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Transcript of Flat Dutch © 2007.
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Flat Dutch
Review of Vossestein, Jacob. 2003. Ch 3, 28-50, Hierarchy and the
Dutch problem with it, in Dealing with the Dutch: A Guide For Visitors,
New Residents And Better Business Relationships. 13th edition. Amsterdam:
KIT Publishers.
Nederland. Flat country, flat social structure, though hardly flat broke
(p6). At least for scions of the hot (neoliberal, T.U.L.I.P.1?) economy (p44),
Pim Fortuyn supporters perhaps. Of course the gay scientist Professor Pim is
dead, murdered by a Vegan.2
Such, one may carp, is Dutch politics. On thinks of those enduring
English slurs from the Anglo-Dutch Wars of 17th century: the Dutch defence (a
retreat), Dutch courage (booze, itself from a Dutch word), the Dutch nightingale
(a frog), etc. Then Holland and England vied for colonial supremacy; now they
both bask in the fading glory of red (state) giant America.
The Holland Vossestein lauds may itself be dying under the impact of
todays globalising, Anglocentric (soon Sinocentric?) capitalism. But he
bypasses that prognosis, with helpful ideological asides from unnamed
peripatetic managers etc and a nod in the direction of the followers of
Islam.
A significant though short partof his article is preoccupied with the
influence of religion (and even socialism, p48) on the Dutch character and
language (p47, n.8) what he terms Calvinistic socio-religious equality as
well as the flatness of the landscape. He also considers the peculiarly Dutchkind of water politics (too much, not too little), stratified cities (p42), and
wealth distribution, all skated over in a chatty manner.
Tax evasion, for instance, is not rampant in Holland, partly due to the
well-organised Dutch bureaucracy (p45). The Netherlands surely has no
faux egalitarianism, a quiet life for the 200+ old (rich) families3 (p33) who
meekly or sneakily rent from the Dutch masses the social insurance of
socialism, viz., social welfare (see p46). He doesnt ponder either how long
welfare will last, when it has been withering in the Well-Oiled West since about
1971.
True, even the Dutch ruling class are formal heirs of the educative laboursof the Brethren of the Common Life, started by Geert Groote (1340-1384), and
the pacifist humanism and Ghandian ahimsa toward all living souls,
including animals (p47-48) of its star pupil Desidirius Erasmus (1436-1536).
1Mnemonic for remembering the so-called Five Points of Calvinism against the
Arminian Remonstrance, which had nothing to do with Armenia. These canons of the Synodof Dort comprise: Total depravity (inability), Unconditional election, Limited atonement,Irresistible grace, and Perseverance/preservation of the saints. They werent in favour of allthese things.
2
I.e., one who supposedly avoids that diet of sub-prime hamburgers known as theAmerican Dream (and its various derivatives).
3Brought to public attention by a union leader called Mertens in 1968.
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Except many nouveau riche, who sound more Nietzschean, even
Futuristic in the sense of that early 20th century Duce of self-publicisation
F.T. Marinetti (on him, see Ireland, 2000; Wendt, 1999).
A Turkish manager commented, Karl Marx would be quite happy here.
(p46).
(Marx his mother Henrietta Pressburg was from Nijmegen in Holland
actually hated the circle from which one cannot escape4 of bureaucracy
that inverted hierarchy of the nine circles of Hell quite as much as, say,
Dickens, and perhaps Dant! But he did feel that socialism might come to
Holland peacefully.5)
Maybe it has, just shorn of archaic jargon.
But as Schwarzmann (2006) suggests, Holland is transvaluing its values:
Old religious, ideological and family structures are breaking upand the younger generation has a different, at times extremelycontrasting, perception of life and the world.
On the surface, this might attract those who detest hierarchy, where the
dead seize the living. Yet very precious babies may be thrown out with the
dike water, especially if the, ahem, young Turks of the ruling class command
the ruling logos via the old media, and covet the sole mass-medium6 of free
speech, the Internet.
The (classical liberal, religious) concept of moral equality (p48) is both
a cause and effect of the rather flat pyramid of Dutch society7
(p46), arguesVossestein regardless, ducking the resolution of that paradox. By comparison
with much of the world these days, the Netherlands is a paradise (though as
recently as 1945 it was not).8
4The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy
of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lowerlevels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, 1843.5One day the workers will have to seize political supremacy to establish the new organisation of
labour; he [sic] will have to overthrow the old policy which supports old institutions if he wants to escapethe fate of the early christians who, neglecting and despising politics, never saw their kingdom on earth.But we by no means claimed that the means for achieving this goal were identical everywhere. We knowthat the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries must be taken into account; and wedo not deny the existence of countries like America, England, and if I knew your institutions better I mightadd Holland, where the workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means.
cited in Jack Conrad, Formulation nine and the possibility of peaceful revolution,Weekly Worker[Communist Party of Great Britain], 448 Thursday September 19 2002.
