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Speaker 1: and our and our friend.
Speaker 2: Our theme music was written for us by un Woman,
Speaker 2: and this week we are talking about the late sixties
Speaker 2: and early seventies movement of anarcho pacifist Christian mystic hippie
Speaker 2: dykers in the Netherlands who did a lot of really
Speaker 2: wild and interesting shit. And uh, you should go back
Speaker 2: and listen, because we talked about the Provos for the
Speaker 2: first half of it. And now I promised you Nomes,
Speaker 2: but first I'm going to do like several years between
Speaker 2: the Provos and the Gnomes. Yeah, nothing will be left out.
Speaker 2: Tons of things are left out. I do not understand
Speaker 2: how people cover entire historical things in only one episode
Speaker 2: of a podcast anymore. I'm like slowly drifting towards four
Speaker 2: parters just so that like this one was even on
Speaker 2: the cusp. Anyway, the Provos declared themselves disbanded, but they
Speaker 2: didn't stop doing stuff or caring. They just declared the
Speaker 2: movement dead and they sort of split up into different
Speaker 2: stamen translated as tribes. You get this new hippie pacifist
Speaker 2: neo provo magazine, the White Gazette. Everything in the White
Speaker 2: Gazette was spelled phonetically and drawn psychedelically.
Speaker 3: Oh I hate that absolutely.
Speaker 2: I would absolutely hate actually being one of these people.
Speaker 2: I do not like a lot of the aesthetics that they've.
Speaker 3: Ficked is Dutch, because I don't speak German anymore, but
Speaker 3: I was once fluent in German, and German is fully phonetic,
Speaker 3: Like everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds like
Speaker 3: when you say it spelled, like, is Dutch phonetic or
Speaker 3: were they doing something funky?
Speaker 2: They were doing something funky they were like because also,
Speaker 2: I mean, even you can take English words that are
Speaker 2: phonetic and then like rewrite them in like weird hippie
Speaker 2: ways that are even longer than somehow you know they're
Speaker 2: kind of doing that. I read some of the like
Speaker 2: translations of their various titles and things, but I don't
Speaker 2: know enough of the Dutch.
Speaker 3: To tally get. I hate the vibe of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I love what these people did. It is
Speaker 2: not my subculture. That is how I feel about them
Speaker 2: when you come back and tell me the exact same thing.
Speaker 2: But everyone was Goths. I'm just like building a time machine.
Speaker 2: But you have this similar divide in Amsterdam that you
Speaker 2: had all over the late sixties movements. The radicals who
Speaker 2: started the subculture started looking towards other political venues as
Speaker 2: the politics are slowly stripped away from the subculture. The
Speaker 2: beans and love fests stop antagonizing the cops, and the
Speaker 2: original provos start looking into other ways to confront capitalism
Speaker 2: besides subculture itself. In most other countries, this turns into
Speaker 2: urban guerrilla warfare. The you know, the early seventies is
Speaker 2: the period where people go underground and get guns. In
Speaker 2: the Netherlands, they leaned more and their visions of alternatives
Speaker 2: to capitalism. They set up a Digger store named after
Speaker 2: the San Francisco Diggers we've covered on the show a
Speaker 2: couple times, so everything at the store is free. Decades later,
Speaker 2: the first functioning free stores I ever went to actually
Speaker 2: were squatted storefronts. In Amsterdam. Some of the art weirdos
Speaker 2: started the insect sect at war with environmental boredom and pollution,
Speaker 2: and they put on operas for butterflies and built a
Speaker 2: monument to the fallen butterfly.
Speaker 3: I don't get it, but I love that for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, there's so much of this period is that
Speaker 2: I don't get it, but I love it for you.
Speaker 3: Like they're just having a good time outside with their friends,
Speaker 3: Like they're on drugs for.
Speaker 2: Sure, absolutely, And you know, it's working well for them.
Speaker 2: Squatters start opening up social centers with used bookstores attached.
Speaker 2: And Amsterdam, meanwhile, the Netherlands more broadly, seems to fill
Speaker 2: a similar role in Europe that like San Francisco and
Speaker 2: California did in the United States. It's the place that
Speaker 2: people go to hitchhike two and do drugs and hate society.
Speaker 2: Soon they all start camping at doms Square, which is
Speaker 2: the big national square where the National Monument is, and
Speaker 2: shit right in the center of Amsterdam. And these are
Speaker 2: called the dom slappers because they live in dom Square
Speaker 2: and there were no restroom facilities provided for the Domslappers.
Speaker 3: Well, that's a problem.
Speaker 2: Day one. It was a problem day one. They pissed
Speaker 2: and shit on the National monument and in the doorways
Speaker 2: of local businesses. They were not change things. Do not change, no, no.
Speaker 2: When you set up an occupation, you get the bathroom
Speaker 2: set up first thing, day one. All the while the
Speaker 2: students are doing their student organizing thing. That's the style
Speaker 2: at the time. In April nineteen sixty nine, some students
Speaker 2: took over the university with the slogan that translates weird
Speaker 2: and boring as co determination for all sectors at all levels.
Speaker 2: Maybe just fucking ripped in Dutch.
Speaker 3: But octors in all levels. Yeah, what do we want
Speaker 3: when we want it on an organized, an equal timeline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is student occupation. Nineteen sixty nine ended up
Speaker 2: a huge battle of police and five hundred and seventy arrests,
Speaker 2: and the trials proved a pr nightmare for the government.
Speaker 2: This idea of provoking the police continues to be a
Speaker 2: very effective strategy in the Netherlands. Afterwards, the organizers adopted
Speaker 2: a rigid Marxist Leninist line and almost everyone left the
Speaker 2: movement as a result. According to the history book I read,
Speaker 2: which was written by a former cabouter who was probably
Speaker 2: a Progressive or Green Party person by the time they're
Speaker 2: writing it, and was an anarchist in their youth. Just
Speaker 2: to get the bias of the author out the whim,
Speaker 2: fifteen hundred public school teachers formed the National Critical Teachers
Speaker 2: Working Group opposed to the quote authoritarian garbage system of
Speaker 2: education in the country, which ruled Oh yeah, high school
Speaker 2: students start occupying buildings like they occupied the like Catholic
Speaker 2: Pedagogical Institute or something, because like some kids got in
Speaker 2: trouble for like playing with a condom, like they weren't
Speaker 2: fucking there was like literally holding a condom in class,
Speaker 2: and then like people were like, fuck you old school Catholics.
Speaker 2: You can't tell us not to have condoms. And its cool.
Speaker 2: Everywhere people are just getting into rad shit movements to
Speaker 2: stop urban renewal. There's like this thing where the urban
Speaker 2: renewal was attempting to destroy the Jewish Quarter, which had
Speaker 2: already been heavily destroyed by the war, and so people
Speaker 2: got together to fight it. Composers and classical musicians started
Speaker 2: fighting against the classical music establishment. People started throwing tomatoes
Speaker 2: at Shakespeare plays because it's the same old shit or whatever,
Speaker 2: which is funny because like Shakespeare's actually kind of cool,
Speaker 2: but like I get it, you're being mad at the
Speaker 2: establishment of theater.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're going back to basics. I think the tomatoes
Speaker 3: are oldest time.
Speaker 2: I know, Shakespeare probably would approve. And the squatters start
Speaker 2: getting even more organized, starting these like action groups, and
Speaker 2: you have like like when I live there, squatting was
Speaker 2: organized by neighborhood and you had a neighborhood squad councils.
Speaker 2: If you wanted to open a building, you would go
Speaker 2: to the squad council and the day that you open
Speaker 2: the building, one hundred people would come with you and
Speaker 2: hold back the police while you open the building.
Speaker 3: Oh that's beautiful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is a I think there's this thing where
Speaker 2: like people think that certain tactics don't work well, and
Speaker 2: I think it's certain taxes don't work well. Not every
Speaker 2: tactic is appropriate every situation, but a lot of tactics
Speaker 2: don't work when they're not organized, and work really well
Speaker 2: when they're organized. And that doesn't mean that it has
Speaker 2: to be hierarchical. It just means that you have to
Speaker 2: fucking work together.
Speaker 3: Right, There's that persistent myth and anarchism means you can't
Speaker 3: have a plan.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, which is like one of the problems of
Speaker 2: the anarchism is a lot of the anarchists have also
Speaker 2: heard that myth and believe it. You know, feminism is
Speaker 2: on the rise. This is the start of the second Wave,
Speaker 2: which we mostly talk shit on now, but there's a
Speaker 2: lot of good things that were coming out of it.
