Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to cool People. Did cool stuff the thing that you already listened to probably at least once this week. Otherwise, why did you? It says Part two at like the top of the title. Are you your brain works so differently from me? If you just clicked part two as the first thing you clicked. I'm actually impressed, but I'm not as impressed with you, the listener as I am impressed with my guest, Molly Conquer Hi.
Molly, Hey, hargret, glad to be back.
Yeah, thanks for coming back on this totally separate day. That made that joke like egg times, Everyone knows that that laugh is the one and only Sophie, our producer.
Hi, Sophie, Hi, you can do that joke again. It never it never gets old.
Yay. That's good. It's called a bit if you do it over and over again. Yo, I'm learning how to lame all for the bit, including the bit where everyone has to say hi to Dan or audio engineer Hi, Danel, Hi Dan Danel.
I commit to you as our audio engineer, Daniel, Yeah, and our and our friend.
Our theme music was written for us by un Woman, and this week we are talking about the late sixties and early seventies movement of anarcho pacifist Christian mystic hippie dykers in the Netherlands who did a lot of really wild and interesting shit. And uh, you should go back and listen, because we talked about the Provos for the first half of it. And now I promised you Nomes, but first I'm going to do like several years between the Provos and the Gnomes. Yeah, nothing will be left out.
Tons of things are left out. I do not understand how people cover entire historical things in only one episode of a podcast anymore. I'm like slowly drifting towards four parters just so that like this one was even on the cusp. Anyway, the Provos declared themselves disbanded, but they didn't stop doing stuff or caring. They just declared the movement dead and they sort of split up into different stamen translated as tribes. You get this new hippie pacifist
neo provo magazine, the White Gazette. Everything in the White Gazette was spelled phonetically and drawn psychedelically.
Oh I hate that absolutely.
I would absolutely hate actually being one of these people. I do not like a lot of the aesthetics that they've.
Ficked is Dutch, because I don't speak German anymore, but I was once fluent in German, and German is fully phonetic, Like everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds like when you say it spelled, like, is Dutch phonetic or were they doing something funky?
They were doing something funky they were like because also, I mean, even you can take English words that are phonetic and then like rewrite them in like weird hippie ways that are even longer than somehow you know they're kind of doing that. I read some of the like translations of their various titles and things, but I don't know enough of the Dutch.
To tally get. I hate the vibe of that.
Yeah, no, I love what these people did. It is not my subculture. That is how I feel about them when you come back and tell me the exact same thing. But everyone was Goths. I'm just like building a time machine. But you have this similar divide in Amsterdam that you had all over the late sixties movements. The radicals who started the subculture started looking towards other political venues as
the politics are slowly stripped away from the subculture. The beans and love fests stop antagonizing the cops, and the original provos start looking into other ways to confront capitalism besides subculture itself. In most other countries, this turns into urban guerrilla warfare. The you know, the early seventies is the period where people go underground and get guns. In the Netherlands, they leaned more and their visions of alternatives
to capitalism. They set up a Digger store named after the San Francisco Diggers we've covered on the show a couple times, so everything at the store is free. Decades later, the first functioning free stores I ever went to actually were squatted storefronts. In Amsterdam. Some of the art weirdos started the insect sect at war with environmental boredom and pollution, and they put on operas for butterflies and built a monument to the fallen butterfly.
I don't get it, but I love that for them.
Yeah, exactly, there's so much of this period is that I don't get it, but I love it for you.
Like they're just having a good time outside with their friends, Like they're on drugs for.
Sure, absolutely, And you know, it's working well for them. Squatters start opening up social centers with used bookstores attached. And Amsterdam, meanwhile, the Netherlands more broadly, seems to fill a similar role in Europe that like San Francisco and California did in the United States. It's the place that people go to hitchhike two and do drugs and hate society. Soon they all start camping at doms Square, which is the big national square where the National Monument is, and
shit right in the center of Amsterdam. And these are called the dom slappers because they live in dom Square and there were no restroom facilities provided for the Domslappers.
Well, that's a problem.
Day one. It was a problem day one. They pissed and shit on the National monument and in the doorways of local businesses. They were not change things. Do not change, no, no. When you set up an occupation, you get the bathroom set up first thing, day one. All the while the students are doing their student organizing thing. That's the style
at the time. In April nineteen sixty nine, some students took over the university with the slogan that translates weird and boring as co determination for all sectors at all levels. Maybe just fucking ripped in Dutch.
But octors in all levels. Yeah, what do we want when we want it on an organized, an equal timeline.
Yeah, this is student occupation. Nineteen sixty nine ended up a huge battle of police and five hundred and seventy arrests, and the trials proved a pr nightmare for the government. This idea of provoking the police continues to be a very effective strategy in the Netherlands. Afterwards, the organizers adopted a rigid Marxist Leninist line and almost everyone left the
movement as a result. According to the history book I read, which was written by a former cabouter who was probably a Progressive or Green Party person by the time they're
writing it, and was an anarchist in their youth. Just to get the bias of the author out the whim, fifteen hundred public school teachers formed the National Critical Teachers Working Group opposed to the quote authoritarian garbage system of education in the country, which ruled Oh yeah, high school students start occupying buildings like they occupied the like Catholic Pedagogical Institute or something, because like some kids got in trouble for like playing with a condom, like they weren't
fucking there was like literally holding a condom in class, and then like people were like, fuck you old school Catholics. You can't tell us not to have condoms. And its cool. Everywhere people are just getting into rad shit movements to stop urban renewal. There's like this thing where the urban renewal was attempting to destroy the Jewish Quarter, which had already been heavily destroyed by the war, and so people got together to fight it. Composers and classical musicians started
fighting against the classical music establishment. People started throwing tomatoes at Shakespeare plays because it's the same old shit or whatever, which is funny because like Shakespeare's actually kind of cool, but like I get it, you're being mad at the establishment of theater.
Yeah, we're going back to basics. I think the tomatoes are oldest time.
I know, Shakespeare probably would approve. And the squatters start getting even more organized, starting these like action groups, and you have like like when I live there, squatting was organized by neighborhood and you had a neighborhood squad councils. If you wanted to open a building, you would go to the squad council and the day that you open the building, one hundred people would come with you and hold back the police while you open the building.
