From ... in Philosophy — Jul 21, 2023

Ultimately, the Netherlands has no actual constitution—Part 2: Arbitrary Rule

In the first part of this two-part article on the Dutch 'constitution', I pointed out its strongly relativistic nature. We saw that it is subjectivist, irrationalist popular sovereignty, wanting to be like God, that governs minds. If such a mind is at work in a people, such a people is also unfit to have a constitution in the true sense of the word.

For fundamental rights are absolute among themselves, and thus, within the legal sphere—once again—incapable of being downplayed (or 'relativised', as we say in Dutch): neither in relation to each other, nor by ordinary statutes, nor by treaties with supranational or international organisations, nor by treaties with those private organisations, the non-governmental organisations (NGOs)—such as the aforementioned corporatist (that is, fascist) WEF, which is not even a government organisation nor can even be, but is a public-private partnership organisation.

A true constitution is, moreover, not historically reducible to the subjective popular will, which fluctuates capriciously over time, but stands the test of time, is constant and unchanging and thus affords a dependable protection to its subjects.

Not for nothing did Abraham Kuyper call Calvinism, as we saw in Part 1, the only guarantee of our constitutional freedoms. A true constitution will, therefore, only come into being when a Calvinist spirit is at work in a nation, recognising at the commencement of its constitution that sovereignty lies with God,[1] In that spirit, the various articles of the constitution are expressions of the Biblical Ten Commandments, of the Torah—and are, as has been said, mutually absolute, sovereign, and thus not relative to each other (even temporarily). They are only all relative to the absolute Source of all power, which is the only Sovereign, God the Creator and Sustainer of this cosmos. Only a Calvinist (and perhaps the Jewish) people can therefore possess a constitution in the true sense of the word.

The tragedy is, that such a (current or formerly) Calvinist people also assumes, indeed must assume, freedom of conscience as a matter of principle‚ and thus must take democracy for granted. Hence the knock-on risk that one day (a day that has now come), a different spirit would prevail, which is no longer focused on God and His holy will, but takes a different trend, or direction (richting), as Dutch political parlance puts it.

Thus, when the nominalist[2] humanists take over, the constitution will be subjectified, i.e., reduced, denatured to the capricious popular will. That it so say, lose its objective-legal, real-world (fundamental) legal character by being reduced to the historical aspect of this temporal reality. That does not take away the wrongness of the move, however. Laws and treaties that the Rutte régime now signs on the sly in WEF contexts or within the walls of Bilderberg hotels are therefore very often unlawful laws and voidable treaties. Be that as it may, what do we do about it, with all these judges who are paid-up members of the anti-God D66 party? We eagerly await Rainer Füllmich's tribunal![3]

Structure and direction

In the above, I italicised the term 'direction'. I did so to make it clear that a distinction must be made between structure and direction. This crucial distinction can ultimately only be made consistently from a (neo-)Calvinist spirit. It also has to do with the well-known dilemma in Christian politics that can be summarised as 'Theocracy or democracy?'.

Within Dutch Reformed philosophy, in what is known as the philosophy of the cosmonomic idea (Dutch: wijsbegeerte der wetsidee, 'philosophy of the idea of the law', henceforth denoted by its Dutch abbreviation WdW), God is regarded as the Creator of the universe and thus also as the Source[4] of all power and authority, and as the great, ordering Master Builder, Architect, anterior to Whom we can find no first causes. He orders the cosmos through the law structures[5] of the cosmic law-order[6] or divinely created order[7]. It is this legal order, consisting of natural laws—and, when it comes to the cultural world of human beings, normative principles—that makes the existence of everything possible. This positive character of law—for the law order makes existence possible[8]—is also called the transcendental character of law[9], and also known as the created-order side of law, or the temporal reality side of law.

