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July 8, 2023

The Dutch coalition government just collapsed

By Andrea Widburg

It didn’t get much play in the American press, but something significant happened in Holland: The Dutch coalition government collapsed. This is the same government that sought to seize 30% of Holland’s farms in the name of decreasing “nitrogen” and slowing “climate change.” The opposition to destroying Holland’s agricultural sector was a significant factor in Holland’s March elections and is an ongoing problem, but outlets such as the AP and the New York Times want everyone to know that anti-immigrant right-wingers are the sole problem in Holland.

Last summer, people began to be aware of something very peculiar going on in the Netherlands: The government was waging war against farmers. Holland’s farmland is one of the great wonders of the world, for the industrious Dutch, over the centuries, laboriously created this land from what was once salt water from the Atlantic Ocean and Zuiderzee. This led Holland to become the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural food products. It is, in other words, one of the bulwarks against world famine.

Holland’s gift to the world didn’t matter to a government invested in the climate change fraud. It announced that the country had to reduce its nitrogen output by 30-70% to comply with EU dictates. This would require confiscating up to 30% of Holland’s farms, especially the ones with livestock. Adding insult to injury, the Dutch government planned to use the confiscated land for “asylum seekers” (i.e., illegal immigrants).

Image: Dutch farmers protest the government. Twitter screen grab.

The Dutch farmers responded to this plan with massive protests. In March, enough Dutch voters sided with the farmers to make the farmer’s newly created political party, the Boer-Burger Beweging (“BBB”), the largest single party in the Dutch Parliament. Nevertheless, the weirdness of the multi-party Parliamentary systems that dominate in Europe meant that the coalition of leftist parties was still sufficient to create a completely dysfunctional coalition of conservatives, farmers, climate changistas, and socialists.

Inevitably, the coalition fell apart (and this is the AP’s version):

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte visited the king Saturday to hand in the resignation of his four-party coalition, setting the deeply divided Netherlands on track for a general election later this year.

[snip]

The vexed issue of reining in migration that has troubled countries across Europe for years was the final stumbling block that brought down Rutte's government Friday night, exposing the deep ideological differences between the four parties that made up the uneasy coalition.

Rutte was trying to crack down on illegal immigration, which offended the left side of the coalition. However, that’s only part of the story because, over the past few weeks, the same government was still waging war on the farmers in the name of “climate change”:

The Hague, the seat of the Dutch government, declared a state of emergency, or “noodbevel” which would be more correctly translated as an emergency order, to prevent farmers from driving their tractors into the city to protest the government’s mandatory fertilizer reduction targets.

The organisers of Thursday’s protest, the Farmers Defence Force, said the state of emergency was a way to quash their democratic rights and freedom of assembly.

Outlets such as the New York Times are struggling to come to terms with what’s happening in the Netherlands. (After all, just last year, a conservative won the election in Italy.) According to the Times, this is all about those helpless refugees and the right wing’s refusal to accept them:

Recently empowered far-right parties have dominated the narrative on migration, seizing on growing public fears about national identity, and Mr. Rutte’s insistence on an unusual, tough policy seemed aimed at preventing just that, analysts said.

And that deeper issue is playing out against the backdrop of a cost-of-living crisis, insecurity stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a growing number of asylum seekers and migrant tragedies at E.U. borders.

The remainder of the article focuses on immigration into Europe—which we should all be clear means Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East who have values decidedly at odds with the long Dutch tradition of religious and social liberalism.

The article doesn’t have a single word in it about the government’s plan to seize farmland and turn it over to refugees. Given the BBB’s success in the March election, this effort to paint the Dutch government’s collapse solely as the result of right-wing racism is interesting, to say the least.

Reading the Times always reminds me that, at law, fraud isn’t always a matter of affirmative misrepresentations. Sometimes it’s also the result of intentional omissions. I’m not accusing the Times of fraud, of course; I’m just saying that editorial decisions mean that the readers don’t always get the whole picture.

 

 

 

 

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