Historian and family man. Care about conservation, wildlife, regenerative agriculture, holistic planned grazing, freedom. Neither a socialist nor a liberal.
Joined March 2011
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Ik denk dat dit alles zegt over hoe de VS neerkijken op de #VN. Het zal de geloofwaardigheid van de VN nog verder aantasten, voor zover dat nog mogelijk is. As the circus leaves town...
nos.nl/artikel/2636746-honga…
Voor alle zogenaamde salon-#communisten. Hetzelfde principe kan je ook toepassen op #hamas-vlaggen. De #swastika is al verboden.
“Dear Italian students, who today take to the streets carrying flags with the hammer and sickle and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ‘CCCP’,” began an open letter in Italian by Lithuanian expat Neringa Budryt.
“I would like to ask you a question: do you truly know what the symbols you carry represent? And do you know what would have happened to many of you had you openly demonstrated in countries living under the oppression of communist regimes?
Let me tell you something. It is easy to display a red flag when, for you, communism is merely an abstract idea of equality, social justice, and rebellion against the system. It is easy to wear a T-shirt with "CCCP" on it when you have never experienced the reality of a communist regime.
We come from that part of Europe where communism was not a T-shirt, a symbol of rebellion, or a romanticized notion of equality. It was the system in which we lived—a system we never chose.
We know the history of Soviet repression, Stalinist purges, the Gulags, and mass deportations. Above all, we know the word "Siberia"—a place to which thousands of innocent people were forcibly deported, simply for thinking differently.
In Siberia—amidst freezing cold, starvation, and forced labor—many lost their lives; those who survived carried the scars of that experience forever. Entire families were torn apart, and generations were denied the chance to live freely in their own homeland.
In the countries of the Soviet bloc, censorship, political police, surveillance, and the suppression of dissent drastically curtailed individual freedoms.
We grew up in a system where state control permeated even our daily lives. At school, we were required to wear the red necktie of the "Pioneers." We were monitored; they tracked where we went and even whether we attended church. Even faith—a choice that should belong to an individual’s own conscience—could become a cause for suspicion.
We used to celebrate Christmas with our windows blacked out, to ensure no one would see us and report us. Because it was forbidden—just like so many other things: jeans, rock music, and all the symbols of a Western lifestyle. My mother returned from a Soviet labor camp. And do you know what happened to her? She was barred from continuing her education because she had been labeled an enemy of communism.
Under a communist regime, you could not protest. You risked arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, persecution—and, in certain historical contexts, even death. In the Soviet Union and other communist regimes, political dissent could cost you your freedom and your life.
Demonstrations independent of the authorities were not a guaranteed right; they were often suppressed by force.
That is why it strikes me to see young Italians proudly displaying the hammer and sickle—symbols associated with regimes that persecuted and imprisoned millions of people.
Today, you are free to take to the streets, shout against the government, criticize institutions, and wave your flags precisely because you live in a democracy that grants you these freedoms. Under an authoritarian regime of that kind, protesting against those in power could have landed you in prison.
This is not about denying the existence of social injustices, inequalities, or the right to fight for a better world. You are free to take to the streets to demand a more just society—but you should not idealize a system that denied so many people the very things you are free to exercise today: the right to choose, to believe, to speak, and to dissent. Before wearing a T-shirt with "CCCP" on it, listen to those who experienced that world. Talk to the deportees and their descendants; read the accounts of those who endured the gulags and forced exile to Siberia. Learn what it meant to be stripped of your freedom, your home, your loved ones—and even any prospect of a normal life—simply because of your background or your beliefs.
Before waving the hammer and sickle, please, study history thoroughly.”
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
The good news about Lula winning Brazilian election is that when he blames Ukraine & tells them to give us their land, at least it will be anti-imperialist.
Unlike when a fascist says the same thing.