Laws are thus the conditions of existence for everything that is, and thus the foundation of everything, and as such constant, i.e. unchanging[10]. Their very function is to make all subjective, legal change possible. That which is lawfully dependent on the law, and is thus subject to it, is also called the subject side of creation, as regards temporal reality. Change on this subject side is only discernible thanks to the existence of its legal aspect, of its transcendental condition of possibility[11]. A change to the cosmic order of law itself is inconceivable, impossible, because it leads to a regressus ad infinitum; for change can only be imagined on the basis of something constant. So when someone, typically a historical revisionist, protests, "Everything changes, so that includes laws, norms, principles, values," he is forced to assume something constant with respect to which he observes that change—and so on ad infinitum.

A change on the subject side of temporal reality can (specifically, when there is a typically human activity[12]) immediately also mean a change of direction of the process of unlocking the potentialities innate in the cosmos. Thereby, this new religious orientation can move in two opposite directions: either[13] in the direction of the true Source of this cosmos, or[14] in that of a supposed origin of it.

In the latter case, there are again two possibilities:

a) there is a regression, an involution, in that there is a primitivising renegade orientation towards the natural substrate, which is the case with the nature religions of primitive peoples, stuck in the Stone Age, and with the irrationalist climate hysterics, the green-romantic worshippers of the pastoral idyll of the cult of deified 'Mother Earth'. There is no longer even an unfolding of creation potentials within this green religion—an unfolding which, after all, by definition takes place in the transcendental direction of cosmic time. Deeper than this, then, a culture, humanity, cannot sink; one is then bound to the natural substrate, leading to the apostatic[15] worship of nature gods, or of Mother Earth, which is seen as a living being;

(b) there is an apostate tendency towards a hypostasised (that is, embodied) normative modal aspect, such as human reason, or towards a hypostasised so-called act of consciousness or direction of consciousness, such as the human will. Whichever of these is hypostatised is then deified—as is the case with rationalist and voluntarist humanists, respectively. In the latter two cases, something normative—i.e., something that typically pertains to human beings, but which is created—is idolised as the origin of all that is[16].

Governments, not subjects, are what is bound by any constitution worth the name

Now, in the context of what I seek to emphasise regarding the nature of a constitution, it is important to bear two things in mind.

First, that the unlocking of norm principles, the shaping of norms, can and does occur freely by human beings variably—that is, within the frameworks of norm principles, depending on time and place[17]. Within the WdW, this is called 'variability under the law'. The exaggeration of this potential is what characterises the prevailing historicist-humanist legal positivism, which here refuses to know of any qualitative, mutually irreducible variety of constant, supra-temporal norm principles, or values, but rather absolutises one of them, e.g. 'public health'.

And secondly, that a true constitutional law is of foundational, i.e., fundamental character. Several articles of the Dutch Constitution formulate invariable legal norms, timeless values, such as 'care of public health'. Natural law is characterised by a lop-sided emphasis on this timeless character, in the sense that it again refuses to accept the legitimacy of the existence of different modes of positing, depending on time and place. But it is an empirical fact that, depending on time and place, i.e. varying by culture, positivity can and may indeed be given different forms in laws. This can be done constitutionally, but also in a non-constitutional manner.

In the latter case, one obtains non-constitutional and thus unjust laws, as always happens in totalitarian states, a mode into which the Netherlands too—horribile dictū—is increasingly degenerating. Then a law may be procedurally correct, i.e. legally valid, but in a modal-legal sense it may be the result of a development, of a positing, of a normative principle formulated in a constitutional article, in a renegade direction. Then that particular constitutional article will actually be reduced, denatured, into another constitutional article and thus de facto cease to exist. There is then a violation of sovereignty in its own right of its content, e.g. the right to bodily integrity.

This denaturing of fundamental rights occurs in humanist régimes on the basis of the philosophy known as legal positivism. With such governments, when a crisis situation[18] arises, there can never be (or be proven to be) a rule of law, because the totalitarian will of such a government—which claims formally to reflect and implement the popular will, which is considered sovereign and thus as God[19]—has no respect for its own, legally qualified limits of competence as determined by God, and thus violates the non-legally-qualified spheres of societies of different natures, which ought precisely to be secured by the constitution. Those societal circles of different natures actually have as sacred and absolute a right internally as the government has within its own sphere. It is for this reason that Kuyper, in his manifesto, Ons Program, calls resistance against such a self-deifying government not merely permissible, but even a duty.

