Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
Speaker 2: a weekly reminder that sometimes people do things about the
Speaker 2: bad things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest
Speaker 2: today is Molly Conger.
Speaker 3: I'm Mollie any Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wrote down as your bio rather than looking
Speaker 2: at what your bio is elsewhere. The famed socialist dog
Speaker 2: mom of Twitter, an investigator of far right extremism, and
Speaker 2: a city council of ficionado, as well as the reason
Speaker 2: that I now know I don't know how to spell aficionado.
Speaker 3: Yeah. That about covers it.
Speaker 2: Excellent. Well, I'll have to do the rest of the
Speaker 2: introductions as if other people matter. I mean, Hi, Sophie. Wow,
Speaker 2: that's the meanest I've ever done that. I'm sorry, I
Speaker 2: see I feel bad. There's no going back.
Speaker 3: That's usually much warmer.
Speaker 1: I demand a compliment.
Speaker 2: Sophie is great. I'll take it. Sophie has good interior design,
Speaker 2: but I can't tell you about it. Dear listener.
Speaker 1: Ah, my plants are doing really, it's really.
Speaker 2: I was about to mention the plants.
Speaker 1: We're doing really well right now, really thriving. They feel,
Speaker 1: they feel alive, and well, which is better than I do.
Speaker 2: Also, Sophie has helped my skincare game.
Speaker 3: I'm super excited to be the podcast idiot, which is
Speaker 3: a title that I bade up for the person who
Speaker 3: receives the information. It's, you know, it's big shoes to fill.
Speaker 3: I've looked up to a lot of podcast idiots in
Speaker 3: the industry and I'm excited to try it.
Speaker 2: I believe in you.
Speaker 1: Molly said that in one of our cool Zone meetings
Speaker 1: and I was like, does anybody want to be the
Speaker 1: podcast idiot? And I go at cool Zone Media, we
Speaker 1: call that the Sophie.
Speaker 3: Well, I know I want. I wanted to hint about
Speaker 3: the topic, but I did not receive one, so I'm
Speaker 3: going I'm going in full idiot.
Speaker 2: We only we only give hints when it's like sketchy
Speaker 2: enough that we have to be That's what I told him.
Speaker 2: I was like, if I'm about to talk about someone
Speaker 2: who's like currently under investigation as like a terrorist, I
Speaker 2: usually have to be like, hey, uh is this okay?
Speaker 2: You know, but none of these people are also not
Speaker 2: currently under investigation for terrorism? Is our audio engineer at
Speaker 2: danel Hi danel Hi danel We can't move forward until
Speaker 2: everyone says hid to Daniel unsure.
Speaker 3: I love Danel. Daniel's giving me a lot of help
Speaker 3: in my new podcasting journey, so I really appreciate Daniel.
Speaker 2: He's the best excellent. Our theme music was written for
Speaker 2: us by unwoman, so I know it was going to
Speaker 2: have you one. And then I was like, what who
Speaker 2: do I Who am I going to talk about? And
Speaker 2: I thought about it and I thought about it and
Speaker 2: I stare at it my bookshelf, and then I realized,
Speaker 2: there are these people that have you ever heard of
Speaker 2: the Provos of Amsterdam? These are not the provos of Ireland.
Speaker 3: Oh no, the provos of Ireland. Yes, the Provos of Amsterdam.
Speaker 2: No, entirely different. Etymology came before the Provos of Ireland
Speaker 2: and not provo utah. I also not provo utah.
Speaker 3: And not provolone cheese.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm ready, yeah, entirely offer anymology than all of
Speaker 2: those things. There's a remarkable amount of provo that one
Speaker 2: could at a lodge. Okay. Have you ever heard of
Speaker 2: the kabouter?
Speaker 3: No? Okay, I'm ready to learn.
Speaker 2: Excellent. What have I told you that? During the late
Speaker 2: sixties and early seventies, while countercultural movements all over the
Speaker 2: West were kicking off, right. We've talked about a lot
Speaker 2: of them on this show. The Dutch had a version.
Speaker 2: Everywhere had a version of this. The Dutch had a
Speaker 2: few versions of it, and they had their own unique
Speaker 2: spin on things. The counterculture of the Netherlands centered around
Speaker 2: a group of pranksters and Arco pacifists and ANARCO city
Speaker 2: council members.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, so.
Speaker 2: I got really excited to bring you on for this one.
Speaker 3: I'm doing the system from inside.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll talk about it. I'll be curious your take
Speaker 2: on this. And they built a thriving and politically engaged counterculture.
Speaker 2: They brought organic food into the cities. They started the
Speaker 2: squatting movement in the modern sense that redefined Dutch life
Speaker 2: for generations and brought a lot of attention to the
Speaker 2: housing crisis. They demanded human accessible RBIT infrastructure, and they
Speaker 2: scared the shit out of the monarchy. And they called
Speaker 2: themselves gnomes. That's adorable because cabuter is a word for gnome.
Speaker 2: Did they have like the little pointy hats? They didn't
Speaker 2: wear them, but the ones that they use as their
Speaker 2: symbol absolutely did. Actually, the pointy hat comes from the
Speaker 2: Cabouter gnome. It comes from the Dutch gnome. The book Gnome,
Speaker 2: like the illustrated book that all the western gnome stuff
Speaker 2: comes from, was originally called Cabalter in the original Dutch.
Speaker 3: I'm going to choose to believe that all the old
Speaker 3: people in town who have like a little lawn gnome
Speaker 3: are sort of secretly signaling their interest in Dutch counterculture.
Speaker 2: I think that they are, and I think that you
Speaker 2: can and just expect that they will respond favorably if
Speaker 2: you act well. Actually, this group of countercultures really nice
Speaker 2: to old people. That was one of my favorite parts.
Speaker 2: But we're going to get to that. That's coming. So
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about the Provos and we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about the Caboulters, two distinct groups that are
Speaker 2: not actually incredibly distinct, but they are at different times.
Speaker 2: And because it's this show, I might talk about the Netherlands.
Speaker 2: The Netherlands the first time I decided to move to
Speaker 2: Netherlands twenty years ago, and my grandfather looked at me
Speaker 2: with a wink and he said, ah, because of the
Speaker 2: lady in the picture windows, which was a reference to
Speaker 2: the famed legalized sex work of the Netherlens where youcy, Grandpa. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was actually the sketchiest thing my Grandpa's ever said
Speaker 2: the name. My uncle looked at me and made a
Speaker 2: little like toke gesture, you know, holding his fingers up
Speaker 2: to his lips, a reference to the decriminalized weed that
Speaker 2: the country is also famous for. However, my friends knew
Speaker 2: I was actually moving there the legal squatting that the
Speaker 2: country was only famous for in pretty much my social circle.
Speaker 2: But I was a squatter, So the Netherlands was famous
Speaker 2: to me. Like my friends who had lived there before
Speaker 2: would come back with these like wild stories about you know,
Speaker 2: these huge squad actions and fighting back the cops and
Speaker 2: all the fun crazy stuff. And I was like twenty one,
Speaker 2: so I was like, this is where I'm going. Have
Speaker 2: you ever been to the Netherlands, you know much about it?
Speaker 3: I have not. I've been to Germany, but I didn't
Speaker 3: get much further than that. That's okay, Honestly, when you
Speaker 3: said they were fighting back against the monarchy, I forgot
Speaker 3: they had that. I forgot we were still doing that.
Speaker 2: So no, that's on my short list of contexts I'm
Speaker 2: about to I was to say about the Netherlands. The
Speaker 2: things that are worth knowing about the Netherlands for this story. One,
Speaker 2: it is the most densely populated country in Europe that
Speaker 2: isn't like an island or a specific city state, you know,
Speaker 2: because Europe has a lot of like countries that are
Speaker 2: a city.
Speaker 3: Monica back in the city, yeah, like.
Speaker 2: And Style, Yeah, those are Yeah, those are more densely
Speaker 2: populated than Netlands. But as far as like normal ass
Speaker 2: countries go, no offense if you're listening to this in
Speaker 2: one of those city states. Actually, I think city states
Speaker 2: are cool.
Speaker 1: Whatever.
Speaker 3: It's okay to offend the people of Monaco, Okay. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just a casino, isn't it.
Speaker 2: I know even less of it. You could tell me
Speaker 2: almost anything about Monaco and I would believe you. Second
Speaker 2: thing to know about the Netherlands it's a monarchy. Still
Speaker 2: still still doing that. Yeah. I had this moment once
Speaker 2: I was I was there ten years ago or something,
Speaker 2: and I was like hanging out with my friends and
Speaker 2: I'm like in this square and there's this giant picture
Speaker 2: of the Queen Beatrix, who's in this story actually, and
Speaker 2: I like look, and I'm like, God, sometimes I forget
Speaker 2: that y'all are a monarchy. It's embarrassing. And then my
Speaker 2: friend's like, yeah, you're a police state and I.
