(LifeSiteNews) — Despite blockades by the military and many arrests, the Dutch city of The Hague saw a protest by an estimated 10,000 Dutch farmers on Saturday, in defiance of a government ban. The day saw a counter protest by the earth-worshipping death cult Extinction Rebellion, whose assembly was broken up by the use of water cannon loaned from Germany.
The farmers, whose battle against the proposed compulsory purchase and closure of around 3,000 farms nationwide, are also protesting against nitrogen reduction targets which they assert target agriculture unfairly – and at a pace likely to lead to ruin. The action comes after a similar protest in Brussels last week by Belgian farmers.
The Counter Signal’s Keean Bexte interviewed spokeswoman Eva Vlaardingebroek at the demonstration, who warned that the expropriation of the farmers would cause serious problems with the food supply in the world’s second-largest food exporter.
Vlaardingebroek, who has become something of a figurehead for the farmers, asserts that the small country of The Netherlands is a pilot nation for the World Economic Forum project to dispossess food producers.
She claims that the Dutch national character or “Poldercultuur” is being exploited – and with considerable success – for malicious purposes. Yet even the legendary tolerance of the Dutch has its limits.
This new protest took place immediately prior to the Dutch Provincial and Water Board elections scheduled for the 15 of March. Dutch farmers have rallied around a new political party, the Farmer Citizen Movement, which is poised to take second place in the national polling average.
In more rural areas, such as the northeastern region of Drenthe, the BBB has a commanding lead.
Founded in 2019, the Farmer Citizen Movement is a party whose philosophy is based not on the left/right dichotomy – but on neighborly and human scale values. Their leader, Caroline van der Plas, has twice taken to the media to criticize the approach of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, a former corporate manager for the global food giant Unilever.
Van der Plas objects to the framing of Dutch domestic politics which has excluded the ordinary people for which she claims to stand. Her latest campaign video, released on Twitter in Dutch, marks the emergence of a politics which seeks to capitalize on the marginalization of normal people from the political process.
We stand for the hardworking ordinary Dutch who work hard, who want to live an affordable life, and who have a beer at the weekend and care for everyone.
But that is not made easy for us.
The problems Van der Plas presents will be familiar to anyone who has witnessed the slow motion collapse of their society, and the retreat of politics into a performance art conducted by a distant managerial technocracy.
The citizens cannot pay the bills any more. Schoolchildren cannot take the school bus any more, the community police officer has disappeared, the farmer cannot farm – none of this can be taken for granted any more.
And then the cabinet of Rutte and Kaag asks itself why trust in politics has gone through the floor.
The names can be changed to those of your own leaders, as the ideology and practice of politics is identical throughout the West. It is a form of administration which sees humanity as a mass scale management issue, and which is intentionally out of touch with the ordinary person. To the technocrat, small-scale community life is anathema, as it is where independent, decent and God-fearing people tend to live.
Small-scale communities regardless of opinion make for happier people generally. The posthuman future imagined for us is one which monetizes the mental illness hothoused by its vast urbanizations and atomizing policies. Huge conurbations are far easier to control, by means imagined by the Hudson Institute in the early years of technocratic dreaming. They are containment facilities for mutually antagonistic populations, fragmented into extreme identitarian groups and sharing the placeless architecture of international nowhereland. Human-scale politics is possible, it is practical and it is appealing. It promises a future worth fighting for.
The sudden appeal of Van der Plas and her party cannot be explained by farming protests alone. She speaks for many when she indicates that the leaders of her nation have no idea who their citizens are, and what their lives are like. She has crafted an appeal to the working people of the country whose views, like yours, simply do not feature in the news, and whose community and cultural life is being rapidly eradicated.
We are the farmers, fishermen and fisherwomen, the agent, technician, soldier, the hunter, the businessmen and women, nurses, carers, teachers, students – ordinary people with ordinary sane opinions.
We want to ensure that in the provinces that the buses will run again, that people have a local doctor, that there are good train connections, that the police will return to the villages and neighborhoods, that small schools can remain open and that farmers, growers, gardeners and fishermen can continue to pursue their vocations with passion.
This list of demands is striking because these are things we had expected to take for granted – not to be taken away. It is a remarkable appeal from one of the richest countries in Europe, let alone the world.
“This is what you can vote for,” says Van der Plas at the end of her piece to camera. Her appeal is to a populism of common sense and human scale relations under threat from an ideology utterly without relation to the experience of ordinary life. This is an agenda with mass appeal, because it appeals to the majority who by nature of their normality have seen their influence in politics marginalized to irrelevance.