Speaker 2: And you've got a direct action playful socialist feminist group
Speaker 2: called mad Mina named after an early Dutch feminist socialist
Speaker 2: named Wilhelma Druker and mad Mina is into the ludic activism,
Speaker 2: the playful activism of the time. On the twenty third
Speaker 2: of January nineteen seventy, fifteen women and five men stormed
Speaker 2: a men only business school, while the same day more
Speaker 2: of them burned corsets in public. I've read this translated
Speaker 2: braziers and never like, and I've read it translated corsets.
Speaker 3: I don't know, because I thought that the sort of
Speaker 3: the American feminist braw burning was largely a myth, But
Speaker 3: it sounds like this really did happen.
Speaker 2: So these people were absolutely doing this. And it might
Speaker 2: have been a corset and it might have been a bra,
Speaker 2: but yeah, no, it's one of those things where like
Speaker 2: myths have their some origin of truth. They did the
Speaker 2: one action that I can't fully sign off on, but
Speaker 2: it's still my favorite one they did. They just started
Speaker 2: wolf whistling men in the streets. That was like a
Speaker 2: big thing that they did. I'm not mad at it, no, No,
Speaker 2: it's like one of those things were like in the abstract,
Speaker 2: You're like, look, this shouldn't happen to anyone. But I'm
Speaker 2: a little bit like, as I used to do this
Speaker 2: as a when I was like a young crustal. This
Speaker 2: is way too much of me in this episode, but whatever,
Speaker 2: when I was like a young squatter punk and I
Speaker 2: was still presenting as a boy and had a beard
Speaker 2: and all that stuff. But some of the women in
Speaker 2: our group were getting cat called by the businessmen, like
Speaker 2: walking to work when they would walk past us where
Speaker 2: we sat on the street, because we were crosspunks. And
Speaker 2: we learned that if us squatter boys cat called the men,
Speaker 2: they got really uncomfortable and didn't really come by anymore.
Speaker 2: And so my favorite was, how is it swinging hot cock?
Speaker 2: But I would never sexually harass anyone. I've never done
Speaker 2: anything like I just said.
Speaker 3: Well, they were called provocatives, right, they were provoking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, totally, I'm not mad at them, these people
Speaker 2: for doing this, like the provos MADMENA tied this theatrical
Speaker 2: action to specific and achievable goals. They fought for abortion rights,
Speaker 2: they fought for equal pay, they fought for daycare centers
Speaker 2: and shit like that. And it's that pairing. They would
Speaker 2: take playful action and they would pair it to specific
Speaker 2: and achievable goals. And now you know, I'm not saying
Speaker 2: this is the best way to solve every problem. There's
Speaker 2: problems in this and it actually some of it is
Speaker 2: that it's fairly easy to be recuperated, and that happened
Speaker 2: a lot to what these folks did. But it also
Speaker 2: accomplishes a lot sometimes, you know. Overall, after the provos,
Speaker 2: the political and personal revolutions of the sixties were distinct
Speaker 2: from one from one another again until this is my favorite,
Speaker 2: until because usually those just stay distinct, and the hippies
Speaker 2: and the radicals narrow. The twains shall ever meet again,
Speaker 2: you know, until the cabouters.
Speaker 3: Gnomes, gnobesnobs, no gnomes.
Speaker 2: So we're going to go back to this guy. Ruven
Speaker 2: Don was the He was the anarchist who'd shown up
Speaker 2: to the happenings with some ideas he'd like written up
Speaker 2: that first paper. You know, after the provo collapsed, he
Speaker 2: fell into a depression. And this is a very common
Speaker 2: thing that actually, I assume a lot of our listeners
Speaker 2: are still dealing with the high point of a large
Speaker 2: social movement. What comes after is often very depressing. He
Speaker 2: got out of it in the classic way. This is
Speaker 2: not the classic way. It's a very strange way. He
Speaker 2: obsessively read Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince who became an
Speaker 2: anarchist and was a major developer of the concept of
Speaker 2: mutual aid as a factor of evolution in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 3: He's definitely not the only one to have gone down that.
Speaker 2: Road, that's true. The other way he got out of
Speaker 2: his depression, and this one was actually doctor's orders, and
Speaker 2: I actually think is a fairly good here's to a
Speaker 2: society where the doctor can prescribe this to you and
Speaker 2: you can do it. He started to work on a farm.
Speaker 3: I thought you were going to say heroin. They weren't
Speaker 3: describing that. They weren't prescribing that in the sixties.
Speaker 2: I don't know enough about drug history. They prescribe him
Speaker 2: to work on a biodynamic farm, which is a bigger
Speaker 2: in Europe than it is in the US. But biodynamics
Speaker 2: is like halfway between organic farming and witchcraft. It's like
Speaker 2: where you like plant by the sea, the moon and stuff,
Speaker 2: and it's very interesting, but it's whatever. And while he's
Speaker 2: out working on this farm, he falls in love with
Speaker 2: a piece of Dutch folklore that went on to become
Speaker 2: rather important. The cabouter goboucher is usually translated as a gnome,
Speaker 2: and that's where a lot of the modern ideas of
Speaker 2: gnomes come from. The famous art book called Gnome with
Speaker 2: a Big Beard, red hatted guy. That book is originally
Speaker 2: Dutch and it's called gobouter. Cabouchers are forest spirits that
Speaker 2: come to hang out on farms and help out during
Speaker 2: the night. And the etymology is obscured by time, but
Speaker 2: it seems to likely to refer to a pagan spirit
Speaker 2: associated with some specific place. So it's like a lot
Speaker 2: of European mythology comes from pre Christian pagan practice. You know,
Speaker 2: on the farm, people cared about the cabouters. They didn't
Speaker 2: use modern machinery because it scares the cabouters, and the
Speaker 2: cabouchers were a metaphor to quote former Provo and kabouterer
Speaker 2: Coen Tasman, who wrote the main book that I ended
Speaker 2: up using as a source for this, because there's not
Speaker 2: a lot of English Langue sources about the Cabalter. It's
Speaker 2: called clearly cabalter from his book. A humanity that views
Speaker 2: nature as an ally and not as an adversary to
Speaker 2: be conquered. That's what the Cabalter's represented. I'm so fucking into.
Speaker 3: It how much of this is and I guess it's
Speaker 3: hard to separate, right, but how much of this at
Speaker 3: this time, at least in the countryside, is a sincere
Speaker 3: holding on to of this sort of folk belief. Like
Speaker 3: I know, there's some story a couple of years ago
Speaker 3: in Iceland about a highway that had to be rerouted
Speaker 3: because the place where they were going to build the road,
Speaker 3: the people in the small town in Iceland were like, no,
Speaker 3: but like the Gnome lives there, you can't build the
Speaker 3: road where the Noome lives. And there was you know,
Speaker 3: I think initially a lot of people sort of joking
Speaker 3: around like oly people in Iceland really believe that, and
Speaker 3: some of it may have been sincere belief, but I
Speaker 3: think some of it was people using this sort of
Speaker 3: folkloric belief that was common in the region for an
Speaker 3: environmental purpose.
Speaker 2: So I am not certain, and I spent a while
Speaker 2: thinking about this. I think that probably the farmers both
Speaker 2: knew it was a metaphor and also let that metaphor
Speaker 2: be real, because I think that is the theological impulse.
Speaker 2: I think the theological impulse is the letting metaphor be real,
Speaker 2: And that's my read on it. As I think that
Speaker 2: they both did and didn't believe it and held on
Speaker 2: to both of those things because it was like useful
Speaker 2: to them. But I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's I think that's where I sort
Speaker 3: of landed reading those stories about the Gnome and Iceland,
Speaker 3: that was, Yeah, it both is and isn't a sincere belief,
Speaker 3: and in.
Speaker 2: The end it kind of doesn't matter, yeah, exactly. And
Speaker 2: maybe because it's like that's the way that I like it, right,
Speaker 2: I like it as a metaphor you choose to take seriously,
Speaker 2: you know, And so maybe that's me reading into it
Speaker 2: what I would what I would do, But I don't know. Overall,
Speaker 2: the biodynamic thing is like very witchy and often in
Speaker 2: ways that are kind of like I've talked to some
Speaker 2: biodynamic farmers about like like, yeah, we stick with the
Speaker 2: dynamic thing because it sells better in the market than
Speaker 2: instead of just labeling it organic. But it's a little
Speaker 2: bit weird, you know, like it's like a very but
Speaker 2: other people like totally into it. Very complicated.
