Amsterdam has become the first capital city in the world to ban advertising for fossil fuel products.
The ban covers air travel, cruise ships, petrol and diesel cars, gas contracts and a range of other so-called "high-emission products".
The ban applies to public space - billboards, bus shelters, buses, trams, metro and train stations.
The ban also includes advertising for meat... And it hits both ribeye specials in the supermarket as well as restaurants and burger chains.
Yes. You read that correctly.
Today is not April 1st.
Try reading that 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 continues 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's something else.
It's something much worse - and you can see the same pattern everywhere if you look. Here in this country too, 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 an agriculture that is subsidized all the way through. Green agriculture 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 GUARANTEED run cleaner and better production than.
The "green" energy that is supposed to "save us" depends on copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements dug up by children in Congo for Chinese companies we passed a resolution against three weeks earlier. Germany's transition ran on Russian gas until it no longer worked. And then it became American gas. And then it will be something else. Never themselves.
The 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-powered tanks, ships and planes. We want NATO, but not what NATO actually requires. We want peace in Europe and can no longer produce ourselves what a war demands.
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 simultaneously outlawing VPN connections... "for your own safety".
When COVID came, we discovered that we can no longer manufacture paracetamol. That the antibiotics - like a long list of other rather important medicinal products - come from India, and the precursors to them from China. That we as a continent had surrendered our own breath to countries we could not rely on in a crisis. We called it globalization. But it was in reality the dismantling of our independence, autonomy and supply security.
Under it all lies something more fundamental. A civilization 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 calculation 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 no one voted on, no one asked for, and which no one is allowed to describe anymore 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 arrive grow up in traditions that don't share a single one of the premises this society is built on. And we tell ourselves that irreconcilable difference is a strength.
I repeat.
It is not hypocrisy.
Because hypocrisy presupposes that you still share the values you violate. This is something else.
It is a civilization where the individual parts no longer speak to each other. 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 separate realities and are simultaneously 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 don't want to depend on. And then we call it simultaneously... 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 want to be - and a reality that keeps reminding us who we actually are.
A civilization can pretend to be two things at the same time.
Just not for very long.
Shouldn't we start talking about the Lie?
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