The consideration that, as we saw in Part 1, it is so easy to violate constitutionally-enshrined civil rights with new laws also means—a fortiori, of course—that it is all the easier, certainly from the point of view of conscience, to override ordinary statutes, temporarily, if not for as long as one wants.

I am thinking here of the aforementioned absurd permission given to Big Pharma to administer merely experimental gene therapy drugs to the entire population under great duress, which even almost led to coercion, in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Nuremberg Code, at the same time as banning reliably effective, long-established and cheap drugs! And this against a virus with an extremely low Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) (as was clear from the outset), where—and this is what concerns me now—with the greatest ease in the world, a law against the use on humans of gene therapeutics is 'temporarily' pushed aside[20]! What do laws even mean nowadays? This is pure subjectivism!

It has hopefully already become clear from the foregoing that this variability in its legal aspect means that it is legislation made by the government, not the conduct of subjects, that must comply with the constitution. Legislation, and government conduct in enforcing it, is subjectively ruled by the constitution, not the subjects[21]. The subjects are submissive—subject—to laws which in turn must be just, which must be constitutional.

So the constitution itself should never contain elements that apply to subjects, to which subjects should adhere. The constitution should never contain what has in recent decades become casually spoken of as 'a horizontal effect'. On the contrary, the constitution should protect subjects and their connections from the legislature. This is, with the thoroughly communist expansion in the 1990s of Article 1, sadly no longer the case in the Netherlands. Thus, this addition represents a revolutionary rape by government of the nature of a constitution worthy of the name.

But it also brought about a tension within the constitution, in that the constitution thus became internally contradictory. This problem has been hinted at already. It is always grimly entertaining to guess what balancing act a regular judge is going to make between articles of the constitution in a particular case. His weighing-up of the one against the other soon leads to what I would call a hierarchisation between articles of the constitution. By this means, a totalitarian ultra-liberal 'judge' will quickly make mincemeat of all other articles of the constitution besides Article 1, which is then deified as the 'super-constitutional article' of equity ideology.

So it is legislation—not legal objects such as natural persons and legal entities—that must, if it is to be just, comply with the constitution. This legislation concerns the variability in the legal aspect of temporal reality. On its subject side are the aforementioned legal subjects. The latter are thus subject (submissive) to this ordinary legislation, which varies according to culture and era. In that variability, these subjects must be able to assume that this ordinary, positively valid legislation complies with the fundamental law and is therefore constitutional, lawful.

“Theocracy or democracy”—a false dichotomy

We thus immediately arrive at an elegant solution to the lingering dilemma (perhaps lingering more strongly in previous decades) within Christian political thought: theocracy or democracy? In short, I think the answer must be: theocracy for the invariable, transcendental, that is fundamental legal legal structure—that is, the constitution; and democracy for the direction, that is the subjects, who, when arrangements are democratic (which is no longer the case in the Netherlands under the successive Rutte administrations), determine who their deputies in the States-General (Parliament) are and who thus indirectly determine who the puppets will be who are allowed to wield governmental power; that is, public power.

Theocracy for the constitution

From a Dutch anti-revolutionary perspective, legislative power is also part of governmental power, as seen in Part 1. According to this view, it is the government that should try to formulate the articles of the constitution in legislation in a constitutional manner. Parliament then exercises control not only over the implementation of government power, but also over that power itself. When the government puppets no longer do what the people want, it is parliament that must ensure that they are replaced—if those puppets have not themselves, thanks to their hopefully still functioning conscience, become morally aware that things can no longer go on like this and have the decency to resign of their own accord.