Speaker 3: I mean, I have a complicated relationship with the Black
Speaker 3: Soldier fly larva that do my composting.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's and so a supposed as you can get to
Speaker 3: biodynamic farming in an apartment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. So the kabouchers are helpful, but also mocking
Speaker 2: is like one of their things, right, They like, they're
Speaker 2: going to come and do all this work at night,
Speaker 2: but they're going to kind of pick fun of you
Speaker 2: at you too, And that's very the ludic activism. It
Speaker 2: is the playful activism, and so depressed anarchy boy Room.
Speaker 2: He builds up a whole political theory out of them.
Speaker 2: It's the marriage of opposites, the country and the city,
Speaker 2: the masculine and the feminine, of amateur and professional work.
Speaker 2: He declared that a kaboucher city, a kaboucher stad, would
Speaker 2: be guided rather than governed, and he wrote a book
Speaker 2: his theories called The Message from a Wise Cabouter, with
Speaker 2: the kaboucher, in this case not being like him, but
Speaker 2: his favorite bearding man, Peter Kerpotkin. And so he found
Speaker 2: his way out of despair by hard, honest work and
Speaker 2: by reading anarchist theory, and by hearing from people all
Speaker 2: around the world who had been inspired by the work
Speaker 2: of the provos and realizing that it hadn't all been
Speaker 2: for naught. In nineteen sixty nine, he came back to
Speaker 2: Amsterdam and he became the fourth Provo of the Amsterdam
Speaker 2: Municipal Council. Like you know, I mentioned earlier that they
Speaker 2: on to each other. Yeah, and his predecessor on the
Speaker 2: council and his mentor on what to do with it
Speaker 2: was this woman Irene, who'd started the sex education classes
Speaker 2: for women. And I think that part's important because she
Speaker 2: kind of like it was like a one line thing.
Speaker 2: It's like, oh, and his mentor Irene, And I'm like m.
Speaker 3: Hmm, what was she mentoring him in?
Speaker 2: Well, I've just mean like this this great man history
Speaker 2: thing where it's like Rue is like the he becomes
Speaker 2: the face of the cabouters and he was a little
Speaker 2: bit the face of the provos. And that's like contentious
Speaker 2: right even at the time, But like he's cool and
Speaker 2: his cool stuff at least at this point. But he's
Speaker 2: not alone in doing this, you know. But what he
Speaker 2: chooses to do with his seat is fucking cool. His
Speaker 2: nomebook had done pretty well and so people are like
Speaker 2: kind of listening to him. At this point, he figured,
Speaker 2: all right, let's make Amsterdam a utopia. Let's make it
Speaker 2: Amsterdam Kebaltristad and a lot of people do a lot
Speaker 2: of damage in history trying to create utopia because usually,
Speaker 2: including a bunch of anarchists, they'll go to a colonial
Speaker 2: place like America and then like be like, we're going
Speaker 2: to set up a utopia. They decided to do it
Speaker 2: where they already lived and where they were from, and
Speaker 2: that is a more respectable decision. So he wrote up
Speaker 2: his proposals, and according to his proposals, Amsterdam needed more
Speaker 2: gardens and more trees, sheep and goats. Yeah, absolutely, Sheep
Speaker 2: and goats could be kept on rooftop gardens. Flowers and
Speaker 2: food should be planted everywhere. The only cars allowed in
Speaker 2: the city would be provo style white cars, which was
Speaker 2: and this wasn't his idea. This is actually the guy
Speaker 2: who did the white by School program later came up
Speaker 2: with the white cars, which were electric cars. In the
Speaker 2: fuck nineteen sixty eight nineteen sixty nine, they were talking
Speaker 2: about electric cars and started making them.
Speaker 3: They were living in the year three thousand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they were electric cars for anyone to use.
Speaker 2: Administrative power would be decentralized along anarchist lines, with community
Speaker 2: and neighborhood councils, empowered in all ways. Schools and universities
Speaker 2: would become democratic, and then industry wouldn't just be democratic.
Speaker 2: This is actually ahead of its time. Most workplace democracy
Speaker 2: pushes for workers cooperatives, and I'm all about it. But
Speaker 2: they argued that, or he argued in the later Mark
Speaker 2: Abouchers argued that industry should be run not solely by
Speaker 2: the workers, but by councils composed of both the workers
Speaker 2: and the consumers to make sure that what's being produced
Speaker 2: is what's needed.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: He also he had spent eleven days in prison at
Speaker 2: some point recently. I think it was for public seeing
Speaker 2: that bomb making instructions back at the very beginning of
Speaker 2: it all.
Speaker 3: But I'm not sure you mistake anyone could make.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who hasn't. He also said that that prison should
Speaker 2: become a people's astronomical observatory. You will be shocked to
Speaker 2: know that his ideas did not find too much traction
Speaker 2: among city council, where he was like one of you
Speaker 2: forty people or whatever you know.
Speaker 3: Now, the resolution to put sheep on the roof didn't
Speaker 3: take no weirdly enough, and they constantly declared him out
Speaker 3: of order whenever he tried to speak.
Speaker 2: But he got media attention, and he set up meetings
Speaker 2: every two weeks that were open to the public where
Speaker 2: he would tell people what was going on in city council,
Speaker 2: and he would ask people affected by specific city council
Speaker 2: decisions to come and advise him directly. So he's not
Speaker 2: just like, my ideas are what city council needs to do,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: No, he's actually trying to engage in democracy. Yeah, which
Speaker 3: a lot of elected officials are very resistant too.
Speaker 2: It's almost like there's something about the nature of power.
Speaker 2: He called these meetings cabouterer meetings, because of course he did. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: all these hippies are sleeping on Doms Square and pissing
Speaker 2: on the National Monument, and the city council is like,
Speaker 2: maybe we should ban sleeping there, which is funny. I
Speaker 2: just assumed it was illegal from the start, right because
Speaker 2: like in America, we assume that we don't have any
Speaker 2: rights to public space. But it was a big deal
Speaker 2: that they were like considering banning sleeping in public and
Speaker 2: Rue just argued, hey, I got an idea, what if
Speaker 2: we put up bathrooms?
Speaker 3: I mean, a revolutionary baffling. How could you think of
Speaker 3: something so brilliant.
Speaker 2: And What's also funny is actually Amsterdam is like a
Speaker 2: little bit famous for the men's journals in public. I
Speaker 2: did not know that, which is actually I don't have
Speaker 2: a problem with. But one of the things that Madmena
Speaker 2: and I think another one of the direct action feminist
Speaker 2: groups around the time was doing is demanding women's public urinals.
Speaker 2: And there's actually I actually wonder because there's some of
Speaker 2: these public urinals. They're funny. They're just like a it's
Speaker 2: like a post with like four holes. You just like
Speaker 2: walk up to it and four men can walk up
Speaker 2: to it at once and pee into it.
Speaker 3: So was this like solving a social problem of men
Speaker 3: just pissing on the street. Yeah, so they already kind
Speaker 3: of knew that that was the solution to people pissing outside.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, absolutely, Yeah, it's.
Speaker 4: A problem they'd alread addressed as to a society. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 4: but they wouldn't do it there. And uh, and I
Speaker 4: actually wonder whether some of the women's ones don't exist,
Speaker 4: because there is another style where it's a little bit
Speaker 4: you have some privacy. It's a kind of a it's
Speaker 4: like almost like a little.
Speaker 2: Roundabout that you like walk into. It's this tiny little
Speaker 2: thing the size of a phone booth. But instead of door,
Speaker 2: you just walk around a circle in a spiral and
Speaker 2: there's a hole in the ground and you can pee
Speaker 2: in it.
Speaker 3: I mean, I would solve so many problems.
Speaker 2: I know. And so he's like, all right, why don't
Speaker 2: we just put up bathrooms. But he also said that
Speaker 2: the National Monument was the monument's colonial oppression of Indonesia,
Speaker 2: and that pissed off the Mare so much that he
Speaker 2: was cut out. His talk was cut out for the
Speaker 2: meetings minutes.
