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219 years ago today…
 
“The far right can’t take away our hopes and memories. Culture is our weapon” writes Milo Rau in the Guardian:
Because all three of the values underpinning the revolution – liberty, fraternity and equality – are now disappearing into thin air in Europe, the birthplace of democracy.
And the political changes seem irreversible: In seven European democracies, far-right parties have entered government, and in several more states, including France, they are pushing at the gates of power. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and, of course, Russia, have quasi-autocratic governments. Last Sunday the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), a party that even the conservative media describe as “radical rightwing”, won a general election for the first time. They campaigned on the slogan “Fortress Austria”, in effect advocating an ethnically and culturally cleansed country. The term is reminiscent of “Fortress Europe” – a phrase favoured by Goebbels.
The FPÖ manifesto calls for “two genders” to be enshrined in the constitution, “remigration” to be radically implemented and for the creation of a two-tier society in which only “real” Austrians are entitled to social benefits. In the words of the FPÖ, it wants to “gain full power over government, space and people”.
“Ethnically cleansed” … “Goebbels” … “full power over government, space and people” … With the mad courage of despair, in the next sentence Mr Rau gets down to specifics about what form this onrushing horror will take:
In the area of cultural policy, it wants to follow the example of neighbouring Hungary and Slovakia and cut public subsidies for “woke events”, such as the Eurovision song contest
I wasn’t expecting that.
and the Vienna festival, which I am the director of.
Ah, now I understand.
In the eyes of the FPÖ, “woke” is presumably anything that is not brass band music, operetta or Germanic-pop schlager music.
In doing so, it is politicising a trend that has been apparent throughout Europe for many years: I remember in 2019, when I was still artistic director of the NTGent in Belgium, we demonstrated against the Flemish region’s budget cuts. The process of allocating subsidies was akin to distributing scarce food after a natural disaster: institutions and independent companies were thrown together into a pool that had far too little money at its disposal.
In neoliberal fashion, the actual problem – namely, insufficient subsidies for the arts – was translated into a competitive conflict.
From what I have read about the FPÖ, it does seem that the party’s “far right” label has more substance behind it than is usual, but the party “cutting cultural budgets on the grounds that they are not economically viable” does not contribute to my having that opinion. Mr Rau seems to think that that the disbursement of government subsidies being a political matter, taxpayer money being treated as a finite resource, and subsidy-funded arts organisations actually having to compete with each other all constitute outrages against the natural order.
The other day I was having a congenial chat with a landlord with a portfolio of ten properties in the Czech Republic. I asked him about the local rental market and he mentioned he had just rented an apartment to a middle class Jewish family from Dublin. They had relocated to Prague permanently because “Jewish people have no future in Ireland.”
I have rarely felt so horrified by a casual remark.
Shocking news from today’s Sunday Telegraph:
Dutch job disease: how labour rights have undermined the Netherlands
Sacking an employee in the Netherlands is no easy feat.
Ask many managers and they will explain to you the nuisance of having to apply to the courts to obtain a “dismissal permit” for an underperforming employee.
Even if a worker has agreed to leave, they then have a two-week cooling-off period to possibly change their mind.
The process is so arduous that the Dutch are deemed by the OECD to have one of the strictest worker protection regimes in the developed world.
This might sound unambiguously progressive for the Netherlands, and a potential inspiration for Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner as she seeks to enhance workers’ rights in the UK.
However, for plenty of workers, the Dutch system has backfired.
Underpinning the problem is the fact that many bosses are increasingly reluctant to hire workers given the difficulties they later encounter when trying to sack them.
The result is that more than one quarter of Dutch workers are employed only on temporary contracts, far more than any other rich country.
I have just returned from a holiday in Switzerland, where I often go to do deplorable things. While visiting a country, I try to keep an eye on which news stories are trending there. The almighty algorithm has observed my interest in things Swiss and even after my return keeps sending stories from the “swissinfo.ch” website my way. I am sure you can guess what it was about the following story that struck me as odd:
Swiss colonial exploitation highlighted by National Museum
Switzerland’s colonial history is the focus of an exhibition at the National Museum in Zurich. Based on new research, it looks at the country’s role in colonialism and slavery, and considers its legacy today.
