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THE PROVOS :: Amsterdam’S Anarchist Revolt

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THE PROVOS :: Amsterdam’S Anarchist Revolt :: THE PROVOS :: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt By RICHARD KEMPTON Richard Kempton May 10, 2003 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 4 Chapter 1: Amsterdam, the Magic Center 8 (1961-1965) Chapter 2: The Prophet of Magic Amsterdam: Robert Jasper 14 Grootveld (1961-1965) Chapter 3: The Birth of Provo 21 (May-June 1965) Chapter 4: The State Is Provoked 30 (July 1965-March 1966) Chapter 5: The Finest Hour of the Dutch Republic 38 (March 10 1966) Chapter 6: Two Dimensions of Police Brutality: 46 The City Under Siege (March 19-June 13 1966) Chapter 7: The Monster of Amsterdam 61 (June 14 1966) Chapter 8: The Decline of Provo 76 (June 15 1966-May 14 1967) Appendix 1 New Babylon 86 Appendix 2 Dada Influences 88 Appendix 3 Anarchist Antecedents in Amsterdam 91 2 Richard Kempton May 10, 2003 Appendix 4 Provos in the Provinces 95 Appendix 5 The Kabouters (1970) 98 Appendix 6 Sartre’s Concept of the Fused Group: Analytical Applications to the Neo-Anarchist Groups of the 1960’s. 102 3 Richard Kempton May 10, 2003 INTRODUCTION In the 1960’s the political and artistic imagination of the Netherlands was seized by a unique and bizarre political movement known as Provo, that sprang into birth full-grown, almost overnight, by virtue of a fatally timed pun, and succeeded in fermenting a year-long rebellion in the heart of the Dutch capital, culminating explosively in a spontaneous five-day riot on June 14th, 1966. Provo made a lasting impression in the Netherlands, changing the course of Dutch political life and turning Amsterdam into the legendary mecca of a new international subculture. The Provo movement, though not well known outside of Belgium and Holland, is one of the most stunning of the cultural revolutions of the 1960’s. Bits and pieces of the Provo legend have been woven, here and there, into the mythology of the period. Non-Dutch readers, however, have never had the opportunity to become acquainted with the movement because little was published that wasn’t in Dutch. The Netherlands was not the same after 1966. One basic result has been the de-facto if not de-jure recognition of the use of soft drugs such as marihuana, hashish, LSD, psylocibin, and mescalin, making the Netherlands a pioneer in unofficially but openly tolerating the drug subculture. Another effect of the Provo movement was to move this smug middle-class social democracy to the left, to a point where the Dutch parliament disassociated itself from the efforts of the United States in Vietnam on two occasions. Then too Provo was to create a solid political base for the New Left and give rise to later Anarchist movements in the Netherlands: the student seizure of the Maagdehuis, the administrative building of the University of Amsterdam, in 1969, as well as inspiring the creation of the Kabouter movement in 1970. This new movement showed promise of taking even wider hold than the Provos on Dutch political life before it too faded out. A host of new imaginative movements sprang from the Provo incubator, such as the Paniek-Zaaiers (Panic Planters), an ecological movement, as well as neighborhood activist groups in Amsterdam, ever on hand to keep the political pot boiling and the imagination stirred. A third effect of Provo was to promote a sexual revolution in the Netherlands, at one time the most puritanical of countries. Scandinavia is better known for its militant social democracy and its sexual revolution, factors that were opposed in the Netherlands by strongly entrenched religions that were well organized politically, as well as by puritanical traditions. But Scandinavia cannot match the unique Anarchism of the Provos and the active role played by the thriving avant-garde cultural scene of Amsterdam in giving birth to this movement. Provo began as a humble one-man anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaign in 1962 and reached its climax in the five-day battle of Amsterdam in June 1966. Although most of the information on the movement is in Dutch, Delta magazine, a semi-official English language quarterly of Dutch culture that was 4 Richard Kempton May 10, 2003 published in Amsterdam before its demise, brought out a special issue on the Provos (Volume 10, Number 3, Autumn 1967). The coverage is surprisingly pro- Provo, has an attractive layout and is available in many libraries. However, it concentrated on the 1966 political phase of the movement and avoided looking at the rich artistic and drug culture milieu out of which the movement developed. Yet this issue has been the best source of information available to non-Dutch readers. The main source of information on the Provos is some half-dozen books published in Dutch and listed in the bibliography. The present text seeks to provide a narration of the