Amsterdam has become the first capital city in the world to ban advertising for fossil products.
The ban covers air travel, cruises, petrol and diesel cars, gas contracts and a range of other so-called "high-emission products".
The ban applies in public spaces - billboards, bus shelters, buses, trams, metro and train stations.
The ban also covers advertising for meat... And it hits both ribeye offers in the supermarket as well as restaurants and burger chains.
Yes. You read that right.
It is not April 1st today.
Try reading it again - and find a single place inside it where such a decision can be anchored to what you call reality.
Keep reading.
Because this is happening at the same time as the Dutch government is sending frigates out in a military coalition to ensure that the oil from Hormuz can continue to flow freely into precisely those homes that are no longer allowed to see the advertisements for it.
Because the reality is that Holland itself, which is now banning the advertising for oil, still - like all other Western countries - covers around 75-80% of its total energy consumption with fossil sources. Oil and gas.
It might look like hypocrisy.
But it is something else.
It is something much worse - and you can see the same pattern everywhere, if you look. Also here in this country where the madness is spreading.
The beef steak that builds a strong body is taxed and shamed, while the processed bread beside it comes from agriculture that is subsidised all the way through. Green farming exists in speeches. In reality, the small farms are closing across all of Europe under the weight of taxes and directives, while food production moves to countries we in the same conversation tell ourselves we are morally superior to. And which we WITH CERTAINTY run cleaner and better production than.
The "green" energy that is supposed to "save us" hangs on copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements that are dug up by children in Congo by Chinese companies we passed a resolution against three weeks earlier. Germany's transition ran on Russian gas, until it no longer did. And then it became American gas. And then it will be something else. Never themselves.
Defence must be in top form, but conscription is abolished, the ammunition factories are closed, and the soldiers are trained in an equality-fixated rainbow pedagogy that has forgotten that war is violent - and which imagines we should switch to climate-neutral electric tanks, ships and planes. We want NATO, but not what NATO actually requires. We want peace in Europe and can no longer ourselves produce what a war requires.
And certainly not on the world's most expensive energy - the "green" kind - which they keep telling us without blushing is the world's cheapest... as if we don't have an internet connection to the rest of the world and can check prices.
This of course only until they shut down access, while they outlaw VPN connections... "for your own safety's sake".
When COVID came, we discovered that we can no longer manufacture paracetamol. That the antibiotics - like a long series of other rather important pharmaceutical products - come from India, and the precursors to it from China. That we as a continent had handed over our own breath to countries we in a crisis would not be able to trust. We called it globalisation. But it was in reality the dismantling of our independence, autonomy and supply security.
Underneath it all lies something more fundamental. A civilisation reproduces itself - or it doesn't. We haven't had enough children for 50 years, and instead of asking why, we have decided to import our way out of the equation and call it enrichment.
We want the world's most expensive welfare system, we want pensions, we want a country that exists in two generations.
It requires what we no longer do.
And it requires what we are no longer allowed to say.
And on top of it all, we have given ourselves a demographic transformation that no one has voted on, no one has asked for, and which no one is any longer allowed to describe without being shut down. This even though it stands right in front of us, every single time we walk into a pedestrian street or a classroom. The children are no longer the same children. And some of those who are arriving grow up in traditions that do not share a single one of the premises this society is built on. And imagine that incompatible difference is a strength.
I repeat.
This is not hypocrisy.
Because hypocrisy presupposes that you still share the values you break. This is something else.
It is a civilisation where the individual parts no longer speak together. Where the moral theatre in one ministry continues, completely unaffected by what the next ministry does. Where the city council in Amsterdam and the foreign ministry in The Hague stand in their own reality and are at the same time the same government.
It is an unreality where we ban what we cannot do without. Dismantle what we cannot replace. Import what we have said we do not want to be dependent on. And then we call it at the same time... progress.
Contradiction presupposes a whole.
But the whole is gone.
What remains is a set of policies that each say something nice about who we would like to be - and a reality that keeps reminding us of who we actually are.
A civilisation can pretend it is two things at the same time.
Just not for very long.
Shouldn't we start talking about the Lie?
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