(political interruption - irregularly scheduled blogging will resume shortly)
When I started my new blog, I wanted to stay away from politics. It’s been done and it’s been done better. I wanted to write about things that are not in the news, things that aren’t mentioned elsewhere. I wanted to try to be original. Unfortunately, they don’t let you. After writing a post in which I compared the Soviet and American space programmes, this has suddenly become an “anti-American” blog. So maybe I should explain a bit more about where I stand exactly.
The best way to tell where you stand is the way you vote. The first time I voted, I voted D’66. At that time the first purple cabinet could be formed and I thought that would be a good thing. The purple cabinet was a coalition between the liberals (VVD) and socialists (PvdA) made possible by a new, now big enough central party (D’66). After WWII, the christian-democrats had dominated the political landscape. Being the most central party, no one could get around them when forming a coalition. They ruled this country for 50 years. The first purple cabinet changed all that. D’66 is more or less the opposite of the christian-democrats. They are also in the middle of the political landscape, but apart from that are quite different. They are far more progressive when it comes to moral issues like gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia. They also have an agenda of democratic reform, like elected mayors and referendums. At one point they called themselves ‘social-liberals’, but that didn’t stick. I have voted for them ever since, because they have taken some serious hits and I didn’t want them to disappear. They have disappointed me recently by making the current government possible. Originally, the big winners of the last elections were the socialists and christian-democrats. But they failed to form a coalition. Then the christian-democrats turned to the liberals and D’66 to form the current government. I think they shouldn’t have lent themselves to that. I think they should have sent Balkenende (christian-democrats) back to Bos (socialists) because that’s the coalition the people voted for. D’66: it’s the party for nice intellectual people who don’t know how to play the game of politics. Of course, no post about Dutch politics is complete without the mention of the phenomenon Pim Fortuyn. Some of his ideas were good, most were badly thought through. I especially disliked the way he rode the wave of cynical and racist underbelly feelings present in society at that time. The way he played the media was brilliant, however. He had real charisma. Where a right-wing phenomenon like Berlusconi fails, he would have succeeded. Without him his party imploded due to lack of leadership, lack of intellectual and diplomatic quality. The voters fled back to the traditional parties, and the LPF will never be heard from again.
On a more global scale, the first defining moment for me was the fall of the wall. I was in Berlin in the summer of 1989 and it made a big impression on me. But I was even more amazed by what happened afterwards. People seem to have concluded that, now that capitalism has been victorious over communism, everything that is capitalist is good. Initially this caused a wave of incredible optimism that exploded in the dotcom bubble. Ideologically, the left reinvented itself in ‘the third way’. The function of the state would now be to make sure the capitalist system worked correctly. The right responded by taking position on the other side of that argument– that of corruption, cronyism and irrational religiousness. Today, it seems, cynicism has taken over. Political Correctness is dead and it’s ok to be as bad as you wanna be. 9/11 was the ultimate excuse to take things one step further. I have stood on top of the WTC and I understand this incident would make a big impression on people. I like to call it an incident, because it really wasn’t such a big thing. The buildings were, the consequences were, but the thing itself wasn’t. Bigger disasters are happening right now, but mostly in the third world so nobody cares. This is the big problem of the world today. In a few years, the Taliban will have completed their comeback in Afganistan and Iraq will have a new dictator. And who knows what might happen in all those dictatorships called Farawayistan or Neverheardofia. The balance of power is skewed and the world is working towards a new balance, whatever that might be. The power base of the Taliban is not the bank accounts of its wealthy Saudi supporters, it’s the people whose only hope to mean something in this world lies in the madrassas of the extremists. In a way, it’s a third world backlash. And that’s why the so-called anti-globalisation movement is so important. They should have been the big news of 2001. Then 9/11 happened and a machine started rolling that looked impossible to stop. But 9/11 also proved the power of low-tech. And that’s not even their most important weapon. Look at Iraq, look at Afganistan. They have time on their side.
When I started this piece I wanted to compose some sort of coherent vision. But I don’t have one. My own little country is easy to oversee. But the world as a whole is such an incredibly overwhelming puzzle of countries and cultures. I don’t think any singular vision would fit that. In the end I started to write as I would a blog entry. I started to focus on a less and less issues, tried to connect some dots, worked towards some kind of point and turned it into a pessimistic warning. Sorry about that. That’s why I don’t like to write about politics. So many words and I still feel I haven’t said what I wanted to. And to people who still think all this is anti-American, I will say what I’ve been repeating all over the slogosphere: anti-Bushism does not equal anti-Americanism.
Thank you.
7:02:01 PM 
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