NO HOUSING NO KING
Today, April 27, we come together to celebrate Housing Day (Woningsdag), not Koningsdag (King’s Day). Instead of celebrating the monarchy, we will celebrate the resistance and bravery of everyday people. Kingsday is a day of hypocrisy, where we wear orange plastic crowns to pretend we are a king, while every other day we are struggling to make ends meet. While the royal family bathes in luxury we are struggling to pay for basic necessities like food, energy and housing. Nationalism and the celebrations of the monarchy we see today, work to create false divisions that do not serve us. It draws artificial borders over land and divides us, it breaks the natural tendency of solidarity between people and instead teaches us we should fear one another.
It is time to learn and reflect on our history. It is time that we refuse to drink the poison of nationalism and ask ourselves what we actually celebrate when we celebrate the birthday of the king. Kingsday is a day of wilful ignorance: where we forget the wrongdoings of the royal family, forget our problems and our daily search for stability and celebrate thoughtlessness and drunk excess. But today we are here to create a day of remembrance, that serves to remind us of the bloody history of the Dutch state and the complicity of the monarchy in colonialism and genocide. We are here to celebrate the solidarity of everyday people and their resistance against oppression. We are here to celebrate the beginning of the end of the monarchy. We are here to celebrate Housing Day, not King’s Day.
To kick of Woningsdag we have squatted this building. This building has been squatted before during the housing demonstration “Woonprotest” in September 2021 and was met with a eviction from the police which resulted in 61 arrests. We now squatted this building as a reaction towards this event and the ever increasing cost of housing.
Gravenstraat 26 was empty for four years and is owned by the CEO of YoungCapital Rogier André Leon Thewessen and real-estate speculator. Jerôme Anzola. They both earn their wealth trough exploitation of working class people and use their wealth to leave buildings empty in the midst of a housing crisis.
The task we have at hand is to fight back here, to build a revolutionary movement at home and attack the infrastructure of war and capital. It is with this purpose that we open this building today. On this day we refuse to celebrate this meaningless nationalist holiday. We refuse to celebrate a monarchy that leeches off our taxes to fund their empty villas. We refuse to celebrate a state that finances wars and genocides. For the liberation of all, against the parasitic ruling class.
Gravenstraat 26-28
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Some squats in the Netherlands: https://radar.squat.net/en/groups/country/NL/squated/squat
Groups (social center, collective, squat) in the Netherlands: https://radar.squat.net/en/groups/country/NL
Events in the Netherlands: https://radar.squat.net/en/events/country/NL
