More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Coates
Read between
July 14 - August 9, 2025
So the country was ‘the Netherlands’, and the people who lived there were Dutch, and spoke Dutch, a language that sounded to an outsider like a drunk man gargling soup.
nearly 200,000 acres in the nineteenth century alone. In the 1860s, steam pumps helped drain a huge lake south of Amsterdam, including a certain part known, on account of its many shipwrecks, as the ‘ship-hole’. The name survived at the airport built on the new polder – Schiphol – where planes could land and take off from an area that used to be several metres under water.
Dutch people’s tendency to view the environment not as something to protect, but as something to protect from, was also reflected in the country’s environmental record. The Netherlands’ enormous ports, acres of gas and chemical plants and seemingly endless sprawl of greenhouses meant that, per capita, its carbon emissions were almost double those of France. As the home of Europe’s largest airport and biggest oil refinery, the Netherlands was failing to meet Kyoto emissions reduction targets, and had particulate air pollution roughly 50 per cent higher than the developed-country average. For a
...more
During Klassieker matches, Feyenoord supporters would sing songs about the Holocaust and even wave Hamas flags; ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’ went one chant.
The problem was, in my opinion, exacerbated by the tone-deafness of a political class who lived in areas with few ethnic minorities, with immigrants more likely to give them a good price for retiling the bathroom than to take their job.
It seemed to me that many of those who defended immigration did so partly because they were never exposed to any of its disadvantages.