If it were not for the way that every museum in the Western world has scrubbed out and re-written the labels on its displays to be “anti-colonialist”, I might consider this exhibition to be a welcome corrective. The Swiss are an admirable people, but they do have a slight tendency to think that their neutrality and their benign absence from the indexes of history books are entirely the results of virtue rather than geography. As the exhibition points out, many Swiss were happy to profit from slavery. Then I read further:
It [the exhibition] tells the story of businessmen who took part in the transatlantic slave trade or made their fortunes trading in colonial commodities and exploiting enslaved populations. In particular, the exhibition presents the whips and handcuffs used on slaves on coffee and cocoa plantations in Ghana, which enabled Swiss businessmen to make their fortunes.
It also tells the story of people who traveled the globe as missionaries or left Switzerland to found settlements and exploit territories considered uninhabited.
Why are traders in colonial commodities, missionaries and migrants lumped in with slavers, as if trading with other peoples, trying to persuade them to believe in the same things you do, or moving to a place you thought was uninhabited were evils in themselves?
It looks to me as if this exhibition is less about telling the stories of the forgotten victims of Swiss oppressors than about classifying the Swiss as an oppressor people, or, to be more exact, about making sure the Swiss know that little things like never having had any colonies are not enough to acquit them of being members of a colonialist race.
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Related post: “N star star star star, not N star star star star star”.
I recently purchased a train ticket online for a trip wholly within Sweden from Swedish Railways, SJ. The terms and conditions came in an English version, and I note the following:
‘Terms and conditions of purchase and travel
The ticket is non-transferable. On the journey, you need to show a valid ID document (passport, Nordic driving license or ID card, national ID card from an EU country or the Migration Agency’s LMA card that shows that you are an asylum seeker).
The covering email also states:
‘If you can’t show the ticket digitally, you can print it and take it with you on the journey. It’s not possible to print at the train companies’ service points.
The tickets are personal and only valid together with an ID document.
Have a nice journey!
SJ’
So in Sweden, you can become a fare dodger (i.e. a criminal) if you don’t have some form of State ID on you even if you are using a train ticket that you have paid for in full.
How long before our exciting new government finds this a useful way to limit movements, although some might think that in the UK, if you do have a passport, as a regular citizen, you soon won’t be allowed on a train in case you go somewhere nice or go to meet people of a like mind. Either way, it is a sinister development.
I have read that in the days when newspapers still used metal type, the compositors used to keep commonly used headlines ready-formed. The Bloomberg headline below would require only the substitution of the appropriate country name to work for anywhere in the world in any decade since governments came to vex mankind:
How Rent Controls Are Deepening the Dutch Housing Crisis
A law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating an apartment shortage.
Two years ago, Nine Moraal and her two children moved into a one-bedroom flat near the Dutch city of Utrecht, a comfortable spot close to family and friends. Although she had only a two-year lease, she expected to be able to extend it and stay until she could get one of the Netherlands’ many rent-controlled apartments.
But last spring, her landlord told her she’d have to move out in November, because renting the flat was no longer profitable. Despite “frantic efforts on social media, phone calls, visits to realtors and housing agencies,” the 33-year-old educator says she hasn’t found anything. “The cost isn’t the problem, but a real shortage of housing is.”
Moraal is among the growing number of Dutch people struggling to find a rental property after a new law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating a housing shortage. Aiming to protect low-income tenants, the government in July imposed rent controls on thousands of homes, introducing a system of rating properties based on factors such as condition, size and energy efficiency. The Affordable Rent Act introduced rent controls on 300,000 units, moving them out of the unregulated market.
[…]
ASR Nederland NV, which owns about 15,000 apartments across the country, has called on the government to rethink the measure. Almost its entire portfolio was shifted into the regulated segment on July 1, spurring it to abandon plans to purchase more rental properties, says Jos Baeten, ASR’s chief executive officer. “There are other investment categories that are more appropriate,” he says.
