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Transcript

Jeff J. Brown: Good evening, everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland. And I’ve got a friend who I’ve actually known for several years now, Colin Brace on the show tonight. How are you doing, Colin?

Colin Brace: I’m doing very well. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.

Jeff: Colin reached out to me several years ago. I don’t remember exactly how or what.

Colin: I ordered your books.

Jeff: Oh, that’s right, you ordered my books. And I think you’re still contributing, making a small donation each month. I don’t know if that’s still going on or not, but I really appreciate it. You’re one of the longest. You’re a legacy. You’re a legacy donator. So it all adds up. Really appreciate it. That’s not why I have Colin on the show tonight. Colin is in Holland or the Netherlands. Colin, where are you in Holland? Tell us about that.

Colin: I mean, the great city of Amsterdam.

Jeff: Wow.

Colin: I’ve been here for 40 years. You know, one of the things that fascinates me when I hear from you, I hear about you and I follow you, is how much you’ve moved about. You’ve been to Brazil if I recall quickly, then you in South Africa.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. I tried to live there and become a farmer there  and it did not work out.

Colin: Yeah. And you felt very peripatetic. That’s the right word. So from one place to another. And now you’ve made another big move from Normandy to Taiwan. And I follow this, I think wow. I’ve been living in the same place more or less within about 4 or 5km radius of about 4 or 5 km for 40 years. And I don’t say it’s better or worse, I’ve had a much different trajectory. Put it that way.

Jeff: That’s okay. Every horizon created, we lose something in the rearview mirror but, you know, that’s okay. Well, tell us about you’ve been there for 40 years. Where were you before that?

Colin: Well, I was born and grew up in the United States like yourself. I’m an East Coast person. My family lived in Boston in beautiful New England. And my father was on the faculty of MIT, the big technical university there. So I grew up in Cambridge, in fact, just across the river from Boston. In my early 20s, I met a Dutch woman, and we moved here together and lived together for some years. And then at a certain point, we went our own way. But I’ve been here ever since. I got into the kind of what you might call the language services business. I started working as a freelance editor and translator, and that kind of branched into other things.

At a certain point, I started doing a mixture of journalism and kind of copywriting and pretty much anything to do with English except teaching. I’ve never been an English teacher, but I’ve done lots of other pretty much everything else in the kind of the domain of the written word. And I did that for about 30 years, and I’m kind of winding it down now. So at the end of that, that particular phase of my life. And so I’m taking on other things like the Substack we will talk about a little bit later about. But one thing I will say, though having been here for 40 years is well, I may have missed out on some of the excitement of moving to a new country like you’ve done over and over again. But I have actually gotten to know the place pretty well.

Jeff: I bet you have.

Colin: And it is. You know, I can say now that I have kind of that, that take of an outsider who’s been here a long time. So I feel like I do have some kind of understanding about you. You posed some interesting questions that we’ll get to in a little while, and I hope to be able to answer some of them, or at least throw some ideas out there which will be food for thought if you know what I’m getting at.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Colin: Yeah, that’s it in a nutshell.

Jeff: Do you have Dutch citizenship? I mean, you must.

Colin: Yes, I do.

Jeff: Okay. Good for you. Well, listen, let’s get started with some of my questions.

Colin: Yes.

Jeff: I’ve read a lot about colonial history in Spain who go Britain and France deserve credit for their genocidal pasts. Yet Holland hides under cover about its colonial history. It even colonized Taiwan. How can the Dutch get away from not being shamed too? How do they get away with it, Colin?

Colin: That’s a good question. I’ve often wondered also about the lack of how should I put it. It’s not like a subject people here like to talk much about. I don’t think it fits in. It doesn’t fit in with the self-perception the Dutch have of being this sort of tolerant, liberal, progressive society. You know, there is now a little bit more attention to, for example, the role slavery played in the 17th century. And how it became an important part of the economy, that kind of thing.