Speaker 3: Well, that's against the rules.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it wasn't at the time, and that
Speaker 2: was kind of one of the things. Anything that was
Speaker 2: like censured bad. Yeah, And so he went on to
Speaker 2: specifically fuck with that rule. He wrote the Sabotage Memorandum,
Speaker 2: which is a formal proposal the city council that the
Speaker 2: city council should approve of Dutch citizens sabotaging the Dutch military,
Speaker 2: up to and including seducing and killing soldiers. I bet
Speaker 2: that one over really good. And what's funny about it,
Speaker 2: it sounds so out of the blue. The Netherlands is
Speaker 2: reeling from its from occupation. Most of the people who
Speaker 2: are twenty grew up during that right and there's this
Speaker 2: national shame that they didn't do more. They had one
Speaker 2: of the most active resistance movements in Europe, A ton
Speaker 2: of people participated, but they hadn't really succeeded. A large
Speaker 2: majority of that country's Jewish population had been murdered by
Speaker 2: the Nazis, and this is a national shame that they
Speaker 2: still bear. And so the idea idea of the Sabotage
Speaker 2: Memorandum was an argument that basically the Dutch people should
Speaker 2: be trained to do better next time. And this is
Speaker 2: actually we talked about this earlier in the US. The
Speaker 2: right wing has this particular militia mentality, right that every
Speaker 2: patriot needs to be ready to overthrow the government with
Speaker 2: like ar fifteens. This was a mostly pacifist Dutch version
Speaker 2: of a similar thing, one based on actual recent history.
Speaker 2: For them, the people need to be ready to sabotage
Speaker 2: authoritarian rule. But to ruin and other folks, that included
Speaker 2: the current capitalist system.
Speaker 3: Right, because that's the occupying force. Now, yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah no. And I first read about it and
Speaker 2: I was like, ah, it's clever, and then they like
Speaker 2: read a little bit more about it and like put
Speaker 2: in some other pieces and was like, oh, that's really
Speaker 2: fucking clever.
Speaker 3: It's got layers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and much like the layers of irony in running
Speaker 2: this podcast in an ad sponsored way, like these ads
Speaker 2: here and we're back. So the mayor vetoed this as
Speaker 2: a discussion. He submitted it formally as like appropriated all
Speaker 2: of paperwork, you know, And the mayor was like, nope,
Speaker 2: because if we had as a proper discussion, we would
Speaker 2: be publishing the whole thing right in the minutes of.
Speaker 3: The meeting, and you got to put the whole document
Speaker 3: in the agenda.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those are the rules. Yeah. So the public and
Speaker 2: press pushed and pushed, and of course the rest of
Speaker 2: the city council didn't go for the plan, but they
Speaker 2: did end up pushing enough to get it entered into
Speaker 2: public discussion. So they put they put the sex stortion.
Speaker 3: Plan in the minutes. They put it in the minutes
Speaker 3: that the mayor got mad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Meanwhile, the cabouncers are forming as a group
Speaker 2: and Ru's not in charge, Like that's part of how
Speaker 2: they fall apart, is whether or not Ru's in charge.
Speaker 2: We'll get to that. And they're like, all right, well,
Speaker 2: it didn't work in city council. So we're gonna put
Speaker 2: together the people University for sabotage, and we are going
Speaker 2: to train youth and counter recruitment and generally try to
Speaker 2: stop the Western war machine. And this becomes more and
Speaker 2: more popular, and some other folks show up one day
Speaker 2: and they bring a proposal. Let's just declare a new government,
Speaker 2: a people's government.
Speaker 3: As a bit, just really commit to the bit. The
Speaker 3: government will have to laugh.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 2: It worked, It even made the government law. It's so weird.
Speaker 2: This is I'm so excited about this story.
Speaker 3: I just feel like that would not work in America.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: But also, we wouldn't do it as a joke, we
Speaker 2: take seriously. Instead, we would just like do it, you know,
Speaker 2: and it wouldn't be the same. And also, I mean,
Speaker 2: there's this thing that happens where like, for example, I
Speaker 2: think in a two thousand and five or eight or
Speaker 2: something like that, some leaders within the Lakota Nation attempted
Speaker 2: to secede from the United States in a very reasonable
Speaker 2: way from my point of view, and it was just ignored.
Speaker 3: Right, I guess that's the best case scenario when you're
Speaker 3: talking about the US government.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's sad and true. So on February fifth, nineteen seventy,
Speaker 2: the assemble crowd at the People's University declared the Orange
Speaker 2: Free State the parity of government. It would have its
Speaker 2: own assemblies and decision making bodies, but the whole thing
Speaker 2: was designed to mock the idea of the state, especially monarchy.
Speaker 2: If occupy was a joke that took itself seriously, is
Speaker 2: what this was.
Speaker 3: Oh, they have gesture's privilege right, Oh my god, totally.
Speaker 3: Like the police can't be mad because you're the gester. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and like your mind with a king.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And when people come and like attack it, it
Speaker 2: makes the police look bad. The name the Orange Free
Speaker 2: State was a play on words because it was orange free,
Speaker 2: right without the House of Orange. Oh, but also it's
Speaker 2: like state free, like without the state, or you could
Speaker 2: just read it straight and it's the Orange Free State.
Speaker 3: It works on so many levels, I know, I know.
Speaker 2: So Amsterdam City Hall was now the Councilor's embassy with
Speaker 2: the existing state, so their council member was no longer
Speaker 2: like their council member, he was their ambassadory. Yeah. The
Speaker 2: countercultural magazine Aloha was nationalized and became the Orange free
Speaker 2: state government gazette and their proclamation. They of course they
Speaker 2: print up a proclamation. The whole point you're doing this
Speaker 2: is you get the proclamation. Yeah. Whereas and it opened,
Speaker 2: how does a new society grow out of an old one?
Speaker 2: Like a toadstool on a rotting tree stump, and it
Speaker 2: talks about how it's going to take what's useful from
Speaker 2: the old society, but something entirely new. And there's another
Speaker 2: part in it that I like, quote, why does the
Speaker 2: old society perish? Because it can't save itself from its
Speaker 2: own conflicts? Political tensions between existing authoritarian governments can explode
Speaker 2: into a military catastrophe at any moment. Official technology and
Speaker 2: industry's aggresson against nature systematically demolish the biological environment, and
Speaker 2: apocalyptic catastrophes will result within a few years. They were
Speaker 2: off by a couple decades, but they're not fucking wrong.
Speaker 2: Unprecedented epidemics, food poisoning and famine, mass extinction of animals
Speaker 2: and humans are inevitable if this isn't averted by the
Speaker 2: rise of a new culture. A new culture with a
Speaker 2: new man, the culture gnome will remove the tension between
Speaker 2: nature and the old culture who understands animals and unites
Speaker 2: people in love. Who will restore unity among everything that lives. Oh,
Speaker 2: I'm the culture Gnome. I'm doing this. It's so fucking
Speaker 2: good because it's not just who's going to replace the
Speaker 2: old world? Fuck everything that ever came from the old world.
Speaker 2: It's like, no, we are mushrooms and we're going to
Speaker 2: grow out of the rot of the old world. And
Speaker 2: the Gnome is going to help tie the old world
Speaker 2: and the new world together.
Speaker 3: That's so beautiful.
Speaker 2: And so this was printed in the tens of thousands
Speaker 2: and distributed across the country for fifty cents a copy
Speaker 2: and was like a one of the major fundraising things
Speaker 2: or the Orange Free State. They wrote a raucous national
Speaker 2: anthem called the Owl Sits in the Elms, and I
Speaker 2: could not find a recording of it, but the lyrics are.
Speaker 3: We have to somewhere Internet parties.
Speaker 2: I know, I bet you there's someone who could just
Speaker 2: sing it to us. I'm sure that like an old
Speaker 2: dutch Man, surely, the owl sits in the elms at
Speaker 2: the falling of the night, and over yonder hill, the
Speaker 2: cuckoo softly calls cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. Cuckoo, so true,
Speaker 2: and it's just like I love that it's nonsense.
Speaker 3: Is it a metaphor?
Speaker 2: The cuckoo is a trickster bird who lays eggs in
Speaker 2: other birds' nests. Okay, but it was mostly because it
Speaker 2: was nonsense and fun to sing. One of the first
Speaker 2: things they did. They're in the National the Domb Square, right,
Speaker 2: They're the big place where the National Monument is. So
Speaker 2: they chip a hole in the paving stones. These motherfuckers.
Speaker 2: They tear up so many paving stones. It's gonna be
Speaker 2: so good.
Speaker 3: Do they make a piss hole?
Speaker 2: No, they go and they plant and their national monument
Speaker 2: of their own, which is a dwarf orange tree. Oh.
Speaker 3: Is it the one with the horrible thorns?
Speaker 2: Oh? I don't know. Does it have horrible thorns?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: So, my mom has something called I guess it's a
Speaker 3: mutant orange tree. But it makes these tiny little oranges
Speaker 3: that are really bitter. But the oranges are about this big,
Speaker 3: but the thorns are like as big as these big
Speaker 3: curved thorns. I hope it's one of those.
Speaker 2: I hope so too. I think it's just one of
Speaker 2: those like shorter orange trees, just like.
Speaker 3: A little orange tree, because the mutant orange tree I
Speaker 3: think would be a beautiful symbol for the gnomes.
