This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders.
Something else striking: how is it that I am the first Dutch writer to have anything to say about this matter? I will continue with this question tomorrow.
On 9/11, no Dutch writer had anything to say. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Silence. MH17? A few poems about the guilty Russians the day after. The Ukraine referendum? Didn’t exist if it were up to the writers. COVID-19? They all dutifully followed the government narrative. A genocide in Gaza before our eyes? The Dutch writer is absent. Houellebecq in a Dutch porn movie? Instead of filling the newspapers and writers jumping over each other, there was a deadly silence.
So what use is this so-called writers’ caste if reality passes them by unnoticed? They don’t even seem capable of reacting. Essentially, they are not writers, at least not in the sense of a public, responsible intellectual who can independently sustain a justified perspective apart from the state.
What would we have thought if after World War II no writers wrote about the war because the government, which has a tight grip on the writers’ wallets through the Dutch Foundation for Literature, dictated their stories? Did the Nazis actually lose? Over the years, I’ve become less convinced of that. After all, the great sponsor of the Nazis was followed like a headless chicken, hardly a sign of enlightenment. Furthermore, the genocide circus just continued, but now targeted at people ‘who are not like us,’ with a different skin color. Abracadabra, and it’s no longer a genocide.
I included a tab of 1cp-LSD with my poetry collection to critics. Did the poetry news outlets mention this? No, there was an icy silence, not even a single note.
Then something serious is happening. Even in Russia or Kazakhstan, such a thing wouldn’t go unmentioned—you would have to travel to a country like North Korea to find something similar, where people keep silent out of pure fear.
Because what Kirac did, let’s not kid ourselves: the most notorious French writer is tricked into an art porn film, French newspapers are full of it, and not a single Dutch ‘writer’ has anything to say?
Willem Oltmans argued in an interview with Theo van Gogh that once you get the ‘red card’ in the Netherlands, you never rid yourself of it. He himself received that red card from Luns, who opposed him all his life behind the scenes. Ultimately, Oltmans managed to prove this opposition in court, but not without a helping hand from Juliana.
Writers to whom the entirety of reality passes by like a dream because they are so busy writing thrilling boys’ books about World War II.
Houellebecq was the first Frenchman whose sponsorship by the cigarette industry was not openly and proudly displayed but was hidden. He is a walking billboard for Gauloise Blonde, but we will never know what he received for it. That is the ironic result of the fight against this industry: because such sponsorships were stigmatized, they went underground. Now, if you suggest that Houellebecq’s smoking might have a financial dimension, and that his perpetual pro-Israel stance, unfazed by genocides, might be due to an extra allowance from certain agencies, you’re labeled a conspiracy theorist. I believe 120 million euros are allocated yearly, of which a few million can be spared to ensure it seems like the intellectual caste supports the ultra-religious project.
But this sponsorship is not visible either. Nowadays, it’s also not clear which social media entities are AI-driven: anyone who thinks a long series of robotic proponents of aggressive colonialism are real people is mistaken. The International Criminal Court spoke clearly this week: what is happening in Israel is apartheid. This is now officially documented.
But we have a ‘political order’ that is significantly sponsored by an apartheid state. I find that quite problematic, to be honest. I don’t want to see politicians wrapping themselves in the flag of an apartheid regime and then claiming they are concerned about foreign influence in our politics.
In this video, you see such a ‘Dutch writer,’ and you can see exactly how reality passes by him like a dream. Christiaan Weijts, an establishment writer, saw nothing, and even later, no intelligent analysis appeared about what happened right under his nose.
Nothing to see here, move along. Voltaire sought an intimate bond with those in power: I believe the idea was that the writers’ caste would keep and control the power in check.
But how do we deal with a Voltaire to whom reality passes by in a rosy haze, perhaps because he indeed became a slightly too needy fan of Serotonin?
That was the biggest disappointment with this novel for me: that it had nothing substantial to say about this substance, merely letting a bureaucrat undergo the nonsensical suffering supposedly ironically, and that bureaucrat turns out to be the writer himself after an oh-so-deep analysis, who meanwhile pockets various sponsorships, maybe even from big pharma giants. Houellebecq thought he could outsmart the Dutch: free sex, and then have it banned in court. The plan failed miserably. The Dutch have become very expensive escorts, but fortunately, their little writers, as always, keep silent.
That leads to an obvious conclusion: we have something that works even better than your Captorix, Monsieur Houellebecq. We have something you French lack, a completely superior form of hidden sponsorship. In this drawing of Europe published in Bologna in 1871, the Netherlands is represented by a little devil coming out of a box:
And I think the Italians, in all their mockery, were closer to the truth than they could imagine. The little devil in a box, yes, let’s continue with that tomorrow.
Martijn 21-07-2024