But you’re absolutely right that it’s kind of slipped under the radar in a certain way. And I think one possible aspect of it is, is that it was never quite the same kind of expression of kind of cultural domination that that British, the British projected this very much this exporting Britishness. So you have people still playing cricket in India and Pakistan, this kind of thing. Whereas I think that the Dutch colonial past was much more of a kind of cold-blooded economy.

Jeff: Yeah, mercantile. Just merchant.

Colin: Exactly. So, you don’t go to. I’ve never been to Indonesia, but from what I understand, when you go to Indonesia, you’re not overwhelmed with this sense of Dutchess. I mean, they were there for, what, 300 years or something like that, but they didn’t really leave a very strong cultural implant the way I also have never been to India or Pakistan, but I get the sense that they have there. I mean, they still speak a lot of English in India, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Colin: I don’t think there are only a few. Sorry.

Jeff: It’s an official language of India.

Colin: Yes, exactly. And, I don’t think Dutch is the official language of Indonesia. I only think a few of the older generation, the postwar generation may speak Dutch. But certainly none of the younger people. It’s not a thing. So that’s only a partial explanation, I think. You know, it’s interesting because World War Two ended here in May 45th. That was like the moment when the kind of they that was the Liberation Day here is May 5^th or May 6th, something like that. And so that’s the kind of the end of World War Two.

And already in September 1945, the Dutch launched a military operation to fight in Indonesia against the independence movement there. So they had barely shaken the dust off from World War Two and sitting here in this kind of broken place. They were already heading over to Indonesia to make sure that their colony didn’t free itself from the colonial yoke. And that’s quite actually, I put it that’s something of a contradiction, you might say. You might think that after World War Two there would be this kind of like, well, we’ve had enough war for now. Let’s cool it, let’s work on rebuilding our societies, our cities, our decimated industry.

But no, they headed over there to fight the war of independence. It was quite a I don’t know too much about the exact contours of that colonial war, but it was not a pretty thing. It was quite a vicious business. And I asked somebody once a Dutch guy who had actually been there, who had been deployed to Java or somewhere as a soldier. I said, why did Holland go to war so quickly? Why did they launch themselves into this military adventure so soon literally months after the end of World War two? And he said to me, well, he said at the time people felt it was sort of the only thing they had.

The only thing we have left is our colony in Indonesia, and we didn’t want to let it go. We had to keep a hold of it. And so they went over there and they fought obviously a losing battle. Eventually, Indonesia declared its independence. One thing a lot of, you may know about Sukarno and the whole Bandung movement of they wanted to chart a course and not be on one side of the Cold War or the other. They wanted an independent sort of third way. But that was not allowed. Eventually, Sukarno was even though he was not “pro-Soviet”. Simply declaring your independence is not good enough. It had to be on our side.

Jeff: Yeah.

Colin: No sitting on the fence that respect, no equivocating or. I don’t think he was equivocating. I think he clearly wanted a charted independent path, which is the way the BRICS countries do now. It was kind of like a predecessor or premonition of BRICS, but that was at the height of the Cold War. That was not to be. It’s one thing or another, you may recall. Well, that famous odious domino theory that if the US didn’t hit Vietnam to fight the war there, to beat the communists there, that the other countries of Southeast Asia were and they were afraid of Indonesia, of course.

So in any case, to get back to the original question why doesn’t Holland? It’s somehow it’s I think the country has kind of reshaped its self-image and the way it projects itself in the world. And it’s kind of managed to kind of sweep that part of the history under the rug. And so the postwar image of Holland was being this tolerant, multicultural, multi-confessional society, which is progressive and all this kind of thing. And so they kind of buried the whole colonial past pretty quickly.

But the funny thing is, right, you come to Amsterdam, where I live in the center, and it’s you’re surrounded by emblems and evidence, even the prosperity of the city was built on this, the mercantilism you were referring to a moment ago. So the colonial past is it may be people don’t talk about it, but it’s so evident everywhere. You know, the great 17th-century canal system was built up. You know, it was a very prosperous place at the time. And certainly, colonial relations played an important part in that. So why it’s. So it’s I hope I don’t think I have a really comprehensive answer to your question, but I hope I’ve scratched at least a little bit at the surface there.