Speaker 2: Now, that would be if they did it again now
Speaker 2: as the apocalypse is like here instead of the thing
Speaker 2: that seems like to be in the future, you know,
Speaker 2: as like they have to plant it on a rooftop
Speaker 2: garden because the dam's break And anyway, the mayor cut
Speaker 2: down the orange tree the next day, but he was
Speaker 2: kind of savvy about it. He started playing along with
Speaker 2: the joke, and he was basically like, well, it would
Speaker 2: be rude for one friendly nation to place a monument
Speaker 2: in the territory of another friendly nation, and we're not
Speaker 2: at war with each other.
Speaker 3: Well, they should said it was a gift, like the
Speaker 3: Statue of Liberty or something.
Speaker 2: I know, right. The Orange Free State lasted for over
Speaker 2: a year, from February nineteen seventy to April nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: About two thousand people were like pretty directly involved, not
Speaker 2: including their tens of thousands of supporters, voters, and magazine readers.
Speaker 2: Among their organizers were teachers and students, dropouts, plumbers and inventor,
Speaker 2: a millionaire, priests, small shopkeepers, dozens of people who made
Speaker 2: and sold clothes for a living. The counterculture fashion at
Speaker 2: the time was to only wear handmade clothes. About a
Speaker 2: third of them were women, and two thirds of them
Speaker 2: were under twenty five, and they raised most of their
Speaker 2: money by selling various periodicals. And it was a playful
Speaker 2: game that they took seriously. The mainstream world was the
Speaker 2: shadow world, and those who tried to shut down the
Speaker 2: cabouters were trolls, enemy of the Nome. The kabouchers who
Speaker 2: traveled out from Amsterdam were missionaries and wandering preachers. A
Speaker 2: bunch of other cities started chapters, and these days the
Speaker 2: cabouts are less known about than the provos, or just
Speaker 2: more written about the provos. But they were actually a
Speaker 2: substantially bigger deal. There was like two thousand news articles
Speaker 2: written about them in the year that they existed. They
Speaker 2: had more people, more projects, and in the end more votes.
Speaker 2: They spread out across the country when they put together Slate.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about more in a little bit. That Slate
Speaker 2: garnered thirty eight thousand votes in Amsterdam in the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy elections. That's eleven percent of the votes, and they
Speaker 2: got five seats, and they got six seats spread out elsewhere.
Speaker 3: That's not nothing for a bit, Yeah, absolutely, I mean
Speaker 3: that's a you can't get a third party candidate that
Speaker 3: many seats now.
Speaker 2: No, all the while they are wild hippies breaking the law,
Speaker 2: they are opening squats for housing and social centers. They
Speaker 2: turned one building into the state theater of the Orange
Speaker 2: Free State, and they were claim me an autonomous territory
Speaker 2: within the Netherlands. They were squatting.
Speaker 3: They're like making sovereign territory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as a joke, but also real.
Speaker 3: Like the gnome right, it's it's a metaphor, that's.
Speaker 2: Real, exactly exactly, And this squatted territory was often functionally
Speaker 2: sovereign within the Netherlands because squatters defended it. And this
Speaker 2: is actually when we get past this is like the
Speaker 2: squatters leave the non violence behind and start throwing monotops
Speaker 2: at cops within a decade. A friend of mine was
Speaker 2: a bartender at a Dutch squatted bar in the nineties
Speaker 2: and she told me this story. One night, a cop
Speaker 2: parked out front of the bar, but did it on
Speaker 2: punk night, so drunk punk squatters went out and burned
Speaker 2: the cop car. I mean, what were they supposed to do?
Speaker 2: The cops arrived hat in hands and apologized for having
Speaker 2: parked a cop car in front of the bar, and
Speaker 2: it would not happen again.
Speaker 3: Goddamn right, got dear with that.
Speaker 2: A proper country power concedes not without a demand. So
Speaker 2: the cabalter. They come from every walk of Dutch life.
Speaker 2: There's Catholics, Protestants, Jews who grew up hiding in the war.
Speaker 2: There's Dutch, Indian, Indonesian and African born. Dutch people were
Speaker 2: all part of it. They're into provocative, playful direct action.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite things in the world. One of
Speaker 2: my favorite Dutch inventions is the bock feats, which is
Speaker 2: a pickup truck bicycle and it it's like there's bock
Speaker 2: feats in America where it's like a little box on
Speaker 2: the bike. The ones in the the ones in Amsterdam
Speaker 2: are like a pickup truck bed on the front of
Speaker 2: a bicycle. And it works because the Netherlands is completely.
Speaker 3: Flat, right, there's no hills under the sea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the annoying part of driving about riding a
Speaker 2: box feats is getting it up the hill of the
Speaker 2: when you go over a canal. You know, that's like
Speaker 2: the one you gotta get ready. But other than that,
Speaker 2: you can move a ton of stuff around. And so
Speaker 2: they take their bock feats and they stage protests to
Speaker 2: block cars from entering the city. They just they're like, nope,
Speaker 2: it's car free now, we told you it would be.
Speaker 2: They tear up the cobblestones and plant trees in major intersections.
Speaker 2: They have big takeovers of streets by parents and children,
Speaker 2: being like, no, we're doing a play street. Fuck you.
Speaker 2: They illegally paint new pedestrian crosswalks, and the cities at
Speaker 2: war with them. Right They'll like, they'll paint a new
Speaker 2: pedestrian crosswalk and then the city will paint over it.
Speaker 2: But then like it rained really hard and it washed
Speaker 2: away the paint that covered up the crosswalk, and the
Speaker 2: crosswalk came back.
Speaker 3: How this is also doable right now? You could go
Speaker 3: paint a grilla crosswalk.
Speaker 2: You absolutely could.
Speaker 3: I would never advocate illegal activity, no.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not, But if people wanted to do it, I
Speaker 2: would support their bail fund. They got some streets permanently
Speaker 2: closed to cars, streets that are pedestrian only today. That's incredible.
Speaker 2: Decades later, Yeah, they shaped Amsterdam, and in some ways,
Speaker 2: I mean, in some ways they shaped it for capitalism, right,
Speaker 2: Those capestrian only streets are great shopping streets.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking about, Like, what little I know about it
Speaker 3: Amsterdam as a physical place is that it does have
Speaker 3: so many of these like pedestrian malls and everyone's riding
Speaker 3: a bike, and it sounds like they did.
Speaker 2: That it's because of the nomes. They also went to
Speaker 2: war with the city over playground safety. We're gonna get
Speaker 2: into this is the most wholesome group of people I've
Speaker 2: ever covered on the show, and I was crying reading
Speaker 2: about them earlier. They go around and illegally put rubber
Speaker 2: tiles under playground equipment so that kids don't get hurt
Speaker 2: when they fall. City workers would come and rip it
Speaker 2: up and replace it with cobblestone, so the cabouchers would
Speaker 2: just go out and do it again, over and over
Speaker 2: again until they won. Sadly, they won because a little
Speaker 2: girl fell on the stones and died. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: it seems like a predictable outcome when you're putting it
Speaker 2: entirely predictable play plates. Yeah. And then, most wholesome of all,
Speaker 2: they set up a department of Welfare, which existed to
Speaker 2: look after lonely old people. Oh this was coordinated. It
Speaker 2: wasn't just like twenty year olds to be like, we
Speaker 2: know what old people want. There was a sixty year
Speaker 2: old disabled cabouter who worked together with a bunch of
Speaker 2: nuns figuring out what old people needed. And then the
Speaker 2: anarchists came in and took care of it. It was
Speaker 2: highly organized. It involved four hundred volunteers. It was divided
Speaker 2: up by city district, and it like the city didn't
Speaker 2: have a good system to look after the elderly at
Speaker 2: this point, and a lot of the way that the
Speaker 2: city does it currently comes from this. And so the
Speaker 2: elderly are lonely, right, So young log hair hippies would
Speaker 2: come read them the Bible as they went to sleep
Speaker 2: if that's what they wanted, or they would take they
Speaker 2: would do the grocery shopping, or they would take out
Speaker 2: the trash. And around this time is when you get
Speaker 2: the loud and fierce atheist contingent that kept trying to
Speaker 2: make the Orange Free State like take a specific atheistic line.
Speaker 2: But people wouldn't go for it, not because they were Christians,
Speaker 2: but because they weren't. They were like, no, people can
Speaker 2: do what they want about religion is the best I
Speaker 2: can understand, and then the Department of Welfare staffed a
Speaker 2: phone line for lonely old people.
Speaker 3: The cost so sweet.