Se e http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/448/peaceful.html, accessed16.5.2007. The quote is from Marxs speech at a public meeting in Amsterdam on September 81872 celebrating the Hague Convention of the First International. Itself from K Marx, F EngelsCW Vol 22, Moscow 1986, p618).(Note that I do not belong to or support the CPGB or itsaffiliates.)
6As against narrowcasting, e.g. of public or community radio.
7
Even an [unstable] upside-down pyramid, p30.8Those under thirty (but over thirteen) may think of the 1998 song Holland, 1945 by
former American band Neutral Milk Hotel.
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This bedazzles Vossestein; he ignores the discourse between those
neglected cultural, historical entities, classes. That is, on a global scale.
Egalitarianism is a Dutch core-value or is it merely lip-service? A central
component of democratic equality and informed consent9 is free speech,
generally writing. One cannot communicate fully with ones overlords except
through ideological warfare. Hollands masters and servants seem to know
viscerally the value of ceaseless struggle, but prefer jaw-jaw to war-war.
Though he equates, in a Nietschean manner, equality with mediocrity
(p32), dull as the geographical flatness of the bulk of his country (all cheap land
and canals full of bicycles!), Vossestein understands that liberty of debate is a
great leveller when it lets a hundred tall poppies10 (p3) bloom. Talk is cheap as
water, a very democratic element indeed (p47). The past lack of it [talk] in the
Netherlands has been disastrous: the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, starvation at
the stroke of a pen; theDiary of Anne Frank. Let us take a brief trip into hell.
The psychologist Linda M. Woolf states,
over 75% of Holland's Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.This represents the largest percentage of Jews to die from a particularcountry with the exception of Poland.
Partly, geography, and Hollands social openness, had a hand in
facilitating this. But only partly. Woolf adds,
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and overnight German law went intoeffect including all restrictive anti-Jewish legislation. The invasion of Poland and
Czechoslovakia resulted in immediate martial Nazi law and leadership. However,the invasion of the Netherlands resulted in neither. While the royal familyincluding Queen Wilhelmina fled into exile in Britain, civilian leaders were notreplaced. Rather, the Dutch civilian administration was subsumed by a civilGerman administration. Additionally, Dutch law remained in effect.
The same mind that creates the Corporation in society creates the
bureaucracy in the state. said Marx in 1843. The aphasic language of hierarchy
is ultimately the text of totalitarianism. Nietzsches bte-noire, equality of
expression, poisons such a self-validating will to power.
The Dutch fought an asymmetrical war against the Spanish throne (for
those who remember the Spanish Inquisition); sixty-four years ago, many didstand up to the Nazi occupation, including through a General Strike11 organised
by the illegal Dutch Communist Party.
At such times, the Dutch parole (their strange enough (p30) nasal
grunting, a sort of crusty dinder-daander-donder, nearly as incomprehensible as
their cousins across the Channel) can convey a lot of exceptional sense.
Through the linguistic labours of ruling elites, they may have internalised
9Not manufactured, Walter Lippman,Public Opinion, 1922, as cit. by Noam Chomsky,
e.g. in Maher & Groves, 2004, p141.10
Tulips?11Woolf: the only such general anti-pogrom strike to have occurred in Nazi-occupied
Europe.
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capitalism, indeed they were one if its proving grounds. But the levelisation of
humanity, with its self-obfuscations and misapplied Aristotelian logic, or at the
periphery Nietzschean passionate irrationalism, they wisely distrust. Is that true,
though, of the nomenklatura of this socialism?
Moral equality, hardly slave morality, may cause (then in time, be caused
by) a Galbraithian countervailing economic power, but will it allow that
equality to grow more relative all the time? What is the social price of
preserving the concomitant inequality? A mess of nationalist pottage?
Anyone moving around Europe over the last decade will knowthat immigration is something that troubles citizens from Finland toSicily. Europeans have an atavistic belief that their particular nationalway of life constitutes a treasure. Its a mindset that castsimmigrants in the role of despoilers of a precious heritage Theunease wont go away no matter how often reasonable men repeat thatEurope with its falling birth rate needs foreign labor to maintain its
prosperity and welfare system.
Byrne, 2007, para. 3
Cheap labour and moral equality do not mix. Woolf reminds us that when
Hitler invaded,
Culturally, Dutch society was stratified largely on the basis ofreligion. Thus, close friendships between Jews and Christians wereuncommon in war-time Holland. This made it difficult for Jews to find aplace of hiding within the homes of Gentile neighbors individuals that
they did not know.
As a result of the Dutch religious stratification, the Dutchpeople could be certified as almost 100 percent Aryan.
