Another tractorcade by Dutch farmers rolled Aug. 19 to the government office in Assen, in Drenthe Province, to protest the government plan to shut down about half of all agriculture in The Netherlands by withdrawing farmers’ permits to farm, under various EU regulations to protect “nature,” reduce nitrogen run-off, etc.
This follows a huge tractor convoy action Aug. 14, in the province of North Brabant, centered on Den Bosch, by the Farmers Defense Force (FDF), which together with other groups, is leading the nationwide effort.
This past week also saw the government increase its efforts to discredit the farmers and specifically, the Farmers Defense Force, without much success, since most people seem to have realized that their food is at stake. Nonetheless, some media are publicizing polling results claiming the public is down on the farmers. When a fatal car crash occurred Aug. 14, well behind a tractorcade, Prime Minister Rob Jetten immediately blamed the farmers.
In an area where farmers’ protests have historically been watched by the hundreds of thousands, the host for the Omroep Brabant provincial TV lamented to Mark van den Oever, the FDF leader, that it was a pity that he (Mark), who was once a down-to-earth pig farmer from the region, had fallen so low as to become a radical. The TV host accused van den Oever of wrongly comparing the government persecution of the farmers to the treatment of the Jews by the occupying Nazis during World War II. Omroep Brabant complained about the FDF’s handing out Stars of David with a ‘B’ for “boer”—farmer—on them, to crowds in Den Bosch at the big Aug. 14 protest. The Jewish advocacy group CIDI also immediately condemned the FDF action as “reprehensible.”
Van den Oever, however, responded calmly: “I think that as an activist group, you sometimes have to be allowed to walk on the edge.” When asked whether this explicit comparison with the persecution of the Jews was not completely inappropriate, he responded coolly, “Revoking permits [of the farmers] is also inappropriate.”
Van den Oever further points out that the government’s feeding of the media uproar may be expressing its own sense of collective guilt, for treating farmers as the Jews were treated in occupied Holland during WW II. “Perhaps the Dutch authorities have such a strong reaction because they don’t have a clear conscience.”
Dutch history in WW II is less than glorious. Approximately 22,000 to 25,000 Dutchmen served in the Waffen-SS, the largest number of recruits to these hard Nazis from any Western European country outside of Germany. After the war, the monarchy allowed some Dutch Waffen-SS veterans to regain their citizenship if they volunteered to fight against the freedom fighters in Indonesia in 1945-49, and help the House of Orange continue their brutal colonial regime. The “Collaboration Files” were not opened until 2025. History on this is provided in an article, “In the Uniform of the Enemy: Dutch Volunteers in the Waffen-SS,”, by Andrew McGregor.
