The sun is shining, there's a fresh wind and I managed to clear about two square metres of weeds before human voices drove me back inside; when cloggies are about, best hide in the house. Oh well, it was good to be in my own garden for a while. I even stupidly crossed the line of vision of two cloggies who feel quite at ease to be in their garden, but they were busy and probably didn't see me. I think. I hope. Fortunately, cloggies are blind. It's not that they don't notice things. Oh no, in the style of meddling busybodies they take note of everything around them and store it in memory for later use. But their minds are so warped that there are things they can't see, simply because their brains can't process the input. It's a bit like being colour-blind. Which is not to say that the Dutch are colour-blind. They are keenly aware of colour.
The (native, white) Dutch are not racist. Or so they think. I heard the words "Turk" and "Moroccan" used as terms of abuse long before I learned they referred to countries, but compared to expatriate Dutch sugar cane plantation owners in the West Indies a few centuries back, whose cruelty towards their slaves appalled even a Dutchman who recorded their behaviour for posterity, the modern-day (native, white) Dutch are not racist. When I stood by a bus stop chatting to a colleague whose name happened to be Mohammed (you'd be surprised how many men in how many countries are called that) he said: "Look, there's one looking at us." He was referring to the cars that were zooming past, and when I kept my eyes on the road, I noticed what he had noticed: that every driver's head turned towards us as the car passed. Eek, a foreigner!
Because that is how the (white) Dutch call coloured people of all shades: "foreigner". Never mind that "foreign" has to do with nationality and a person in any shade of brown, yellow, pink or purple who has a Dutch passport is emphatically not a foreigner. An exotic, maybe, like white South Africans, and let's remember where those came from and how they behaved in the country where they arrived as foreigners. But the Dutch cannot see themselves as foreigners. They will go on holiday to Italy and phone home to their cloggie friends in a crowd of Italians to say: "I'm surrounded by foreigners!". Much like the (non-native, white, US) Americans, they can't understand that there is anything outside their country, yet somehow think the whole world is their territory. Then again, New York was called New Amsterdam before it changed hands.
The Dutch do know Turkey, though. When I shared a house with two North Africans in a village I call Hicksville Hell, some brat wrote on my garden shed: "the bitch that lives here fucks Turks". Actually, I can fuck all the Turks I like: I can book a trip to Turkey and have a jolly good time and even take a few favourites back home with me, the way Dutch men do in Thailand, and no one in the whole village has a damn thing to say about it. But these oh-no-we're-not-racist Dutch people think they can impose racial segregation, ie. whites stay with whites, blacks stay with blacks, greys stay with greys: yes, apartheid, the racial caste system imposed by Dutch colonists on native Africans and clearly still alive in its country of origin. A Dutch woman to whom I joked about my foreign in-laws said, only half jokingly: "Weren't there any Dutch boys left?" A man in Hicksville Hell who started a quarrel with me over not having replied properly to his greeting revealed the real source of his anger when he blurted out: "You and that Turk of yours!" The Dutch divide planet Earth into the Netherlands (the place where we live) and Turkey (everywhere else). More countries might confuse them. Said Turk was in fact Moroccan. Aahh, Turks, Moroccans, what's the difference. They come from two different continents, that's the difference. That they (superficially) resemble each other at all is due to their common European gene input through both having intermarried with whites around the south-east edges of the continent for the last three or so millennia. Still, their racial characteristics are distinct enough for me to be able to tell apart a typical Turk from a typical North African. The (native) Dutch, Germans and Belgians, on the other hand, are very hard to tell apart purely by looks, being ethnically closely related. But mistake a cloggie for a Belgian or, even worse, a kraut, and expect a punch in the face. The quintessential Dutch: so racist, yet so ignorant about race.