Bijzonder raar artikel. Zie ik nu sluikreclame hier en daar?
nos.nl/artikel/2636736-a-mer…
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
Hoe makkelijk is het toch voor Rusland om beïnvloedingsoperaties te doen in het Westen. Gewoon iemand uit de entourage van Poetin (in casu de pro-Kremlin ex-Stasi-agent en North-Stream bestuurder Matthias Warnig ) mondeling laten verklaren tegen Financial Times dat "Poetin in 2023 bereid was tot verregaande terugtrekking" en "Zelensky dat weigerde", en het wordt gepubliceerd als onthulling en overgenomen in talloze kranten. Waarna het legioen nuttige idioten op westerse sociale media weer los kan gaan en schreeuwen: "Zie je wel dat het Zelenski is die oorlog wil en Poetin die redelijk is en vrede voorstelt!". Terwijl geen enkele schriftelijke bron noch verklaring van Poetin die bewering kan staven, niemand in 2023 ooit van dat voorstel had gehoord (noch in de VS, noch in de Oekraïense regering), en Poetin op 30 september 2022 al de veroverde gebieden (en meer) grondwettelijk bij Rusland had aangehecht. Missie volbracht voor Rusland. Hoewel dit nooit gebeurd is in 2023, krijgt het pleidooi om hulp aan Oekraïne te stoppen om Zelenski tot "vrede" te dwingen weer zuurstof in de Westerse publieke opinie. Alleen bedoelt Poetin met vrede iets anders dan zijn Europese propagandisten dat tegenover obs voorstellen: capitulatie.
Laut Financial Times bot Putin Anfang 2023 einen weitgehenden Truppenabzug an. Selenskyj lehnte ab. Ein ukrainischer Abgeordneter liefert nun brisante Details. berliner-zeitung.de/article/…
Zoals bekend stelt Rusland/Putin onmogelijke eisen (het betreft namelijk soevereine landen) en krijgt Oekraïne/Zelensky naderhand de schuld. Het is zo doorzichtig dat in theorie zelfs Trump het door zou kunnen hebben, ware het niet dat het hem veel geld oplevert.
Goede plannen allemaal, maar voorlopig hebben ze nog geen akkoord c.q. meerderheid voor welk (financieel) plan dan ook. #minderheidskabinet = polderen to standstill.
nos.nl/artikel/2636722-kabin…
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
Mental Communism – How to Recognize It.
You don't need a party card to be a communist anymore. You don't even need to have read Marx. Mental communism is not an ideology. It is a way of thinking – and you meet it every day: in the office, in the newsroom, at the dinner table, in the ministry.
Here is how to recognize it.
1. Words before things. Rename a problem and it's solved. Insecurity becomes "a feeling of insecurity." Rioters become "youths." Censorship becomes "fighting disinformation."
2. Intentions before results. A policy is good because it means well and sounds good. That it failed is a detail – usually someone else's fault.
3. Humanity before people. He loves humanity. He can't stand his neighbor.
4. The model before reality. When the world doesn't fit the theory, the world must change. A new law, a new program, a bigger budget.
5. An enemy for every failure. The plan never fails. It is sabotaged – by the rich, the speculators, the "far right," the weather.
6. Appearances before reality. Poses before acts: the flag in the profile picture, the slogan at dinner, the open letter signed with a hundred others. Then nothing.
7. Rights for me, rules for you. Free speech for his side, "hate speech" for yours. Private schools for his children, public ones for yours.
8. He never pays. Being wrong costs him nothing – he moves on to the next cause, the next post, the next promotion.
9. Consensus instead of evidence. "Experts agree." "Studies show." "Everyone knows." Ask which study, and you become the problem.
10. No exit. Ask him what would prove him wrong. Silence – or outrage.
Poles recognize it instantly. We lived inside it for forty-five years: the meetings where everyone knew and nobody said, the newspapers reporting record harvests, the slogans on the walls. The regime only partly fell. The habit stayed. And in the West, it never even needed a regime.
What unites all ten? One thing. For the mental communist, reality doesn't exist – only his wishes, his words, his poses, and the power to impose them. Every sign is the same gesture: putting something in reality's place. Words instead of things. Intentions instead of results. A model instead of the world. An enemy instead of a mistake. A pose instead of an act. Consensus instead of evidence. That is also why he never pays and never admits he was wrong: you cannot be wrong about a world you don't believe exists.