Jeff: Well, one of the things I’ve actually read, I don’t know if this is true or not, Colin, but I’ve read that if like a writer or a journalist or somebody who has a public presence in Holland starts talking about and divulging what the Dutch did because, I mean, a lot of people don’t know they were in the Caribbean. They were all over the place. They were the Anglo-Dutch Wars and they were going at it hand and fist against Britain fighting for territory. But I have read that people who have tried to talk about it, they are ruthlessly suppressed by the government. And I’ve read that they’re even threatened to lose their citizenship if they keep it up. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what I’ve read.

Colin: Well, that’s quite possible, but I suspect that it’s more a kind of collective will to do, to kind of ignore it. It’s more like we just simply ignore it and don’t really talk about it. I mean, there is now kind of like awoke dimension to addressing slavery, for example. They’re planning a slavery museum here in Amsterdam. So there is some effort to there’s some interest in kind of reconstructing some of that.

But so often it has its cast in this kind of very much this kind of issue of kind of cultural identity and this kind of thing without really, in my opinion, looking at the hard economic basis for it and the fact that these colonies, these countries were ruthlessly exploited for centuries and the amount of wealth that flowed into this country was immense. And I feel that it’s a kind of an almost a dilettantish way too.

I hope I’m not being disrespectful to people who care about the anti-slavery movement, but I feel it’s a little bit dilettantish and it’s kind of a superficial way of looking at it, it’s framed purely as racism. And of course, racism didn’t play a role, but it doesn’t quite explain or investigate all of the dimensions of it. So it tends to be kind of a symbolic thing. So we’ll put up a statue, we’ll tear down the statues to our colonial oppressors, the admirals, and this kind of thing. We’ll put up a statue for this, and it’s sort of an exchanging $0.01 cents, one collection of symbols for another.

Jeff: Well, another thing is that Holland does not get all of the attention that France and Italy and England get. But it seems to me and I do follow what’s maybe more than most Americans what’s going on in Holland because I actually well, it’s a long story, but I visited a lot of farms there back in the 1980s for a job I had. I understand that Holland is kind of like a petri dish for the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and the Agenda 2030. And it seems like they’re trying to break Holland first so that they can then go after France and Italy which have bigger economies. So can you tell us about that? I mean, do you sense that that’s going on?

Colin: Well, it’s interesting that you heard about the farmer protests a few years ago. And that just seemed. This is one of your questions as well. The WEF and then the farmer thing and there I think that they are definitely connected. And it just seemed so irrational. This is a country as you’ve observed is profoundly rooted in agriculture. It’s an agricultural superpower as well. It’s the second largest agricultural exporter in the world after the US. You look at the map. I mean, it’s a tiny little country, but it’s very, very fertile and has a very highly developed, efficient agricultural sector.

And then it’s also very lucrative. I mean, the flowers and the vegetables, all the stuff that they produce in the greenhouses throughout the year, especially in the winter months. It’s very, very big business. It’s worth you know, 100 million a year, 100 billion a year, or something like that. And so why they launch this attack? It’s another really good word for farming and wanted to just try to dismantle it. It’s hard to put all the pieces together, but it seems to be a kind of combination of this kind of globalist agenda of trying to centralize and break independence. Farmers are still very independent.

They have a close tie to the ground and the surroundings and the environment and the places they have lived and farmed sometimes for many generations. And so they still have a kind of independent spirit. And that’s in this day and age with this globalist agenda to try to highly centralize all kinds of forms of control, this is kind of a threat. And so farmers have a way of being a little bit too independent. So there’s a sense that we want to break the kind the independent spirit of the farmer citizens and try to move towards a much more kind of centralized corporate form of agriculture. I don’t think they’re going to succeed ultimately, because there’s too much resistance to that. There’s too much. But you can do a lot of damage in the process.

