Socialism

During the night of 31 January 1953, a flood disaster hit the South-west of the Netherlands. About 1850 people and tens of thousands of animals lost their lives. Around 100,000 people had to be evacuated, 4500 buildings were destroyed and many more were damaged. Almost 200,000 hectares of land were flooded. Nine months later the last hole in the dike was closed.

In 1953, a North Sea monsoon, a 100-year storm, hit the Netherlands. While as many as 100,000 people were evacuated safely, 1850 people lost their lives, as did many times that many animals. Close to 5000 buildings were destroyed when the pressure of the water Dutch people have spent most of their life fighting came pressing through the dikes and berms and washed over people’s lives in a wave of destruction unseen before in the history of the Netherlands, the low lands.

What the Dutch people knew, however, is that this flood wasn’t a first—and therefore wasn’t likely the last either. In the 15th century 70 villages were swallowed by the sea, 10,000 people killed. In the 16th century, it happened again, this time killing 30,000.

The 1953 floods prompted the country’s finest engineers to put together a plan to build some kind of mechanism by which the Netherlands could be protected from such horrific nightmares, and the product of those finest Dutch minds, Delta Works, was undertaken. The year was 1953, soon after the disaster. The project itself wasn’t completed until 1997. But the result, some say, is one of the seven wonders of the modern world, the world’s own largest flood protection project.

And it’s had other benefits—the creation of what the Dutch call “sweet water” lakes, capable of offering fresh water—not salt water—to farmers and industrial plants. Some would say everyone profited from Delta Works. I’m not an ecologist, but I’m guessing some of them would disagree.

No matter. Delta Works is a project which has not only saved human lives, but also offered new and wonderful opportunities to the people of the region.

We toured the place today, went down into its bowels, heard the story first hand, got a sense of its immense power, stood on its ramparts, as if Delta Works was really little more than a huge Dutch castle. In a way it is, keeping out the North Sea at bay.

Zeeland’s own coat of arms features a roaring lion trying to bring down the unruly sea. Think of Delta Works that way, the roaring lion that powerfully tames the sea.

Back in 1953, no sooner had the flood subsided than those fine engineering minds were at it, determining what had to be built in order to guarantee no more such horrifying tragedies. What they come up with, no free enterprise building would have. It took the government to do it. It took the combined will of the Dutch people to build Delta Works because it was a project that went to the heart of the nation’s fears. I’m sure it took taxes.

There is, in my home country, a kind of derision for all things European right now, a sense that the Netherlands, like just about everybody else in the world has sold its free soul to the Devil, in exchange for a cushy life.

It may well be true that the Dutch have a cushy life. I haven’t seen much poverty in the last week, although we haven’t been touring the dreary sections of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Leeuwarden. Maybe we’ve stayed with the touristy places. We haven’t seen the darkness most right-wing Americans attribute to France or England or Holland.

But then people love to use socialism as a bogey man in the U.S., love to claim that there could be nothing more un-American than Obamacare, than the loss of another flag-draped blessing of American exceptionalism—freedom. Freedom. Freedom.

Who can be against it? Well, certainly not the Dutch, who probably exercise more license, more freedom, in their everyday lives than most Americans.

Are the Dutch free? Maybe not. Maybe not to build homes wherever they want, to build garages as big as hay barns, to do a whole ton of things.

But there’s a trade-off. We just spent most of the afternoon on the beach at Schevenengen, one of the Netherlands’ biggest coast-line resort areas. People didn’t look like they were suffering all that much, despite the fact that they have socialized medicine.

I’m no socialist, but it seems to me that if some Yankees want to understand something about European socialism all they need to do is have a look at Delta Works. Almost 70 years ago now, the Netherlands suffered the worst tragedy they had since being occupied by neighboring thugs from Germany. What did they do about it?—the dreamed up Delta Works, designed it themselves, created a portable island to carry out the work, and then put it up--dams, sluices, locks, dikes, levees, and storm surge barriers—to keep its people safe.

The government did it. It won’t make money. The American Society of Civil Engineers calls it one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

But they’re socialists--

--Maybe more so than we are; but if you want to understand why they don’t want to be like us, like Americans, it might be instructive to take a tour of Delta Works sometime and realize that this incredible series of contraptions is a national project. The government did it.

Perhaps the Dutch people don’t grouse about taxes any less than Americans; perhaps they do. What’s clear, however, from the story of Delta Works, from the pictures in its belly, is that once upon a time the Dutch people threw in all kinds of cash, all kinds of revenue, in order to build the seventh wonder of the modern world. It wasn’t Phillips; it wasn’t Shell.

It was the Netherlands.

The temp was somewhere around 70 today on Schevenengen beach. No storms, no rambunctious tides, no ferocious waves. Maybe the Netherlands didn’t need the Delta Works today.

But there’s always tomorrow. And there’s always someday.

If you want to understand why many Dutch people don’t complain about what we call “socialism,” you might consider a bike along the Delta Works, just to see for yourself.

Maybe, sometimes—just sometimes. . .it works.