Like children living in their fantasies. Children believing that wishing makes it so – except these children have power.
The good news: a habit of mind can be broken. It starts with one sentence, said out loud: the world doesn't work like that.
What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:
Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie
Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.
This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.
Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.
The Words We’re Missing
The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:
Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.
These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.
And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.
The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism
What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.
That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.
This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.
The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.
Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It
People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.
The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.
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Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
Een ochtendcolumn
Ik zat in de auto en luisterde naar een vertegenwoordiger van PRO, het voormalige GroenLinks-PvdA. Volgens mij was het bij BNR. De man vertelde het inmiddels vertrouwde verhaal over de breedste schouders. Over mensen met een jacht, die meer geld hebben dan ze kunnen uitgeven. Zijn partij was er voor de gewone werkende man.
Het verhaal is overzichtelijk. Meer geld voor de zorg, het onderwijs en de bestaanszekerheid. We hebben een plan. De rijken gaan meer betalen. We belasten vermogen, winst en erfenissen zwaarder en daarmee betalen we de voorzieningen.
Terwijl ik luisterde, vroeg ik me af wat er gebeurt als we gewoon eens uitvoeren wat PRO en en het inmiddels aan Pro vastgeklonken Volt hebben bedacht. PRO groeit in de peilingen. Het verhaal dat de breedste schouders de begrotingsproblemen zullen oplossen spreekt kennelijk aan. Laten we die beloofde bijdrage dan eens ophalen en kijken waar we uitkomen.
Het CPB heeft dat doorgerekend. Met de plannen die GroenLinks-PvdA in 2025 aanleverde, komt de staatsschuld in 2060 uit op ongeveer 130 procent van de economie. Bij Volt op 150 procent. En ja, alle voorgestelde belastingverhogingen van beide partijen zijn daar in verwerkt.
De jachteigenaar heeft dan meer betaald. Vermogen en erfenissen zijn zwaarder belast. Toch groeit de schuld met deze ingrepen door tot boven het huidige niveau van Frankrijk, dat nu op 119 procent staat.
Het Frankrijk waarvoor de OESO berekent dat richting 2030 ongeveer 100 miljard euro aan structurele begrotingsverbetering nodig is. Het Frankrijk waar de regering de begroting niet meer sluitend krijgt en elke bezuiniging tot nationaal verzet leidt. Waar inmiddels de militairen de veiligheid van de burgers moeten bewaken. Het Frankrijk dat aan de rand van de financiële afgrond staat.
Ook in Nederland klinken waarschuwingen. De Raad van State schreef bij een schuld die richting 126 procent gaat dat onze voorzieningen moeilijk houdbaar blijven. De plannen van PRO en Volt komen daarboven uit en dan zijn de gewenste belastingverhogingen al zonder compromissen meegerekend.
Daar zit een merkwaardige belofte. De kiezer krijgt te horen dat de rijken de rekening zullen betalen. Dat voeren we vervolgens uit en als resultaat krijgen we dan een onhoudbare schuld die welvaartsmaatschappij naar zijn grenzen drijft.
Met de belofte van de breedste schouders houden deze partijen het debat vandaag in een houdgreep. Waarom uitgaven begrenzen zolang er mensen met jachten zijn, zolang er nog bredere schouders zijn?
Wie vraagt hoe we alles gaan betalen, krijgt hetzelfde antwoord. Haal het bij de rijken. Maar aan het einde van de doorrekening verschijnt een andere betaler. Onze kinderen.
In de auto ging het over mensen die meer geld hebben dan ze kunnen uitgeven. Aan het einde van de rekensom blijken de breedste schouders de schouders te zijn van de generatie die nu nog in de schoolbanken zit.
Kunnen we het idee van een #minderheidskabinet inmiddels failliet verklaren?