Speaker 3: Was like, okay, we'll get a ass then, sure right,
Speaker 3: fair enough, fair enough.
Speaker 2: So it's a monarchy. It's also a colonial power in
Speaker 2: it or you know, had a large empire at some point.
Speaker 2: It's kind of the also ran of the Western European empires.
Speaker 2: But and then fourth, I lived there for like seven
Speaker 2: or eight months, and I spent a lot of time
Speaker 2: trying to learn Dutch and or just pronounced Dutch words,
Speaker 2: and I was a colossal failure at both. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to continue my streak here.
Speaker 3: So no, it just looks like somebody was trying to
Speaker 3: type in German but they got blackout drunk and someone
Speaker 3: hit them in the hand with a mallet and all
Speaker 3: of their fingers are broken.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: But the pronunciation is so much more fun than German,
Speaker 2: Like German is like everything sounds like I'm gonna murder
Speaker 2: you and everyone that you've ever met, and everything in
Speaker 2: Dutch sounds very nice, like yeah, yeah. So the Netherlands
Speaker 2: has long been a place that prides itself on religious
Speaker 2: tolerance compared to other places in Europe, a lot of
Speaker 2: people fleeing persecution while up there, which including like whenever,
Speaker 2: the Protestants and the Catholics, and I mean it's obviously
Speaker 2: not perfect, right, but there's it's been a thing for
Speaker 2: a while, which means that had a lot of Jews
Speaker 2: lived there. Then the Nazis occupied it in World War
Speaker 2: Two and the Dutch resistance kicked in, and it was
Speaker 2: one of the countries it had a very different style
Speaker 2: of resistance to the occupation than a lot of other countries.
Speaker 2: It was one of the most resistant countries. We did
Speaker 2: a whole episode about the gay art movement there that
Speaker 2: burned the Nazi records and forged ideas and blu shit up.
Speaker 2: If people want to go listen to the Gay Resistance
Speaker 2: to Nazis episode.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah.
Speaker 2: But and over a million people were involved on some
Speaker 2: level in aiding like Jews escape the Holocaust. However, they
Speaker 2: were not incredibly remarkably successful at this, despite the large
Speaker 2: scale of it. One of the reasons for that is
Speaker 2: that the Dutch resistance movement was less violent than many
Speaker 2: other resistance movements. This is going to come up. This
Speaker 2: shapes the culture of what we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: as for why the Dutch resistance culture was less violent.
Speaker 2: I was like, Oh, it's because the Dutch are all pacifist.
Speaker 2: Because I'm the people I'm going to talk about today,
Speaker 2: I fairly pascifist. Right, so far I found when I
Speaker 2: look up why the Dutch resistance movement was a less
Speaker 2: violent movement overall. One of the reasons, according to one
Speaker 2: of the participants, was that the Dutch head of firearms registry,
Speaker 2: and so when the Nazis took charge, they got the
Speaker 2: firearms registry and they went door to door and took
Speaker 2: everyone's guns away.
Speaker 3: Oh god, Alex Jones was right in the past.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that comes up when I
Speaker 2: read all of this is that like all of these
Speaker 2: things that like right wing militias are afraid of here
Speaker 2: are true for the left and are not true for
Speaker 2: the right. You know or have been in various places
Speaker 2: and times, right, Like.
Speaker 3: The guy you look up to actually did do that
Speaker 3: thing you're afraid of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, like overall the right wing collapse, Well, there
Speaker 2: are a lot of Dutch monarchists who have actually fought
Speaker 2: in the resistance too. Was there was right wing resistance
Speaker 2: to fascist occupation in some places although overall, but no, whatever,
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to give too much credit.
Speaker 3: Resistant Hitler in the name of the King, Like you
Speaker 3: know you.
Speaker 2: Got the spirit, yeah, exactly, like you know the right answer. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you have this like kind of you get a little
Speaker 2: bit of this like patriotic like don't fuck with our Jews,
Speaker 2: And I'm like, you know what, it could be as
Speaker 2: patriotic as you want, as long as the core messages
Speaker 2: we will shoot the people who are trying to kill
Speaker 2: the Jewish people. That's fine anyway. The Nazis collectively punished
Speaker 2: the Dutch people, which I'm sure I have no bearing on.
Speaker 2: More than a million people were directly involved in supporting
Speaker 2: this resistance. Right, so, the Nazis cut off food from
Speaker 2: November nineteen forty four to May nineteen forty five, more
Speaker 2: than twenty thousand Dutch people starve to death. This is
Speaker 2: called the Hunger Winter. Victually elderly men starved to death.
Speaker 2: During this period. Four point five million people were affected
Speaker 2: by this starvation. They were living off of like six
Speaker 2: hundred calories a day, which is a third of what
Speaker 2: you need if you're not doing much. An entire generation
Speaker 2: of children born or living at the time suffered lifelong ailments,
Speaker 2: and this is going to be when we talk about
Speaker 2: these peaceful hippies in this modern consumer culture. This is
Speaker 2: what they were born from, this is what their childhoods were.
Speaker 2: Audrey Hepburn grew up in the occupied Netherlands and actually
Speaker 2: supported the resistance by when she was like a teenager,
Speaker 2: by performing ballet to raise money to support the resistance,
Speaker 2: which is fucking cool. Her time in the hunger winter
Speaker 2: left her with lifelong ailments like anemia. So in case
Speaker 2: anyone wants to think about what's happening in Palestine right now,
Speaker 2: I leave the comparison to you about what mass starvation
Speaker 2: does to an entire generation, including the people who survive.
Speaker 2: So the war ends, like in most of the West,
Speaker 2: you've got this very conservative couple of decades after this
Speaker 2: enormous hardship and poverty. Then you get like consumerism and
Speaker 2: rising wages of the nineteen fifties, and then you get
Speaker 2: the sixties. The sixties hit the Netherlands, and that's what
Speaker 2: we're gonna talk about today. Counterculture, all that stuff. When
Speaker 2: I first started doing this podcast, I was like, oh God,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna end up having to do all of these
Speaker 2: different sixties counterculture movements, and I was like kind of
Speaker 2: like eh, And then the more I read about them,
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, no, there's like they're all different, they're
Speaker 2: all cool, some of them suck whatever, They're all interesting,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: No, but the children of you know, the people who
Speaker 3: are coming of age in the sixties in the Netherlands
Speaker 3: had such a different childhood experience than you know, American
Speaker 3: hippies coming of age after not surviving an occupation.
Speaker 2: No, totally, And like a lot of the people who
Speaker 2: are going to be talking about today, a lot of
Speaker 2: them grew up either hiding Jews in their house, being
Speaker 2: the Jews who are hidden in house. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of like Jewish orphans who are raised by non Jewish
Speaker 2: families because for reasons that become clear. No, it is.
Speaker 2: It's a very interesting thing. But you also compare with
Speaker 2: like the Netherlands is the colonial core and it is
Speaker 2: a primarily white country, and so there are some people
Speaker 2: of color who are coming from basically from the colonies.
Speaker 3: Right where are the Netherlands called like Southeast Asia, like
Speaker 3: Sri Lanka, Indonesia.
Speaker 2: Parts of Southeast Asia, parts of the northeast South America
Speaker 2: and South South Africa like but like South Africa before
Speaker 2: the British took it. I'm not actually as I need
Speaker 2: to learn more about the Boer Wars and all that
Speaker 2: stuff that happened, because a lot of the origins of
Speaker 2: modern fascism grow up in South Africa and Rhodesia and shit,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah.
Speaker 3: It just keeps coming up. It just won't die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wish it would, like you lost the war,
Speaker 2: get over? Oh right. I I've lived in the American
Speaker 2: South anyway because of the fact that the Netherlands colonial core,
Speaker 2: like a lot of the sixties culture in the US is,
Speaker 2: especially the radical culture is in relation to the civil
Speaker 2: rights movement, is in relation to the wild amount of
Speaker 2: racism and the fact that you know, it is a
Speaker 2: colonized space, right, And so I actually think that some
Speaker 2: of the anarcho pacifism, the pacifist part of that that's
Speaker 2: going to come up. I actually think that that's a
Speaker 2: relation to the way that power works in their country,
Speaker 2: as compared to like the United States, where people of
Speaker 2: color fighting for their rights largely distanced themselves from pacifism
Speaker 2: by the end of the late sixties, at least in
Speaker 2: terms of the larger social movements. Anyway, the first subculture
Speaker 2: in the Netherlands to shatter this post war tranquility was
Speaker 2: called the Nosom. They were the Dutch greasers, and so
Speaker 2: it's cool. Was like, half of who we're going to
Speaker 2: be talking about instead of it's hippies, is greasers.