And this is my sense about the World Economic Forum Agenda, the heavily centralized globalist efforts to impose this very authoritarian government in Brussels. They have all these ideas and these plans, but it’s not going so well, I think, because it’s very hard to impose this kind of top-down control on people unless you actually can deliver unless you actually, you can offer good governance. And we see it now we have these floundering from one government, one coalition to another. And there’s a lot of unrest. And so, yeah, it’s very damaging, but it’s hard to see how they’re ultimately going to succeed at it. And, Holland is for sure very much at the center of the whole WEF.

It’s been in the center of the EU. As you know, the earliest iteration of the EU was the Benelux Coal and Steel. That was back in the 50s. Yeah, it was kind of a kind of a basically it was a cartel for steel and coal and oil and that evolved into the European Community. And then there it grew and grew and grew and became more and more centralized and powerful. And so Holland’s been right at the center of it ever since. But as pro-EU is pro this and pro that is as the country may appear, it’s never fully bought into it. You know, I mean, let me give you an example. Back in 2005, I don’t know where were you living in 2005. Do you remember? Well, it doesn’t matter.

Jeff: I was living in the United States.

Colin: All right. Oh, I see. I was thinking because you had been living in France, so I was wondering if you were.

Jeff: Then we went back to China, and then we went back to France, and then we went back to. Anyway. I was in the USA at the time.

Colin: Well maybe your wife might remember this, but in 2005, there were two referendums held in the EU and two EU countries. One was held in France, and one was held in the Netherlands. And these were the first two referendums designed to confirm the establishment of the EU Constitution. And this was a very it was quite a long document. It was very, very, very much a kind of a neoliberal template. It was very much defining the kind of economic model that the community would take. And we had these referendums in France, and we had them in the Netherlands and both in France and in the Netherlands, a majority of the people voted against them.

Jeff: Yeah.

Colin: And so clearly not everyone was on board at the time. Neither of these two countries has ever been absolutely on board with all of this. So one could underestimate the public acceptance of this kind of big globalist project. But one should not overestimate either, because there’s always been this kind of skepticism, shall I put it? And as you may also remember around the same time, there was a third referendum held in Ireland, and that one was for reasons I don’t entirely understand. That was more of a binding referendum.

So the Irish actually had in that particular case it had to pass. And the Irish also voted against it, which was the wrong outcome. So they were forced to actually rerun the referendum six months later. And somehow they cajoled, pressured manipulated the Irish into voting the correct way this time. And after that, they abandoned this referendum system. Basically, the constitution was rebranded as the Lisbon Treaty, and the Lisbon Treaty was deemed not to be required; they didn’t believe that it required a referendum. So they just basically passed it in, I think it was 2009.

Jeff: Exactly.

Colin: And the Lisbon Treaty, that to me, I think if you combine the Lisbon Treaty with 2007, 2008 financial crisis, that was really like, I think the turning point when an enormous amount of control was concentrated and brought into Brussels. And so it’s been a long, gradual process ever since. But these are two of the absolutely, for me, key pivotal moments. To me, the kind of centralization force we need is a kind of overdrive at that point. It’s been downhill ever since.

Jeff: Yeah. Well, I’m a dual national. I have French nationality, but I really follow politics in Europe and it’s awful. I mean Ursula von der Leyen, she’s an absolute totalitarian dictator. She’s worse than any imagined dictator that you can think of in modern history. And I think the first treaty was the Maastricht Treaty. Right? Is it Maastricht?

Colin: Yes, exactly. It’s a city in Southern Holland, right near the Belgian border.

Jeff: Yeah.

Colin: And that was in 1992.

Jeff: That was also voted against. And then the legislatures overruled them. No, no, they passed Maastricht. And then I think everybody figured out what a bad deal it was. And then the other two talked about they voted no. But then they just turned Maastricht, France, and just at midnight just overrode the popular vote and just passed it at midnight in practical secrecy. So much for Western democracy.

Colin: Yeah. Yeah. Maastricht in my sense of the Maastricht treaty, was that it really paved the way for the Euro.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah.

