Newsletter 18 July
19 juli 2024 | Forum for Democracy Intl
Before the summer recess, Thierry Baudet was able to question the new prime minister about Ukraine. He asked, ‘Why is it in the interest of the Netherlands to support Ukraine?’ Dick Schoof replied only that Russia was the aggressor and that it was in the Netherlands’ interest to resist this. Thierry tried three times to get him to explain what exactly that interest was: Schoof would not, or could not, really say.
Instead, he referred to ‘intelligence’ – he was previously the head of the Dutch secret service – but did not reveal any information. Is this a new model of governmental transparency? The only concrete reference Schoof made was to the shooting down of flight MH-17 in 2014 (long before the Russian invasion of 2022), an event which was investigated by the Dutch secret service but not by the country which owned the plane, Malaysia, and without the involvement of the accused party, Russia, because the Netherlands refused to allow it to cooperate with the enquiry.
So the true nature of the ‘interest’ remains as much as a mystery as the ‘intelligence’ invoked by the PM.
Watch Thierry's with Dick Schoof here
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In the week in which Donald Trump was nearly murdered, it is worth recalling that this is only one in a long line of violent attacks against patriotic politicians – from the milk shakes thrown at Nigel Farage, through the two violent physical attacks to the head against Thierry Baudet, to the severe shooting of the Slovak PM, Robert Fico, who was far more seriously wounded than Trump. All these attacks were preceded by vilification in the media and, in many cases, by lawfare. The common theme is that the victims of these attacks are said to be extremists, whereas in reality it is of course the liberals and leftists who are the extremists - like those who this week also applauded the sudden, arbitrary and brutal closure of the German media outlet, Compact Magazin, on the orders of the German government (not the courts!). Forum Inside, the Dutch language weekly broadcast, was devoted to this, as was a recent X-post by Thierry.
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Lenin said that imperialism was the highest form of capitalism but maybe it is wokeism. That, at least, is what Sid Lukkassen thinks. In an article written for FVD, Sid argues that the ideology of woke, according to which all inherited communities are decried as oppressive, creates a deracinated worldwide population with no specific local or even national loyalties. This in turn engenders anxiety and loneliness, which people try to relieve through consumerism – on a global scale, since everyone is conditioned to recognise the same brands and, ultimately, to want the same things – and of course economies of scale and mass formations of identical wants are great for multinationals.
Read Sid Lukkassen's article here
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We had the human firecracker, Lionel of the United States (LOTUS), and the brilliant Peter Lavelle as our guests on The Forum this week, to discuss ‘the Trumpian moment’. If you missed it, you can listen back to it by clicking below.
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