At the beginning of the summer, the Dutch cabinet of prime minister Rutte collapsed over the issue of mass immigration. Not over a clear-cut continuation or interruption of its liberal immigration policy, but in the best tradition of coalition parliamentarianism, over a complex alternative between two forms of family reunion of accepted immigrants. Otherwise the inevitable elections might have to be fought over either mass immigration or a stop to it and everyone knows that the population at large is no longer willing to accept more single males from Africa and the Middle East. These migrants are being welcomed in centres all over the country and all municipalities have to provide living space for those whose claim to asylum is considered legitimate. One look at the map of where these welcome centres have been set up or planned next to the already existing ones, makes clear that they are disproportionately concentrated in the countryside. Often very small communities who have never been confronted with non-Dutch speaking newcomers, are assigned relatively large welcome centres without provision of what the new inhabitants are expected to do, except waiting for a decision of their application to stay.
Although the aspiration of the immigrants is always to get to the big cities, their presence in the countryside can be protracted. Even in cases where their application is rejected, they remain in or near the centres because the Netherlands has no policy of repatriation of those whose claim to residence is not considered valid. This category of young foreigners is often causing mayhem in small villages in the north and east of the country. But it is there, precisely, that another major social change is taking place: the planned expropriation of an estimated one-fifth of the Dutch farming population.
The Dutch coalition government that fell early summer, certainly fitted the description of Klaus Schwab, the oracle of Davos, that his World Economic Forum had »penetrated the cabinets« (a claim he made several years ago at a discussion in Harvard). It was the fourth government under prime minister Rutte, who himself is a militant advocate of the Great Reset, the WEF programme, as were several of his cabinet ministers.
The Great Reset is one of the labels of what I call »ultra-capitalism«. In this variety of capitalism, the plan is to expropriate all private property that has not yet been absorbed into big corporate property, including the portfolios of large holding companies like BlackRock and Vanguard. Capitalism by itself tends to concentrate and centralise ownership, but in light of popular unrest and economic dysfunction, the WEF project is to accelerate this process top-down and so complete the capitalist trajectory. Private property other than held by the largest units must disappear and the WEF slogan, »You will own nothing and be happy« refers to the presumed end-state of the system. No private car ownership, ideally no air travel, and a slow expropriation of private home ownership would certainly assure the first part of the slogan.
A population lacking the means to break out of so-called 15-minute cities in which movement is tightly regulated by digital ID’s, will also have lost the ability to organise itself politically outside the framework offered by the existing parliamentary system. Digital technology supporting a surveillance society would complement ultra-capitalism for the economy.
The Covid experience, a bio-warfare experiment ushering in such control regimes in many countries and an even more disastrous gene therapy programme, in hindsight may be considered the first instalment of this grandiose project. It failed in many ways although causing irreparable harm to billions of people. As an instance of global governance, the type of world order instituted after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR, it came to an abrupt end when Russia after decades of NATO enlargement, struck back militarily in February 2022. The Atlantic alliance by then was cast as the military arm of the global governance projected by the West, but for Russia and for China, this was an unacceptable course of events. If these countries had still embraced the Covid state of emergency (China more emphatically than Russia, indeed as one of the driving forces), the Ukraine crisis broke the mould of the global governance project altogether, and by implication, the WEF format of an ultra-capitalist future.
In this light, the significance of the fall of the Dutch cabinet goes far beyond local Dutch conditions. For the underlying issues, the expropriation of one-fifth of the farming population (to begin with) and the unrestrained influx of young Africans and Middle Easterners are both instances of the WEF programme. That programme has run aground in the Netherlands because even the normally pliant and tolerant Dutch population is growing restive in the face of it. Never mind that the media (print media being owned by two Belgian conglomerates) remain silent on the significance of these two major developments and certainly on the underlying connections. The Digital Services Act which the EU will promulgate this August will introduce tighter censorship on social media to suppress any alternative information on key aspects of the Great Reset.
This gives the ruling oligarchy and its technocratic cadre a large measure of freedom to prepare for a resumption of the WEF strategy. The farmers« protest, which led to a wide-spread campaign in which farms raised the Dutch flag upside-down, with blue on top, as a sign of serious disconnect. The Christian-Democratic party, one of the four coalition parties, traditionally strong in the countryside, melted away. However, a new party, the Boeren-Burger Beweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement, BBB) sprang up which won the Provincial elections last spring, emerging as the largest in the country after its leader, Caroline van der Plas, had represented BBB on her own in parliament for a whole session. In the Provincial election campaign, upside-down flags on most farmland were replaced by handsome green-on-white BBB boards; as it later turned out, thanks to the Dutch Bayer-Monsanto agency which also ran the secretariat of the party prior to its phenomenal success.
In other words, as things stand, the corporate sector (the Bayer-Monsanto merger itself was a BlackRock operation) recouped the lost ground fairly easily, securing a place at the high table if BBB as expected, will become one of the leading parties in the general election planned for November.
Meanwhile, mass immigration also continues because the government, although keen to introduce other measures connected to the Great Reset and the digital surveillance society (notably the digital Central Bank currency), can claim that because immigration was the ground for the cabinet to fall, it cannot take bold measures in this particular domain. Yet mass immigration, as it does in the rest of »old Europe«, is changing the face of society and undermines the social bonds without which no popular movement can arise. It is no coincidence that the farmers« movement against expropriation is a »white« movement, of course also because there are no immigrant farmers; yet its being native Dutch is also a precondition for it to be there at all, as a movement. The main trade union federation FNV on the other hand, like the parties of the historic Left, is preoccupied with »diversity« issues and has so far failed to mobilise its membership for a fight to defend the interests of the remaining working population.
Yet the prospect of a resumption of the ultra-capitalist WEF drive requires a broad resistance front in which solidarity must be restored, also with immigrants who are already in the country. This requirement and the urgent need to stop further immigration is a sensitive and profoundly contradictory combination which yet must be tackled by a new political leadership capable of presenting the issues in a unifying, progressive political language that is so far lacking.
