The Weekly Forum - 14 August
20 augustus 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
The Dutch parliament was recalled from its summer recess this week but not to discuss anything to do with the Netherlands or Europe. Instead, the subject was Gaza - something over which European MPs have little or no control. Unlike the governing Freedom Party of Geert Wilders - which supports Israel “100%”, to quote one of Wilders’ X-posts - Forum for Democracy initially tried to stay neutral in the latest war. However the excesses (to put it mildly) of the Israeli regime have made even instinctive Israel supporters recoil in horror. Thierry Baudet told Parliament that he thought that Israel has gone too far and that the mass killing in Gaza is both inhumane and counter-productive. Not only will it breed future generations of Palestinian fighters - and thus prolong the cycle of revenge indefinitely, without apparently any victory yet in sight - it is also jeopardising the plight of Jews around the world who get the blame.
Watch Thierry’s speech here (translated by AI)
Thierry gave a long interview (in Dutch) to the podcaster Benjamin Wortman this week. They discussed politics, nationalism, Christianity and how to think independently. We have extracted a section where Thierry tackles the last of these. Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, who foresaw that democracy would lead to an increase in the power of the state – a new form of despotism – Thierry explained that it is exceptionally difficult to think independently. Politics suffers greatly from the phenomenon of the crowd – from the tendency of people to go with the flow, or to vote for parties simply because they are high in the polls, however weak their actual record while in office. This means that the liberal paradigm of democracy – that each individual rationally pursues his own self-interest and reflects on it before entering the polling booth – is anthropologically false. As Gustave Le Bon wrote over a century ago, crowds accumulate not intelligence but mediocrity.
Watch the clip of Thierry’s interview here (translated by AI)
FVD International’s director, John Laughland, gave a lecture at the Young FVD summer camp in Burgundy last month, on Western nihilism. The noted French demographer, Emmanuel Todd, used the concept in his latest book, The Defeat of the West, and John developed the idea claiming that it explains a range of phenomena which dominate modern politics – ideology and the obsession with controlling the narrative; the obsession with fictitious political constructs like the EU, Bosnia, Kosovo or even Ukraine; globalism, which ultimately stems from a belief in the essential one-ness of reality and from a hatred of multiplicity; an exaggerated belief in ‘science’; the obsession with trans ideology and the cult of indeterminacy; and of course violence. This last point is perhaps the most obvious and was well characterised by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons where one character accuses the nihilist Bazarov of wanting to destroy everything, whereas “one must construct, too, you know” - to which Bazarov replies, “That is not our business . . . we must first clear the ground.”
Patrick Wood, who has just completed his third book on technocracy, was our wonderful guest on The Forum this week. Technocracy is the hallmark of globalism and the true scourge of our era.