When they came for the activists, I did not speak out— because I was not an activist.

The ruling coalition wants to restrict the right to protest. This goes against the European Convention on Human Rights and is a well-documented stage in the playbook of the far right to gradually gain absolute power. We must not let ourselves be divided and speak out against the frame of “anarchists” vs. “law-abiding citizens” used to justify the erosion of fundamental rights. Because we want to make clear that we will not just let this happen, we put up 300 posters in the center of The Hague with the texts “The right to protest is a human right!” and a line based on Niemöller’s famous sermon “When they came for the activists, I did not speak out— because I was not an activist”.

In the Netherlands, a conversation about the dangers of the extreme right quickly gets bogged down in the question of whether or not a right-wing extremist leader is the literal reincarnation of a National Socialist. In a context where the singularity of World War II is emphasized in education, this is understandable. In this case, however, we fear that it gets in the way of adequately responding to and preventing a multiplicity of repressive and colonial regimes as well as preventing us from really asking what the lesson of historical fascism could be. We live in the now, where repressive regimes founded in white-nationalist ideology are already active on the world stage. In an era of Big Tech, Trump and nauseating gestures by the richest man on Earth, curtailing the right to protest really is the last thing we need. “What we are witnessing now is the government trying to put all kinds of restrictions and that is extremely worrisome,” says attorney Willem Jebbink in De Nieuws BV on January 22nd, 2025.

The Action Fund is proud of the disruptive actions we have been privileged to support in recent years.