Speaker 3: So it's like sharks and jets, yeah basically, but like
Speaker 3: with no mats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, just imagine everyone in a nomat. No one,
Speaker 2: no one's actually wear a nomat, but you should imagine
Speaker 2: them all in no mats. They came in on the
Speaker 2: scene in the mid fifties fifty nineteen fifty five is
Speaker 2: when they get their name. They year or two before
Speaker 2: that they started doing their thing. They wore jeans, and
Speaker 2: they wore leather jackets, and they listened to rock and
Speaker 2: roll I think I and they drove around them. They
Speaker 2: listen to Western pop music and they drove around the
Speaker 2: mopeds and shit. And their name comes from another cool
Speaker 2: thing about Dutch history, thieves. Can't you ever played like
Speaker 2: dungeons and dragons or any of that shit.
Speaker 3: No, I'm a sore winner and a sore losers. I
Speaker 3: don't really like games.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, well, see I don't like competitive games, and
Speaker 2: that's actually why I like tabletop role playing games. But anyway,
Speaker 2: thieves can't is this other language that thieves use, And
Speaker 2: generally speaking, the word thieves can't comes from the British
Speaker 2: version of this. The version of it that's in the
Speaker 2: Netherlands is called a bahu barhuns, the guttural h that
Speaker 2: no one. I actually gave up trying to learn Dutch
Speaker 2: because I would try to learn the difference between these
Speaker 2: things and no one could understand. There's anyway whatever me.
Speaker 3: So it's just like crime code.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the language of the criminal underworld, and it
Speaker 2: it has some like older like late medieval, early modern
Speaker 2: kind of origins, but it's especially about eighteen fifty to
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty and kind of the mafia like kind of
Speaker 2: criminal underworld. But some of uso, the more cool criminal underworld, criminals,
Speaker 2: vagabonds and traveling salespeople spoke it in the seventeenth century
Speaker 2: and a lot of it comes from Yiddish, which is cool,
Speaker 2: and I feel like it's just slowly making its way
Speaker 2: into cool people bingo and that makes me happy. So
Speaker 2: the nosem it gets translated as a greaser and it
Speaker 2: or it gets translated as beatnik. They had another cool name,
Speaker 2: which they actually had before Nose them. They were the dikers.
Speaker 2: All right, I'm in I know. Imagine getting to wear
Speaker 2: a black leather jacket and ride around on a moped
Speaker 2: with your friends, often multiple people per moped. And because
Speaker 2: the diker, you.
Speaker 3: Know, they're known for their dikes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean in this case, it's because the dikers
Speaker 2: hung around some of the areas of Amsterdam with dykes,
Speaker 2: like new and Dyke. They were like, everyone's like subculture
Speaker 2: name here is just like whatever part of Amsterdam they
Speaker 2: hung out in. So it was like instead of sharks
Speaker 2: and jets, it's like those fucking LDEs of pliners. Actually
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about the light suppliers.
Speaker 3: It's like Bowery Boys or whatever. You know, it's like
Speaker 3: whatever part of town.
Speaker 2: Totally, Oh Bowery Boys is are good. That is the
Speaker 2: way to Yeah. A journalist gave them the name Nozom
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty five and they were like, yeah, fuck it,
Speaker 2: whatever that sounds cool. Yeah, we're like crime whatever, we
Speaker 2: don't care. And the ones who hung out in near
Speaker 2: Lde's applying were the artsy ones, and so they were
Speaker 2: the Pliners. In nineteen sixty five, an academic noting the
Speaker 2: provocative behavior of all these youth cultures, started calling them
Speaker 2: provos and so unlike the provisional IRA, which gets the provos,
Speaker 2: which gets its name from provisional, in this case they
Speaker 2: get their name from a provocative and the provos are like, yeah, fuck, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're provos. We're into it, like whatever it was meant
Speaker 2: as a pejorative, but they didn't care. And this is
Speaker 2: four years before the provisional IRA. I don't know why
Speaker 2: I'm so into like mate pointing out that this is
Speaker 2: the original provos, But here I am.
Speaker 3: The hipsters of being provos.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. They're completely unrelated, but it makes
Speaker 2: it hard for me.
Speaker 3: A different number of rifles.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, very different number of rifles. Yes, they don't have
Speaker 2: songs like my little ArmaLite. They have songs about like
Speaker 2: we are cuckoo birds and the owls are up above us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a whole different provo vibe.
Speaker 2: It is. It is, although if you put the two
Speaker 2: together and anyway, and there's a couple of these provos
Speaker 2: who are very important to our story. One of them
Speaker 2: is named Hoberry Asper Rutfeld and he is not gonna
Speaker 2: look good to audience for some specific reasons. The Netherlands
Speaker 2: has had a bunch of colonies, right, and one of
Speaker 2: those from a good long time ago is South Africa,
Speaker 2: and so a lot of Dutch people would like go
Speaker 2: visit South Africa, right. And so when he was a kid,
Speaker 2: I think Cobert went to South Africa and he got
Speaker 2: super into it. He became obsessed with African magic.
Speaker 3: Oh good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he was a pliner. He was one of
Speaker 2: the artsy weirdos of this growing Provos subculture. He was
Speaker 2: also a total wingnut who was not afraid to do
Speaker 2: weird shit. And so we started the big political thing
Speaker 2: at this time. This is before they really got like
Speaker 2: politics politics. They were just against consumer culture. They were like,
Speaker 2: we don't like this stuff, this consumer culture that we're
Speaker 2: being sold. And he had one primary target. And whenever
Speaker 2: you look up this man, he has referred to as
Speaker 2: a anti smoking activist. That is his single issue.
Speaker 3: He was early on the scene with that one.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it is really fascinating to me. Smoking is big
Speaker 2: corporations and consumerism trying to kill you. He argued. He
Speaker 2: is right, he's against it. I don't disagree. He also
Speaker 2: smoked constantly, so he.
Speaker 3: Knew what he was up against. You know, he's getting
Speaker 3: to know, getting to know the enemy.
Speaker 2: He referred to it as being a witness to the darkness.
Speaker 1: This is like where half of Madmen got their inspiration.
Speaker 1: So they basically did like the entire thing about doing
Speaker 1: ads for the tobacco industry while all chain smoking. And
Speaker 1: then they had like the like the like, uh, don't smoke.
Speaker 1: People come and they were smoking during the meeting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but no, Now I think that's that's perfect. I'm
Speaker 3: putting that in my back pocket now, and anytime anyone
Speaker 3: calls me out on my my own personal hypocrisy or
Speaker 3: my vices, I'll say, no, I'm I'm bearing witness to
Speaker 3: the darkness.
Speaker 2: There you go, just like we are about to bear
Speaker 2: witness to our own darkness. And perhaps seventy years from now,
Speaker 2: a historian, we'll say. And then there was cool Zone
Speaker 2: media who said they were against capitalism, and yet the
Speaker 2: advertisements like these ones and we're back. And so this
Speaker 2: guy Hobert, he goes around vandalizing cigarette posters with a
Speaker 2: big K, which stands for conquer cancer. And he went
Speaker 2: to jail for a couple months for his graffiti against
Speaker 2: cancer right, and then when he gets out, he gets
Speaker 2: a rich sponsor for his Oh this is where I
Speaker 2: should have done it. Oh well whatever, he has a
Speaker 2: rich sponsor for his campaign, and so he opens the
Speaker 2: anti smoke temple and then his anti smoke temple burns
Speaker 2: down and I think he did it, and I can't
Speaker 2: find more information about that, and it annoys me.
Speaker 3: It was He's Reichschnock fire.
Speaker 2: It. Yeah, I almost had you on it. At some point,
Speaker 2: I'm going to do an episode about how the Reichstag
Speaker 2: fire was lit by someone who was very earnestly anti fascist,
Speaker 2: and just to have a conversation about how complicated certain
Speaker 2: actions can be. But that's not what we're talking about today.
Speaker 2: So there was starting these culture of happenings, which were
Speaker 2: big public events that the artsy greasers, now starting to
Speaker 2: move towards hippies, would just show up at and do
Speaker 2: weird shit, and he kind of wound up kicking that off.
Speaker 2: He had these anti smoking beans that involved an awful
Speaker 2: lot of him smoking. There's this statue of a little
Speaker 2: girl on the spou the it's the name of a
Speaker 2: square in Amsterdam. And I used to walk by it
Speaker 2: every day, and one day an older punk anarchist who
Speaker 2: was the first person to tell me about the provos
Speaker 2: and the cabalter. And I'll get to the caboutry later.
Speaker 2: This statue is called the Little Darling, and it is
Speaker 2: meant to represent the playful, indefatigable I don't pronounce that
Speaker 2: word spirit of the Dutch youth. But it was donated
Speaker 2: to the city by a tobacco company. So as soon
Speaker 2: as Colbert finds that out, he's like, this is where
Speaker 2: I'm going. This is the center of it all, and
Speaker 2: it's kind of perfect right. It's the like playful, youthful
Speaker 2: spirit of the city. And he goes. And that's the
Speaker 2: whole point of these movements I'm going to talk about,
Speaker 2: is that they prided themselves on the what's called the
Speaker 2: ludic spirit, the playful spirit that they brought into things. However,
Speaker 2: his particular method won't look good. Almost every history of
Speaker 2: this leaves a very important part out. I bet you're
Speaker 2: gonna be a figure out which part they leave out.