But if this process no longer functions in this democratic manner—for instance, because government and parliament unite in a cabal—and if no correction can take place through court rulings, because judges (as in the Netherlands) are not allowed to review the constitution, nor is there a constitutional court, or because election results turn out to be falsified, then an uprising may be used for the purpose, but always under the leadership of lesser magistrates [22]. Kuyper deliberately does not call this a revolution, because a revolt refers only to the direction chosen in policy, as in legislative policy. A revolution, or upheaval, refers to the structure; in this case, the constitution. Abraham Kuyper puts it this way (emphasis added):

[. . .] Infringing the law is not breaking it. To infringe the law is not to follow the law in a particular case. To be a law-breaker is an attempt to render the law null and void forever. This is the same difference as between revolution, insurrection and mutiny. When the rabble, displeased with a government measure, runs amok, they do not mean to set the power of government aside forever, but simply to abolish that measure. Rebellion does not mean changing the laws of society, but is simply the attempt to entrust the enforcement of those laws to other persons. Revolution, on the other hand, does not necessarily concern itself with which persons form the government, but seeks to break the law that has hitherto bound social life[23].

And Mekkes writes, in similar vein to John Knox before Mary, Queen of Scots (emphasis added):

Expulsion of totalitarian tyranny is duty to God, as soon as—due to the changing of the spirits through whatever influence—the opportunity seems to have been offered to place the monopoly of armed power in the hands of groups intent on restoring the material rule of law, while avoiding anarchy. All options that are at hand to influence the spirit of the oppressed people in this direction in a preparatory manner—and, at a more advanced stage, to organise armed rebellion, or with the help of foreign countries—should be used as intensively as possible. For, in the totalitarian tyranny, the totalitarian decay, the total perversion of the divine institution of the state manifests, which the Christian citizen is not at liberty to not help support by his co-responsibility—even passively—if the healing of the wounded body politic, by dissolution of the depraved regime, is attainable[24].

As seen earlier, the communist extension of scope of Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution in the 1990s was a revolutionary act.

Within a Christian state, the constitution reflects the will of God, which is expressed, among other places, succinctly in the Ten Commandments of the Covenant at Horeb[25]. God is also recognised in such a constitution already in Article 1 as the Only True Sovereign and thus Source of all power. In this sense, in terms of law, a Christian state is theocratic, not democratic. The old chairman of the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party, Dr W.P. Berghuis, rightly held the view in 1951[26] that within the Christian view of state and government, government is seen as an institution endowed with authority and equipped with powers by God and not by man, and that the achievement of the constitutional state in the material sense is seen in bringing into effect (Berghuis meant, in positing) not legal measures arising from human beings and determined by their fickle insights, but divine, absolutely valid legal principles (here, of course, we are thinking primarily of the Ten Commandments).

On popular sovereignty in the sense of the French Revolution, he wrote, in the spirit of Althusius:

It is self-evident on this point that, for the aforementioned Christian idea of the state as a ground for democracy, the doctrine of popular sovereignty—and, more generally, those views according to which governmental powers and law are determined by popular will and popular consciousness—are not acceptable. [27]

Democracy, too, leaves the positive law-determining influence with the people—who, whether many or few, are incapable of any good and prone to all evil. The real 'safeguard', if one may call it that, of the rule of law, namely faithful obedience by government and subject to the law of God, is not part of democracy.[28].

Positively, he words it as follows:

[. . .] [I]s not the rule of law, and are not justice, spiritual freedom and equality, even as far as non-Christian citizens of the state are concerned, best served and guaranteed by a Christian government in accordance with the standards set by God, however sinful and flawed this government will always be? For the Christian, God's commandments for the life of the state have absolute value against all other theories of the state. A proper fulfilment of the state's function is essentially possible only when it takes place in submission and obedience to those commandments. It is by this that all subjects, of whatever faith, are best served, including for the free exercise of their conscience[29].

Only then—that is, only in the case of a Christian constitution—does it even make sense, as has been said, to take the oath to the constitution. For why should a human being obey another human being, or by extension something abstract like 'the' popular will, if that other person has not received his power ex officio from the Creator of all? Is one human being somehow superior to another? Did this take place on the basis of a vague myth surrounding a supposedly 'social contract' entered into some time in the dim and distant past by all mankind, contracting with itself(!)? The eugenicist transhumanists may think themselves superior beings, but they assuredly are not. There is no evolution from lower to higher, towards a higher species of human, an Übermensch.