Oh that's beautiful.
Yeah, it is a I think there's this thing where like people think that certain tactics don't work well, and I think it's certain taxes don't work well. Not every tactic is appropriate every situation, but a lot of tactics don't work when they're not organized, and work really well when they're organized. And that doesn't mean that it has to be hierarchical. It just means that you have to fucking work together.
Right, There's that persistent myth and anarchism means you can't have a plan.
Right exactly, which is like one of the problems of the anarchism is a lot of the anarchists have also heard that myth and believe it. You know, feminism is on the rise. This is the start of the second Wave, which we mostly talk shit on now, but there's a lot of good things that were coming out of it. And you've got a direct action playful socialist feminist group called mad Mina named after an early Dutch feminist socialist named Wilhelma Druker and mad Mina is into the ludic activism,
the playful activism of the time. On the twenty third of January nineteen seventy, fifteen women and five men stormed a men only business school, while the same day more of them burned corsets in public. I've read this translated braziers and never like, and I've read it translated corsets.
I don't know, because I thought that the sort of the American feminist braw burning was largely a myth, But it sounds like this really did happen.
So these people were absolutely doing this. And it might have been a corset and it might have been a bra, but yeah, no, it's one of those things where like myths have their some origin of truth. They did the one action that I can't fully sign off on, but it's still my favorite one they did. They just started wolf whistling men in the streets. That was like a big thing that they did. I'm not mad at it, no, No, it's like one of those things were like in the abstract,
You're like, look, this shouldn't happen to anyone. But I'm a little bit like, as I used to do this as a when I was like a young crustal. This is way too much of me in this episode, but whatever, when I was like a young squatter punk and I was still presenting as a boy and had a beard and all that stuff. But some of the women in our group were getting cat called by the businessmen, like walking to work when they would walk past us where
we sat on the street, because we were crosspunks. And we learned that if us squatter boys cat called the men, they got really uncomfortable and didn't really come by anymore. And so my favorite was, how is it swinging hot cock? But I would never sexually harass anyone. I've never done anything like I just said.
Well, they were called provocatives, right, they were provoking.
Yeah, no, totally, I'm not mad at them, these people for doing this, like the provos MADMENA tied this theatrical action to specific and achievable goals. They fought for abortion rights, they fought for equal pay, they fought for daycare centers and shit like that. And it's that pairing. They would take playful action and they would pair it to specific and achievable goals. And now you know, I'm not saying
this is the best way to solve every problem. There's problems in this and it actually some of it is that it's fairly easy to be recuperated, and that happened a lot to what these folks did. But it also accomplishes a lot sometimes, you know. Overall, after the provos, the political and personal revolutions of the sixties were distinct from one from one another again until this is my favorite, until because usually those just stay distinct, and the hippies
and the radicals narrow. The twains shall ever meet again, you know, until the cabouters.
Gnomes, gnobesnobs, no gnomes.
So we're going to go back to this guy. Ruven Don was the He was the anarchist who'd shown up to the happenings with some ideas he'd like written up that first paper. You know, after the provo collapsed, he fell into a depression. And this is a very common thing that actually, I assume a lot of our listeners are still dealing with the high point of a large social movement. What comes after is often very depressing. He got out of it in the classic way. This is
not the classic way. It's a very strange way. He obsessively read Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince who became an anarchist and was a major developer of the concept of mutual aid as a factor of evolution in the animal kingdom.
He's definitely not the only one to have gone down that.
Road, that's true. The other way he got out of his depression, and this one was actually doctor's orders, and I actually think is a fairly good here's to a society where the doctor can prescribe this to you and you can do it. He started to work on a farm.
I thought you were going to say heroin. They weren't describing that. They weren't prescribing that in the sixties.
I don't know enough about drug history. They prescribe him to work on a biodynamic farm, which is a bigger in Europe than it is in the US. But biodynamics is like halfway between organic farming and witchcraft. It's like where you like plant by the sea, the moon and stuff, and it's very interesting, but it's whatever. And while he's out working on this farm, he falls in love with a piece of Dutch folklore that went on to become
rather important. The cabouter goboucher is usually translated as a gnome, and that's where a lot of the modern ideas of gnomes come from. The famous art book called Gnome with a Big Beard, red hatted guy. That book is originally Dutch and it's called gobouter. Cabouchers are forest spirits that come to hang out on farms and help out during the night. And the etymology is obscured by time, but it seems to likely to refer to a pagan spirit associated with some specific place. So it's like a lot
of European mythology comes from pre Christian pagan practice. You know, on the farm, people cared about the cabouters. They didn't use modern machinery because it scares the cabouters, and the cabouchers were a metaphor to quote former Provo and kabouterer Coen Tasman, who wrote the main book that I ended up using as a source for this, because there's not a lot of English Langue sources about the Cabalter. It's
called clearly cabalter from his book. A humanity that views nature as an ally and not as an adversary to be conquered. That's what the Cabalter's represented. I'm so fucking into.
It how much of this is and I guess it's hard to separate, right, but how much of this at this time, at least in the countryside, is a sincere holding on to of this sort of folk belief. Like I know, there's some story a couple of years ago in Iceland about a highway that had to be rerouted because the place where they were going to build the road, the people in the small town in Iceland were like, no, but like the Gnome lives there, you can't build the
road where the Noome lives. And there was you know, I think initially a lot of people sort of joking around like oly people in Iceland really believe that, and some of it may have been sincere belief, but I think some of it was people using this sort of folkloric belief that was common in the region for an environmental purpose.
So I am not certain, and I spent a while thinking about this. I think that probably the farmers both knew it was a metaphor and also let that metaphor be real, because I think that is the theological impulse. I think the theological impulse is the letting metaphor be real, And that's my read on it. As I think that they both did and didn't believe it and held on to both of those things because it was like useful to them. But I don't know.
Yeah, I mean that's I think that's where I sort of landed reading those stories about the Gnome and Iceland, that was, Yeah, it both is and isn't a sincere belief, and in.