Speaker 2: Every week, Robert shows up in costume to perform ceremonies
Speaker 2: and rant against the evils of tobacco.
Speaker 3: Cutran love blackface? Was he in blackface?
Speaker 2: He wasn't blackface? You win?
Speaker 1: You haven't seen that episode of Atlanta with Donald Glover
Speaker 1: talking about just just watch it, just watch it. Fuck?
Speaker 2: I have. I've seen the first season of Atlanta, but
Speaker 2: I don't remember.
Speaker 1: This was in like one of the later seasons and
Speaker 1: they're they're like they're in Europe and then and then
Speaker 1: they go to Amsterdam.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, no, I would remember.
Speaker 3: Think they still do their little like Santa's little blackface friend. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Christmas parades.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, nice.
Speaker 2: So in Dutch tradition there's center clause Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas.
Speaker 2: He's the patron saint of Amsterdam and of sailors and beggars.
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool. In Dutch form, Santa Claus has an assistant,
Speaker 2: zvart Pete Black Pete.
Speaker 3: Little black Peter.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So Robert puts on blackface every week and goes
Speaker 2: to rant against consumer culture. He ranted against the asphalt
Speaker 2: jungle of refrigerators and electric egg beaters. And we've talked
Speaker 2: some about the Western European traditional blackface and memory on
Speaker 2: this show about how like in different places does and
Speaker 2: doesn't have roots and racial stereotypes, but how everyone with
Speaker 2: any kind of conscience has moved away from it because.
Speaker 3: I think there is some argument, at least from the Dutch,
Speaker 3: that Schwartzapeter is not in blackface, that he's covered in soot, right,
Speaker 3: But he's like, it's chick.
Speaker 2: That's what they've moved to.
Speaker 3: That's what they claim. I don't know, yah did real
Speaker 3: history there.
Speaker 2: But he also wears a curly wig and has bright
Speaker 2: red lips.
Speaker 3: That's not great.
Speaker 2: The best I've been able to figure out is that overall,
Speaker 2: the Western European tradition of mummery doesn't quite come from
Speaker 2: racial stereotypes but plays into them badly. But zvart Pete
Speaker 2: seems to be coming from racial stereotypes more completely. And
Speaker 2: this is a as you pointed out, there's a big
Speaker 2: culture war thing in the Netherlands right now, and so
Speaker 2: people are talking about sooty Pete these days.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, if he's doing the smoking thing,
Speaker 3: you can lean into the soot, but it doesn't sound
Speaker 3: like absolutely doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then it's like, I don't know what this
Speaker 2: man's thought he was doing. As relates to this, I
Speaker 2: don't know whether he's like, oh as Art Pete's totally unrelated,
Speaker 2: but I'm also obsessed with African magic. You know, is
Speaker 2: not looking good. But yeah, so these days more and
Speaker 2: more people do soot splotched face instead and the very
Speaker 2: distinctly not blackface, and that is good. Cobert did this
Speaker 2: ceremony every week for a year and it became kind
Speaker 2: of his thing, and people would join in and get entranced.
Speaker 2: Apparently he was like fairly good at doing these like
Speaker 2: kind of wild ceremonies, and the magic kind of worked.
Speaker 2: Other pliners started doing happenings too, and it sort of
Speaker 2: spread throughout the city. There's only a little bit of
Speaker 2: politics in any of this, a general we don't like
Speaker 2: consumer society. And then they found a political idea that
Speaker 2: spoke to them, anarchism. There were these young anarchists. The
Speaker 2: one who gets named by history is ruvn Dan, who
Speaker 2: edited a bunch of papers like The Free and eventually Provo.
Speaker 2: He and the others were going to these happenings and
Speaker 2: he wrote up a pamphlet and he showed up with
Speaker 2: the Weird Ritual with a pamphlet and it read Provo
Speaker 2: feels it must make a choice desperate revolt or cowering defeat.
Speaker 2: Provo encourages rebellion wherever it can. Provo knows it must
Speaker 2: ultimately be the loser, but it cannot miss the chance
Speaker 2: to thoroughly provoke this society once more. Provo wants to
Speaker 2: renew anarchism and bring it to the young. And the
Speaker 2: people were like, yeah, cool, we're in. We didn't like
Speaker 2: the USSR thing, we don't like the capitalism. This is
Speaker 2: fucking great. How do we talk, like, how do we
Speaker 2: merge our weird ass art happenings with your anarchism? And
Speaker 2: so they started a magazine called Provo. It described itself
Speaker 2: as a monthly sheet for anarchist provos, beatnix pliners, scissor grinders, jailbirds,
Speaker 2: simple simon stylites, magicians, pacifists, potato chip chaps, Charlatan's philosophers,
Speaker 2: germ carriers, grand masters of the Queen's horse happeners, vegetarian
Speaker 2: syndicalss santi clauses, kindergarten teachers, agitators, pyromaniac's assistant assistants, scratchers
Speaker 2: and syphilitics, secret police and other riff raff. Provo is
Speaker 2: something against capitalism, communism, fascism, bureaucracy, militarism, professionalism, dogmatism, and authoritarianism.
Speaker 3: They've invented several new kinds of guys.
Speaker 2: They have so many kinds of guys. You have so
Speaker 2: many options when you join the provos.
Speaker 3: I mean, potato chip chap sounds good.
Speaker 2: I know, I know. Simple Steiman stylites is like a
Speaker 2: Christian mysticism thing that I had to look up. It's
Speaker 2: like a guy who sat on top of a pillar
Speaker 2: because he didn't like talking to people and he wanted
Speaker 2: to live in a sthetic life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hermit herban on a big poll.
Speaker 2: Yeah, herbit pull Hermit cave is.
Speaker 3: Better, I think, but stylite works too.
Speaker 2: I clearly would go for a mountain in West Virginia.
Speaker 2: That is where I would actually go to be a hermit.
Speaker 2: I cannot make any other claim that.
Speaker 3: You chose your choice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, clearly decision.
Speaker 3: It's too late for you to be a scissor grinder.
Speaker 2: I know, although I kind of want to be, but
Speaker 2: that's a unrelated more of a s effect. So anyway,
Speaker 2: so they're tying together weird passivism, Christian mysticism, anarchism in
Speaker 2: the counterculture, the provos. You will be shocked to know
Speaker 2: this was not hierarchical or a membership organization. It was
Speaker 2: an open movement. The magazine had several thousand subscribers and
Speaker 2: supporters who sometimes showed up, and then a core of
Speaker 2: more like one hundred people who were always there at
Speaker 2: the provo happenings. And they were anarchists, but they were
Speaker 2: too anarchists for most of anarchism. They considered the old
Speaker 2: school anarchists, communists and socialists and their class struggle obsession
Speaker 2: as irrelevant at a post war society. Basically, the betrayal
Speaker 2: of the Russian Revolution by the Bolsheviks had thrown off
Speaker 2: the proletarian momentum, as had consumer society and the rise
Speaker 2: of fascism. Quote, the proletariat of the West has submitted
Speaker 2: to its political leadership and TV. It has merged with
Speaker 2: the old bourgeoisie into one large gray rabble of addicted concers.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They kind of got ar ass there, I know.
Speaker 2: Right, And so they wrote a bunch of really interesting
Speaker 2: I don't read much theory on this show, but they
Speaker 2: wrote a bunch of interesting theory about this. And the
Speaker 2: part that I like for this story is that they
Speaker 2: coined the term provotariat, which is quote, the provotariat is
Speaker 2: characterized by detachment from the manufacturing process through a psychological
Speaker 2: protest against manufactured social attitudes. They pushed for the provotariat
Speaker 2: of the developed world to join with the hungry proletariat
Speaker 2: of the developing world and have a worldwide revolution. Basically,
Speaker 2: they invented Adbusters about thirty years before Adbusters. I don't
Speaker 2: even know if Adbusters are still around or if it's so.
Speaker 3: I mean, he started out, you know, defacing ads, so
Speaker 3: it makes sense. Yeah, he's staying true to his roots. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So they also weren't against participation in municipal electoral politics,
Speaker 2: and this becomes a defining part of their politics. The
Speaker 2: local Marxists hated the provos because the Provos rejected the
Speaker 2: USSR as much as they rejected capitalism. Some things never change.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely no, this is like they were like, the
Speaker 2: anti tanky is brilliant. I just like read this and
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, time flat circle, I get it.
