🎧 Listen to the OpenBooksAI Podcast on YouTube · youtube.com/@OpenBooksAI Explore philosophy, power, markets, history, and the forces that shape human societies. OpenBooksAI features immersive audio narrations, philosophical fiction, historical essays, and reflections on civilization, conflict, collapse, and the darker instincts that emerge when order breaks down. 🔔 Subscribe on YouTube for every new OpenBooksAI release. Eating the Powerful: From the Dutch Disaster Year to the Rhetoric of the Left Chapter 1: The Day the Mob Ate the Prime Minister On the afternoon of the twentieth of August in the year sixteen hundred and seventy-two, the city of The Hague lay under a sky the color of old pewter. The air carried the salt tang of the nearby sea and the heavier scent of fear that had hung over the Dutch Republic for months. This was the Rampjaar, the Disaster Year, when the great Republic that had once commanded the seas and the trade of the world found itself invaded from every side. French armies poured across the borders. English ships threatened the coasts. The Bishop of Münster and the Archbishop of Cologne added their forces to the assault. Towns fell. Rivers that had once been defenses became highways for the enemy. The people, who had grown prosperous under the long peace and the careful management of trade, now watched their world unravel and looked for someone to blame. At the center of that fury stood Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, the brilliant, disciplined architect of Dutch republicanism, and his brother Cornelis, a powerful naval magistrate and regent of Dordrecht. For nearly twenty years Johan had served as the closest thing the Republic possessed to a prime minister—a mathematician as well as a statesman, a republican who believed the power of the House of Orange must be kept in check if the liberties of the provinces were to survive. Together the brothers had steered the United Netherlands through wars and negotiations, balancing merchant interests and provincial rights. Yet in the summer of 1672 the balance collapsed. As foreign armies marched deep into provincial territory, the panicked populace sought scapegoats. They found them in the leadership that, in the public mind, had left the nation defenseless. The machinery of destruction was set in motion by a cruel and deliberate falsehood. Cornelis de Witt had been seized on the flimsiest of evidence, accused of plotting to assassinate the young Prince of Orange, William the Third, who had just been elevated by a desperate people hungry for strong leadership. Tortured on the rack in the Gevangenpoort—the medieval prison gatehouse at the heart of The Hague—Cornelis stubbornly refused to confess to a crime he did not commit. On the twentieth of August the court sentenced him to banishment for life, a punishment that satisfied no one. For an enraged mob already whipped into frenzy by Orangist agitators and pamphleteers, exile was far too lenient. They wanted blood and a public reckoning that would obliterate the republican faction. Johan de Witt, displaying a fatal mixture of loyalty and stubborn disbelief in the depths of popular malice, received word that morning that he might collect his brother. He had already resigned his office weeks earlier, broken by the weight of events and by an earlier attempt on his own life that had left him wounded. Now he walked through the streets toward the Gevangenpoort, a tall figure in sober black, accompanied only by a servant. He believed, or forced himself to believe, that the formal sentence would be honored. He did not yet understand that the sentence was merely a stage in a larger drama already arranged by men who wished them both dead. By early afternoon a massive, seething crowd had surrounded the prison. Civic guards who should have kept order stood aside, joined the throng, or froze in cowardice. Orangist agitators moved among the people, feeding the anger that had been building for months. Merchants who had lost ships, artisans whose trade had dried up, soldiers who had watched the frontiers crumble—all found in the De Witt brothers a single object on which to pour their rage. When Johan entered the prison to see his brother, the crowd outside grew denser and louder. Accusations of treason flew through the air like sparks. The brothers, it was said, had sold the country to the French. They had plotted against the Prince. They had grown fat while the Republic starved. Inside the Gevangenpoort the two men spoke briefly. Cornelis, weakened by torture, prepared himself for exile. Johan tried to reassure him. Outside, the noise swelled into a roar. Then the doors gave way. Armed men poured in. The civic guard either fled or turned against the prisoners. Johan and Cornelis were seized, dragged onto the stone steps, and thrown into the midst of the mob. What