The end it kind of doesn't matter, yeah, exactly. And maybe because it's like that's the way that I like it, right, I like it as a metaphor you choose to take seriously, you know, And so maybe that's me reading into it what I would what I would do, But I don't know. Overall, the biodynamic thing is like very witchy and often in ways that are kind of like I've talked to some biodynamic farmers about like like, yeah, we stick with the dynamic thing because it sells better in the market than
instead of just labeling it organic. But it's a little bit weird, you know, like it's like a very but other people like totally into it. Very complicated.
I mean, I have a complicated relationship with the Black Soldier fly larva that do my composting.
You know.
It's and so a supposed as you can get to biodynamic farming in an apartment.
Yeah, totally. So the kabouchers are helpful, but also mocking is like one of their things, right, They like, they're going to come and do all this work at night, but they're going to kind of pick fun of you at you too, And that's very the ludic activism. It is the playful activism, and so depressed anarchy boy Room. He builds up a whole political theory out of them. It's the marriage of opposites, the country and the city, the masculine and the feminine, of amateur and professional work.
He declared that a kaboucher city, a kaboucher stad, would be guided rather than governed, and he wrote a book his theories called The Message from a Wise Cabouter, with the kaboucher, in this case not being like him, but his favorite bearding man, Peter Kerpotkin. And so he found his way out of despair by hard, honest work and by reading anarchist theory, and by hearing from people all around the world who had been inspired by the work of the provos and realizing that it hadn't all been
for naught. In nineteen sixty nine, he came back to Amsterdam and he became the fourth Provo of the Amsterdam Municipal Council. Like you know, I mentioned earlier that they on to each other. Yeah, and his predecessor on the council and his mentor on what to do with it was this woman Irene, who'd started the sex education classes for women. And I think that part's important because she kind of like it was like a one line thing. It's like, oh, and his mentor Irene, And I'm like m.
Hmm, what was she mentoring him in?
Well, I've just mean like this this great man history thing where it's like Rue is like the he becomes the face of the cabouters and he was a little bit the face of the provos. And that's like contentious right even at the time, But like he's cool and his cool stuff at least at this point. But he's not alone in doing this, you know. But what he chooses to do with his seat is fucking cool. His nomebook had done pretty well and so people are like
kind of listening to him. At this point, he figured, all right, let's make Amsterdam a utopia. Let's make it Amsterdam Kebaltristad and a lot of people do a lot of damage in history trying to create utopia because usually, including a bunch of anarchists, they'll go to a colonial place like America and then like be like, we're going to set up a utopia. They decided to do it where they already lived and where they were from, and
that is a more respectable decision. So he wrote up his proposals, and according to his proposals, Amsterdam needed more gardens and more trees, sheep and goats. Yeah, absolutely, Sheep and goats could be kept on rooftop gardens. Flowers and food should be planted everywhere. The only cars allowed in the city would be provo style white cars, which was and this wasn't his idea. This is actually the guy who did the white by School program later came up
with the white cars, which were electric cars. In the fuck nineteen sixty eight nineteen sixty nine, they were talking about electric cars and started making them.
They were living in the year three thousand.
Yeah, and they were electric cars for anyone to use. Administrative power would be decentralized along anarchist lines, with community and neighborhood councils, empowered in all ways. Schools and universities would become democratic, and then industry wouldn't just be democratic. This is actually ahead of its time. Most workplace democracy
pushes for workers cooperatives, and I'm all about it. But they argued that, or he argued in the later Mark Abouchers argued that industry should be run not solely by the workers, but by councils composed of both the workers and the consumers to make sure that what's being produced is what's needed.
Okay.
He also he had spent eleven days in prison at some point recently. I think it was for public seeing that bomb making instructions back at the very beginning of it all.
But I'm not sure you mistake anyone could make.
Yeah, who hasn't. He also said that that prison should become a people's astronomical observatory. You will be shocked to know that his ideas did not find too much traction among city council, where he was like one of you forty people or whatever you know.
Now, the resolution to put sheep on the roof didn't take no weirdly enough, and they constantly declared him out of order whenever he tried to speak.
But he got media attention, and he set up meetings every two weeks that were open to the public where he would tell people what was going on in city council, and he would ask people affected by specific city council decisions to come and advise him directly. So he's not just like, my ideas are what city council needs to do, you know.
No, he's actually trying to engage in democracy. Yeah, which a lot of elected officials are very resistant too.
It's almost like there's something about the nature of power. He called these meetings cabouterer meetings, because of course he did. Meanwhile, all these hippies are sleeping on Doms Square and pissing on the National Monument, and the city council is like, maybe we should ban sleeping there, which is funny. I just assumed it was illegal from the start, right because like in America, we assume that we don't have any
rights to public space. But it was a big deal that they were like considering banning sleeping in public and Rue just argued, hey, I got an idea, what if we put up bathrooms?
I mean, a revolutionary baffling. How could you think of something so brilliant.
And What's also funny is actually Amsterdam is like a little bit famous for the men's journals in public. I did not know that, which is actually I don't have a problem with. But one of the things that Madmena and I think another one of the direct action feminist groups around the time was doing is demanding women's public urinals. And there's actually I actually wonder because there's some of these public urinals. They're funny. They're just like a it's
like a post with like four holes. You just like walk up to it and four men can walk up to it at once and pee into it.
So was this like solving a social problem of men just pissing on the street. Yeah, so they already kind of knew that that was the solution to people pissing outside.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely, Yeah, it's.
A problem they'd alread addressed as to a society. Yeah, totally, but they wouldn't do it there. And uh, and I actually wonder whether some of the women's ones don't exist, because there is another style where it's a little bit you have some privacy. It's a kind of a it's like almost like a little.
Roundabout that you like walk into. It's this tiny little thing the size of a phone booth. But instead of door, you just walk around a circle in a spiral and there's a hole in the ground and you can pee in it.
I mean, I would solve so many problems.
I know. And so he's like, all right, why don't we just put up bathrooms. But he also said that the National Monument was the monument's colonial oppression of Indonesia, and that pissed off the Mare so much that he was cut out. His talk was cut out for the meetings minutes.
Well, that's against the rules.
