Kees van den Bos: 'Subduing for threats encourages windmill terrorist to continue'

On 29 March Prof Dr Kees van den Bos (Social Psychology) wrote in the Dutch newspaper Dagblad van het Noorden about windmill activists.

Recently several companies involved in the construction of a wind farm were threatened by a windmill activist. For example, the company Avitec infra & milieu from the Dutch village Nieuw-Buinen was forced to stop the construction of roads for planned wind turbines in the Monden area of Drenthe.

Terrorist

The author of the threatening letter can be seen as a terrorist. It is a criminal act that is in line with acts like extortion. Van den Bos hopes that this 'terrorist act' will convince other citizens "to protest peacefully against developments that they regard as undesirable. In a democratic constitutional state you sometimes have to take your loss. Not everything can go the way you want it to."

Kees van den Bos

Kees van den Bos is a psychologist, and also connected to Institutions for Open Societies - an interdisciplinary research area of Utrecht University focused on the development and expansion of healthy open societies everywhere.