followed was not an execution in any orderly sense. It was a frenzy. The brothers faced their attackers with the stoic composure of statesmen, but composure was useless against a tidal wave of hatred. They were beaten with fists, clubs, and the butts of muskets. Swords and pikes found their bodies. Shots rang out. Cornelis, already broken by the rack, was battered into a mangled heap. Johan, according to some accounts, attempted to read from a small religious book he carried even as the butt of a musket split his skull. The crowd tore at their clothing until both men lay naked on the stones. Blood spread across the cobbles. Yet the killing was only the prologue. The corpses were bound by the ankles with heavy ropes and dragged through the streets of The Hague like hunted game. The procession wound its way to the Groene Zoodje, the traditional place of public execution near the prison, where a gibbet stood ready. There the bodies were hoisted by the feet and left to hang upside down, swinging slowly in the August air. The position itself was a final humiliation, reserved for the worst of criminals. But the mob was not finished. Knives, shears, and daggers appeared. Hands reached up. Fingers were severed. Toes were cut away. Ears and noses disappeared into pockets or were held aloft for the crowd to see. The g******s were removed. The chests were opened. Hearts were torn free and held high. Contemporary accounts record a macabre open-air market springing up along the edges of the square: fingers changed hands for fifteen or twenty stuivers, an ear might fetch twenty-five or thirty, a toe went for less. Men carried the relics into nearby taverns and held them up for the company to admire. Some kept them as proof that they had been present at the great reckoning. Others sold them again before the day was out. The tongue of Johan de Witt—the tongue that had sworn the Eternal Edict against the House of Orange—was cut out and preserved by those who hated what it had said. Years later it would rest in a lead box beside a finger said to belong to Cornelis. The desecration did not stop at external extremities. As the frenzy deepened, individuals climbed or hoisted themselves to reach deeper into the torsos. Organs were forcibly excised. One account spoke of a man who claimed to have eaten an eyeball. Others described pieces of liver and muscle tissue being passed from hand to hand, some of them thrust into mouths in the heat of the moment. Whether every such detail was precise or whether some grew in the telling, the central fact remained: the bodies were not merely killed and displayed. They were taken apart, piece by piece, and portions of them were treated as trophies, as merchandise, and, according to more than one witness, as food. This was not an act prompted by starvation. The bakeries and markets of the Republic were still functioning; the granaries were not empty. It was an expression of absolute, visceral consumption—an instinctive urge to ingest the enemy, to absorb their power, and to erase their existence by turning their physical bodies into waste within the stomachs of the populace. By the time the worst of the violence had spent itself, the bodies of Johan and Cornelis de Witt were unrecognizable: mutilated stumps hanging from the gallows, stripped of every identifiable feature, their internal organs scattered, their dignity entirely consumed by the citizens they had spent a lifetime governing. In the days that followed, pamphlets and prints spread the story across the provinces and beyond. Engravers showed the gibbet, the naked corpses, the crowd with knives raised. Painters recorded the scene in dark oils—the pale flesh against the wooden posts, the torches, the faces twisted by rage or by a terrible satisfaction. The event entered the memory of the Dutch people as one of the darkest episodes in their history, a moment when the boundary between justice and butchery disappeared and when the language of politics gave way to the language of the slaughterhouse. Johan de Witt had once calculated the odds of life and death with the precision of a mathematician. He had negotiated treaties and managed finances with the same cool clarity. On the twentieth of August those calculations ended in the square before the Gevangenpoort. What remained was not a statesman or a republican ideal, but flesh that could be cut, sold, and, if the accounts are to be believed, tasted. The Disaster Year had claimed its most visible victims, and the manner of their destruction would echo far beyond the streets of The Hague, carrying with it a question that later generations would confront in their own ways: what happens when a people decides that its leaders are no longer men to be argued with, but bodies to be consumed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit openbooksai.substack.com