And who or what determines that the plutocrats of the WEF are those Übermenschen, then? They themselves? Their wealth? By an equal right, anyone else could choose the standard of physical beauty, and then the likes of Schwab and Harari would be at the bottom of the pile. On their own transhumanist terms, I would thus be even more inclined to consider the cyborg slaves that they want to make out of the rest of humanity as Übermenschen, and the plotters themselves as Untermenschen. After all, what else is an Übermensch in their eyes? The genes of transhumanists mutate as fast as those of others. If they consider cyborg slaves, zombies with no free will of their own, as the next stage in what they see as the always upward evolutionary process, then they are refuting nothing other than their own social Darwinist theory. For I cannot, with the best will in the world, regard such creatures as a step up the evolutionary ladder, but as a step down.

Democracy for the subject

And a Christian state must be democratic as far as the subject side is concerned, because in this dispensation, before Christ's return and before the Day of Judgement, the tares must be left to grow up together with the wheat. Christianity does not, and should not, know of any compulsion of conscience; compel them to come in means "urge them, convince them that the offer is in earnest" (ἀνάγκασον). In this sense, every person is equally personally accountable to God. From a Dutch Reformed point of view, there must never be an attempt, as was the case with the Anabaptist radicals in the sixteenth century, to establish the Kingdom of God here on earth, supernaturally unaided. That is what Christ will do at His second coming.

But the concept 'democratic' is not taken here in the sense of the French Revolution, which conceives of democracy as popular sovereignty (la volonté générale). After all, the subjects of a state, the citizens of the state, do not bear governmental responsibility as such—not directly—and not even indirectly through their parliament, the 'nation in microcosm', which by dint of its duties is not allowed to be part of the government. They have no responsibility with regard to the exercise of governmental powers. Governmental power is sovereign and thus undivided; it rests undividedly with the sovereign, government. Berghuis writes (emphasis added):

The state is not an association with members, with the latter as such being co-responsible for governance policies. The organisational structure of the state is characterised by the typical government-subject relationship. The government governs not because of and at the behest of the subjects but by virtue of its office-derived, God-given mandate, and bears sole responsibility for its policy in that quality.

While the subjects are responsible for the life of the state, they are so qua subjects; i.e., the good life of the state is not only determined by the actions of the government, but equally by the attitude and behaviour of the subjects. [. . .]

No basis for democracy can therefore be found in subject-responsibility, for that [form of government] involves a method of exercising governmental powers[30].

But in what sense should a Christian state be democratic as regards its subject side? Berghuis sees democracy as the form of government in which the rule of law and the idea of public justice (constituting the legal aspect) can best be achieved (that is, the subject side), because in a democracy the historical level of development—i.e., the degree of cultural openness, of the actual socioeconomic, cultural, ethical and religious situation within a people's state society—can best be taken into account:

The democratic form of government is the form by which, in the simplest manner, a public policy in accordance with the level of the people can be brought about more or less automatically [. . .] For [the Christian], democracy is acceptable, because it is the method by which the effect of God's ordinances for the statecraft is made possible, according to the degree of cultural openness of the state society[31].

In implementing this, it will not be possible to bring about a rule of law as it should be according to the idea of law in a perfect society, as if there were no brokenness. But neither will the acceptance of democracy as a form of government by Christian political science mean approving the existing cultural level of a people:

Neither government nor subjects are released in democracy from the primary duty to strive and thrust towards the perfect rule of law[32].

And:

The democratic form of state [. . .] will only be able to be applied [. . .] if the idea of the rule of law itself has also taken root in that people[33].

Althusius, too, attributed responsibility for achieving the structure of the state to the people. He regarded the magistrate, following the tradition of the monarchomachs, as the people's proxy for those powers, which the people did not exercise directly themselves. Mekkes writes:

The universitas populi [whole of the people], identified with the state as a "corpus symbioticum" [symbiotic body], is for [Althusius] the essential bearer of state authority[34].

