A Message to the Dutch People: No More Lectures Please!
Geert Wilders
His Evil Doppelganger
Half of our family are Dutch. Correction: make that three-quarters since three of us are Dutch nationals. We celebrate Sinterklaas (sans Zwarte Piet), have wooden shoes and Delft china as home decor, try to grow tulips in the spring, sprinkle candy on our bread and consume other questionable foods. Punctuality for us is a near religious experience. We are frugal by nature. And we are tolerant of everybody.
The Dutch pride themselves on their tolerance, citing ad nauseam how they welcome foreigners, are kind to LGBT folk, have legalized pot and prostitution and tried to save Anne Frank from the Nazis. (Let's not get onto the Germans. My in-laws still mourned the bikes stolen from them by the Wehrmacht till their dying day - Waar is mijn fiets?!)
In their pride of tolerance, however, the Dutch can be a tad sanctimonious. Spend some time in Holland and, as an American, you are lectured on racism, sexism, war, politics, guns and religion. How backwards we Americans are in comparison to Europeans. I call this Eurosnobbery. I like to remind my Dutch family and friends that it was their ancestors who, with the Portuguese, launched that 17th century IPO called slavery. And, by the way, just what did you guys do to develop Indonesia and prepare its people for independence? And, oh! Let's not forget those hearty folks who brought us apartheid! Finally, there was World War II. There were probably at least as many collaborators as active resisters. You get my drift.
When I dated the woman who would become my wife, I was struck by her knee-jerk lefty-chic remarks on U.S. domestic and foreign policies. I recall telling her she sounded as if she came out of some North Korean re-education camp. (I scored no points with this line and had to ratchet down my counter-critiques.) My younger in-laws dished out the same spiel. "Are you guys really a NATO ally, or what?" I retorted. And, "A micro-state has no right to lecture a superpower," I sniffed. Anyway, I had enough of self-righteous lecturing from the Dutch, who are otherwise a fairly likeable people as a whole.
But now it's time to turn the tables. Time for us Yanks to dish it back. Why? Because the proudly tolerant Dutch people are on the verge of electing a latter day Anton Mussert as a key government powerbroker. For those of you who don't know, Mussert was head of the fascist NSB, Nazi puppets and collaborators during World War II. The new guy's name is Geert Wilders.
Wilders' weird doughy facial features and hair that appears to have been manufactured in a Shanghai factory looks eerily to me like a real life incarnation of an evil ventriloquist's doll from a B-grade horror movie. He wants to ban the Koran, close all mosques and halt Muslim immigration. He loathes the EU. He is the antithesis of tolerance. He's what our esteemed president would call, "a bad hombre." What's wrong, Netherlands? Have you caught the same Crazy virus that now afflicts us?
To be fair, there are serious issues which are pushing Europeans in the populist direction. The central issue, as in the U.S., appears to be immigration.
Per the Washington Post, "the proportion of Dutch municipalities with between 10 percent and 25 percent non-Western migrants doubled between 2002 and 2015, according to the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, a government research agency, fueled in part by the arrivals of asylum seekers from Middle East conflicts in recent years. Overall, non-Western immigrants rose from 7.6 to 12 percent of the Dutch population between 1996 and 2015." Perhaps the time has come for liberal Western democracies to reconsider open immigration policies. Europeans, whose countries are based historically on ethnicity rather than on immigration, have more difficulty coping with outsiders settling in their societies than do Americans, Canadians, Australians and other immigrant nations.
Now that we got that out of the way, here's a lecture from one Yank with a foot in both societies:
Don't do it! Don't make the same mistake we have of putting an out-of-control buffoon with stampot for brains in power. If you do, you instantly lose all that holy moral high ground for which you Dutch are obnoxious - er, famous.
If you do put him in office - please stop the lectures. We'll all be in the same sinking boat.