Speaker 2: I know, it literally had me crying reading about this, honestly.
Speaker 3: Like this, I mean, you know, some of these other
Speaker 3: social programs there's like sort of a legitimate capitalistic function
Speaker 3: to them. You could see how that could be appropriated
Speaker 3: and would serve in other systems. But this is just nice.
Speaker 2: This is just nice. Yeah, exactly. They perceived themselves as
Speaker 2: a society outside they exist the shadow world, and in
Speaker 2: the shadow world people are nice to each other and
Speaker 2: take care of each other. So they crazy to the
Speaker 2: infrastructure to do it. Yeah, and it helped bridge this
Speaker 2: generation gap that was widening. When they first set this up.
Speaker 2: No one would go to them because they were like,
Speaker 2: we don't want those workshy long hairs. You know.
Speaker 3: It's I guess in what is in nineteen seventy So
Speaker 3: the elderly were young adults during the war, so they
Speaker 3: do have very different sort of life experiences.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally overall, you're talking about very conservative group of people,
Speaker 2: you know, And yeah, they did all this crazy shit.
Speaker 2: They also at one point raided a soldier's barracks to
Speaker 2: pass out leaflets against the military and trying to get
Speaker 2: people to quit. I think there was mandatory conscription until
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two, but I'm not certain. I've read a
Speaker 2: bunch of different stuff about this.
Speaker 3: That sounds like something a king would do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. But what they ended up doing most of
Speaker 2: them would refuse service or there wasn't a mandatory recruitment
Speaker 2: during this exact moment, I'm not sure, but overall the
Speaker 2: hippies in general would refuse service. Some of them joined
Speaker 2: the military specifically to start anti militarism groups among the soldiers, just.
Speaker 3: To get weird in the barracks.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, if I didn't consider myself a citizen
Speaker 3: of the state, I would not allow myself to be conscripted.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's totally true. Lord, And actually that carries
Speaker 2: across Oh my god, I'm thinking about how like some
Speaker 2: of my friends, whenever squad would get caught, like with
Speaker 2: an out bike light or something and cops would stop them,
Speaker 2: sometimes the squads would just be like, we're not showing
Speaker 2: you id We're we're citizens of the world, We're not
Speaker 2: citizens of the Dutch.
Speaker 3: I'm not driving them traveling.
Speaker 2: And like I had I knew two people who were legal.
Speaker 2: They weren't Dutch, but they were legal. They were European
Speaker 2: citizens that were allowed in the Netherlands. They spent a
Speaker 2: month in foreign attention rather than show their ID because
Speaker 2: they were like, no, the Dutch state has no control
Speaker 2: over me.
Speaker 3: That's a commitment to the bit that I could not uphold.
Speaker 2: I know, but the only the only bit I'm committed
Speaker 2: to is awkward ad transitions like this one.
Speaker 1: And we're back.
Speaker 2: No, I absolutely wouldn't have. I felt bad because people
Speaker 2: are like squatters don't carry ID, and I'm like, I'm
Speaker 2: not a European citizen. I'm carrying for me to spend
Speaker 2: a month in jail over that. I had already been
Speaker 2: to foreign attention at that point because of like a
Speaker 2: the squaders tried to protect. Some Nazis had burned down
Speaker 2: a mosque and then the people who in Rotterdam and
Speaker 2: so folks from the mosque were rebuilding, and the Nazis
Speaker 2: were like, We're going to come beat you up and
Speaker 2: burn it down again. So all the anti fascists and
Speaker 2: the Netherlands. I am one of the few people who
Speaker 2: can say I have been bussed as an Antifa member
Speaker 2: bust out to Rotterdam. It was officially branded Antifa action,
Speaker 2: and I got on a bus and I went over
Speaker 2: to Rotterdam to fucking fight Nazis who were trying to
Speaker 2: burn down a mosque. And I would fucking do it again.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful.
Speaker 2: I didn't get a chance to. We all got arrested.
Speaker 2: And also I suck at fighting, but whatever, but.
Speaker 3: You were willing to try, and I think that's the
Speaker 3: spirit of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I went to Foreign Attention and then I was like,
Speaker 2: this sucks. I'm carrying my ID from now on. Anyway,
Speaker 2: So the cabouncers, some of them, tried to write a
Speaker 2: constitution and brought it to the Assembly, but people like,
Speaker 2: we're good, we don't want one of those. And they
Speaker 2: set out letters to heads of state asking for audiences
Speaker 2: so they could discuss this new country in Amsterdam.
Speaker 3: Incredible, only one world leader obliged, who took the meeting.
Speaker 3: I want you to guess, Okay, okay, it's just the seventies.
Speaker 3: It's really funny, Like I wanted to be the president
Speaker 3: of Ireland, but I'm just thinking of the cut little
Speaker 3: guy that's the president of Ireland now, because he kind
Speaker 3: of like reminds me of home.
Speaker 2: Oh totally uh huh, but I don't know the pope.
Speaker 3: Fuck, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2: Pope Paul the sixth received a caboucher delegation kindly for
Speaker 2: about fifteen minutes, and basically it was like, I like
Speaker 2: what you all have to say about saving the environment
Speaker 2: and dressing housing shortages, but this anarchism thing is no good,
Speaker 2: and you're in way too much of a hurry to
Speaker 2: save the world. The Pope that he received them like
Speaker 2: in Vatican City. Yes, However, there there is a chance
Speaker 2: that this is a lie. Oh don't tell me. It
Speaker 2: was covered by several newspapers.
Speaker 1: Are you saying this is pope paganda?
Speaker 2: Sorry, it might have been a caboucher prank to convince
Speaker 2: the press that this had happened.
Speaker 3: But I mean that does sound like them, I know,
Speaker 3: but I.
Speaker 2: Kind of feel like if they had done it as
Speaker 2: a prank, they would have been a little bit like,
Speaker 2: that's what the Pope would have told them. I think,
Speaker 2: very progressive pope, except about bodily and reproductive autonomy, in
Speaker 2: which he was not very progressive self. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 3: I want to find more and more evidence of this
Speaker 3: meeting that's so special to me.
Speaker 2: I know, I know all of the evidence that's available
Speaker 2: in English that I'm aware of is in clearly Cabouter. However,
Speaker 2: there is a larger The book was originally like I
Speaker 2: think thousands of pages, and then was like the largest
Speaker 2: social leftist social history slash anarchist archive in the world
Speaker 2: is an Amsterdam. It's called the Institute for Social History,
Speaker 2: and that's where the archives of the Cabalter movement that
Speaker 2: con put together is. Anyway, the Cabouter started a new
Speaker 2: postal service cheaper than the national one, and they paid
Speaker 2: their postal workers. If you were at a Cabouter shop,
Speaker 2: you could grab the envelopes that are addressed to places
Speaker 2: along your route home and deliver them and I think
Speaker 2: get paid for that. Oh and Dutch hippies mostly had
Speaker 2: the standard hippie outfits, right, they had like mini skirts
Speaker 2: and tight turtlenecks and bell bottoms and all that shit.
Speaker 2: But the main Dutch edition was that they sometimes the
Speaker 2: hippies wore the capes that the postal workers wore. So
Speaker 2: this makes it extra funny.
Speaker 3: I mean, a cape is just such an accessory. I
Speaker 3: mean that there's so much flair. Absolutely, they believed in
Speaker 3: free love, but they were also fine with marriage, and
Speaker 3: they held elaborate and strange public marriage ceremonies for the
Speaker 3: cabouchers who wanted to commit their love to each other.
Speaker 3: I think that the marriages were offered on like three
Speaker 3: year terms that you had to like go get renewed.
Speaker 3: But I'm not one hundred percent certain about that. I
Speaker 3: respect that, I know, I just evaluate as you go. Oh,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there was a separate and autonomous group woman
Speaker 2: power that allied themselves with the Free State. They also
Speaker 2: opened five organic food stores, meant to compete with the
Speaker 2: overpriced health food stores that it existed before them. They
Speaker 2: weren't the first health food store movement that came from
Speaker 2: the nineteen twenties, but those ones were like overpriced and
Speaker 2: bougie the way that all health food stores go. I
Speaker 2: think some of these caboucher shops are still around today,
Speaker 2: but I think that at least they were around at
Speaker 2: the time of the book was written. I think that
Speaker 2: they kind of got.
Speaker 3: Expensive capitalism creeps in. Yeah.
