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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Coates
Read between
July 6 - July 14, 2019
many leading Dutch politicians unashamedly declared themselves to be atheists, in a way unheard of in Britain or the United States.
Personally believe that American politics could benefit from a healthy dose of atheism
Erasmus of Rotterdam’s principle that ‘the most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war’. In
Give peace a chance
Football, that great leveller and lingua franca of British men, was to me a vaguely menacing mystery; a sport of thrown chairs and punched police horses. It was a universal language that I didn’t speak. No, I did not like football.
In Britain, patriotism is sadly rather tainted by association with a kind of small-mindedness and xenophobia. Symbols such as flags have been appropriated by far-right groups, so someone wearing a T-shirt with the flag of St George on it is likely to be sneered at and dismissed as a racist or a hooligan. Anyone who declares their love of their country too vigorously runs the risk of being branded a narrow-minded Little Englander, or worse.
‘It’s a question of what sort of city you want to live in. There is too much hatred in the world. We are all equal, and we mustn’t forget that.’
My Dutch friends and colleagues, however, coughed up willingly. Tax rates were very high – 52 per cent on earnings higher than about €55,000 a year – but I never heard the kind of bloody-thieving-taxman grumbling that echoed around offices in Britain on payday. One well-paid friend’s cheerful comment that ‘the government takes a lot out of my bank account in taxes, but they put a lot back in there as well’ was typical.
The Netherlands was, according to the UN, the fourth happiest country in the world, and the tolerant, laidback culture appeared to have played an integral role in achieving that.
Tolerance of personal quirks was therefore balanced by intolerance of anything that suggested disorder or a lack of caution. For an outsider, the hidden undercarriage of restrictive regulation could be both confusing and annoying.