Well, I think it wasn't at the time, and that was kind of one of the things. Anything that was like censured bad. Yeah, And so he went on to specifically fuck with that rule. He wrote the Sabotage Memorandum, which is a formal proposal the city council that the city council should approve of Dutch citizens sabotaging the Dutch military, up to and including seducing and killing soldiers. I bet that one over really good. And what's funny about it, it sounds so out of the blue. The Netherlands is
reeling from its from occupation. Most of the people who are twenty grew up during that right and there's this national shame that they didn't do more. They had one of the most active resistance movements in Europe, A ton of people participated, but they hadn't really succeeded. A large majority of that country's Jewish population had been murdered by the Nazis, and this is a national shame that they
still bear. And so the idea idea of the Sabotage Memorandum was an argument that basically the Dutch people should be trained to do better next time. And this is actually we talked about this earlier in the US. The right wing has this particular militia mentality, right that every patriot needs to be ready to overthrow the government with like ar fifteens. This was a mostly pacifist Dutch version of a similar thing, one based on actual recent history.
For them, the people need to be ready to sabotage authoritarian rule. But to ruin and other folks, that included the current capitalist system.
Right, because that's the occupying force. Now, yeah, it makes sense.
Yeah, yeah no. And I first read about it and I was like, ah, it's clever, and then they like read a little bit more about it and like put in some other pieces and was like, oh, that's really fucking clever.
It's got layers.
Yeah, and much like the layers of irony in running this podcast in an ad sponsored way, like these ads here and we're back. So the mayor vetoed this as a discussion. He submitted it formally as like appropriated all of paperwork, you know, And the mayor was like, nope, because if we had as a proper discussion, we would be publishing the whole thing right in the minutes of.
The meeting, and you got to put the whole document in the agenda.
Yeah, those are the rules. Yeah. So the public and press pushed and pushed, and of course the rest of the city council didn't go for the plan, but they did end up pushing enough to get it entered into public discussion. So they put they put the sex stortion.
Plan in the minutes. They put it in the minutes that the mayor got mad.
Yeah, totally. Meanwhile, the cabouncers are forming as a group and Ru's not in charge, Like that's part of how they fall apart, is whether or not Ru's in charge. We'll get to that. And they're like, all right, well, it didn't work in city council. So we're gonna put together the people University for sabotage, and we are going to train youth and counter recruitment and generally try to stop the Western war machine. And this becomes more and more popular, and some other folks show up one day
and they bring a proposal. Let's just declare a new government, a people's government.
As a bit, just really commit to the bit. The government will have to laugh.
It.
It worked, It even made the government law. It's so weird. This is I'm so excited about this story.
I just feel like that would not work in America.
No.
But also, we wouldn't do it as a joke, we take seriously. Instead, we would just like do it, you know, and it wouldn't be the same. And also, I mean, there's this thing that happens where like, for example, I think in a two thousand and five or eight or something like that, some leaders within the Lakota Nation attempted to secede from the United States in a very reasonable way from my point of view, and it was just ignored.
Right, I guess that's the best case scenario when you're talking about the US government.
Yes, that's sad and true. So on February fifth, nineteen seventy, the assemble crowd at the People's University declared the Orange Free State the parity of government. It would have its own assemblies and decision making bodies, but the whole thing was designed to mock the idea of the state, especially monarchy. If occupy was a joke that took itself seriously, is what this was.
Oh, they have gesture's privilege right, Oh my god, totally. Like the police can't be mad because you're the gester. Yeah, and like your mind with a king.
Yeah. And when people come and like attack it, it makes the police look bad. The name the Orange Free State was a play on words because it was orange free, right without the House of Orange. Oh, but also it's like state free, like without the state, or you could just read it straight and it's the Orange Free State.
It works on so many levels, I know, I know.
So Amsterdam City Hall was now the Councilor's embassy with the existing state, so their council member was no longer like their council member, he was their ambassadory. Yeah. The countercultural magazine Aloha was nationalized and became the Orange free state government gazette and their proclamation. They of course they print up a proclamation. The whole point you're doing this is you get the proclamation. Yeah. Whereas and it opened, how does a new society grow out of an old one?
Like a toadstool on a rotting tree stump, and it talks about how it's going to take what's useful from the old society, but something entirely new. And there's another part in it that I like, quote, why does the old society perish? Because it can't save itself from its own conflicts? Political tensions between existing authoritarian governments can explode
into a military catastrophe at any moment. Official technology and industry's aggresson against nature systematically demolish the biological environment, and apocalyptic catastrophes will result within a few years. They were off by a couple decades, but they're not fucking wrong. Unprecedented epidemics, food poisoning and famine, mass extinction of animals and humans are inevitable if this isn't averted by the
rise of a new culture. A new culture with a new man, the culture gnome will remove the tension between nature and the old culture who understands animals and unites people in love. Who will restore unity among everything that lives. Oh, I'm the culture Gnome. I'm doing this. It's so fucking good because it's not just who's going to replace the old world? Fuck everything that ever came from the old world. It's like, no, we are mushrooms and we're going to
grow out of the rot of the old world. And the Gnome is going to help tie the old world and the new world together.
That's so beautiful.
And so this was printed in the tens of thousands and distributed across the country for fifty cents a copy and was like a one of the major fundraising things or the Orange Free State. They wrote a raucous national anthem called the Owl Sits in the Elms, and I could not find a recording of it, but the lyrics are.
We have to somewhere Internet parties.
I know, I bet you there's someone who could just sing it to us. I'm sure that like an old dutch Man, surely, the owl sits in the elms at the falling of the night, and over yonder hill, the cuckoo softly calls cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. Cuckoo, so true, and it's just like I love that it's nonsense.
Is it a metaphor?
The cuckoo is a trickster bird who lays eggs in other birds' nests. Okay, but it was mostly because it was nonsense and fun to sing. One of the first things they did. They're in the National the Domb Square, right, They're the big place where the National Monument is. So they chip a hole in the paving stones. These motherfuckers. They tear up so many paving stones. It's gonna be so good.
Do they make a piss hole?
No, they go and they plant and their national monument of their own, which is a dwarf orange tree. Oh.
Is it the one with the horrible thorns?
Oh? I don't know. Does it have horrible thorns?
Oh?