Colin: It kind of consolidated economic policy, economic control, established this kind of proto-central European Central Bank and kind of laid the way for the introduction of the Euro, which was in 2002.

Jeff: Yeah.

Colin: And that was a terrible, terrible decision. I remember back in the late 90s, there was a Dutch Socialist Party. It’s never gotten very large, but it’s always had a kind of a 5% to 10%, maybe a little bit higher, maybe a little bit around that kind of around the 10%, 5% to 10% share in parliamentary seats and, they waged a quite a persistent campaign against the Euro. And I even have a sticker here somewhere, an old bumper sticker I was cleaning up the other day, and I found this saying no to the Euro sticker.

And I don’t remember all of the details of their campaign, but I think that it was the essentials. I think they got down that it was trying to impose a single euro, a single economic model on a collection of countries that had very different economic development paths. And it was kind of a one-size-fits-top-down, push this thing on. And it’s been good for some countries and terrible for others, as I’m sure you know.

Jeff: Well, we lived in France and actually had a business in France, a retail business in France from 1997 to 2001. And then we left and went back to the United States until 2010. Then we went back to China and the propaganda for the Euro. And the total oppression of anybody questioning the Euro. I mean, people were just brainwashed that they had to have the Euro if they wanted to compete against the United States of America and all.

And of course, it’s all the City of London and you know who orchestrated the Euro because that’s what they want. They want one single currency. They can control it instead of 25 different ones. What is it? What’s the mood in Holland? Is there a possibility for Holland to exit from the EU, or will that ever happen or is it just not on the table, or what’s going on with all the anger and all that?

Colin: That’s a complicated question because I think that many people have a kind of an instinctual, you might call it sentimental, you might call it somewhat self-unconscious. Belief in that European kind of unity is a good idea that we should all these are all tiny little countries like Holland. You know, we have to kind of stick together this kind of thing. And I think there’s a certain rational understanding of that. I mean, it’s not let me put it this way. It’s not a completely irrational thing. And I think that the European Community of the 80s was, in many ways a very good thing. You know, it was basically a free trade zone. That’s the way it was started. It was called the EEC back in the day, the European Economic Community.

Jeff: Yeah.

Colin: And it was basically designed back then to kind of harmonize trade and to raise kind of establish kind of standards for exchange and consumer protection, all this kind of thing. And lots of good things came out of that, I’m sure. And so I think a lot of people I get the sense they still haven’t caught on to the idea that caught on, that it’s gone so much further than that, that this once good system, good plan, a good idea has been kind of having been transmogrified into something very, very scary and dangerous and highly destructive.

And I think that people still haven’t quite many people at least still haven’t quite figured that out. So if you have a poll today or tomorrow asking people should Holland leave and should there be a next? I don’t think you’d probably find a majority. But if you ask them whether we should establish a European army, whether we should go to fight in Ukraine if you get deeper into the weeds of the politics, I don’t think you’d find much enthusiasm for that. And I think there is a kind of growing, I don’t call it Euroscepticism.

Okay. And we have a populist party now the Freiheit Party of the Freedom. It’s the Wilders party. They were very much a right-wing populist to use the kind of conventional terminology. And they have a measure of Euroscepticism to them. And so I don’t think people want their voters, their base, I don’t think wants an immediate exit, but they sort of want like keep Brussels at bay. We have to make certain kinds of decisions on our we still have to keep a certain amount of sovereignty and some kinds of decisions. So it’s not full-throated support but it’s much the same way I think Greece was in 2015.

They wanted a new kind of economic set of economic policies, but they weren’t quite ready to leave the eurozone. They weren’t quite ready to leave the whole Euro project. So my feeling is that the longer the EU continues along its current trajectory, the worse its decisions are because we now have a completely unelectable, unaccountable, intransparent decision-making system in Brussels and without any kind of feedback loop. These people are making terrible decisions. Terrible. I mean, the whole Ukraine war, the lion marching off to Kyiv every so often to kind of declare do whatever it takes, all this kind of thing.