Speaker 2: They also opened a biodynamic restaurant and they had a
Speaker 2: free swap meet every week. Their whole thing was that
Speaker 2: they believed in an economy where like surplus is just
Speaker 2: freely exchanged between people. They partnered up with youth social
Speaker 2: service groups. They just fucking did everything. They partnered up
Speaker 2: with youth social service groups to provide part time work
Speaker 2: for the kinds of troubled youth who struggled to find work.
Speaker 2: They were involved in labor actions, and they named at
Speaker 2: least one of their labor actions after Lord of the Rings,
Speaker 2: which makes my fucking heart sing. They named one of
Speaker 2: their labor actions the Black Writer, where they occupied an
Speaker 2: existing storefront. There was like this chain store that was
Speaker 2: about to go out of business and lay off twenty
Speaker 2: five hundred workers. But they had been like treating their
Speaker 2: workers like shit the entire time, and so they occupied
Speaker 2: this store. The workers did get fired, but the publicity
Speaker 2: of the stunt led to government inspection of that company,
Speaker 2: who found all kinds of wrongdoing, and in the end,
Speaker 2: these hippies secured pensions for twenty five hundred people.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like that alone is like like what a good
Speaker 2: way to spend your fucking afternoon.
Speaker 3: Like the gnomes with the Lord of the Rings mission
Speaker 3: like got twenty five hundred people a pension.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you can't.
Speaker 3: Laugh at that.
Speaker 2: No, no notes, I'm into it earnestly. I am into
Speaker 2: them as gnomes. I mean I am in a band
Speaker 2: called feminog School. I clearly am fine with the Lord
Speaker 2: of the Rings references. Every Thursday for over a year
Speaker 2: they held people's assemblies and these were open to the
Speaker 2: public and a camera crew, which has some upsides and downsides.
Speaker 2: They had a different moderator every week to avoid people
Speaker 2: taking power, and the twelve different people's departments which anyone
Speaker 2: could sign up for, would report back at these Sometimes
Speaker 2: these meetings were kind of a shit show, especially once
Speaker 2: they got famous and they had a lot of looker ons.
Speaker 2: They were all over the press. I mentioned there was
Speaker 2: like two thousand articles about them. But the press picked
Speaker 2: that anarchist council member Rule Vondn as the leader and
Speaker 2: put him on air whenever they could. And this did
Speaker 2: not make anyone happy. It might have made it might
Speaker 2: have made real happy, but it's like, it's hard to know,
Speaker 2: you know. At one point a wax museum made a
Speaker 2: statue of him without his permission. Well that's so creepy,
Speaker 2: And it was him dressed as a gnome with a
Speaker 2: little krapotkin doll on his lap.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm coming back around on and I love it.
Speaker 2: I know he wrote an angry letter asking them to
Speaker 2: destroy it. The museum instead put a sign on his
Speaker 2: life likeness that said I desire to live an anarchist life.
Speaker 3: I bet that slaps harder and Dutch.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Later he renounces his anarchism and gets into mainstream
Speaker 2: politics like not right wing politics like Green Party. But
Speaker 2: I suspect the people who thought he was looking out
Speaker 2: for his own fame were like onto something, or he
Speaker 2: drove them away with all their petty bickering. Who fucking knows.
Speaker 2: He wrote about the Kboucher strategy. So we fight the
Speaker 2: existing order with both hands. With the left hand, we
Speaker 2: generate the new society and make people understand how we
Speaker 2: want to do that. With the right hand, we work
Speaker 2: on reforming the old society to the extent that effort
Speaker 2: offers prospects for further democratization of the old society in
Speaker 2: the direction of the new one. Both hands are directed
Speaker 2: by one head, one way of thinking. On the day
Speaker 2: of the permanent revolution, the old and new societies will
Speaker 2: fuse together.
Speaker 3: I'm known pilled. That's perfect. That's perfect, right, It's it
Speaker 3: bridges the gap, you know, it instantly shuts down the
Speaker 3: argument of like, well, you know, if you're running on
Speaker 3: for city council, then you're assimilating your your conceding to
Speaker 3: the to the system. You can't you can't change it
Speaker 3: from the inside. We can do both, and we are
Speaker 3: doing both, right.
Speaker 2: I think that it is an honest appraisal to say
Speaker 2: that no one knows what tactics work, and shutting down
Speaker 2: a tactic ideologically is not as interesting as shutting I mean, morally,
Speaker 2: you can shut down tactics. Morally you can be like
Speaker 2: it's not moral to take power over other people and
Speaker 2: tell everyone what to do. That's how I feel, right.
Speaker 2: But like to say, yeah, you can't use the system
Speaker 2: to change the system, it's like.
Speaker 3: But they did it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The environmental movement has been a really good example,
Speaker 2: like the you know, Earth First has always been like, oh,
Speaker 2: every tool in the toolbox, and that includes that they
Speaker 2: call it like paper wrenching instead of monkey wrenching, where
Speaker 2: you like file lawsuits and you use the society, and like, yeah, that's.
Speaker 3: I mean, they did it. You can't really argue, you know,
Speaker 3: they they had something.
Speaker 2: I know, it does fall apart, and everyone wants to
Speaker 2: argue about why it fell apart. All of the late
Speaker 2: sixties early seventies social movements fell apart, all of them
Speaker 2: that I've read about, you know, and all of them
Speaker 2: achieved various things along the way through different tactics, and
Speaker 2: absolutely the cabouter achieved an awful lot. In the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy elections. The biggest winner was people not voting. Abstention
Speaker 2: went up from eleven percent in the previous election to
Speaker 2: forty percent in that particular election, because basically people are like,
Speaker 2: we fucking hate the old world. The Cabouter movement got
Speaker 2: thirty six thousand votes in Amsterdam alone, and it won
Speaker 2: five seats. Like I was saying, this puts the Cabouters
Speaker 2: as the fourth biggest party overall in city politics. They
Speaker 2: were the biggest party in seven different neighborhoods, all ones
Speaker 2: where the like fuck voting idea was popular, and so
Speaker 2: basically it was like it's like this or they're like,
Speaker 2: will either take this or nothing? You know. One of
Speaker 2: the candidates who won was a sixteen year old. He
Speaker 2: was a protest candidate who was not allowed to take
Speaker 2: office because you had to be at least I think
Speaker 2: either eighteen or maybe in twenty three to take office.
Speaker 3: They're really taking this as a bit thing pretty far,
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: But then they actually fell into a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: fighting about The people who won and were taking office
Speaker 2: were like, Okay, great, the sixteen year old won, Well,
Speaker 2: obviously he can't take the seat, so we'll put someone
Speaker 2: else in, whereas the like a little bit the more
Speaker 2: like pure direct action type folks were like, no, you
Speaker 2: need to put a tape recorder on his seat and
Speaker 2: as a as a sort of permanent protest, you know,
Speaker 2: or you can play things out and stuff. I honestly
Speaker 2: see both sides of that debate. Personally. As a political party,
Speaker 2: they offered five positions. The radical democratization of businesses, schools,
Speaker 2: and government, transparency and decentralization in city administration, fixing the environment,
Speaker 2: especially by going car free in the city, socialized housing,
Speaker 2: and returning the city center to a residential rather than
Speaker 2: commercial focus.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's my political platform.
Speaker 2: I'm not surprised, and that's why I love that. I
Speaker 2: love that. The split between the parliamentary cabouder and the
Speaker 2: rank and file cabouder continued to grow. Some of the
Speaker 2: magazines were mocking their celebrity council member room, and then it,
Speaker 2: honestly just all started to lose traction. Socially, turnout starts
Speaker 2: to drop at the general assemblies. Some people felt that
Speaker 2: they weren't being serious enough, so they tried to become
Speaker 2: more organized. This dropped turnout further. Everyone blamed everyone else
Speaker 2: for it. It doesn't help that in nineteen seventy an
Speaker 2: entire graduating class of the police department opted to put
Speaker 2: on hippie clothes and infiltrate the cabouters.
Speaker 3: They did cointel pro to my nomes.
Speaker 2: They did, and it's it's hard to know about how
Speaker 2: much of the infighting that we're talking about comes from what.
Speaker 2: It also doesn't help that Rue at this point wants
Speaker 2: to run for national office, and that was like people
Speaker 2: were like those britches, yeah, and people were like, look,
Speaker 2: we're fine with city government. That was controversial, but we
Speaker 2: accepted it, some of us. But this is too much.
Speaker 3: And that was part of the original philosophy, right, was
Speaker 3: that you can make these sort of neighborhood council, city
Speaker 3: council level changes, right, but you get bigger than that.