Ebru Umar is a real Turk, and one of the two people I'll bother to call by her proper name from now on. (Whether she's Dutch with a Turkish passport or a legalized immigrant I don't know. But she's ethnically Turkish.) Both she and Ayaan Hirsi Ali stand accused of racism, the one for complaining about Moroccans, the other for campaigning against Islam. The first lives in an area of Amsterdam terrorized by hoodlums who for socio-economic reasons are mostly of North African descent. The second fled from East Africa (Somalia if I recall correctly) where Islam-based oppression is even worse than in Afghanistan, has been going on for much longer, and includes practices that are not even standard part of that religion. Ah yes, two new words have made their way into Dutch vocabulary: "Moroccan" and "moslem", and like "foreigner", they are synonyms for "coloured person". The way the Dutch use their language shows how deeply racism is rooted into the collective Dutch soul, which explains why the Dutch cannot perceive the irony of accusing these two intelligent, informed foreigners of racism, while championing two (from my viewpoint fortunately dead) DUTCH WHITE MALES who actively encouraged Dutch racism and channelled it for their own ends. Maybe coloured people, and women at that, have no right to be racist. These men were called Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn and I shall henceforth call them Fatso and the neo-Hitler, which does them perfect justice.
Before I give them the treatment they deserve, first some parallels. The Dutch celebrate remembrance day on 4th May and liberation day on 5th May. Liberation from what, I asked myself as a child, since our family was a domestic dictatorial regime and my father yelled at me and hit me for forgetting to observe the traditional minute of silence for those who fell to save us from the enemy in WWII. Us? Dad was naturalized foreign import from Austria, ie. one of the enemy countries that "those who fell" fought against, and we were both born after the war. As 1945 receded into the distance and news of other wars reached the Dutch, they foggily started to realize that freedom is not just a matter of chasing out the Boche, but 4th & 5th May, two days I do not celebrate, are still disgustingly Dutch-centric. Nevertheless, by all means let the people who remember that time make their own monuments and decorate them with flowers. It is the yearly tradition for wreaths of flowers to be laid on a large public monument on 4th May. That "foreign" children had despoiled the monument by kicking the wreaths about, was headline news in all the papers, prompting comments of "how much longer do we have to tolerate these foreigners who don't respect us". That, in Hicksville Hell, local children had vandalized the flowerbeds planted around its own little war monument, was euphemistically described in the local rag as "unfortunately the boys have been a bit naughty, so hopefully their mothers will keep a closer watch on them from now on". Because those boys, you see, were white.
Foreign (coloured) men, you know, are very brutal and primitive and not into women's lib, so a Dutch woman who marries them can expect abuse. I've been "married" to a Moroccan, a construction to save him from his psycho family - little did I know he was the psycho. Yes, he grew up in a dysfunctional family; so did I, and in his worst state of derangement this "foreigner" - a real foreigner, for a change - wasn't as bad as my white (immigrant) Dutch father, nor was I ever as abjectly submissive as my white, (native) Dutch mother. That I was prepared to go through this fake marriage at all was that, as survivor of thoroughly rotten parents, I felt solidarity with anyone having gone through the same, REGARDLESS OF RACE - a phrase that all those non-racist Dutchies who either shouted or thought "you and your Turk" might re-read a few times - or, for that matter, gender, and would do anything to help them. After ditching him, my next wounded bird was a Dutch woman, born and raised in the Netherlands, of Indonesian descent with some Dutch and Irish genes mixed in, and who had consequently been given the "foreigner" treatment all her life. Including indecent proposals from Dutch white men, the kind of men who, while priding themselves on their emancipation, import Polish brides and oriental beauties from Thailand because they can't handle all the feminism here.
