Three Cheers For the Dutch Resistance

Way to go Dutch freedom fighters:

Gotta like the Dutch. I write often about Holland in part because I lived there for five years and it is a neat place: think of the windmills, the tulips, Amsterdam (the ‘Venice of the North’), Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Corrie ten Boom, Brother Andrew, and so on. But I also have been writing about the country recently because of the diabolical war declared on the Dutch farmers by the EU-enslaved government.

In the interests of ‘saving the planet,’ the Big Brother statists are taking over thousands of farms. That should scare all of us. When the government is in charge of food production and distribution, you know we are heading into a really scary brave new world indeed. See one of my previous pieces on this matter: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2022/07/15/farmers-against-fascism/

As I said in those earlier articles, the farmers (and many other Hollanders) are not at all happy about this and they are fighting back. And well they should. No farms means no food. It is that simple. Most folks in the Netherlands no more want to eat insects to save the climate than we do here in Australia.

So the brave Dutch farmers continue to resist. And their most recent move is to create their own political party. A recent article discusses this latest development:

The story of the Dutch farmers’ protest is an inspiration to us all. It is a tale of success and of the rise of common-sense community politics to the national level, and one in which strong social bonds are winning against the forces of an inhuman bureaucracy.

 

In October 2021, Dutch farmers began protesting against their government. The reason was the government’s environmental policy. In its aim of reducing nitrogen emissions, it announced its intention to forcibly close 3000 farms and halve meat production by 2030.

 

The Netherlands is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second largest food exporter in the world. Such a move would have ramifications for the cost and availability of food worldwide. It was one which was met with determined resistance by the farmers, in a campaign of civil disobedience which saw shots fired by police and the army on the streets. The farmers have shut down motorways with tractor convoys, sprayed the police with manure, and camped outside a minister’s house. The attempts to preserve their livelihood, which provides much of the world’s food amid a global crisis in food supply, have been characterized as terrorism.

 

Yet the farmers are winning. They have won concessions from the government, regionally and nationally. The agriculture minister has resigned as a result. Now they have created a political party, which now looks likely to shape or even lead the next government.

 

The BBB, or Farmer Citizen Movement, was founded in 2019 by a half-Irish woman named Caroline van der Plas. She sees the neighborly bond as the core value of the party, a concept which is dear to the hearts of Dutch farmers, who rely on those near to them to help out in times of need. It is an idea which extends through the nation, but is especially strong in rural areas where bureaucracies have not replaced the support networks of community. This emphasis on strong human ties, individual and not mass scale ownership, with independence from large scale bureaucracies, self reliance, and cooperation, is more reminiscent of the Catholic economic model of Distributism. Perhaps this explains its demonization in the media.

 

The Dutch farm intensively, being the second largest exporter of food worldwide (after the USA). Yet their agribusiness is not owned solely by big business. In the USA, four companies dominate the meat industry. In 2022, by contrast, most Dutch meat companies had one employee, 60 had two, and only 35 have more than 100. Dutch farming is not in the hands of massive corporations but still owned and operated by small scale local farmers who rely on each other.

 

Socialism promises freedom through regulation, leaving the mass scale structures of society in place. It prefers to consolidate industry in vast operations which lead to dairy farmers committing suicide, as they are unable to compete with the huge buying power of the supermarkets. It is a power which drives down prices for the consumer, but to a level at which small scale producers cannot survive. Farmers in the USA are six times more likely to kill themselves than the average American. The same tragedy afflicts farmers in the UK and Australia.

The piece concludes this way:

To the media, a party based on the values of kinship and stable community is toxic. These values are ‘far right’, of course, under an ideology which sees meat, family values, and neighborly cooperation as extremist. Moreover, the protests over the stated aim of the Dutch government to close 3000 farms have been derided as “conspiracy theories about an assault on Western civilization itself.” Elsewhere, the farmers are framed as “peak polluters,” further legitimizing hatred for ordinary people whose community life has not yet been ruined by global scale actors.

 

Happily, the Dutch seem to be immune to the attempts to marginalize their normal life as some form of hateful ideology. The Farmers and Citizens Movement have risen in the polls and are expected to gain over ten percent of the vote in the coming provincial elections in March.

 

This is not just a story of hope, but one which promises success in elections whilst offering a model of plentiful production that preserves in farming—and in wider social organization—a way of life worth living. https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/the-dutch-farmers-have-created-their-own-political-party-and-its-doing-well-in-the-polls/?utm_source=daily-canada-2023-01-12&utm_medium=email

Way to go champs. It is great to see ordinary people rising up against Leviathan. The more this happens, the more others will be emboldened to do the same. Let me finish with two quotes on this. The first, by Billy Graham, I have featured before: “Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.”

The second comes from a person I have often mentioned in these articles. I refer to the young Dutch conservative activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek. I quite like what she recently tweeted:

“I don’t care what people, the media or the establishment say about me anymore. I would much rather be called a ‘radical’ in the fight against evil, than a moderate. And so should you. When you speak up and you stop being afraid of what they say about you, they lose their power.”

Quite so Eva. May all freedom-loving peoples around the world take heart from the brave Dutch freedom fighters. Just as many Dutch citizens joined the resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War, many today are resisting the globalist climate Nazis and Great Reset crowd. More power to them!

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