So, my mom has something called I guess it's a mutant orange tree. But it makes these tiny little oranges that are really bitter. But the oranges are about this big, but the thorns are like as big as these big curved thorns. I hope it's one of those.
I hope so too. I think it's just one of those like shorter orange trees, just like.
A little orange tree, because the mutant orange tree I think would be a beautiful symbol for the gnomes.
Now, that would be if they did it again now as the apocalypse is like here instead of the thing that seems like to be in the future, you know, as like they have to plant it on a rooftop garden because the dam's break And anyway, the mayor cut down the orange tree the next day, but he was
kind of savvy about it. He started playing along with the joke, and he was basically like, well, it would be rude for one friendly nation to place a monument in the territory of another friendly nation, and we're not at war with each other.
Well, they should said it was a gift, like the Statue of Liberty or something.
I know, right. The Orange Free State lasted for over a year, from February nineteen seventy to April nineteen seventy one. About two thousand people were like pretty directly involved, not including their tens of thousands of supporters, voters, and magazine readers. Among their organizers were teachers and students, dropouts, plumbers and inventor, a millionaire, priests, small shopkeepers, dozens of people who made and sold clothes for a living. The counterculture fashion at
the time was to only wear handmade clothes. About a third of them were women, and two thirds of them were under twenty five, and they raised most of their money by selling various periodicals. And it was a playful game that they took seriously. The mainstream world was the shadow world, and those who tried to shut down the cabouters were trolls, enemy of the Nome. The kabouchers who
traveled out from Amsterdam were missionaries and wandering preachers. A bunch of other cities started chapters, and these days the cabouts are less known about than the provos, or just more written about the provos. But they were actually a substantially bigger deal. There was like two thousand news articles written about them in the year that they existed. They had more people, more projects, and in the end more votes. They spread out across the country when they put together Slate.
We'll talk about more in a little bit. That Slate garnered thirty eight thousand votes in Amsterdam in the nineteen seventy elections. That's eleven percent of the votes, and they got five seats, and they got six seats spread out elsewhere.
That's not nothing for a bit, Yeah, absolutely, I mean that's a you can't get a third party candidate that many seats now.
No, all the while they are wild hippies breaking the law, they are opening squats for housing and social centers. They turned one building into the state theater of the Orange Free State, and they were claim me an autonomous territory within the Netherlands. They were squatting.
They're like making sovereign territory.
Yeah, as a joke, but also real.
Like the gnome right, it's it's a metaphor, that's.
Real, exactly exactly, And this squatted territory was often functionally sovereign within the Netherlands because squatters defended it. And this is actually when we get past this is like the squatters leave the non violence behind and start throwing monotops at cops within a decade. A friend of mine was a bartender at a Dutch squatted bar in the nineties
and she told me this story. One night, a cop parked out front of the bar, but did it on punk night, so drunk punk squatters went out and burned the cop car. I mean, what were they supposed to do? The cops arrived hat in hands and apologized for having parked a cop car in front of the bar, and it would not happen again.
Goddamn right, got dear with that.
A proper country power concedes not without a demand. So the cabalter. They come from every walk of Dutch life. There's Catholics, Protestants, Jews who grew up hiding in the war. There's Dutch, Indian, Indonesian and African born. Dutch people were all part of it. They're into provocative, playful direct action.
One of my favorite things in the world. One of my favorite Dutch inventions is the bock feats, which is a pickup truck bicycle and it it's like there's bock feats in America where it's like a little box on the bike. The ones in the the ones in Amsterdam are like a pickup truck bed on the front of a bicycle. And it works because the Netherlands is completely.
Flat, right, there's no hills under the sea.
Yeah, Like the annoying part of driving about riding a box feats is getting it up the hill of the when you go over a canal. You know, that's like the one you gotta get ready. But other than that, you can move a ton of stuff around. And so they take their bock feats and they stage protests to block cars from entering the city. They just they're like, nope, it's car free now, we told you it would be. They tear up the cobblestones and plant trees in major intersections.
They have big takeovers of streets by parents and children, being like, no, we're doing a play street. Fuck you. They illegally paint new pedestrian crosswalks, and the cities at war with them. Right They'll like, they'll paint a new pedestrian crosswalk and then the city will paint over it. But then like it rained really hard and it washed away the paint that covered up the crosswalk, and the crosswalk came back.
How this is also doable right now? You could go paint a grilla crosswalk.
You absolutely could.
I would never advocate illegal activity, no.
Absolutely not, But if people wanted to do it, I would support their bail fund. They got some streets permanently closed to cars, streets that are pedestrian only today. That's incredible. Decades later, Yeah, they shaped Amsterdam, and in some ways, I mean, in some ways they shaped it for capitalism, right, Those capestrian only streets are great shopping streets.
I'm thinking about, Like, what little I know about it Amsterdam as a physical place is that it does have so many of these like pedestrian malls and everyone's riding a bike, and it sounds like they did.
That it's because of the nomes. They also went to war with the city over playground safety. We're gonna get into this is the most wholesome group of people I've ever covered on the show, and I was crying reading about them earlier. They go around and illegally put rubber tiles under playground equipment so that kids don't get hurt when they fall. City workers would come and rip it up and replace it with cobblestone, so the cabouchers would just go out and do it again, over and over
again until they won. Sadly, they won because a little girl fell on the stones and died. Oh my god, it seems like a predictable outcome when you're putting it entirely predictable play plates. Yeah. And then, most wholesome of all, they set up a department of Welfare, which existed to look after lonely old people. Oh this was coordinated. It wasn't just like twenty year olds to be like, we know what old people want. There was a sixty year old disabled cabouter who worked together with a bunch of
nuns figuring out what old people needed. And then the anarchists came in and took care of it. It was highly organized. It involved four hundred volunteers. It was divided up by city district, and it like the city didn't have a good system to look after the elderly at this point, and a lot of the way that the
city does it currently comes from this. And so the elderly are lonely, right, So young log hair hippies would come read them the Bible as they went to sleep if that's what they wanted, or they would take they would do the grocery shopping, or they would take out the trash. And around this time is when you get the loud and fierce atheist contingent that kept trying to make the Orange Free State like take a specific atheistic line. But people wouldn't go for it, not because they were Christians,
but because they weren't. They were like, no, people can do what they want about religion is the best I can understand, and then the Department of Welfare staffed a phone line for lonely old people.