Moroccans - synonymous with Turks, moslems and foreigners - come here to steal our jobs and live off our social security system. I don't know how they could do both at the same time, unless they follow the Dutch example of working while being on the dole. My dad did something like that. Like so many cloggies, he emigrated to Canada where the streets are paved with gold, found that the streets there are paved with ordinary paving stones, returned, leaving his wife and kids stranded, and set about enriching himself at the expense of Dutch society. Fortunately, I'd been parked somewhere else. But it is incredible that coloured fortune seekers, who at one point were invited into the country by a post-war government to help us rebuild and then stayed, who do hard work for low pay, upon whose slave labour the country's economy has come to depend, are called parasites while whites who invade a continent in the footsteps of other palefaces and expect to strike it rich, are not faulted even when they fail and return to commit fraud. Actually, foreigners who emigrate to the Netherlands can be Moroccan, Egyptian, Israeli, Chinese, you name it; the Chinese have contributed substantially to the country's economy and cuisine while at the same time doing what's wisest in cloggieland: staying invisible. Is that why I never hear racists about kicking out the Chinese? And has anyone noticed how many Poles are working here, or is their white skin camouflage enough? The so-called "gastarbeiders" from Turkey and Morocco are a political embarrassment to this day, and Dutch politicans are still working on how to get rid of them. I spitefully hope the politicians succeed, because Dutch agro-industry would collapse as a result. Unless it can import enough Poles to compensate.
Foreign children are antisocial and bad learners, just look at their grades, and white parents take their children out of "black" schools and send them to "white" schools for a better education. I dunno, I went to a pretty black school: to wit, the British School in the Netherlands, whose pupils came from all around the world, notably countries from the former British Commonwealth. I didn't like going to that school and still have serious objections against it, but as an educational institution it has a shining reputation. It is nowhere near as bad as some allmost-all-white schools around Leimuiden and Roelofarendsveen where the pupils hit the teachers. Ah yes, that happens in black schools too, doesn't it? That is, when it happens in a black school, it's a headline story. That my (white) younger brother was held down by (white) schoolyard bullies while they kicked his bicycle around, that a (white) co-worker told me he hit his teacher "for being an asshole", that another (white) fifteenish co-worker had committed pretty crimes and was a bit shocked to be diagnosed with sexually transmitted disease - facts that he candidly admitted in the workplace - where "white" in this case also means "Dutch", is not something the Dutch want to know. They don't want to understand what I figured out all by myself at the age of twelve: that the behaviour at "black" schools is that of the lower classes, that white racism is pushing coloured people into the lowest social stratum, and that coloured people are adapting to their social role. Recent years have seen much sociopolitical concern over "Moroccan gangs" and the behaviour of Moroccan youths generally. Efforts are made to integrate "Moroccans" into society. The sad thing being that while these integration measures affect real foreigners - reporters immigrated from the Balkan are suddenly forced to take language courses, when obviously their Dutch is fluent - the "foreigners" who cause the problem are NOT FOREIGNERS. They have a Dutch nationality and were raised and often born in the Netherlands. There are many real Moroccan immigrants here, legal and illegal, shifty and reliable, poor and well-off, and if the ten or so I've met are representative of that group, their behaviour is NOTHING like that of the problem group denoted as "Moroccan". There is no need to force this problem group to integrate into Dutch society. THEY ARE ALREADY FULLY INTEGRATED INTO DUTCH SOCIETY. That is precisely the problem. They have embraced the basic norms and values of Dutch society. If they are violent, antisocial, intolerant, parasitical, and all manner of evil things, it is because THEY ARE DUTCH. This cannot be emphasized enough. Before the whole immigrant-worker scheme, their place would have been occupied by cloggies. There is a Dutch expression, "vechten tegen de bierkaai", fighting against the [location name], which means, fighting a hopeless battle. The location referred to is the "Bierkade" in the Hague, home to pretty much the worst scum and rabble a person could imagine, who terrorized the town in the way "Moroccans" do today. They were weeds that just would not die. And they were fully native white nth-generation Dutchies.