Speaker 3: We're not doing it. No mannerchism anymore, Bud.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at that point it is non progressivism, which is
Speaker 2: where he's going to turn to, well, nomeless progressivism. And
Speaker 2: so the Orange Free State and the Cabouchers are losing
Speaker 2: their steam from infighting and conflict about strategy and from
Speaker 2: just how hard it is to build a better world
Speaker 2: in the shell of the old while the old world
Speaker 2: still operates. In March nineteen seventy one, the last People's
Speaker 2: Assembly was held, and then the Cabouters as a general
Speaker 2: organization ceased to exist, but they still held municipal seats
Speaker 2: eleven of them total, right, five in Amsterdam and six
Speaker 2: across the country. By nineteen seventy three, ruvon Dahn renounces
Speaker 2: his anarchism like formally is like, that's just not me anymore,
Speaker 2: right and joins the Progressive Party, saying that a collection
Speaker 2: of action groups can't make a change, But they did,
Speaker 2: I know, and that he actually, at least in his
Speaker 2: immediate future, I didn't follow his career. Later, in his
Speaker 2: like immediate future in the Progressive Party, he gets way
Speaker 2: less done, no doubt, and later he's part of joining
Speaker 2: the Green Party. And I can't speak to their successes
Speaker 2: because I didn't read about them, but yeah, he's like,
Speaker 2: I'm excited to join a party that actually exercises power,
Speaker 2: is the way he put it. And he had to
Speaker 2: step down out of his cabowder seat so he was
Speaker 2: no longer a city council member for a little while.
Speaker 2: But then he won a seat with a Progressive Party
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy four, and the Progressive Party absolutely like
Speaker 2: put his name in big letters, being like fuck you,
Speaker 2: we got we got him, you know.
Speaker 3: But then he did nothing with him. I know, that's shameful.
Speaker 2: When he became an Alderman, he refused to take a
Speaker 2: free official car but accepted a free official bike, and
Speaker 2: like he didn't sell out and become right wing or whatever.
Speaker 2: He became a Green Party guy. And to quote author
Speaker 2: Kohne Tasman quote, the Kabouder fraction, which I think is
Speaker 2: the word for the percentage of them that are the
Speaker 2: own city council may have expended a lot of his
Speaker 2: energy and quarrels, but it will probably go down in
Speaker 2: history as one of the most productive groups to ever
Speaker 2: sit on the Amsterdam Municipal Council. There is unlikely to
Speaker 2: ever be another council fraction of comparable size that submits
Speaker 2: so many memoranda, motions and written in oral questions over
Speaker 2: a similar timeframe. They fundamentally changed the culture of the
Speaker 2: city council. It used to be that individual council members
Speaker 2: like didn't not couldn't, but didn't submit their own memoranda. Instead,
Speaker 2: they like waited for like their fraction leaders to approve
Speaker 2: of it, you know. And it changed that Now individual
Speaker 2: municipal council members do. And then in May nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 2: the cabatter movements lost steam. The Caboaters don't gain any
Speaker 2: seats on the next election. The Cobatter Party is no more.
Speaker 2: Their ideas live on in rubber tiles, under playgrounds, in
Speaker 2: the squatter movement, in the bike lanes, enclosed streets, in
Speaker 2: the organic food stores. Some of their attempts to bring
Speaker 2: more power into neighborhoods have been permanent in the city,
Speaker 2: particularly in how neighborhoods centers for the elderly are set up.
Speaker 2: And once again, the actions they put into place, many
Speaker 2: of them kept going with them. They kept pushing for
Speaker 2: the white car system of electric cars. By nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 2: there were five electric stations for these cars with about
Speaker 2: twenty five hundred people subscribed to the service. It became
Speaker 2: like a token system, kind of a socialized version of
Speaker 2: rent a car. You know, these never took off. The
Speaker 2: public will and the technology weren't there. They had to
Speaker 2: build like entire power states for each car. Basically, not
Speaker 2: for each car, but anywhere you want to have cars,
Speaker 2: you have to build a huge thing in order.
Speaker 3: An infrastructure project as hard to do as a bit.
Speaker 2: Right, totally, But yeah, them's the Cabouders. They did more
Speaker 2: than I thought when I first started reading about them,
Speaker 2: And I'm fucking I'm obsessed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just I'm going to be thinking about this
Speaker 3: for days. Just like there's something so easily translatable about this, right,
Speaker 3: Like we don't we don't have to have like a
Speaker 3: weekly black face party in town square or anything. But like, yeah,
Speaker 3: but the idea that like, no, you don't, You don't
Speaker 3: have to wait around for everyone to be ready for
Speaker 3: the good change that you want to make. You could
Speaker 3: just do it. You can just do it totally. Just
Speaker 3: leave a bunch of bikes outside. Yeah, just help some
Speaker 3: old people get organized with your pals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it prefigures so much of the modern
Speaker 2: mutual Aid movement, which is one of the things that
Speaker 2: I'm proudest of of, like the legacy of anarchism and
Speaker 2: just the idea that, like, we can take direct action
Speaker 2: and not just against the bad things, although I'm very
Speaker 2: excited when people do that, but we can take direct
Speaker 2: action about the things that are missing in our lives
Speaker 2: and the people the lives of people around us, you know.
Speaker 3: And I'd love that they you know. I guess it's
Speaker 3: controversial for anarchists to talk about grabbing a lever of power,
Speaker 3: but I think that the levers of power that exist
Speaker 3: at the neighborhood and the council level are small enough
Speaker 3: for us to reach and grab, and that's where the
Speaker 3: real change make you. That's for the real changes can
Speaker 3: be made for your neighbors. Like in your neighborhood, you
Speaker 3: can make make some real meaningful change.
Speaker 2: I think it was the combo of the two.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, absolutely, you know, they went out and
Speaker 3: they did it with and without permission, but you know,
Speaker 3: the left hand and the right hand together. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 3: someone should run for their city council as an home.
Speaker 2: I've known anarchists on city councils before, actually, and they
Speaker 2: usually come out of more of this sort of activist
Speaker 2: side of it. You know. I know a lot of
Speaker 2: environmental activists who are anarchists, who are like, well, I'm
Speaker 2: running for city council because I'm trying to fix this
Speaker 2: thing in my city, you know. And it's like contentious,
Speaker 2: but I really like the idea that we should be
Speaker 2: ideologically motivated, not ideologically controlled or whatever the way they've
Speaker 2: phrased it is. That's better than that.
Speaker 3: Because it can be done. Yeah, can be done.
Speaker 2: Well, I think.
Speaker 3: The plug I'm still thinking about these gnomes. No, it's okay,
Speaker 3: I know, I'm just I'm so happy about this. I'm
Speaker 3: so inspired by the Gnomes. Yeah plugs. Right now, I
Speaker 3: am guest hosting on It could happen here, so you
Speaker 3: probably still tune in and catch some of those bad boys.
Speaker 3: I am tweeting about my non anarchist city council on
Speaker 3: Twitter at socialist dog Mom, and I am working on
Speaker 3: getting more regular at my newsletter. It's a ghost newsletter.
Speaker 3: It's like Substack, but there's less fascists there. It's called
Speaker 3: The Devil's Advocates. It's about what happens when white supremacist
Speaker 3: violence interacts with the us quo system. Yeah, that's it
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, I have a substack on the Ghost but
Speaker 2: it has more nazis called substack and if you look
Speaker 2: Marco Kiljoy substack you'll find it. I write about about
Speaker 2: half of the posts are a little bit more personal,
Speaker 2: like memoir and talking about my reflections about the things
Speaker 2: that I read and you know, in history and things
Speaker 2: like that. And the other ones are essays and me
Speaker 2: talking about what can be done. And I mean, I
Speaker 2: don't know what to do, but you know, the best
Speaker 2: as I understand things is what I write there. And
Speaker 2: that half is free. And check out more stuff from
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. There's a bunch of new things coming
Speaker 2: this year. And I'm I keep saying this, but I
Speaker 2: just I don't know. I listened to non Cool Zone
Speaker 2: Media podcast too. That's not as good, yeah, because they're
Speaker 2: not run by Sophie Sophie anything.
Speaker 1: The plug mostly just like you nailed the Cool Zone plugs,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do another. And just that, like
Speaker 1: I've received a decent amount of messages and just so
Speaker 1: everyone is aware, Google the Google podcast app is going away,
Speaker 1: like wha, Like it's going bye bye. I think, uh,
Speaker 1: the date for that is April second, and then you
Speaker 1: won't be able to export or migrate your shows from
Speaker 1: the Google podcast app to your new app after June,
Speaker 1: so if you use.
Speaker 2: That app, stop, Yay the internet sucks now, all right,
Speaker 2: See you all next Monday.
Speaker 3: Get out there and be a gnome nme.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
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