One provision of the law bars short-term leases, instead requiring all contracts to be open-ended. Some in the industry suggest the change will encourage landlords to prioritize foreigners, who are more likely to move away after a few years, giving owners more flexibility.
Emphasis added. That’ll go down well with the PVV, currently the largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives.
I came across this Substack essay by someone called Mick Ryan about the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk region of Russia, a move that seems to have taken Moscow completely by surprise:
This Ukrainian operation represents a very significant effort on the part of the Ukrainians to reset the status quo in the war, and change narratives about Ukraine prospects in this war.
It is the kind of strategic risk-taking that I don’t think is well understood in many Western capitals anymore. For nearly two generations now, Western nations have been able to cut military spending. None of them have faced existential threats, even though the War on Terror did require a significant response for more than a decade after 9/11.
The slow decision-making cycles in Western military and political circles, and in military procurement, is indicative of institutions that no longer understand the imperative to act quickly and decisively while taking major risks.
This is not the case for the Ukrainians. They have faced an existential threat since February 2022 (and more broadly, for the entirety of their existence as a people) and have a very different political and military decision-making calculus than those of their supporters. A nation and a people who face an existential risk from their neighbour tend to think differently from those who do not.
“Flashback: Harris fumed at Americans for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ before illegal migrants got protections”, Fox News reports:
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Speakers pushed for the passage of the Dream Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, NBC News reported.
Here is the video and here is the 2017 NBC article to which the article refers.
This clip has got a lot of play because it shows Kamala Harris as a purse-lipped woke puritan. Fair enough, she is one. Even if one completely accepted her point of view that passing the DREAM1 Act was a desirable objective in 2017, why should that not having been done be the thing that made it outrageous for Americans to wish each other “Merry Christmas” until it was done? There were plenty of worse things going on in the world in 2017: wars, famines, natural catastrophes, terrorism, poverty, crime. Why were these miseries not enough to prompt the curtailment of Christmas greetings until they were solved? Nor were these evils limited to the year 2017. So far as I know the DREAM Act has not been passed to this day. So we must assume Kamala Harris has now personally abstained from “speaking Merry Christmas” for six years and seven months and is still saying “How dare you” to anyone else who does it.
Yet in her defence, gestures of self-abnegation as a demonstration of commitment such as Harris made have a long history. In 1601, during the Dutch Revolt, Archduke Albert of Austria was laying siege to Ostend. His wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, declared that she would not change her shift until the city fell2. Since that did not happen until September 1604, her underwear got a bit grubby, giving rise to the colour term “Isabelline”.
Now that’s what I call commitment. If she wants to be taken seriously, Kamala Harris needs to follow the example of Isabella and urge her followers to do likewise.
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1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
2This story has been fact-checked to the standard expected of the Guardian or the New York Times.
In the end, what I would offer to anyone on either side of the Atlantic who thinks a new Trump administration would yeet the USA out of NATO on a whim is this; get out more. Actually talk to people on the natsec right. Get out of your intellectually onanistic terrariums. And for the sake of your larger credibility and sanity – do not think the America you read about in the NYT/WaPo and their derivatives, especially in an election year, is a reflection of the full reality.
Read broadly. Seek out a contrary opinion. Have reasonable discussions of substance. Don’t assume anyone who disagrees with you on policy is evil and the absolute worst version of their enemies’ caricature.
In the end, we all want the same thing, don’t we? Keep America in, the Russia out, and France & Germany down.
– CDR Salamander
The Sage of Kettering and I have been on another trip, this time to Copenhagen, obliging the self-loathing poster of that poster, with flits over the Øresund to Malmö and to Helsingborg in Sweden. On landing in Copenhagen’s pleasant airport, we immediately leave Denmark for Sweden by train, taking in the well-known bridge, onto which we emerge after a few minutes in a tunnel. It is an impressive piece of engineering. Bizarrely, well, to anyone from the UK, it was finished in time and within budget despite them finding over 20 WW2 bombs. At our first stop just over the bridge, the sign announces a check by the Swedish border guard, but nothing materialises.