But, Dutch people having on the whole less functional brains than me and not being able to figure this out at any age, are happy to further ostracize the juvenile delinquents their own racism has produced, also pushing them further into their criminal and terrorizing behaviour. A woman's handbag is grabbed by a thief. She, in her car, goes into reverse to pin him against a wall - maybe she was trying to get her property back? He doesn't survive the manoeuver and becomes a martyr, while she faces a charge of murder/manslaughter. Because you see, she was white and he was coloured. And: he stole her handbag. For me, that is the only relevant point; but Dutch society separates into "you shouldn't have killed that poor foreigner, you RACIST" and "how much longer do we have to put up with these foreigners". It's funny how Dutch white racism, which is what both views are based on, affects white cloggies as disastrously as coloured ones. So, why, why is this racism so persistent? Usually racism is an excuse for one group of people to exploit another group of people, but with coloured people using their very skin colour as carte blanche for any criminal activity, and getting popular support for this, the scheme has, to put it mildly, backfired. I feel like screaming: "Wake up! Get a clue!!" Because as a result of the result of Dutch white racism, Dutch white racism is stronger than ever. It is costing lives, on both sides. Although some lives I regret less than others.
Hitler was the spearhead of a campaign for power that had nothing to do with race, least of all with "the Jews"; yet this master manipulator understood - as did Milosevic, and Tudzman for that matter - that the way to rally people to a cause is the trick of Us and Them. Us, the goodguys; Them, the [fill in a name] where the blank can be foreigners, Jews, Communists, capitalists, moslems, whatever. But race is safest for although people can join or abandon a religious or political movement, they can't abandon their genotype; so, to make them believe that their genotype obliges them to obey you, is to make them your eternal slave. It has worked horribly well, in various countries, and people who tut-tut that Milosevic must not be compared to Hitler, should realize that this trick can be used more than once. What happened to the Bosnian moslems is a small-scale replay of the Holocaust, and if "moslem" is a religious attribute, then so, originally, was "jew" - like the Jews, the descendants from Turkish invaders called Bosnian moslems are in the position of being both ethnically and religiously defined. By confusing "Moroccan" and "moslem", the Dutch are repeating the error, and a certain ambitious politician, sensing the strength and blindness of white Dutch racism, tried the trick a third time. He won himself fame and followers by "daring" to speak up about Moroccan youth gangs and the trouble they caused, "daring" to say that people no longer felt safe in the streets (I was born in 1968 and have never felt safe in any Dutch street, so that's hardly a recent problem), "daring" to say that Islam is a stupid religion (yes, just like Christianity) and generally blaring out half-truths to get his name in the papers and encourage all those cloggies who would like to pogrom, but don't dare to. He was bald and homosexual, two things that are not terribly relevant to me but were repeated tiresomely in the media. What was relevant to me was his manipulating, his rabble-rousing (he denied that he was racist, but his followers clearly were, and that was the sentiment he played on) and his vicious, unfounded attacks on not only "moslems" and "foreigners" but also "communists" and "socialists" and left-wing parties in general. Maybe because the left-wing parties were his main rivals, but this is exactly what Hitler did, which is why I call him the neo-Hitler. And the worst thing is, it worked. Multitudes of cloggies adored this man. Because he had a big car. Because he had a big mouth. (So big, they even forgave him for being a bald woofter.) Because he handed them scapegoats and promised them an improbable golden future. If only they would follow him, sorry, vote for him. His followers sprayed "Stem Pim" (vote for for the neo-Hitler) on billboards and cyclist tracks. Never at ease in cloggieland, I strongly considered fleeing the country.
The neo-Hitler's life was ended just before the elections by a bullet from a (white, Dutch) environmental activist called Volkert van de Graaf. "A blow to democracy!!" wailed the papers, but, I suspect, the opposite. Remember how the Nazi regime rose to power? Well, that and some fooling around with the elections; a truth few cloggies know is that most Germans at that time were anti-Hitler. Nazi concentration camps originally served to eliminate German dissidents! That the Dutch elections were only allowed to continue because the neo-Hitler "would have wanted it", chilled me to the bone. But more was to come.