Speaker 3: You know, like these guys would have been posting the
Speaker 3: weirdest fucking memes.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, these absolutely would be mean people. Right now. There
Speaker 2: was this official student union movement, the SVB and it
Speaker 2: was like all proper. I think it was Marcus Lennis
Speaker 2: Maoist and it was like materialist, and it had doll
Speaker 2: meetings and leaflets, and the SVB called students young intellectual
Speaker 2: workers who deserved a scholarly salary, and the provos instead
Speaker 2: went to the students and were like, you know, the
Speaker 2: provo tariot, and the students were like, yeah, that sounds
Speaker 2: way more fun.
Speaker 3: Like your guys are having happenings.
Speaker 2: I know, y'all are fucking too, like because they are
Speaker 2: a weird, you know, crazy counterculture. The provos held the
Speaker 2: only authority that could be respected was the authority built
Speaker 2: on trust. If leaders weren't worthy of the trust of
Speaker 2: those that they led, they should stepped down. So they
Speaker 2: weren't traditional anarchists even at the start, you know, they honestly,
Speaker 2: like I bet you these people would take like one
Speaker 2: look at the Zapatistas and like the Rochavin movement and
Speaker 2: been like that's our fucking jam, you know. But theory
Speaker 2: wasn't really their thing. Their thing was these happenings. And
Speaker 2: their thing was also offering and trying out specific solutions
Speaker 2: to specific problems. Well, and I'll talk about those in
Speaker 2: a minute. They became active in a number of social struggles.
Speaker 2: They became active in the protests against the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2: The Dutch backed the US in that war, but never
Speaker 2: actually sent any troops, and my inference is that the
Speaker 2: large protest movement was part of that decision. They were
Speaker 2: by and large committed pacifists. They were anti militarists, but
Speaker 2: also focused their tactics and strategy around non violently provoking
Speaker 2: violent reactions from the state to show the violence inherent
Speaker 2: in the system.
Speaker 1: This had.
Speaker 2: It's a dark road, I know. It's also the kind
Speaker 2: of road where I'm like, I mean, I guess people
Speaker 2: have tried in the US, but I'm like, I think
Speaker 2: people know about the violence inheran the system here.
Speaker 3: I mean there. Yeah, there are plenty of protest movements
Speaker 3: now in the US whose whole goal is like, look,
Speaker 3: how awful it is that the state is repressing us
Speaker 3: like this. It's like, yeah, I know, now I're in jail.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When it's a surprise because you're like happy Dutch culture,
Speaker 2: then it's interesting. I don't know whatever. I'm not trying
Speaker 2: to people who are doing shit. I'm pro people doing shit.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to they tysically.
Speaker 3: Send troops to Vietnam, Like what is sort of the
Speaker 3: state of the Netherlands in the sixties, right, like had
Speaker 3: they fully demilitarized after the war? Likel do they at
Speaker 3: what point do their colonies wind down? I should know this, but.
Speaker 2: No, and I only know some of this. I know
Speaker 2: that they lost Indonesia when Japan became the colonial rulers
Speaker 2: of Indonesia in the mid nineteen forties during World War Two,
Speaker 2: and that was like a big one. So a lot
Speaker 2: of the pro votariats grew up in Indonesia, and I
Speaker 2: actually cannot I get the feeling that the author of
Speaker 2: most of the text is a little bit like race
Speaker 2: blind and wouldn't tell me whether or not someone from
Speaker 2: Indonesia was Indonesian or was like a white person who
Speaker 2: lived there in a colonial sense. I get the impression
Speaker 2: both of those things are true. Also, the Dutch absolutely
Speaker 2: had a military, and I think a lot of their
Speaker 2: stuff was against conscription. I ended up like halfway down
Speaker 2: a rabbit hole of figuring out exactly when they did
Speaker 2: and didn't have conscription, but it kept changing year to year,
Speaker 2: and so I didn't finish that rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I just feel like the Netherlands was completely left out
Speaker 3: of my public school education, So I don't know what
Speaker 3: they were doing.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, I mean, like I thought it was called Holland,
Speaker 2: you know. And the other big thing that they were
Speaker 2: against is the other thing that we had both forgotten
Speaker 2: was true about them. They really didn't like the monarchy.
Speaker 2: And then Netherlands still has one of those, Princess Beatrix. Later,
Speaker 2: Queen Beatrix got married in nineteen sixty six, and so
Speaker 2: the provos declared that the wedding day would be the
Speaker 2: day of anarchy.
Speaker 3: Oh hell yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Their goal was to disrupt the royal wedding and
Speaker 2: to draw attention to authoritary government by provoking a reaction
Speaker 2: so that people could see the iron fist within the
Speaker 2: velvet glove. Okay, and it it makes sense when you
Speaker 2: have all this pageantry around, like look, here's our beautiful
Speaker 2: you know, like here's the tradition of monarchy.
Speaker 3: So this big royal wedding was sort of in the
Speaker 3: early days of things like this being televised internationally, so
Speaker 3: this was an opportunity for them to get a lot
Speaker 3: of attention.
Speaker 2: Yep. And specifically the fact those television cameras. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: was a big fucking deal. Because also I think that
Speaker 2: overall the Netherlands got TV a little bit later. Like
Speaker 2: I've read about this in a couple other countries. We're
Speaker 2: just like TV is like around and invented, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't really filter out as quickly as it does in
Speaker 2: like the United States. But it's by this point a thing, right,
Speaker 2: And so what they decided to do was mostly they
Speaker 2: spread rumors about what they were going to do rather
Speaker 2: than doing these things. They spread rumors that they were
Speaker 2: going to broadcast the sound of machine gun from speakers
Speaker 2: on the roof of a nearby building. That's really smart,
Speaker 2: I know. And specifically they said this is what we're
Speaker 2: going to do, not not we're going to have machine guns,
Speaker 2: but we are going to make the noise of machine guns,
Speaker 2: you know. They also said you can tell they're getting
Speaker 2: into being hippies. They said they're going to dose the
Speaker 2: police horses with acid or just the entire municipal water supply.
Speaker 3: What would LSD do to we all horse That's a
Speaker 3: good question.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it'd be bad. Don't maliciously dose anyone.
Speaker 2: Be hippies. You were wrong about the whole. In the US,
Speaker 2: the East Coast and West Coast drug scene had a
Speaker 2: massive divide about whether or not is if a good
Speaker 2: way to like turn people on to the revolution by
Speaker 2: dosing them without asking them?
Speaker 3: Did that too?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I know, right? And it was the West Coast hippies
Speaker 2: who were like, not, it's cool to do that. And
Speaker 2: then it was the East Coast like proto punks, like
Speaker 2: this group up against the Wall, motherfucker, who were sort
Speaker 2: of black leather jacket hippies. They were the ones who
Speaker 2: were like, you can't fucking take that choice away from people.
Speaker 2: Fuck you, And I like that. Have you seen the
Speaker 2: Skeletor meme where it's like Skeletor Who's like, let me
Speaker 2: see if I can do this right? Hippies are bad
Speaker 2: people pretending to be good people, and punks are good
Speaker 2: people pretending to be bad people. That's how I feel
Speaker 2: about that divide. Is not how I feel about the Netherlands.
Speaker 2: These are good hippies. I'm talking about buy and large.
Speaker 2: But they claim that they're going to do it to
Speaker 2: provoke a reaction. But that's so.
Speaker 3: Smart as you don't even have to really do anything
Speaker 3: because the cops are just thrown into confusion.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I'm sure some.
Speaker 3: Of them reacted as a they've been dosed regardless.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you're probably right.
Speaker 3: The first Ventanyl scare, they all died, the company, just
Speaker 3: laying in the streets, hyperventilating, tearing off their.
Speaker 2: Clothes, much like, are we sponsored by Ventyl? No? No,
Speaker 2: well whatever, we're sponsored by and were back. The other
Speaker 2: thing that they actually did do and that they said
Speaker 2: they were going to do and then did do, is
Speaker 2: throw orange paint bombs and like smoke bombs and shit.
Speaker 2: It's the color of their monarchy, right, yes, exactly. The
Speaker 2: ruling dynasty is the house of Orange Nassau. Oh and
Speaker 2: what they ended up having was kind of a classic
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty six protest. Lots of people showed up and
Speaker 2: cops beat everyone up. Smoke bombs obscured the royal carriage
Speaker 2: from being seen by the TVs, and so they absolutely
Speaker 2: fucked up the royal wedding as a media spectacle as
Speaker 2: a result of I think this action, I think got it.
Speaker 2: Both the mayor and the chief of police end up
Speaker 2: stepping down and that was.
Speaker 3: Like, that's an international humiliation. Yeah, couldn't control your hippies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so when it was just good old fashioned
Speaker 2: racist happenings at the spou, the cops let people do things.