We then emerge into central Malmö late lunchtime. It is all rather pleasant, none of this violence one hears about. Malmö, soon to host the Eurovision Song Contest, is a fine enough city, thinking back, reminiscent of Liverpool in some ways but without the decay seen today. There are many fine buildings, testament to a prosperous late 19th century.
We have a lunch of meatballs and beer at Gustav Adolphus square, outside in April,
before going to pay our respects at the Raoul Wallenberg park.
On the way back, we see a group of four police officers challenge some youths in the middle of a square.
The architecture here is mainly modern, but with lots of little gems.
In the Old Town core (Gamla Stan) it certainly has a nice feel to it.
→ Continue reading: An Øresund odyssey
Last night came this, “National Conservatism Conference: Police told to shut down right-wing Brussels event”
Brussels police were ordered to shut down a conference for right-wing politicians, including Brexiteer Nigel Farage and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, on Tuesday.
People were stopped from entering the National Conservatism Conference a few hours after it began, organisers said – although it continued for those inside.
The local mayor said he issued the order to ensure public security.
Organisers of the conference said they “overcame attempts to silence” them.
They said they plan to continue with the conference on Wednesday, writing: “See you again tomorrow!” on X, formerly Twitter.
The BBC article continued,
The move to shut down the conference was also criticised by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who called it “unacceptable”.
“Banning political meetings is unconstitutional. Full stop,” Mr De Croo wrote on X.
Referring to the fact that it was the local mayor, Emir Kir, who opposed the conference, Mr De Croo said that while municipal autonomy was a cornerstone of Belgium’s democracy, it could “never overrule the Belgian constitution guaranteeing the freedom of speech”.
Except it just did. In a discussion about this story on Reddit UK Politics, a commenter called “suiluhthrown78” offered some background:
The local mayor Emir Kir who did this has quite a history, Tower hamlets style politics is nothing compared to whats been brewing in Belgium, France etc.
“Emir Kir was considered a party vote machine. High scores which can be explained by threats and intimidation, the sending of targeted letters and the distribution of leaflets in Turkish with adapted content and oriented, sometimes going so far as to shake up the other candidates on its own list and electoral expenses that are not always transparent”
This morning comes this, as reported by the Guardian: “Ursula von der Leyen can run, but can she also hide?”
Ursula von der Leyen became president of the European Commission in a backroom deal in 2019 without facing Europe’s voters. Now she is running for re-election almost without campaigning. The former German defence minister, 65, was chosen unopposed last month as lead candidate of the centre-right European People’s party for the European parliament elections on 6-9 June, although she does not plan to take a seat in the EU legislature. Since then, she has shunned media questioning as far as possible, and is refusing to commit to debating the other candidates in public.
She has not confirmed that she will show up for the high-profile Maastricht debate on 29 April, according to the organisers, and political sources say a major European newspaper had to drop plans to stage its own debate among the Spitzenkandidaten, or lead candidates, because von der Leyen would not pledge to attend.
Frustrated opponents are starting to taunt her as the invisible candidate. “Ursula von der Leyen is claiming to defend European democracy, yet she has refused to run in the European parliament elections, and has failed to clarify whether she will participate in any of the election debates,” Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, co-lead candidate of the Greens, said last week.
Her coyness is at least partly due to a political cronyism scandal that is dogging her path to a second coronation. Von der Leyen is avoiding questioning about her decision to appoint fellow German Christian Democrat MEP Markus Pieper as the EU commission’s first envoy for small and medium-sized enterprises, even though he was reportedly rated below two female contenders for the highly paid role by an independent selection committee.
In a non-binding amendment adopted by 382 votes to 144, the European parliament called last week for the controversial appointment, first revealed in February by two investigative journalists, to be rescinded and the contest run again.
The cronyism scandal has been bubbling away for some time, but I was pleased to see the Guardian reporting it in such uncompromising terms.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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