These are terrible decisions. They’re destroying, as you know, the German economy and creating all kinds of but because there’s no kind of it’s not a really organic movement any kind of way, any kind of organic. There’s no kind of organic development of policy that it’s going in the wrong direction. And I can’t see this as sustainable. There are people like Yanis Varoufakis who say, well we don’t want to throw the whole thing out. We don’t want to destroy the EU. We have to reform it. But, Jeff, how do you reform a set of institutions that are designed in their core to be anti-democratic, not just undemocratic, but anti-democratic?

Jeff: Totalitarian.

Colin: They have contempt for popular will instead we can’t trust the people. We can’t trust them because they’ll vote for the wrong types. Like they’ll vote for a Marine Le Pen, or they’ll vote for a Viktor Orban or a Sinn Féin. And so the whole system is designed to kind of like to basically smother popular the importance, little tiny things about local domestic policy. Yeah. We have a little bit of room. We have some space here in each of our parliaments and in our local municipalities. We can do things. But then, the big, really big thing, the really big themes and I would say the big themes being economics and foreign policy. No, we don’t have a say in that anymore. We’re not allowed to have a say. And these things are being decided by people with zero accountability. And that this is not a system that can last forever. This is not sustainable.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of Ukraine the former prime minister of Holland, Mark, if I pronounce his name wrong Rutte.

Colin: Rutte.

Jeff: Okay. There’s the Dutch pronunciation of Rutte. He just been nominated as the secretary general of NATO. And he just took over from Jens Stoltenberg in Norwegian. Is he going to be any better or is he going to be a ventriloquist dummy for the US Department of Defense?

Colin: Well, I think you’ve answered the question by asking it. I don’t know that you’ve seen he came out a couple of weeks ago, and I think it was one of his first major statements. It wasn’t. I don’t think it was the first time he appeared in public, but it was the first time he made a kind of an articulated statement. It was on RT. I can send you the link if you like because I found it extraordinary. He was saying that we must ramp up our spending. And we have to defend our way of life. And we need to spend more on industry.

And we have to accept the fact that we can have to spend less on social spending. And we have to encourage our banks and our pension funds to invest in arms manufacturers. And you can’t believe you’re reading this kind of thing because, I mean, just a few years ago, this would have been fairy tale stuff. We didn’t think of these terms but this whole Russia threat has been now so assiduously cultivated. And I’ll be honest, he came across as basically the sales guy for the US military-industrial.

Jeff: There you go.

Colin: Basically, they just want to sell Europeans more weapons and expensive, big, expensive weapons, these air defense systems, these j-35, these high, high-end ticket things which are extremely profitable for the companies to make. But it’s a boondoggle. It’s a scam. So he’s to ask whether he’ll be better or worse than Stoltenberg. Based on his most recent comments it’s just more of the same. It’s more of this kind of bellicose rhetoric. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is that that. And this is a theory, okay? This is an idea.

I can’t necessarily prove this is the case, but my sense is that they want to use defense as a way of establishing further centralized control in the EU. It will be a way we need to spend more on defense, and it will be the kind of the nose of the camel under the tent for direct EU taxation. I think this is the Holy Grail in Brussels because if you look at it like a conventional nation-state like you look at France or England or the UK or the US, these central governments have large income streams in terms of taxation.

And if you look at France, I believe that the last time I checked it the French government spending was around 40% of GDP. So when you think about it, that’s a lot. I mean, these governments, governments are a big, huge part of the economy. And I think if the US is a little lower, it’s closer to 30. In Holland, it’s around 35. I think in England it’s the same kind of ballpark. But China I believe, I looked it up a while back, and some. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s around 25% of GDP in state spending. And if you look at the EU Brussels, it’s like 2%. It’s tiny. It’s just a little that they get money from the country’s National contribution.

Jeff: Yeah.

Colin: We all pony up each country ponies up several 10 billion a year for the EU, and some countries are net contributors like the Netherlands, and I believe England was, and Germany and possibly a couple of others like probably France. And then you have like the net recipients, for example, Poland I think is the biggest, best example of the net. They get a lot of money for agriculture and this kind of thing. And so but still, when you put everything back together, it’s still tiny. It’s 2% perhaps.