The killer was sentenced for life, as may be expected. He had a, well, almost show trial with the neo-Hitler's brownshirt followers misbehaving in the benches, and was reported to be ice-cold (he didn't even beg for forgiveness) and "too conscientious" (conscience is a bad thing?). Fact is, he signed away his life when he decided to, quite coldly, kill someone that obviously scared him as much as me, for the same reason. If he'd gone back in time to kill the real Hitler before the elections, he would have been a hero, instead, the neo-Hitler's party thought this act deserved a death sentence. Round the same time that this happened, there was a small article about a missing child called Rowena Rikkers who had presumably been killed by her mother. Way back in my school days, a boy called Kerwin Duinmeijer was knifed by a white skinhead, for being black. These two were innocent victims: a monument was made for the second, and skinheads throughout the country suddenly revised their public image, but the death sentence was never demanded against their killers. Moral of the story: never stand in the way of power! Not satisfied with wanting the actual killer dead, the neo-Hitler's party members accused their left-wing political opponents of having provoked the murder by criticizing him, and a lawyer threatened to charge with murder anyone who further criticized him after his death. Sorry? The victim himself was the person who provoked violence, which was the activist's reason for shooting him, and disguised this as "freedom of speech". The Dutch applauded him en masse while at the same time telling Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who did not rabble-rouse against "foreigners" but expounded the real horror of Islam, drawing from personal experience, to shut up, stop nagging and be more tolerant. In this country, coloured women have no right to speak and if they use freedom of speech to tell the truth, they are racist. Or just intolerant. And people of any colour who oppose a power-hungry manipulator and his followers by also using their freedom of speech, are threatened with legal action. (Who knows, I might get a nasty phone call for this piece.) The man's family, milking his death to the utmost, declared him a martyr for the cause of "freedom of speech" and wanted his death commemorated on 6th May. So, on 4th May, we remember those who died in the fight against the Boche. On 5th May, we celebrate being freed from the oppression of the Boche. And on 6th May, we show that the Nazi regime could just as easily have been Dutch, and the only thing wrong with the Boche is that they were foreigners.
Still more? Yes, another man was milking his death as much as his family: Fatso. Now some people are fat in the sense of having lard stored under the skin, and other people are fat in the sense of being full of themselves to the point of bursting. Fatso fell in both categories. He was Uber-Clog. He drew admiration from those cloggies who wished they could be as completely obnoxious, repulsive, and too disgusting for words as he was. While I was still blissfully unaware of him, he was already ranting and foaming at the mouth about the goat-fucking (it's the one thing they don't fuck, in fact) fundamentalist foreigner Mosran Moloccems, or was that the other way round. Anyone who didn't totally subscribe to his views was his enemy, someone to destroy, someone with no right to speak. (Freedom of speech, anyone?) His "friend" (fellow moslem-hater, though with the actual right to hate) was Ayaan Hirsi Ali - the poor woman picks her friends badly, between Fatso and being member of the most right-wing political party in the Netherlands. They must have welcomed this token black token chick into their white mostly-male ranks; she's Uhura to their Starship Enterprise. Fatso made a film about the neo-Hitler and extolled him in his columns to the point of irritating his followers. By writing columns for their satisfaction, Fatso made money off Dutch racists just as neo-Hitler used them to get votes. And because he was fired by various papers for being an embarrassment ("We don't SAY racist things, Mr. Fatso. We just THINK them.") he could pretend to be a hero. Until he was offed too, not by an intelligent environmental activist but - such poetic justice - by Mohammed B., his pig-headed moslem-Moroccan equivalent.
Hoo boy. "WAAAAH freedom of speech The Foreigners Are Coming WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN THIS COUNTRY ANY MORE" - yeah, join the club. Or rather, don't - when Dutchies bewail the death of the two very people who have seriously jeopardized both freedom of speech and personal safety for people of any race or nationality, and whose evil certainly lives after them, I'd rather not be in the same club with them. I did however discover something about the background to neo-Hitler's rise to power: the ethnically Moroccan Dutch - notably the hoodlums who form gangs - are increasingly violently homophobic. Not living in a coloured neighbourhood, I hadn't realized this. What I've been noticing the last few years is the tentative rise of WHITE DUTCH gay persecution. Bureaucrats refusing gay couples certain services on the grounds of religious objection. A Christian colleague offhandedly remarking that he thinks it must be unnatural for a child to grow up with two fathers, and deservedly getting flamed on the spot: pretending to just express an opinion, he was in fact feeling around to see if homophobia was socially accepted yet. While I'm being lectured on the dangers of Islam, Dutch Christian institutions are slowly, secretly gathering their forces for a purge. And after the gays, who's next? The heretics? The single mothers? The "foreigners"?