Dooyeweerd has the last word:

[Althusius] too attributes the actual sovereignty to the [. . .] association [Dutch 'verband'; could also be translated 'context'] of the state itself, and when he equates this state body with the populus, we must remember that here the people were not conceived of as a collection of individuals, but rather identified in the relationship of members of the state. The government as summum magistratūs [supreme office-bearer], then, exercises state authority not in its own name, but in the name of the body of the state, which itself derives its inalienable sovereignty from God.

There is therefore no question here of a [. . .] theory of popular sovereignty in the sense of the Humanist doctrine of natural law[35].

Footnotes

[1] It is therefore entirely consistent, as a reviewer pointed out to me, that Montesquieu and the conservative political thinker De Tocqueville found in Anglo-American Protestantism the raison d'être for the separation of powers.

[2] Nominalism is the philosophical current that refuses to hear of the existence of laws, of orderings, but regards them as merely subjectively chosen ways of ordering things. It insists that laws are just nomina, names that do not exist objectively.

[3] Perhaps needless to say, Füllmich is a German lawyer gathering evidence for a major trial to bring all those behind the Great Reset before a tribunal similar to the war crimes tribunal held at Nuremberg after World War II.

[4] Gr: archē

[5] This is a conscious tautology, which I am using for the sake of effect.

[6] Ditto.

[7] Herman Dooyeweerd also often used the term 'cosmic temporal order' for this purpose. In this, even the term 'temporal order' is a tautology, because within the WdW—which I adhere to—the following terms are synonymous: law, time, structure, order, form, (geno)type, species. However, the term 'structure' is often used to refer to the internal order of an organism: the construction plan, with which anatomy is concerned, and the term 'form' to refer to the externally visible appearance of an organism (or cultural object): the appearance, the phenotype, with which morphology is concerned.

[8] This is the transcendental character of laws (see also the next footnote). Opposed to this is the inextricably correlated negative character of the law, when the law prohibits or commands all kinds of things. Positive in this sense thus has nothing to do with the positivisation of laws, which is the shaping of laws, which is time- and place-dependent, starting from principles (norms). For the law always has two sides: where a law prohibits one thing, the same law makes another possible as a result. It all depends on how—from which aspect or side—the law is viewed.

[9] In the Dutch original of this article, I write transcendentele instead of transcendenta(a)l because the latter spelling is a Germanism which presumably crept into the Dutch language through the influence of Kant and neo-Kantianism. The German word fundamental, unlike transzendental, fortunately did not end up being borrowed in Dutch in a similar way: we spell the adjective fundamenteel in Dutch.

[10] This fundamental character of the various modal law circles is also what the philosophy of the law idea has in mind when it approaches temporal reality in the so-called 'foundational cosmic temporal direction'. The cosmic-temporal earlier modal law circles form the fundamental substrate circles for the cosmic-temporal later sense modalities, which relative to these are also called the 'superstrate circles'. It would take us too far, to go into this.

[11] This is another figure of speech, used for clarification. In fact, it is two in one: a pleonastic tautology, if I might call it that.

[12] For the enthusiast: expressed in the terminology of the WdW, this always concerns a normatively qualified, subjective, modal functioning within temporal reality.

[13] Namely, when starting from a renegade (apostatic) basic motivation.

[14] Namely, proceeding from a basic Christian motivation.

[15] = renegade

[16] It is worth remembering that the ideal which the World Economic Forum, with its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), envisages for the earth is the aforementioned pastoral-idyllic green ideal of nature-worshippers mentioned under (a) above, but which it seeks to achieve by technocratic means! Moreover, this is not actually the goal for every human being, but only for the trans-humanist cyborg-slave masses (Klaus Schwab's 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', involving the fusion of man and machine).

