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22 days agoThis is it, and we (in the west) have gone so far to the right that the richest man of the world, with a powerful position (formally) near government can do the Hitler salute and the established media just shrugs.
Doing the Hitler salute used to make you a pariah. Now, it’s just a thing the extreme right does to ‘provoke’ (that word I saw used to describe Bannon’s salute in a German newspaper title). In a couple of years, it is normal that the right does this, and the established media doesn’t bat an eye anymore.
It’s clear that you still can’t trust established media to be a force against nazism. They’ll start analysing the nazi takeover as nazi only when it’s much too late, out of fear of not being ‘neutral’.
For Dutch an important source of public domain literature is the Database voor de Nederlandse letteren (dbnl), in cooperation of the Nederlandse taalunie (Dutch Language Union) with several heritage libraries and the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library).
My favourite book you can find on there is probably De stille kracht (The silent force) by Louis Couperus. It’s about a high ranking Dutch colonial family living in a town in East Java, and also the people around them, trying to get the Indies to follow their rules, to be what they want it to be, but in the end failing miserably.
There’s always a lingering feeling of impending doom which, though it goes more to the background at times, never fully goes away. I love it.
De stille kracht is well-known as far as Dutch novels go, there are translations in major European languages (even one in Finnish!).