Speaker 2: But now that they're the Provos, the cops come and
Speaker 2: fuck that up. And so every week the Provos show
Speaker 2: up and have these happenings, and every week the cops
Speaker 2: come and fuck with it. And this starts polarizing Dutch
Speaker 2: society pretty hard. It wins over a huge chunk of
Speaker 2: people towards their cause, but thirty seven percent of the
Speaker 2: Dutch population believe the Provos belonged in prison. Yeah. There
Speaker 2: was also this working class youth gang tension here we
Speaker 2: get in the real sharks versus jets between the Provos
Speaker 2: and this group called the CS the Central Station youth
Speaker 2: who are more like I would use this word googles,
Speaker 2: but no one knows what I mean. And I say
Speaker 2: that they were like the street kids. They were like
Speaker 2: runaways and little Dutch crrousspunks. Yeah, they were the proto
Speaker 2: Dutch crusspunks. And they hung out at Central Station and
Speaker 2: occasionally the Provos and the CS kids would fight, occasionally
Speaker 2: they would make alliances. At one point, the CS kids
Speaker 2: burned down the provo's houseboat. But in proper Hollywood fashion,
Speaker 2: the two groups joined up together when they had a
Speaker 2: common enemy. And this is where I would put this
Speaker 2: would be an important scene in the movie if I
Speaker 2: were making this. There was a right wing youth culture
Speaker 2: called the military, like the actual military, the actual military.
Speaker 3: H okay, yea yea yeah, yeah. I was to say,
Speaker 3: is that like like a cool right wing street gang
Speaker 3: they just called themselves. No, it's like the actual moment.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, like, yeah, they actually have some courage, unlike
Speaker 2: the right wing in the United States that needs to
Speaker 2: just pretend like they're in a military. Anyway. So these sailors,
Speaker 2: these they were called the yanchas, the little Yawns. They
Speaker 2: wanted to rid Central Station of the long haired workshy scum.
Speaker 2: That was like the words that they would us. It's
Speaker 2: like long hair. There was like magazines and shit like
Speaker 2: fight for your right to have a long hair as
Speaker 2: a boy and like and they were workshy, which is true,
Speaker 2: fuck work whatever.
Speaker 1: They weren't.
Speaker 3: They weren't shy about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. They were willing to throw it out about it. Actually,
Speaker 2: So a crew of one hundred marines and sailors maybe
Speaker 2: it actually just sailors and it's just a way that
Speaker 2: got translated. They try to drive the CS kids out
Speaker 2: of Central Station, and the provos show up and they
Speaker 2: all threw down together and they drive the military guys out.
Speaker 2: So these anarcho pacifists who won't fight cops but are like, well,
Speaker 2: we're gonna fight these fucking right wing people who are
Speaker 2: beating up our friends, only we can pick on the
Speaker 2: little kid gang exactly. We'll fight them, not you. This
Speaker 2: did not recruit the CS kids to like join the movement,
Speaker 2: but it's still fucking cool. And so they them being
Speaker 2: active in the streets was cool. But it's like that's
Speaker 2: kind of par for the course for being a sixties
Speaker 2: you know, primarily youth movement. Right. What really makes them
Speaker 2: stand out are their proposals and actions for a better world.
Speaker 2: They called them their White Plans. They picked white because
Speaker 2: it's a symbol of pacifism. Okay, once again, I'm going
Speaker 2: to say a bunch of names of plans that don't
Speaker 2: translate well into English.
Speaker 3: So it just doesn't have a great flavor in English.
Speaker 3: But I get it, I get it.
Speaker 2: No, Yeah, especially once we started talking about the white
Speaker 2: children and the white women, it's going to go it's
Speaker 2: going to look bad. I've read the claim that they
Speaker 2: basically created the modern environmental movement. That is not really true,
Speaker 2: but certainly in the Netherlands they were among the first
Speaker 2: to openly talk about and take seriously the idea of pollution,
Speaker 2: and they were a heavy part of invigorating an environmental
Speaker 2: movement world in the West, the actual roots of the
Speaker 2: modern environmental movement are more nebulous and a little bit
Speaker 2: less Western.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess one sea level rise was a concept
Speaker 3: people understood. It was very fucking real for the Netherlands. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 3: They're not going to be there anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've read some at least one. Whenever you read
Speaker 2: like a climate fiction book, that's like at a macro level,
Speaker 2: it's like and then the Netherlands has to figure out
Speaker 2: how to you know, because right, oh yeah, I forgot
Speaker 2: to say, context wise, most of the Netherlands is below
Speaker 2: sea level.
Speaker 3: It's the Miami of Europe.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so one of their core arguments of the provos,
Speaker 2: and one of their big things they're fighting for forever
Speaker 2: is they want a car free downtown Amsterdam. They're like
Speaker 2: bikes and people, yes, cars No. Their most famous innovation
Speaker 2: out of this is the white bicycle program. They declared
Speaker 2: that the city should close to cars and that twenty
Speaker 2: thousand white bicycles should be left around the city for
Speaker 2: anyone to use, ride it for a while, then leave
Speaker 2: it where you're done when you're done, for the next
Speaker 2: person to use. Decades later, the all devouring maw of
Speaker 2: capitalism has taken this idea and sold it back to
Speaker 2: people as the city bike and scooter plans and even
Speaker 2: like rideshare cars actually come directly like you can trace
Speaker 2: the lineage from the anarcho pacifist Christianness Christmas.
Speaker 3: They made it so ugly, they made it so early.
Speaker 2: What have they done to my boy?
Speaker 3: They ma sacred me boy?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it, okay, Yeah, So the provos are credit
Speaker 2: as the originator is the modern bike and car share system.
Speaker 2: But it was supposed to be free, and they started
Speaker 2: the program by just doing it, just putting a bike out. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they just gathered in public and painted bikes white and
Speaker 2: then passed out leaflets explaining the whole concept. The leaflet
Speaker 2: red and classic provo form daily sacrifices are made for
Speaker 2: that newest authority that the crowd have submitted themselves to
Speaker 2: the car equals authority. Suffocating carbon monoxide is its incense,
Speaker 2: Its image has ruined thousandfold streets and canals.
Speaker 3: God, I feel like you could do this right now. Absolutely,
Speaker 3: this it feels so it feels very modern.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I kept running across over and over again with
Speaker 2: these folks that I'm like, Oh, they're ahead of their time.
Speaker 2: I mean, if they hadn't been ahead of their time,
Speaker 2: if they just succeeded, we'd be in a much better
Speaker 2: situation in the end. Almost every version I've read, when
Speaker 2: people talk about the White Bikes program, they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: like they kind of just got stolen or thrown in
Speaker 2: the canal, you know, like, ah, tragedy of the commons.
Speaker 3: Right, cops stole most of the white bikes, shocking. It
Speaker 3: was illegal to leave bikes unlocked in the Netherlands at
Speaker 3: that point. And if this isn't the most cop brain
Speaker 3: shit in the world, I'd better steal your bike so
Speaker 3: that you don't leave it around for someone to steal.
Speaker 3: They're preventing crime by doing it themselves. Exactly why they
Speaker 3: do most of the drug trafficking, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Exactly, except that one drug that if they get anywhere
Speaker 2: near sponsor of the Why am I being an edgeler today?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 2: Anyway, the founder of this plan is this guy named
Speaker 2: lud Schimmelpennok, and he's from a lefty Catholic family. In
Speaker 2: the end, like a lot of the provos and later cabouters,
Speaker 2: he stayed involved in local government after all of this
Speaker 2: stuff is over, and basically still I think he's alive,
Speaker 2: spends his days trying to alleviate traffic problems. In the Netherlands,
Speaker 2: the bikes weren't the only solution to the car problem.
Speaker 2: They had another program, the name of which does not translate. Well,
Speaker 2: it's called the white body program. Okay again, you know whatever. Anyway,
Speaker 2: anyone who's killed by a car, their outline would be
Speaker 2: chalked onto the street and then the silhouette would be
Speaker 2: carved out and forever filled with white mortar.
Speaker 3: Is this I mean, maybe this has like an entirely
Speaker 3: separate origin. But in the US, when a cyclist is
Speaker 3: killed by a car, they lead like a ghost bike.
Speaker 3: Are these things related?
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 3: Fascinating.
Speaker 2: I spent a while down that particular rabbit hole. That program,
Speaker 2: the ghost bike program, started in two thousand and three
Speaker 2: in Saint Louis and I am not the only one
Speaker 2: who has traced its history back to the Provos.
Speaker 3: Fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that same bike culture of like early two
Speaker 2: thousand and three, like counterculture, was very aware of the
Speaker 2: White Bike Program. I heard about the White Bike program
Speaker 2: many more, way more often than I ever heard about
Speaker 2: the Provos themselves. They also fought for this thing that
Speaker 2: happens now in urban development. They fought for play streets,
Speaker 2: the idea of just taking streets and turning them into
Speaker 2: permanent public space the way that they conceive it of them.