The cost so sweet.
I know, it literally had me crying reading about this, honestly.
Like this, I mean, you know, some of these other social programs there's like sort of a legitimate capitalistic function to them. You could see how that could be appropriated and would serve in other systems. But this is just nice.
This is just nice. Yeah, exactly. They perceived themselves as a society outside they exist the shadow world, and in the shadow world people are nice to each other and take care of each other. So they crazy to the infrastructure to do it. Yeah, and it helped bridge this generation gap that was widening. When they first set this up. No one would go to them because they were like, we don't want those workshy long hairs. You know.
It's I guess in what is in nineteen seventy So the elderly were young adults during the war, so they do have very different sort of life experiences.
Yeah, totally overall, you're talking about very conservative group of people, you know, And yeah, they did all this crazy shit. They also at one point raided a soldier's barracks to pass out leaflets against the military and trying to get people to quit. I think there was mandatory conscription until nineteen seventy two, but I'm not certain. I've read a bunch of different stuff about this.
That sounds like something a king would do.
Yeah, totally. But what they ended up doing most of them would refuse service or there wasn't a mandatory recruitment during this exact moment, I'm not sure, but overall the hippies in general would refuse service. Some of them joined the military specifically to start anti militarism groups among the soldiers, just.
To get weird in the barracks.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, if I didn't consider myself a citizen of the state, I would not allow myself to be conscripted.
Yeah. Yeah, that's totally true. Lord, And actually that carries across Oh my god, I'm thinking about how like some of my friends, whenever squad would get caught, like with an out bike light or something and cops would stop them, sometimes the squads would just be like, we're not showing you id We're we're citizens of the world, We're not citizens of the Dutch.
I'm not driving them traveling.
And like I had I knew two people who were legal. They weren't Dutch, but they were legal. They were European citizens that were allowed in the Netherlands. They spent a month in foreign attention rather than show their ID because they were like, no, the Dutch state has no control over me.
That's a commitment to the bit that I could not uphold.
I know, but the only the only bit I'm committed to is awkward ad transitions like this one.
And we're back.
No, I absolutely wouldn't have. I felt bad because people are like squatters don't carry ID, and I'm like, I'm not a European citizen. I'm carrying for me to spend a month in jail over that. I had already been to foreign attention at that point because of like a the squaders tried to protect. Some Nazis had burned down a mosque and then the people who in Rotterdam and so folks from the mosque were rebuilding, and the Nazis were like, We're going to come beat you up and
burn it down again. So all the anti fascists and the Netherlands. I am one of the few people who can say I have been bussed as an Antifa member bust out to Rotterdam. It was officially branded Antifa action, and I got on a bus and I went over to Rotterdam to fucking fight Nazis who were trying to burn down a mosque. And I would fucking do it again.
That's beautiful.
I didn't get a chance to. We all got arrested. And also I suck at fighting, but whatever, but.
You were willing to try, and I think that's the spirit of it.
Yeah. I went to Foreign Attention and then I was like, this sucks. I'm carrying my ID from now on. Anyway, So the cabouncers, some of them, tried to write a constitution and brought it to the Assembly, but people like, we're good, we don't want one of those. And they set out letters to heads of state asking for audiences so they could discuss this new country in Amsterdam.
Incredible, only one world leader obliged, who took the meeting. I want you to guess, Okay, okay, it's just the seventies. It's really funny, Like I wanted to be the president of Ireland, but I'm just thinking of the cut little guy that's the president of Ireland now, because he kind of like reminds me of home.
Oh totally uh huh, but I don't know the pope.
Fuck, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Pope Paul the sixth received a caboucher delegation kindly for about fifteen minutes, and basically it was like, I like what you all have to say about saving the environment and dressing housing shortages, but this anarchism thing is no good, and you're in way too much of a hurry to save the world. The Pope that he received them like in Vatican City. Yes, However, there there is a chance that this is a lie. Oh don't tell me. It was covered by several newspapers.
Are you saying this is pope paganda?
Sorry, it might have been a caboucher prank to convince the press that this had happened.
But I mean that does sound like them, I know, but I.
Kind of feel like if they had done it as a prank, they would have been a little bit like, that's what the Pope would have told them. I think, very progressive pope, except about bodily and reproductive autonomy, in which he was not very progressive self. Yeah, I love that.
I want to find more and more evidence of this meeting that's so special to me.
I know, I know all of the evidence that's available in English that I'm aware of is in clearly Cabouter. However, there is a larger The book was originally like I think thousands of pages, and then was like the largest social leftist social history slash anarchist archive in the world is an Amsterdam. It's called the Institute for Social History, and that's where the archives of the Cabalter movement that
con put together is. Anyway, the Cabouter started a new postal service cheaper than the national one, and they paid their postal workers. If you were at a Cabouter shop, you could grab the envelopes that are addressed to places along your route home and deliver them and I think get paid for that. Oh and Dutch hippies mostly had the standard hippie outfits, right, they had like mini skirts and tight turtlenecks and bell bottoms and all that shit.
But the main Dutch edition was that they sometimes the hippies wore the capes that the postal workers wore. So this makes it extra funny.
I mean, a cape is just such an accessory. I mean that there's so much flair. Absolutely, they believed in free love, but they were also fine with marriage, and they held elaborate and strange public marriage ceremonies for the cabouchers who wanted to commit their love to each other. I think that the marriages were offered on like three year terms that you had to like go get renewed. But I'm not one hundred percent certain about that. I
respect that, I know, I just evaluate as you go. Oh, you know.
Yeah, And there was a separate and autonomous group woman power that allied themselves with the Free State. They also opened five organic food stores, meant to compete with the overpriced health food stores that it existed before them. They weren't the first health food store movement that came from the nineteen twenties, but those ones were like overpriced and
bougie the way that all health food stores go. I think some of these caboucher shops are still around today, but I think that at least they were around at the time of the book was written. I think that they kind of got.
Expensive capitalism creeps in. Yeah.