For they themselves, seeing themselves as a higher kind of people, naturally want to continue living on the old, super de-luxe footing (here again, note that non-solidarity which we have become accustomed to from the practice of the despots of the communist ideal of equality). Hence this contradiction: that the adherents of the green pastoral idyll, so much opposed to all human cultural development, are happy to align themselves with the technocratic WEF in their war against the traditionally Christian West, from which they sprang but which they hate. Not an ounce of pain for them.

[17] Hence, within the WdW, the core, which is the characteristic, of the cultural-historical aspect is described as 'controlling design to its own free design'.

[18] We have seen that it is a very protracted kind of crisis, with the legislation supported even by the party that calls itself Christen Unie.

[19] But what that actually, materially, means is that she is fine with doing whatever she wants. This is the gap between voters and elected officials in operation. Consider also the abolition of the consultative (i.e., not even binding) Dutch referendum, which was the very first act of the Third Rutte Administration, following the embarrassment of a referendum rejection by the Dutch electorate of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

[20] For more detail, see the Dutch open letter Brandbrief Nederland, wordt wakker! by physician Ruud van der Ven and theologian Anne Nijburg of 5 December 2021, which refers to the State Journal (Staatscourant) announcement of legislation:

Government Gazette no. 54619, Regulation of the Minister of Infrastructure and Water Management of 27 October 2020, no. IENW/BSK-2020/143803 temporarily declaring partially inapplicable the Decree on Genetically Modified Organisms Environmental Management 2013 and revoking the Temporary Regulation on divergent treatment of applications for authorisation for gene therapy in connection with control COVID-19 implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/1043 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use containing or consisting of genetically modified organisms intended for the treatment or prevention of coronavirus disease as well as the supply of those medicinal products (OJ 2020, L 231), 28 October 2020.

[21] Here we see a fine illustration of the double-sidedness of any law: a true constitution limits the power of the government to its own legal sphere, thus prohibiting it from tyrannically stepping outside its legal sphere, and thus commanding it to remain within it (the negative character of the constitution), so that it allows its subjects to live out their non-legally-qualified freedoms free from the government (which includes the judiciary!).

[22] After all, the monopoly on violence lies with the government.

[23] A. Kuyper: 'Het heil ons toekomende' [Our coming salvation], Bible studies, Uit het Woord, second volume, J.H. Kok, Kampen (1909): p. 235

[24] J.P.A. Mekkes: 'Het recht van verzet' [The Right of Resistance], in: 'Rechtsgeleerde opstellen', J.H. Kok N.V., Kampen (1951): pp. 138 ff.

[25] Admittedly, this concerns the covenant of private grace for the people of Israel since the Crucifixion, but in the time between Moses and Calvary, Israel was the only people in the world to whom God had especially revealed Himself.

[26] A date even before he unfortunately (like so many) drifted off in a left-revolutionary direction.

[27] W.P. Berghuis: 'Enkele opmerkingen over democratie' [Some remarks on democracy], in: 'Rechtsgeleerde opstellen', J.H. Kok N.V., Kampen (1951): pp. 27–28

[28] Ibid., p. 29

[29] Ibid., p. 30

[30] Ibid., p. 31

[31] Ibid., p. 32

[32] Ibid., p. 33

[33] Ibid.

[34] J.P.A. Mekkes, 'Het recht van verzet' [The Right of Resistance], in: Rechtsgeleerde opstellen, J.H. Kok N.V., Kampen (1951): p. 133

[35] H. Dooyeweerd: 'De strijd om het souvereiniteitsbegrip in de moderne rechts- en staatsleer' [The struggle over the concept of sovereignty in modern legal and state theory], H.J. Paris, Amsterdam (1950): pp. 21–22

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Ultimately, the Netherlands has no actual constitution—Part 2: Arbitrary Rule

Structure and direction

Governments, not subjects, are what is bound by any constitution worth the name

“Theocracy or democracy”—a false dichotomy

Theocracy for the constitution

Democracy for the subject

Footnotes

Search Results

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Structure and direction

Governments, not subjects, are what is bound by any constitution worth the name

“Theocracy or democracy”—a false dichotomy

Theocracy for the constitution

Democracy for the subject

Footnotes

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