Speaker 2: They would have like free machines, like I think it's
Speaker 2: like washing machines and shit, as well as phones and
Speaker 2: such for anyone who didn't have things at such things
Speaker 2: at home, like the phone, would have like a really
Speaker 2: really long extension cord, you know, so that you could
Speaker 2: like come out to the street, grab the phone. If
Speaker 2: you need to go talk, you go talk, and then
Speaker 2: bring it back, you know, so that anyone who doesn't
Speaker 2: have these things at home can use it. By the
Speaker 2: late sixties, the government actually started this is one of
Speaker 2: the ones they kind of won, and the government started
Speaker 2: kind of working with them and allowing this to happen.
Speaker 2: In more places, and I still know anarchists who are
Speaker 2: involved in making this kind of thing happen. Today. A
Speaker 2: friend of mine got a play street under that name,
Speaker 2: a playstreet for her neighborhood in Queens.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's incredible. So they closed the street off to
Speaker 3: cars and.
Speaker 2: Now it's a public space.
Speaker 3: Beautiful. There was a little bit of movement on that
Speaker 3: I think during the pandemic, right like where they were
Speaker 3: moving like cafe space and what used to be a
Speaker 3: street for cars. But I don't think it really stuck anywhere.
Speaker 2: In the US. Yeah, I feel like I still see
Speaker 2: that sometimes in cities, but I don't know. I don't
Speaker 2: go into cities enough to really be sure. I like them,
Speaker 2: I'm not anti them. Okay. One of my favorite programs
Speaker 2: of THEIRS, this one did not take off. It's called
Speaker 2: their White Chicken Plan. Chicken is slang for cop. It's
Speaker 2: like comparable to pigs. When I was there, we mostly
Speaker 2: called them klotzac, which means ball sack, but at the
Speaker 2: time it was chicken the first Dutch words I learned.
Speaker 2: So the White Chicken program basically cops, instead of driving
Speaker 2: around locking people up, should bicycle around with pockets full
Speaker 2: of sandwiches and fruit to give out to the needy.
Speaker 2: So true. Yeah, and I would just argue this didn't
Speaker 2: take off. I've read a more moderate slash progressive position
Speaker 2: that this actually did have a fairly large influence on
Speaker 2: the way that policing was conceived of in the Netherlands
Speaker 2: as cops as social workers. But it didn't stop cops
Speaker 2: from going around doing bad stuff. So I feel like
Speaker 2: in some ways that's the problem with most attempts to
Speaker 2: reform the police.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's I mean, it would be nice if you
Speaker 3: just made a separate group of guys who did that,
Speaker 3: rather than trying to get the cops to do something,
Speaker 3: because that's just confusing for them. Like I wouldn't take
Speaker 3: a snack from a cop.
Speaker 2: You know, rewires their brain. And Yeah. Then they had
Speaker 2: their white chimney plan, which was to paint all of
Speaker 2: the chimneys of major polluters white so everyone knew what
Speaker 2: they were doing to the world, like a name and
Speaker 2: shame kind of thing.
Speaker 3: I'm with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I I like basically all their plans, like,
Speaker 2: not all of them are perfect. They were anti monogamy,
Speaker 2: but I don't believe they had a white orgy plan. Fortunately,
Speaker 2: on feminism. They were pretty nineteen sixties about it, which
Speaker 2: is to say they were active engage in the fight
Speaker 2: for women's rights all the while doing a sexism. One
Speaker 2: of their things was the promotion of the provo sexual,
Speaker 2: which was basically that hot provo ladies should seduce people
Speaker 2: into their movement and or just like seduce bad people
Speaker 2: to like like go seduce the cops.
Speaker 3: Not not fuxcating, but like they're doing like flirty fishing
Speaker 3: for anarchism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, if people decided that's what they want to do,
Speaker 2: I have no problem inherently with that. You know. Then
Speaker 2: you get into the ones that really don't translate. Well,
Speaker 2: I'll just whatever made my point. They had the White
Speaker 2: Women Plan. One provo Irene Vonden went Vittering wrote up
Speaker 2: a white plan for providing sex and contraceptive education for
Speaker 2: women and girls. White plan is the name of these plans, right,
Speaker 2: they'd write it up, and so basically it was like sex,
Speaker 2: adding contraception, contraceptive education for women and girls. That's what
Speaker 2: we need. And then they had their White Children Plan,
Speaker 2: which was collective nurseries and education along anners lines. Five
Speaker 2: couples with children would pool child bearing and babysitting duties.
Speaker 2: So basically like every parent of the ten parents would
Speaker 2: take a week looking after all the kids in the
Speaker 2: nursery so that everyone had more time to do things
Speaker 2: besides just raising kids. But the kids always had an
Speaker 2: attentive caregiver. Very it takes a village to raise a child,
Speaker 2: and it was cool. It only works if none of
Speaker 2: the ten parents have a regular job, and they they
Speaker 2: hoped that neighbors would like send their kids to go
Speaker 2: and get looked after by the anarchist nurseries, and the
Speaker 2: neighbors weren't doing it. They were on the cutting edge
Speaker 2: of abolition of the family. Yeah, they had a white
Speaker 2: house plan, which was that empty homes should be refurnished
Speaker 2: for housing, and offices in city center should be turned
Speaker 2: into housing. No houses should be demolished until everyone is housed.
Speaker 2: So they would always have their like this is what
Speaker 2: society should do. And then here's like, well, we're going
Speaker 2: to do directly, you know. And what they did directly
Speaker 2: was kind of start the squatter movement. They broke into
Speaker 2: empty buildings and fixed them up with plumbing and electrical
Speaker 2: so that families could move in and live for free.
Speaker 2: There was this very major housing crisis for decades in
Speaker 2: the Netherlands following the war, and this was one of
Speaker 2: their ways of addressing that directly.
Speaker 3: Was it was there a lot of like physical destruction
Speaker 3: in the Netherlands during the war, Like did they lose
Speaker 3: a lot of housing stock to war damage?
Speaker 2: I you know, it's funny and if people want to
Speaker 2: know more about it beyond what my memory can summon up.
Speaker 2: I did an episode about the No No No about
Speaker 2: the Dutch squatting movement with with actually a Dutch squad
Speaker 2: wh runs a podcast they can go back and listen to.
Speaker 2: I know that some cities like Rotterdam were completely leveled
Speaker 2: and rebuilt after the war. I believe Amsterdam was not
Speaker 2: damaged as badly. And I think that again, think that
Speaker 2: the housing shortage was more caused by housing speculation.
Speaker 3: Okay, did they have their own post war baby boom,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't by like I don't know, in America
Speaker 3: we invented the suburbs at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, in this case, it's like houses that were
Speaker 2: empty when the economy is bad, it's like cheaper to
Speaker 2: not let them out to anyone to rent and just
Speaker 2: like hold on to them and wait for the economy
Speaker 2: to get better, and they're also doing a lot of
Speaker 2: like urban development, like the Amsterdam developed as a city
Speaker 2: that was had a residential core and then it became
Speaker 2: more of a commercial core. But then there's like people
Speaker 2: who are trying to live there, and then there's not
Speaker 2: enough housing.
Speaker 3: So they fixed that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and actually I mean to the point where eventually
Speaker 2: the Netherlands legalized squatting because even the government had to
Speaker 2: admit it was a social good. Until I think it
Speaker 2: was twenty eleven, when capitalism succeeded it.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of like empty commercial real estate
Speaker 3: in someone else's country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would never tell any I would actively tell
Speaker 2: people that squatting is a very good social thing to do.
Speaker 2: And if you do it in a if you build
Speaker 2: it up as a movement, you can defend each other
Speaker 2: and you can do things like not have squatting be
Speaker 2: a way of expecting people to live in squalor, but
Speaker 2: instead live very well. I lived in a squatted I
Speaker 2: lived in a squatted mansion owned by a mafia boss.
Speaker 2: That's beautiful because if you're if you leave a building.
Speaker 2: For when squatting was legal in the Netherlands, if the
Speaker 2: building was empty for a year, and you didn't have
Speaker 2: proof that you were in the process of renovating into
Speaker 2: some purpose. People could legally break in and live there
Speaker 2: and so peop So this this mafia dude was in jail,
Speaker 2: so he wasn't doing anything with his fucking mansion. It
Speaker 2: was a row home, but it was this mansion of
Speaker 2: a house right in downtown. So squatters moved in and
Speaker 2: lived there, and every now and then mafia guys would
Speaker 2: come and be like, hey, you should really move out
Speaker 2: of here. But like the squatters in the Netherlands were like, no,
Speaker 2: we're good, fucking bring it because they're fucking tough ast
Speaker 2: shit and they were not pacifist. But time I was there, anyway,
Speaker 2: that's beside the point. The pacifist they called what they
Speaker 2: were doing the gentle revolution or sweet revolution or smart evolution,
Speaker 2: and it was pretty fucking cool. They got into some
Speaker 2: trouble at the very beginning. The first issue of Provo
Speaker 2: had been made by all these like very I come
Speaker 2: from anarchy specifically, so it had like obsolete bomb recipes
Speaker 2: from nineteen ten in the first issue, and it got
Speaker 2: confiscated and they would get arrested for all kinds of shit, though,
Speaker 2: and I feel like these show the character of the movement.
