Dutch Provo movement
Related: hippies - Constant Nieuwenhuys - counterculture - Netherlands
Profile
Provo was a Dutch counterculture movement in the mid-1960s that focussed on provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait. It was preceded by the nozem and followed by the hippie movements, though unlike these two movements, Provo was actually founded, on May 25, 1965, by Jasper Grootveld, an anti-smoking activist and Roel van Duin, anarchist. Provo was disbanded on May 13, 1967.
Provo gained world-prominence through its protests at the royal wedding of Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands and Claus von Amsberg.
Its political component won a seat on the city council of Amsterdam, and developed the White plans, of which the most famous was the White bicycle plan, which entailed placing white bicycles throughout Amsterdam that could be used for free transportation.
One of the non-violent actions that provoked police violence was the handing out of currants in Amsterdam.
Harry Mulisch wrote a short novel, "De Rattenkoning" (The Rat King), about the riots following the Telegraaf's towing of the establishment's party line after the murder of a labourer. Provo was prominently involved in the protests against the Telegraaf. Mulisch wrote about both actors, highlighting the differences: "While their parents, seated on refrigerators and washing machines, watched tv with their left eyes, and their cars with their right eyes, a mixer in one hand and the Telegraaf in the other, the kids left Saturday evening for the Spui square."
("Terwijl hun ouders op ijskasten en wasmachines gezeten met hun linkeroog naar de teevee keken en met hun rechternaar de auto voor de deur, een mixer in hun ene hand, De Telegraaf in de andere, begaven de kinderen zich 's zaterdagsavond naar het Spui.")--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provo [Sept 01]
Phil Bloom
Phil Bloom, first naked woman on Dutch television
image sourced here.
The first nude on Dutch (public for a lack of choice) television was in VPRO station's Hoepla youth programme, in 1967, when Phil Bloom careful closed a newspaper to uncover her breasts. She sat cross-legged in a chair and did not walk from it, if I remember well. The next infamous mass media nude after this piece of television was in the PSP (Pacifist Socialist Party) election poster, where a nude comes running towards the spectator from a meadow, with a cow in the background, under the ‘ontwapenend’ (‘disarming’) headline. This must have been around 1970, when the expression of freedom once and for all proved the left's moral decadence in the eyes of consensus politics. --http://www.nqpaofu.com/2004/nqpaofu81.html [May 2005]
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