Class domination prefers its most visible scapegoats to be other than a
class (cf West, n.d.). A lumpen minority is useful; an affluent minority can
more plausibly stand in as an Aunt Sally for the gilded and (here) guildered
heroes. The Jews, like the Muslims today, were and are both. West asserts (in
language I eschew) that
Cultural practices are the medium through which selves are produced. We are who and what we are owing primarily to cultural practices. The complex process of people shaping and being shaped bycultural practices involves the use of language, psychological factors, sexual identities, and aesthetic conceptions that cannot be adequatelygrasped by a social theory primarily focused on modes of production atthe macrostructural level.
West, #2.
The economic factor (which is often political) often intrudes at any
point, perhaps through hunger or physical sequestration.
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If Vossestein is right, any degradation of financial parity will undermine
the moral sense, and vice-versa, in a downward spiral. Instead of striving for a
BetterWorld, Hollanders may pine for the xenophobic Golden Age, should the
west become a white dwarf. Opening up the files of bureaucratic knowledge
(Marx, 1843) relating to income and wealth distribution, in contrast to
censorious, egalitarianism-faking privacy (p44), might help to maintain the
moral low ground he praises.
Vossestein could also be less phlegmatic and avoid the anecdote (e.g.,
p32). The opinions of his anonymous claque may not always be representative.
His premise that equality means being alike in mediocrity, while excellence
spells master-morality (masters are incomprehensible without slaves) and the
resulting pots of money for a few heropreneurs is contradicted on p46 by his
outline ofnouveau riche conformism and puerility. A Platos Republic of the
Low Countries?Neen dank.
We all want excellence, but some of us want it at the level of all
humanity. It was Hitler (in Mein Kampf, Nation and Race, I.xi) who saw
people as dust particle[s], not Marx.
Calvinism makes us all siblings in sin, but socialism (as its genuine
exponents have intended it12) gives us more than the keys to the citadel: it
unlocks the future, at least morally. All words, all interpretation, all currency,
so many promissory notes, so many accounts and permissions and borrowings
of $IOU.00, and all the gifts of the gab. Barren without referents. Like
language, like historiography, its the goal it stands for that counts.
At times Vossestein sounds like Harold Macmillan in 1957 the Dutch
working class majority (who must restrain themselves financially inprosperity) are not really in bad shape, a 2003 revision of never had it so
good (p42). Some relate the alleged Dutch hatred of hierarchy to the endless
battle against the Flood (1800 drowned in the 1953 hurricane), though the
poorer citizens tend to live in low wet areas, former grasslands (p42), if not
exactly polders or a Secret Annex at the back of the economy. It isnt the
Ganges delta. But its not tilting at (Dutch) windmills to suggest that this
discrimination might be eradicated too. (Issue each of the inhabitants with a
submarine?)
Holland can hardly be understood without its hinterland, which is half the
planet. Rotterdam is the worlds largest port (p37). From this perspective anational viewpoint such as Vossesteins begins to look like a quaint relic, a
mere 359 years after the Treaty of Westphalia gave the Calvinists and their
opposing Christian soldiers formal equal rights. The Dutch are of course
renowned for being internationally oriented, says Schwarzmann (2006). I
believe that for our survival for more than the next historical eyeblink, the
concept of the nation state needs to yield to a planetary focus: one earth and
justice.
Even to Nietzsche, Justice (fairness) originates between parties of
approximately equal power (Human, All to Human, 57). If wealth is power its
12
It is as defensible as Christianity.
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ever-increasing maldistribution is tyranny, and justice requires a new
abolitionism, of classes and the cultural weasel words which excuse them.
Is the author too ideologically blinkered to grasp such carping? A
proletariat, say, cannot be replaced by people from ethnic groups (p42); it is
defined by lack of control of the means of its labour, not econobabble. (Wed all
hear about it particularly from Washington if the Dutch reclaimed their
nations industry and unambitious land and began to own it in common. Their
democracy would then become about as popular as Gazas.) Similarly, moral
equality is void without a struggle to realise it. Solidarity does not come out of
sermons.
But Im glad though an equalitarian tarantula (The tarantulas, with
the black triangle on their backs, Thus Spake Zarathustra, II.29) that
there are still countries likeNederlandwhere he can publish unhindered, can
walk on the all-threatening water of posterity.
Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden [= Freedom is always
and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently], as the highly
individual Red Rosa said (Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918), before,
in the words of Brecht, the Freikorps rubbed her out. Maybe one Dutch
headachey (hung over) day the Hollanders will not intone act normal, thats
strange enough (p3), and ask, why be normal when you can be yourself?
Till that noon, their egalitarianism could be a bit of a Dutch auction.
2613 words.
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