world and NL politics, long-ish
Maybe you've already heard of Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, victim-blaming Zelensky and completely lacking any sort of spine regarding the aggression and abuse from Trump.
This guy was our prime minister in the Netherlands for many many years, and he was *exactly* like this here - completely spineless, wishful thinking, always being an apologist for the authoritarian, and excelling in doing absolutely fuck-all about any kind of problem while putting on a smile and pretending all is fine.
He and his party are the reason our entire country is stacking crisis upon crisis now, and why lots of government infrastructure is falling apart after having been neglected for over a decade, and now everyone has to scramble to pick up the pieces.
He is not doing "careful diplomacy" despite what some people may claim (or want to believe), and you only need to look at the trajectory of the Netherlands over the past decade to see the hard evidence of that. What he's doing is playing the 'enlightened centrist' while collecting a massive payout for declaring everything someone else's problem.
Rutte is an avatar for the banality of evil. He's the useless middle manager trying to justify his existence in the org chart, but on a nation-state scale.
world and NL politics, long-ish
@joepie91 Agree, except for the spineless and useless. He's a malicious neoliberal war criminal who doesn't give a fuck about people's lives and has always been on the same policies team as Wilders, the Dutch Putin stooge. There's much more to say about this side of him, but I still have to do some shopping.
world and NL politics, long-ish
@Heidentweet While I'm inclined to agree, I've personally started focusing more on actions than on intentions - I would rather incite a change in culture so that people recognize inaction as a problem, than endlessly debate about whether someone "really" is actively malicious, which a lot of people don't *want* to be convinced of and so never will be.
world and NL politics, long-ish
@joepie91 Okay, I agree with leaving maliciousness etc out also.wirh your reasons. But spineless is also an attribution of character and not of an action. IMO it's bordering on an apology. His let-it-rip COVID policy and Toeslagenschandaal were not spineless or an inaction. Inaction in the sense of stalling is also an action.
This is something I've very strong feelings about because being a centrist middle manager is his image, not his policies and their consequences or his behaviour. As you said as well, his policies have changed NL for the worse and he got away with everything. But this is me interfering in your thread, so I'll just shut up now.