Provo movement up to the moment it peaked, translating the thoughts of these books as well as interpreting the social milieu of the country so that this fascinating story can be made known outside of the Netherlands. I decided to write this book once I realized that no one else was going to write an account of the Provos in English. It is regrettable that the early “Happening” phase of the movement has been relatively neglected, even by the Dutch, particularly the career of Robert Jasper Grootveld as a “happener- magician” (1962-1965), as this phenomenon has only been sketchily recorded. But perhaps it was meant that the purest and most inspired acts of humanity should exist only as partially recorded deeds, unheralded in history, save for the long shadow they cast on the events that follow, possibly so they may become more quickly absorbed into some future mythology. I wish to emphasize the artistic aspects of the movement: the use of the happening, which is a very “avant-garde” matter, even now, years after it has been declared as “dead”; the imaginative use of language; the relationship of many Provo concepts to the drug subculture, so scrupulously avoided by political writers; and further, to show how the Provos effectively used art forms to accomplish or attempt to accomplish a social revolution, a conversion of social and political life into theater, by the confrontation of artist and authority, protestor and police, the tactic which, borrowed from a concept in a Dutch academic dissertation on juvenile delinquency, gave the Provos their name and their modus operandi. The purely political aspects of the movement are likewise important. But much of what was published in Dutch is dogmatically biased, particularly when it tried to be rational. The success of Provo was largely a success of empirical political action dictated by the mood of the moment. I will give a narrative of the events as they unfolded without trying to evaluate these events too closely. Indeed, by 1966 everything was moving so quickly that it was impossible for the Provos to act within a theoretical framework. It is beside the point to criticize them for this “failure” for the element of Time was creating its own factors. 5 Richard Kempton May 10, 2003 Briefly stated, Provo was the marriage of two youthful elements: the “hip” audience at Robert Jasper Grootveld’s magic happenings, every Saturday at midnight, with the proto-New Left remnants of the Ban-The-Bomb movement, the Dutch Aldermaston marchers in Great Britain, now turned Anarchist in 1965, at the ripe moment of the politically controversial marriage announcement of Beatrix, then the Dutch crown princess. The Dutch monarchy, the war in Vietnam and air pollution from automobiles became the major issues for the movement. And anyone who dared to protest publicly on these issues in Amsterdam during the tense atmosphere of late 1965 and 1966 was subject to immediate arrest and a possible month-long jail sentence. The score for the movement was played against the complex background of Dutch political life, shot full of acronyms, those abbreviations for various government offices. For instance the Dutch equivalent of the F.B.I. is the “B.V.D.”, the Binnelandse Veiligheid Dienst. BVD’s are also known as a major brand of men’s underwear in the United States. Dutch social and political life is based on the peculiarly Dutch Zuilen system (pronounced zow.len), zuilen meaning “pillars” in Dutch. It amounts to being vertical interest groups: Labor, Capital, Catholics and Protestants (Calvinists). The political booty of governing the country was divided four ways, to no one’s complete satisfaction, accomplishing little save for the frustration of genuine political or social change. A valuable book on the subject is Arend Lijphart’s monograph, “The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands”. 2nd revised edition, University of California Press, 1975. “Holland” is a medieval province, now divided into two modern provinces, North Holland (Amsterdam, Haarlem) and South Holland (The Hague, Rotterdam, Delft, Leiden) that comprise two of the eleven provinces of the country we know as the Netherlands (meaning Lowlands). Holland counts for 16% of the land area of the country and is home to 67% of the population. Referring to the Netherlands as “Holland” is comparable to referring to Great Britain as “England”. The national language is called “Nederlands” and used to be called “Hollands”. It is closely related to German and English and sits somewhat midway between the two languages. In English “Nederlands” is called Dutch, taking its name from Diets (pronounced Deets), the medieval forerunner of Dutch. 13 million people in the Netherlands and five million people in Belgium, the Flemish, speak Dutch. The difference in speech between Flemish and Dutch is comparable to the difference between the English spoken in London and New York.
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