Well, the "foreigners" are not as blind as the native Dutch. They reason: "The whites hate us but they hate gays too, so if we bash gays, we'll be one step higher on the ladder." And oh yes, Islam is as homophobic as Christianity, so they're scoring for their own afterlife at the same time. And a (gay) unscrupulous manipulator thinks: "The whites hate gays but they hate coloured people too, so if I bash coloured people, who already have a bad rep, I'll be one step higher on the ladder." Possibly adding: "And when I am Fuhrer, I will be safe from coloured and white gaybashers." In short, homophobia has almost as much to answer for as racism. Meanwhile, if I disagree with the "foreigners" I'm a racist, and if I disagree with the manipulator I oppose freedom of speech, which is funny as "freedom of speech" is already a euphemism for explicit racism. Either way, I'm expected to tolerate intolerance.
Tolerating intolerance is the strategy of one Dutch mayor of the part of Amsterdam terrorized by Dutch hoodlums of North African descent who derive a real sense of superiority from being coloured and "moslem", although both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ebru Umar probably know more about Islam than they do, and possibly even don't drink alcohol, unlike North African males (or naturalized Dutch etc. etc.) who like to tip a few wet ones, believe me. These alcoholics-in-denial (pot is popular too) believe that Bin Laden has come to kill the Infidel and shower them with gold and virgins in the way that discontented labourers set their hopes on the Communist Revolution. The opportunistic Amsterdam hoodlums, who would very likely earn Bin Laden's deepest scorn if he knew about them, are all ready for war and have registered a domain "areyouscaredofme.nl" (in Dutch, obviously) in the same spirit as the patriotic US American who registered "francestinks.com" and "germanystinks.com". In short, these people are vermin who should be cleared out by a good dose of weed-killer along with neo-Hitler's brownshirts. But you can't say that. That would be racist. They are foreigners you know. So when Ebru Umar, a real foreigner (correction, I now know she is officially Dutch - just not culturally so), gave the oh so tolerant mayor a piece of her mind about the living conditions in Hoodlum City, he told her, before a congregation of jeering hoodlums, "Well, Ms Umar, if you don't like it here, you don't have to live here," which is the tolerant Dutch way of saying "fuck off to your own country". Now hoodlums are stupid, but they know when they're being "tolerated". In typical shifty Dutch fashion, they followed her home and punched her in the face at the front door. Hard.
Summary. A foreigner (correction, Dutch citizen, culturally badly immigrated) speaks out about an untenable situation. She is blamed of racism by a white Dutch mayor who practices racism (and possibly sexism) against her (believe me, even foreign whites wouldn't get that sort of reply) and inverted racism, for the purpose of ingratiating himself, towards coloured but Dutch people. Admittedly, she plays into his hands by calling these coloured Dutch (or at least strongly Dutchified) people "Moroccans", and by having taken over Fatso's column. I don't know what she writes in that column, but when she points out that people (possibly whites?) are being terrorized, she is if anything being non-racist in standing up for victims who, gosh, might not even be Turkish! By responding to her non-Dutch non-racism with two forms of Dutch white racism, the mayor helps to create a situation in which "foreigners" bash foreigners (correction, coloured people with Dutch passports who haven't got the hang of Dutch culture yet), knowing full well that they have white Dutch support. A magnificent achievement, the very apex of white Dutch racism! Ms Umar has publicly blamed him. He "apologized" and wants her to call him back. How surprising that she has no desire to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the first (white?) Dutch reaction has already
appeared in the letters section of the paper that publishes
her column. It boils down to: "What if I don't like it here?
Where do I fuck off to?" That's a question I've been asking
myself regularly over the past twenty years. And not because
of the coloured people living here. Or the foreigners.