And I think Brussels wants to push the federalization process further in order to, we want that big economic muscle. And they don’t have that yet. I think that’s like the holy grail of the Brussels bureaucracy to try to get direct funding streams through direct taxation. One way they could do that is through defense spending, by somehow bringing defense spending in centralized defense spending into Brussels.

And then saying, well, in order to fund our defense spending, we need to have direct taxation. So that’s something we have to be on guard for. We have to keep a watch out for it. And this could be I mean Mark Rutte and his people that the NATO pro-NATO people that could be their part of the strategy is drumming up this Russian threat in order to force countries to spend more and then to bring that whole kind of that whole gravy train into motion.

Jeff: Wow. That’s depressing. All that money going into one of the most corrupt cities in the world Brussels. It’s just a soup. What a corrupt shithole place NATO and the EU are. They’re just fetid with corruption.

Colin: I don’t know how closely you’ve been following Pepe Escobar, he says that he thinks that the kind of chain of command these days coming from the US is via NATO. So basically policy, the top-down policy comes from the Washington swamp through NATO into the EU top. That’s his sense of the conduit. In some sense, NATO is now well, let’s put it differently. EU is now kind of occupied by NATO. NATO is like the center of the spinning web. Yeah. It’s obviously a very complex relationship, and I don’t think we should oversimplify it, but it does seem that kind of NATO policy.

I mean, it seems to have an enormous weight these days when we see that, we see how Germany is being destroyed economically by basically NATO policy. And I wonder how many Germans realize what’s happening there. Well, who the author is of their discontent. I think eventually the Nord Stream story will become a hot potato. They’re still in the kind of denial mode about that there. I get the sense. But eventually, that’s going to come out. I think that’s going to be it’s still a public secret, but eventually, I think it’s going to be the Germans will have to come to terms with that. You’ll have to understand this was done to us by our erstwhile ally, and there have to be consequences for that. I think we still may be some time off. It may be still who knows the year. I don’t know, but that’s a mouse with a tail, as the Dutch say. I don’t think it’s going away.

Jeff: Yeah. Tell us about your Substack. I’m a subscriber and you have written some fine essays. What was the inspiration? And what are your goals, and what do you like writing about?

Colin: Well, thank you. I thought, my inspiration was to try to make sense of what’s going on here for people outside of the country. And because I think, of all of these European countries, they all have very much their own kind of character and their own trajectories. And I look for ways in which I look for issues where the kind of the Dutch trajectory reflects on the larger context. And so we’re talking about, for example, this concentration in Brussels, at the same time we’re seeing centrifugal powers pushing outwards.

And each of these centrifugal energy and the centralization energy and the centrifugal energy, manifest themselves, I think, in different ways in each country. I mean, the way, the way it’s coming, it’s manifesting itself as Francis is different than in Germany, this kind of thing. So I’m looking for kind of patterns, which is the way it’s happening here. But I don’t only do geopolitics, I don’t only write about, I also enjoy writing about more kind of cultural and social.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. You’ve done several about Dutch culture. And they were really good.

Colin: Yeah. You know, the bicycling culture and this kind of thing and that type of thing. So, yeah, basically it’s a kind of a personal project to try to make sense of what’s going on around me here. And I think that my sense is that the current trajectory, the current long-term EU direction is going to fail eventually. It’s going to be like NATO and the EU are not sustainable. So I’m trying to sort of like my personal mission is to kind of document it for my particular, my particular church, my particular perspective.

Colin: I think we’ll I think it will happen, but I don’t think it’s going to happen as quickly. And certainly, we cannot forecast, we cannot predict how it will happen, how it will look like, or what the outcome will be. I think the outcome will differ from country to country and this kind of thing. But it isn’t sustainable, Jeff.