Speaker 2: The one woman Coast Shook Coaster was arrested for giving
Speaker 2: out dried currents while preaching charity, which I believe is
Speaker 2: a specific Bible reference that I is above my head.
Speaker 2: Another guy, Hans Tunman, he got himself sentenced to a
Speaker 2: few months in prison from muttering imagine over and over again.
Speaker 2: And I can't figure out how. I don't know what happened.
Speaker 2: I don't know, and I'm so annoyed. Maybe he like
Speaker 2: went up to cops and just came saying it over.
Speaker 3: I don't know, and maybe he was being menacing about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He wrote a book about his time in jail, which,
Speaker 2: if I had more time in my life and I
Speaker 2: had found a translation of Full Time Provo, the book
Speaker 2: he wrote in jail, than I probably would have been
Speaker 2: able to figure out what he was arrested for. It
Speaker 2: sold well enough that it bought him a riverboat. I
Speaker 2: believe this is the one that the CS kids burned down.
Speaker 3: Well, not his jail memoir riverboat.
Speaker 2: I know, but I think they had a bunch of
Speaker 2: riverboats by the end, so I'm not sure they believed
Speaker 2: in municipal autonomy. They believe that city decision making should
Speaker 2: be done at the lowest possible level with neighborhood councils
Speaker 2: and then a larger municipal council only as like the
Speaker 2: way that government happens in society. And so since they
Speaker 2: believed in neighborhood in municipal councils, these anarchists started running
Speaker 2: for city government. This took ideological reconciling, but not a
Speaker 2: ton as they put it, they were ideologically they were
Speaker 2: not ideologically committed. They were ideologically inspired, which like I'm
Speaker 2: not saying one way or the other about what tactics
Speaker 2: makes sense, but that has a better way to look
Speaker 2: at ideology. Their campaign motto was vote provo, have fun, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: sure and sweet yeah. They put together a slate of
Speaker 2: twelve candidates, and the night before the election, Provo twelve
Speaker 2: was painted all over the city. They got thirteen thousand votes,
Speaker 2: which was enough to put one of their candidates onto
Speaker 2: the Amsterdam Municipal Council, the bigger city council. It was
Speaker 2: way less than they'd hoped. When you live in a
Speaker 2: bubble and everyone you know support to you think everyone
Speaker 2: else does two but the voting age at the time.
Speaker 2: According to the history book I read, the voting age
Speaker 2: was twenty three, but according to every internet source I found,
Speaker 2: the voting age was twenty one. The voting age was
Speaker 2: not eighteen at the time, and that's a pretty good turnout.
Speaker 3: None of those child gangs could even vote for them, exactly.
Speaker 2: Entering politics wound up divisive. The one guy they elected
Speaker 2: started getting shipped from his friends who were mad at
Speaker 2: him for like getting too big for his breeches. And
Speaker 2: meanwhile everyone else in the council just opposed him at
Speaker 2: every turn. This, this poor fucking guy just catching it from
Speaker 2: all sides. Yeah, he leaves after a few months, but
Speaker 2: the seats are not by candidate, the seats are by party.
Speaker 3: So they can just fill his seat.
Speaker 2: So another provo steps in, and then a third, and
Speaker 2: then a fourth, and people started complaining about the divide
Speaker 2: between street provos and intellectual provos. Meanwhile, provos spread across
Speaker 2: Western Europe, mostly to various Dutch cities, but also to Belgium,
Speaker 2: West Germany and Sweden. In November nineteen sixty six, they
Speaker 2: held an international provo festival. Beforehand, they did a mass
Speaker 2: washing of each other's feet in a reference to basically
Speaker 2: like Christ the anarchist socialist. There's a Super Bowl ad
Speaker 2: about this shit. So they are very Christian in their foundation.
Speaker 2: They are clearly influenced by Christian theology and let in
Speaker 2: Christian pacifism. One of the problems that I run across
Speaker 2: again and again in history is that when people write
Speaker 2: histories of leftist movements, they are atheists who write these histories,
Speaker 2: And I have a hard time finding the way what
Speaker 2: religion meant to the participants, because that's such an interesting
Speaker 2: movements question, right that, you know, because like you were saying,
Speaker 2: these these sort of political movements are often sort of
Speaker 2: removed from that context.
Speaker 3: But it sounds like these people were, i mean, I
Speaker 3: don't know their own words, like very inspired by the
Speaker 3: actual advice that Christ gave them. Right that they were
Speaker 3: absolutely making sure that everyone had a home and was
Speaker 3: fed and was cared for. And yes, you know, the
Speaker 3: least among us.
Speaker 2: I absolutely believe that meant a lot to at least
Speaker 2: many of them, if not most of them.
Speaker 3: I mean, you're not washing feet for for shits and giggles,
Speaker 3: that's not a.
Speaker 2: Bit, that's no, this is like we are an arco Christians.
Speaker 2: That is what they're That is what they're signifying, or
Speaker 2: at least a lot of them are Jews, right, but
Speaker 2: like they are like specifically being like this is not
Speaker 2: a materialist an atheist movement. There's actually in the later one,
Speaker 2: there's going to be this thing where the atheists like
Speaker 2: kind of like bargin with Fedoras and are like Reddit
Speaker 2: told me that you're not allowed to believe in God,
Speaker 2: and they basically like got run out, and like I
Speaker 2: find it so fascinating. There are these two big alternative
Speaker 2: magazines for youth culture at the time. One's called hit
Speaker 2: Week and one's called a Loha, and they both promote
Speaker 2: long hair. These are the magazines that are like advice
Speaker 2: about how to make your teachers let you have long
Speaker 2: hair and stuff, you know, and they're all about sex
Speaker 2: education and they're all about anarchism. The provos are writing
Speaker 2: these popular magazines by the end, including that anarchist on
Speaker 2: city council. He's writing articles about anarchism and also what's
Speaker 2: going on in local government from his position in the
Speaker 2: council that is now in the magazine is like all
Speaker 2: the rocks. Yeah, and this culture is spreading too. And
Speaker 2: then they all quit. Teenth of May nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: they publicly announced the abolition of Provo. After two years
Speaker 2: of being Provos. They decided that it had lost its character, spontaneity,
Speaker 2: it was gaining public support, and its ideas continued to
Speaker 2: influence everything in Dutch culture. At this point, there's clergymen,
Speaker 2: artists and some politicians. We're speaking about the wonders of
Speaker 2: the provos, but there's also like a tourist bus that
Speaker 2: will drive people to see and argue with the real provos.
Speaker 2: And it had become too predictable and it had lost
Speaker 2: its spirit. So they abolished themselves. They still had a
Speaker 2: city council seat and so they continued to fill that
Speaker 2: and continue to do that work. But once they were abolished,
Speaker 2: they kept going.
Speaker 3: Of course they didn't.
Speaker 2: And then they became nomes. And we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about them as gnomes on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Oh, I can't wait to hear about the gnomes.
Speaker 2: I know, this is one of my Usually the cliffhangers,
Speaker 2: like and then they're literally hanging from a cliff and
Speaker 2: the bombs about to go off or whatever. The fun
Speaker 2: but I'm pretty excited about And then they all turned
Speaker 2: into nomes. But Before we get to that, we should
Speaker 2: talk about you, and we should talk about the stuff
Speaker 2: that you do. Is there any new podcasts that people
Speaker 2: can hear you on or is there any other work
Speaker 2: you want to draw attention to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess this is coming out soon, right, so
Speaker 3: I'm having that two weeks from now, a brief stint.
Speaker 3: Right now, I'm guest hosting on It could happen here,
Speaker 3: so about once a week. You can check me out
Speaker 3: over there. You can always find me on Twitter at
Speaker 3: socialist dog Mom. We don't have any anarchist city council members,
Speaker 3: but I do cover our city council. Ill that's it
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, I want to plug that. Cool Zone Media
Speaker 2: has a new podcast and hold on. It's called Better Offline.
Speaker 2: I spent like two hours listening to it today. I
Speaker 2: should know the name of it. It's good. It's a
Speaker 2: tech podcast. But it's a tech podcast that's called better Offline,
Speaker 2: which helps you understand where it's coming from. Sophie, what
Speaker 2: do you got to plug?
Speaker 1: Uh? Cool Zone Media on the social medies? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: if you have a pet pet it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's not that many nouns where the verb. Actually
Speaker 2: there's probably a lot never mind, see you Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Hey cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
Speaker 1: of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.