They also opened a biodynamic restaurant and they had a free swap meet every week. Their whole thing was that they believed in an economy where like surplus is just freely exchanged between people. They partnered up with youth social service groups. They just fucking did everything. They partnered up with youth social service groups to provide part time work for the kinds of troubled youth who struggled to find work.
They were involved in labor actions, and they named at least one of their labor actions after Lord of the Rings, which makes my fucking heart sing. They named one of their labor actions the Black Writer, where they occupied an existing storefront. There was like this chain store that was about to go out of business and lay off twenty five hundred workers. But they had been like treating their workers like shit the entire time, and so they occupied
this store. The workers did get fired, but the publicity of the stunt led to government inspection of that company, who found all kinds of wrongdoing, and in the end, these hippies secured pensions for twenty five hundred people.
Oh my god.
Yeah, Like that alone is like like what a good way to spend your fucking afternoon.
Like the gnomes with the Lord of the Rings mission like got twenty five hundred people a pension.
Yeah, like you can't.
Laugh at that.
No, no notes, I'm into it earnestly. I am into them as gnomes. I mean I am in a band called feminog School. I clearly am fine with the Lord of the Rings references. Every Thursday for over a year they held people's assemblies and these were open to the public and a camera crew, which has some upsides and downsides.
They had a different moderator every week to avoid people taking power, and the twelve different people's departments which anyone could sign up for, would report back at these Sometimes these meetings were kind of a shit show, especially once they got famous and they had a lot of looker ons. They were all over the press. I mentioned there was like two thousand articles about them. But the press picked that anarchist council member Rule Vondn as the leader and
put him on air whenever they could. And this did not make anyone happy. It might have made it might have made real happy, but it's like, it's hard to know, you know. At one point a wax museum made a statue of him without his permission. Well that's so creepy, And it was him dressed as a gnome with a little krapotkin doll on his lap.
Okay, I'm coming back around on and I love it.
I know he wrote an angry letter asking them to destroy it. The museum instead put a sign on his life likeness that said I desire to live an anarchist life.
I bet that slaps harder and Dutch.
Yeah. Later he renounces his anarchism and gets into mainstream politics like not right wing politics like Green Party. But I suspect the people who thought he was looking out for his own fame were like onto something, or he drove them away with all their petty bickering. Who fucking knows. He wrote about the Kboucher strategy. So we fight the existing order with both hands. With the left hand, we generate the new society and make people understand how we
want to do that. With the right hand, we work on reforming the old society to the extent that effort offers prospects for further democratization of the old society in the direction of the new one. Both hands are directed by one head, one way of thinking. On the day of the permanent revolution, the old and new societies will fuse together.
I'm known pilled. That's perfect. That's perfect, right, It's it bridges the gap, you know, it instantly shuts down the argument of like, well, you know, if you're running on for city council, then you're assimilating your your conceding to the to the system. You can't you can't change it from the inside. We can do both, and we are doing both, right.
I think that it is an honest appraisal to say that no one knows what tactics work, and shutting down a tactic ideologically is not as interesting as shutting I mean, morally, you can shut down tactics. Morally you can be like it's not moral to take power over other people and tell everyone what to do. That's how I feel, right. But like to say, yeah, you can't use the system to change the system, it's like.
But they did it.
Yeah. The environmental movement has been a really good example, like the you know, Earth First has always been like, oh, every tool in the toolbox, and that includes that they call it like paper wrenching instead of monkey wrenching, where you like file lawsuits and you use the society, and like, yeah, that's.
I mean, they did it. You can't really argue, you know, they they had something.
I know, it does fall apart, and everyone wants to argue about why it fell apart. All of the late sixties early seventies social movements fell apart, all of them that I've read about, you know, and all of them achieved various things along the way through different tactics, and absolutely the cabouter achieved an awful lot. In the nineteen
seventy elections. The biggest winner was people not voting. Abstention went up from eleven percent in the previous election to forty percent in that particular election, because basically people are like, we fucking hate the old world. The Cabouter movement got thirty six thousand votes in Amsterdam alone, and it won five seats. Like I was saying, this puts the Cabouters
as the fourth biggest party overall in city politics. They were the biggest party in seven different neighborhoods, all ones where the like fuck voting idea was popular, and so basically it was like it's like this or they're like, will either take this or nothing? You know. One of the candidates who won was a sixteen year old. He was a protest candidate who was not allowed to take office because you had to be at least I think either eighteen or maybe in twenty three to take office.
They're really taking this as a bit thing pretty far, I know.
But then they actually fell into a whole bunch of fighting about The people who won and were taking office were like, Okay, great, the sixteen year old won, Well, obviously he can't take the seat, so we'll put someone else in, whereas the like a little bit the more like pure direct action type folks were like, no, you need to put a tape recorder on his seat and as a as a sort of permanent protest, you know, or you can play things out and stuff. I honestly
see both sides of that debate. Personally. As a political party, they offered five positions. The radical democratization of businesses, schools, and government, transparency and decentralization in city administration, fixing the environment, especially by going car free in the city, socialized housing, and returning the city center to a residential rather than commercial focus.
Wow, that's my political platform.
I'm not surprised, and that's why I love that. I love that. The split between the parliamentary cabouder and the rank and file cabouder continued to grow. Some of the magazines were mocking their celebrity council member room, and then it, honestly just all started to lose traction. Socially, turnout starts to drop at the general assemblies. Some people felt that they weren't being serious enough, so they tried to become more organized. This dropped turnout further. Everyone blamed everyone else
for it. It doesn't help that in nineteen seventy an entire graduating class of the police department opted to put on hippie clothes and infiltrate the cabouters.
They did cointel pro to my nomes.
They did, and it's it's hard to know about how much of the infighting that we're talking about comes from what. It also doesn't help that Rue at this point wants to run for national office, and that was like people were like those britches, yeah, and people were like, look, we're fine with city government. That was controversial, but we accepted it, some of us. But this is too much.
And that was part of the original philosophy, right, was that you can make these sort of neighborhood council, city council level changes, right, but you get bigger than that. We're not doing it. No mannerchism anymore, Bud.