Jeff: That’s for sure. Having lived there and voting there and working there and owning a business there, it’s a nightmare. It’s an absolute nightmare. The one factor that makes Europe better than the United States is that not everybody’s running around with semi-automatic pistols in their cars. We don’t have that. Yeah, it’s sad. It’s sad to see. And just the awful leadership of Schultz and Rutte and Macron and Hollande and Sarkozy and all these bozos who are prime ministers in England. And it’s just it’s embarrassing. It really is. It’s embarrassing for the people.

Colin: What I find so perplexing is how quickly and how awful the political class has become. I mean, we had 20 years ago, we had German leaders 30 years ago, 40 years ago, who were sensible, smart, diplomatic people Gerard Schroeder and these people, I mean, whether you may have disagreed with one particular policy, but they were people of substance.

Jeff: They were statesmen.

Colin: Exactly. And I think one of the biggest one of the most perplexing things for me is to contemplate how quickly that all went downhill. And somehow this, this been a very, very a kind of a quiet coup, I think, in Europe where any kind of independent-minded, like the Villepin, the former he’s given some interviews lately, which I’ve seen in subtitles. And Dominique de Villepin, the former foreign minister of France, very smart guy, very, very well informed. And what happened? Why?

Where did all those people end? Why did they disappear? Why did they? Why have they gone from them? And I think that there’s been a kind of a quiet coup here. And I think it would take another hour of another program to probably unpack all the reasons and the way that happened. But there has to be some explanation or a combination of explanations to help us understand why all of a sudden we’re in this terrible predicament with all these terrible leaders and terrible ideas, and we’re going in absolutely wrong direction. It’s tragic.

Jeff: What’s on your to-do list in terms of geopolitics and writing and anything else along those? What would you like to share about your future plans?

Colin: Well, I don’t have all kinds of concrete plans, but yeah, I will continue to watch things here, and I kind of take the dialectical view of the way things are happening and that you look for the kind of the overarching patterns and the counterweights and when progress is being made, we see it. And when it’s coming, when it’s we’re falling backward. So I don’t have a very concrete answer for you.

But the one thing I will say though, is we are living in very interesting times. I feel that the past few years have been just one endless stream of profound crises after one crisis after another. And it seems that we’re at that, this kind of epochal change, this, the old I see it as really the trajectory of the past 500 years Western domination and superiority over the rest of the world are now crashing to an end. It’s happening very quickly, very dramatically. And the rest of the world, I think, sees it and understands what’s happening.

But we don’t understand it. We haven’t figured out what’s happening to us yet. I’m speaking about collectively in general. I don’t think we understand what the process is going on around us, and we’re completely unprepared for it. And we still have this kind of innate cultural superiority about the superiority of our systems, of our cultures, of our governance forms of governments. And these are collapsing around us, and we’re completely unprepared for it.

Jeff: Well, Colin, this has been a real pleasure. I will recommend your Substack on the interview page.

Colin: Thank you.

Colin: And I always enjoy what you write. And you obviously have a very fascinating story to tell about growing up in Boston and ending up in Amsterdam and loving it.

Colin: So thank you, Jeff. It’s been a real pleasure for me to talk to you, and I always enjoy hearing about your stories there. And Taiwan must be a fascinating place.

Jeff: Well, come visit. You don’t even need a visa. You don’t need to need a visa for 90 days in Taiwan. So it’s an easy place to come visit. And we would love to meet you. When I get back to France next, I’d like to maybe try to come and say hello to you in Amsterdam. And actually, I have been in Limburg, I have been in Woudenberg.

And I’ve been in, I’ve been in all these agricultural areas in Holland and I did not make it to Amsterdam. What is it? Anyway, in the town square, they have a statue of a dairy cow. It’s in the Friesland. It’s in the Friesland area. And so I know more about Holland for agriculture than I do. So anyway, wonderful to have you on. I will give you a Buddhist bow and wish you the very best. And as soon as I get this out, maybe you can cross-post it on Substack when I’ve blasted on Substack. All right.

Colin: Sure. I’d love to. Thank you.

Jeff: Stay in touch. Bye-bye.

Colin: Thank you. You, too. Bye-bye.

###

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