange for collecting from the German company a couple hundred dollars as a “fine” for every such car that is presently sold.

But that’s a temporary exception, and it expires in 2016. For Porsche cars to meet the requirement then, the article reports, they would have to achieve an average 10% improvement in MPG each year in-between. Yes, hybrid Porsches are on the way, but not in time for 2016. And that’s when that little “fine” presently being collected balloons up to amounts that can reach $37,500 per vehicle sold.

                          

One way you can tell this is truly a “big story” (if ipso facto is not itself sufficient for your reasoning process) is that the weekend is not even over, yet reports of repercussions are already coming in. Here’s a piece from Trouw reporting how the governor of Uruzgan (the province in southern Afghanistan where most of the Dutch combat troops are), Asadullah Hamdam, is already getting worried and has called upon the Dutch government to change its mind. On the other hand, Afghan General Juma Gul Himat, chief of police there, says he’s willing to live with a Dutch withdrawal – for a price. He wants better training, better air support, faster economic development, and better equipment: mine-detectors, helicopters. (Ah, mon cher général – what part of “We’re outta here!” don’t you understand?)

The second half of the Trouw article deals with the issue – also covered here in the Algemeen Dagblad – of whether the Australian troops there in Afghanistan could maybe take over for the departing Dutch. Short answer: they can’t, or at least they won’t. That much the Australian foreign minister, Stephen Smith, has made clear. The Aussies do have around 1,550 troops there in Uruzgan also, with no date fixed for them to leave (although the AD article does mention that that country’s minister of defense, John Faulkner, has already expressed the wish that they be out of there soon), but they’ve got their hands full now with the reconstruction and training activities they’ve already been assigned, thank you very much indeed, mate.

But what also caught my eye was this brief piece by Tobias Müller in the the Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung over Wouter Bos, leader of the PvdA party which broke the present coalition government by, in effect, walking out of it. (All PvdA cabinet members resigned their positions.) The title of Müller’s piece translates (roughly) as “Explosive-meister of the coalition,” a reference to the blame being ascribed to Bos and his PvdA for blowing it up. But, as he astutely notes, that is mostly what Bos’ political opponents – most prominently, the politicians of the CDA and CU – want everyone to believe. An alternate view, which probably is gaining more currency, is that of Bos being the only one around willing to stick to his principles in demanding that the promised and planned end to Dutch involvement in Afghanistan go through – “showing backbone at any price,” as Müller phrases it in his article’s lede. As the author notes, Bos has done so many a time before, although usually in connection with selling something to the members of his leftist Labor Party that they didn’t really want to go for, e.g. abandoning the demand for a national referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, raising the retirement age, weakening workers’ protection against being laid off. Granted, those last two are still just proposals for discussion – but at least they are open for discussion.

The point is that it is this reputation for being a principled politician, not just out to be in the government at any price, which could well stand Wouter Bos in good stead in the campaigning-season about to open for May’s general election. (For what it’s worth – the PvdA and Wouter Bos are hardly the personal electoral preferences of this blogger.)

                          

For instance: Brazil is another country ready to assist the Haitians in their hour of need, as you would expect. But in Brazil’s case it is the Ministry of Defense that is taking the lead, as the Dutch newspaper Trouw reports: Brazil sends weapons to Haiti. Weapons? For sure: because people are getting so desperate there by this point that there is the very real threat of a complete break-down of public order, so the place stands sorely in need of some guns that shoot rubber bullets, and other crowd-control armaments.

We can see that from yet another Dutch report, this time from the Algemeen Dagblad: Dutch [team] break off rescue-attempt after gunshots. A Dutch “rescue-brigade” of four ten-man teams (and their dogs) specialized in finding and rescuing people from rubble is finally in Port-au-Prince, but they had to stop their first efforts to rescue people under a collapsed bank after gunfire came ever-closer, and now coordinate with local UN officials for an armed escort. And by the way, it’s a Brazilian who is in command of all UN troops in the country, many of which are Brazilian.

Then there is a rather controversial opinion piece placed today in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique: Are blacks incapable? It’s quite interesting that I can’t find the author’s name anywhere on that webpage, although it does seem he is of African origin himself, as he writes of his “brothers of color” and how they are sure to let him know how they don’t like what he is saying. His lede is brief: “Haitians’ liberty has served for nothing but bringing forth tyrannical regimes.” The situation there is catastrophic now – but it was catastrophic even before the earthquake struck. Much the same applies to the countries of Africa, he writes, still trapped in backwardness and poverty, as they have been for decades since the departure of the colonial authorities. (Also, their own silence now when it comes to offering help of their own to Haiti has been deafening.) The mysterious editorialist attributes this state-of-affairs to black culture, for while all human beings have the same capacity for intelligence, the more “emotional” black outlook on life looks always for a strongman to take charge, and ultimately does not care about the corruption and elites-creation that must ensue. As a result, “we must have the courage to affirm that our culture does not favor [economic] development, it is indeed antagonistic to development.”

A low blow during Haiti’s time of Calvary? Or strong words whose uttering is made all-the-more necessary by the emergency? It does seem that Haiti is fated to be a ward of the US and/or the international community, a basket-case in state form, for quite a long time to come. Anyway, it looks like La Libre does not do comments, so I don’t know how this guy’s “brothers of color” are supposed to check in with their anticipated objections. As for you, dear readers, you’re welcome to do so here by e-mail as always, and perhaps then I could pass along any suitable comments to La Libre.

                          

Still, I just couldn’t help myself, not when the answer is quite clearly “No!” for Chen Kechai, a Chinese man written about in a brief profile in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (“Snow-grave for a cool Chinese”). Go ahead and click through: there are three photos as well, featuring Mr. Chen rather extremely under-dressed both for the cold Chinese countryside around him (said to be -10ºC = 14ºF) and the activities in which he is engaging – burying himself in the snow, pouring cold water on his head, that kind of thing. It says here that he has been indulging in these antics since 1989.

                          

But no, Hitler is a meme that will just not disappear (especially, I suspect, because it is in the public domain, so you don’t have to pay anyone any royalties to bring it up). I’ll just briefly mention here the ridiculous “Obama/Nancy Pelosi-as-Hitler” theme turning up lately, such as at last weekend’s “Tea Party” rally in Washington, DC. Then there is that German AIDS awareness ad you might have heard about recently, depicting a young woman having sex with Hitler and various other historical dictators. (After all, AIDS – like Hitler & Stalin et al. – “is a mass-murderer.”)

Now the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad brings us the latest (by way of the Italian Corriere della Sera). A French tourist browsing in an Italian supermarket (namely Carrefour, headquartered in France) was shocked to find wine being sold in bottles bearing the likenesses of Hitler and Mussolini – and, for that matter, with various fascist slogans inscribed on the labels as well! This particular tourist happened to be of Jewish extraction; she immediately complained to store management, with the result that Carrefour soon removed from its shelves all such bottles. The article adds, however, that other wine bottles remain that are decorated with images of Pope John Paul II, Che Guevara, and Bob Marley. They sell fairly well.