Yeah, at that point it is non progressivism, which is where he's going to turn to, well, nomeless progressivism. And so the Orange Free State and the Cabouchers are losing their steam from infighting and conflict about strategy and from just how hard it is to build a better world in the shell of the old while the old world
still operates. In March nineteen seventy one, the last People's Assembly was held, and then the Cabouters as a general organization ceased to exist, but they still held municipal seats eleven of them total, right, five in Amsterdam and six
across the country. By nineteen seventy three, ruvon Dahn renounces his anarchism like formally is like, that's just not me anymore, right and joins the Progressive Party, saying that a collection of action groups can't make a change, But they did, I know, and that he actually, at least in his immediate future, I didn't follow his career. Later, in his like immediate future in the Progressive Party, he gets way less done, no doubt, and later he's part of joining
the Green Party. And I can't speak to their successes because I didn't read about them, but yeah, he's like, I'm excited to join a party that actually exercises power, is the way he put it. And he had to step down out of his cabowder seat so he was no longer a city council member for a little while. But then he won a seat with a Progressive Party in nineteen seventy four, and the Progressive Party absolutely like put his name in big letters, being like fuck you, we got we got him, you know.
But then he did nothing with him. I know, that's shameful.
When he became an Alderman, he refused to take a free official car but accepted a free official bike, and like he didn't sell out and become right wing or whatever. He became a Green Party guy. And to quote author Kohne Tasman quote, the Kabouder fraction, which I think is the word for the percentage of them that are the own city council may have expended a lot of his energy and quarrels, but it will probably go down in history as one of the most productive groups to ever
sit on the Amsterdam Municipal Council. There is unlikely to ever be another council fraction of comparable size that submits so many memoranda, motions and written in oral questions over a similar timeframe. They fundamentally changed the culture of the city council. It used to be that individual council members like didn't not couldn't, but didn't submit their own memoranda. Instead, they like waited for like their fraction leaders to approve of it, you know. And it changed that Now individual
municipal council members do. And then in May nineteen seventy four, the cabatter movements lost steam. The Caboaters don't gain any seats on the next election. The Cobatter Party is no more. Their ideas live on in rubber tiles, under playgrounds, in the squatter movement, in the bike lanes, enclosed streets, in
the organic food stores. Some of their attempts to bring more power into neighborhoods have been permanent in the city, particularly in how neighborhoods centers for the elderly are set up. And once again, the actions they put into place, many of them kept going with them. They kept pushing for the white car system of electric cars. By nineteen seventy six, there were five electric stations for these cars with about
twenty five hundred people subscribed to the service. It became like a token system, kind of a socialized version of rent a car. You know, these never took off. The public will and the technology weren't there. They had to build like entire power states for each car. Basically, not for each car, but anywhere you want to have cars, you have to build a huge thing in order.
An infrastructure project as hard to do as a bit.
Right, totally, But yeah, them's the Cabouders. They did more than I thought when I first started reading about them, And I'm fucking I'm obsessed.
Yeah, I just I'm going to be thinking about this for days. Just like there's something so easily translatable about this, right, Like we don't we don't have to have like a weekly black face party in town square or anything. But like, yeah, but the idea that like, no, you don't, You don't have to wait around for everyone to be ready for the good change that you want to make. You could just do it. You can just do it totally. Just
leave a bunch of bikes outside. Yeah, just help some old people get organized with your pals.
Yeah, I think it prefigures so much of the modern mutual Aid movement, which is one of the things that I'm proudest of of, like the legacy of anarchism and just the idea that, like, we can take direct action and not just against the bad things, although I'm very excited when people do that, but we can take direct action about the things that are missing in our lives and the people the lives of people around us, you know.
And I'd love that they you know. I guess it's controversial for anarchists to talk about grabbing a lever of power, but I think that the levers of power that exist at the neighborhood and the council level are small enough for us to reach and grab, and that's where the real change make you. That's for the real changes can be made for your neighbors. Like in your neighborhood, you can make make some real meaningful change.
I think it was the combo of the two.
I think, yeah, absolutely, you know, they went out and they did it with and without permission, but you know, the left hand and the right hand together. Yeah, wow, someone should run for their city council as an home.
I've known anarchists on city councils before, actually, and they usually come out of more of this sort of activist side of it. You know. I know a lot of environmental activists who are anarchists, who are like, well, I'm running for city council because I'm trying to fix this thing in my city, you know. And it's like contentious, but I really like the idea that we should be ideologically motivated, not ideologically controlled or whatever the way they've phrased it is. That's better than that.
Because it can be done. Yeah, can be done.
Well, I think.
The plug I'm still thinking about these gnomes. No, it's okay, I know, I'm just I'm so happy about this. I'm so inspired by the Gnomes. Yeah plugs. Right now, I am guest hosting on It could happen here, so you probably still tune in and catch some of those bad boys. I am tweeting about my non anarchist city council on Twitter at socialist dog Mom, and I am working on getting more regular at my newsletter. It's a ghost newsletter. It's like Substack, but there's less fascists there. It's called
The Devil's Advocates. It's about what happens when white supremacist violence interacts with the us quo system. Yeah, that's it for me.
Hell yeah, I have a substack on the Ghost but it has more nazis called substack and if you look Marco Kiljoy substack you'll find it. I write about about half of the posts are a little bit more personal, like memoir and talking about my reflections about the things that I read and you know, in history and things like that. And the other ones are essays and me talking about what can be done. And I mean, I don't know what to do, but you know, the best
as I understand things is what I write there. And that half is free. And check out more stuff from cool Zone Media. There's a bunch of new things coming this year. And I'm I keep saying this, but I just I don't know. I listened to non Cool Zone Media podcast too. That's not as good, yeah, because they're not run by Sophie Sophie anything.
The plug mostly just like you nailed the Cool Zone plugs, I'm not going to do another. And just that, like I've received a decent amount of messages and just so everyone is aware, Google the Google podcast app is going away, like wha, Like it's going bye bye. I think, uh, the date for that is April second, and then you won't be able to export or migrate your shows from the Google podcast app to your new app after June, so if you use.
That app, stop, Yay the internet sucks now, all right, See you all next Monday.
Get out there and be a gnome nme.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.