Polderen to standstill.
nos.nl/artikel/2636518-kabin…
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
I'm noticing the growing possibility that Europe becomes very poor in the course of the next 10-20 years. You have the following factors:
- Heavy industry totally uncompetitive against China, automakers etc. rapidly losing ground
- Services industry totally uncompetitive against AI
- No natural resources, or regulatory hurdles making their extraction impossible
- No access to the new economy (no AI, no data centers, uncompetitive energy sector)
- Client states caught in one-way welfare ratchets, spend reallocation + investment well-nigh impossible
This seems under-contemplated. And we're talking really, seriously dirt poor: taken to its logical conclusion, many countries will have much, much smaller services and manufacturing industries -- economies may become much more heavily skewed toward natural resources and energy markets, where Europe has made it impossible for itself to compete.
And I'm not saying that this is likely to happen, it's an extreme case. But the probability is greater than zero and appears to be growing. The EV of that is so negative that it's surprising to me that it's not coming up more.
Als dit waar is, dan lijkt me dat tactisch gezien een minder handige zet van Netanyahu.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
To put it bluntly: According to the latest "peace plan" from street-huckster Wittkop and the Kremlin...
🇺🇦 Ukraine must:
• Withdraw its troops from the Donetsk region
• Abandon plans to join NATO
🇪🇺 Europe must:
• Resume the purchase of Russian energy resources
• Admit Ukraine into the EU
🇷🇺 Russia must:
• Do nothing
🇺🇸 The USA must:
• Do nothing
In exchange, Ukraine is expected to relinquish the territories occupied by Russia, receiving in return security guarantees described as being "similar to NATO’s Article 5." Given the current conduct of the US administration, however, many no longer even have faith in Article 5 itself—let alone in "similar" guarantees.
In short: This is not a peace plan; it is a word that begins with "capit" and ends with "ulation."
And it represents a capitulation not only for Ukraine but also for Europe—which, under this plan, Trump intends to bring completely to its knees before the USA and Russia.
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
Russia fired 21 missiles at Kyiv following negotiations with Trump’s envoy Witkoff. This is how Russia negotiates.
Dit ljkt een goed initiatief, totdat je ziet dat ze door middel van volgen Schijf van Vijf, het #Voedingscentrum een hefboom in handen geven om voedingsadvies nog meer te politiseren en af te dwingen. Ik zit niet te wachten op nog meer #voedingscommunisme
gezondegeneratie.nl/teken/
Dit is vrij simpel op te lossen: Rusland trekt zich terug en de VS gaat weer kracht uitstralen. Anders beloon je een agressor en wordt de VS gezien als een slappe en onbetrouwbare entiteit.
nos.nl/artikel/2636170-toena…
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
Now clear that Putin's diesel deal was merely a Russian reflexive control operation to con Trump into protecting Russia's oil industry, Russia is only sending 40,000 tons of diesel, or roughly 7% of one day of America's 550,000 ton daily consumption. Further, in the time it takes for this Russian ship to make its 3 week journey to the US, the US will have EXPORTED 4.4 million metric tons.
Putin needed air defense, so Trump was given an excuse to tell the American electorate that protecting Russia's oil industry is actually protecting the US.
US gets nothing, Trump then attacks Ukraine, Ukraine loses its ability to destroy the one thing that makes Putin's war possible. Europe gets another decade of war.
Typical Russian Reflexive control operation and Trump is the ultimate moron mark.
Henri Kerkdijk retweeted
What Russia's meat grinder strategy looks like on the ground. Dozens of soldiers gunned down or blown apart as they were forced to advance over a open terrain, effectively turning themselves into targets on a shooting range.
If this is what Russia does to its own people, imagine what it is capable of doing to others.
Naast de Wet Open Overheid heeft een minderheidskabinet ook onvoldoende tot geen mandaat om dit te doen dunkt me.
@PieterOmtzigt
Het kabinet heeft een noodplan voor de asielketen naar Brussel gestuurd. Wat daarin staat? Dat is niet openbaar in te zien.
Nederlanders moeten kunnen zien wat het kabinet van plan is. Daarom ga ik de Kamer voorstellen dit plan openbaar te laten maken. 👇🏻
tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/…