8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

1/9

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.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

2/9

2

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.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

3/9

3

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.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

4/9

4

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.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

5/9

5

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.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

6/9

6

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.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

7/9

Bibliography

BBC News. Monday, 6 May, 2002, 18:46 GMT 19:46 UK, Obituary:P i m F o r t u y n

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1971462.stm ,accessed 16.5.2007.

BBC News. Tuesday,15 April, 2003, 10:12 GMT

1 1 : 1 2 U K , P r o f i l e : F o r t u y n k i l l e r , a t

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1974572.stm , accessed16.5.2007.

Brethren of the Common Life, Catholic New Advent Encyclopedia. At

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04166b.htm , accessed 16.5.2007.

Byrne, Peter. Murdering Immigration in Holland: A Book Review.Review of Buruma, Ian: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh

and the Limits of Tolerance, U.K.: Atlantic Books, London, 2006, ISBN10

1843543192, ISBN13 978184354 3190, pp. 278. U.S.: The Penguin Press,

N.Y., 2006, ISBN 9781594201080, pp. 288. Swans Commentary swans.com,

M a r c h 1 2 , 2 0 0 7 . A t

http://www.swans.com/library/art13/pbyrne30.html .Accessed 24.5.2007.

Europublic: Understanding Europe. Vossestein, Jacob. At

http://www.europublic.com/en/A133.html, 16 . . 5 . 2007 , accessed

16.5.2007.Holland Ring, The. At http://www.thehollandring.com/toen-

nu.shtml, accessed 16.5.2007.Ireland, Georgia. 2000. F.T. Marinetti and Italian Futurism 1909-1944.

See http://www.discovery.mala.bc.ca/web/irelandg/futurism.htm,

accessed 17.5.2007.

Kreis, Steven. Desiderius Erasmus, 1466-1536. The History Guide:

Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History.2000, last revised, May 132004. At http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/erasmus.html ,accessed 16.5.2007.

Maher, John, Judy Groves. Introducing Chomsky. Edited by RichardAppignanesi. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004.

Marx, Karl.Notes to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, 1843.

See

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch03.htm, accessed 16.5.2007.

Podsheldolkin, Alexander. The Origins of the Stalinist Bureaucracy:

Some New Historical Facts., published in En defensa del Marxismo, No.1,1991, Argent ina . Tr . Mike Jones . At Marxis ts .org ,

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/supplem/pod

sheld.htm#f2 , accessed 23.5.2007.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

8/9

8

ragsraghu, Something positive today in Auschwitz. Apr 18 2007

11:39PM in Travel comments rss: Sulekha Travel, travel.sulekha.com,

http://travel.sulekha.com/blog/2007/04/something-positive-today-in-auschwitz.htm?contributor=ragsraghu .Accessed 24.5.2007. An anonymous tourist (two can play that game) posted this

on an Internet bulletin board recently:

after the Nazi occupation of Holland, as much [sic] as 75% of the Jews of Holland were deported to Auschwitz. This is the highestpercentage in all of Europe for any country. It could not have happenedwithout the active co-operation of the Dutch people.ragsraghu, 2007. Cf Woolf, above.

Schwarzmann, Maya. Review, Dealing with the Dutch. TU Delta,

J a a r g a n g 3 8 N u m m e r 2 3 , 1 7 . 8 . 2 0 0 6 , a t

http://www.delta.tudelft.nl/archief/j38/n23/21140, accessed

18.5.2007.Vossestein, Jacob. 2003. Dealing with the Dutch: A Guide For Visitors,

New Residents And Better Business Relationships. 13th edition. Amsterdam:

KIT Publishers. Ch 3, 28-50, Hierarchy and the Dutch problem with it.

Wendt, Larry. Narrative as Genealogy: Sound Sense in an Era of

H y p e r t e x t . I tal ian Futurism. 28 September 1999. Athttp://cotati.sjsu.edu/spoetry/folder6/ng63.html , accessed17.5.2007.

West, Cornel. Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism. n.d. At

http://race.eserver.org/toward-a-theory-of-racism.html ,

accessed 25.5.2007.Woolf, Linda M. Survival and Resistance: The Netherlands Under Nazi

Occupation. Paper presented at the United States Holocaust Memorial

M u s e u m , A p r i l 6 , 1 9 9 9 .

http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/netherlands.html, accessed25.5.2007.

Words and Language in a Humorous Vein on the Web Since 1995,

Akimbo, Sliced Bread, Dutch Uncles, Chimera, Mickey Finn and Those Pesky

Oxymorons, at http://www.word-detective.com/back-h.html,accessed 16.5.2007.

8/14/2019 Flat Dutch 2007.

9/9