What a screening during demo Police For Freedom, Shameless and Sick Spirits. 77 Years ago Jewish women and children were in line arriving at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland (photo 27 May, 1944). Of course, we can tell ourselves that these are exceptions, but the truth is that this kind of spoiled and eaten people with too much free time in NL are no exception at all.

COLUMN SANDER SCHIMMELPENNINCK July 18, 2021
You see evil stupidity everywhere, but nowhere is it tolerated as in the Netherlands.
Well, that cucumber time turned out to be a bit premature. While the rest of Europe knows the worst coronaleed behind it, the Netherlands is experiencing a dramatic July month. Corona figures exploded due to the horrible murder of Peter R. De Vries, they are worried about us in Italy, and the floods in Limburg are slowly beginning to descend that corona was just a practice game compared to the challenges we face.

Italian mafia judge Paolo Borsellino murdered in 1992, like the merciful De Vries tirelessly fighting against injustice, once said it is normal for every human being to have fear. “The most important thing is that this goes with courage. Don't let fear take hold of you, otherwise it will become an obstacle that prevents you from moving forward.But is fear perhaps a prerequisite for real courage??

The Netherlands, unlike De Vries hoped, is now like Sicily, only without the sun and the good food. More importantly, without the fear required for courage. The Netherlands is the country where the population is in all its indispensable, with a 2-deciliter bottle of Fristi and a filet américain sandwich on a folding chair, watching flooding rivers, as a cosy taste of upcoming climate disasters. And the country where adult people like Jewish concentration camp dwellers dress up to protest corona measures.

You see evil stupidity everywhere, but nowhere is it tolerated as in the Netherlands. The Germans are the inventors of the word quenching, and French President Macron regularly shows his teeth against backwardness. Here we let it go on its course, with the misguided idea that every sound should be heard in our polder, with all the consequences of this.

The absurdity of a tiny country where the most important cities and millions of people are below sea level, but robust climate policy is seen as an expensive hobby, is of a cognitive dissonance that will become your horror. De Telegraaf, the newspaper that consistently votes against climate measures, performed to combine images of drooping Limburg on the front page with short-sighted grumbling about rising climate costs — 'citizen gets a very expensive climate bill present'.

“Citizen has been living above his stand for decades” would have been a better head. With a frightening mortgage debt, the Netherlands is also at enormous risk of being financially flooded in the next economic storm.

The Netherlands has long gone away with a hopeless indecision and lack of leadership, which we also managed to sell as the 'polder model' in our self-overestimation. The way Prime Minister Rutte and his and his have addressed the corona crisis is very understandable by polder standards, and the average surplus mortality is quite acceptable. But it's getting less and less, because we're all beginning to feel that the polder model, of which our corona policy is a clear example, is no longer working at this time.

We can't cuddle or swear the Mocromaffia, and we can't moderate climate change the way we ever moderated wages. Moreover, the pandemic is not a social challenge that we are going to do together with cheerful Sire spots, but a warm-up for the big people choices that are going to become more and more normal.

The Dutch can keep pointing to others until they weigh one ours, but above all will have to sober up from their own deep-seated exceptionalism. The smug Dutchman sincerely thinks that our knowledge of dikes and waterworks is so superior that nothing can happen to us, just as he thinks his prosperity is perpetual and logical, and he never has to work hard, moreover, because he is so incredibly productive.

Unfortunately, we don't live on an island that is immune to the major world problems and are not better but worse calculated on threats than many neighbouring countries. The Dutch polder is underwater, and if we don't want to drown, the dangers of this time should cause us more fear. Because without fear, our courage is just hubris.

Sander Schimmelpenninck is a journalist.