In the previous rant I mentioned two coloured women, the definite foreigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the possible foreigner Ebru Umar. (Update: Ebru Umar does have a Dutch passport, or she wouldn't have returned from Turkey to vote. Either she has a double nationality, a subject worth a separate rant, or the media have totally lied. And of course Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to be issued a Dutch passport to drop her crusade and become politically active in the party that oppresses women in this country, before moving on to the States.) They are two "foreigners", being coloured people, and also "racists", being against i. an oppressive religion and ii. the street rat behaviour currently common to children of North African immigrants, and every good white Dutchie knows that coloured people are foreigners are moslems are coloured people, and a racist is someone who hates foreigners. Therefore, two foreigners who hate foreigners, thereby making it totally okay to be racist, are bound to endear themselves to our white hearts and we think of them as a couple, and want them to make TV appearances together and write supportive pieces about each other and walk the streets hand in hand. An exaggeration? I'm afraid not.
So as not to make the impression that all evidence of Dutch racism revolves around these two totally separate individuals whose only common trait is a functioning brain, a brief skim across the long history of immigration into the Netherlands: Dutch schoolchildren are (were?) taught that the ancestors of the present-day native Dutch entered the country at a place called "Lobith". A Dutch TV programme for exotics of various ethnic backgrounds was called "Bij Lobith" to remind the natives that ultimately everyone living here is an immigrant or a child of immigrants. This was pretty much in caveman days when boundaries ran differently, if they existed at all, and it was normal for people to be nomadic, defining themselves by tribe rather than by country. In North-Western Europe, at least, the inhabitants had settled down around the first millennium, and between the mighty countries of France, Germany (once both united in one empire) and Spain, there existed, small but defiant, the often-flooded mud-flat called The Netherlands. To this day, Dutch schools teach their pupils of our glorious fight against the Spaniards, notably of some Dutch pirate doing to a certain Spanish fleet what the English navy did to the Armada, and yet a lot of dagos, krauts and frogs must have moved through or settled in this country before passports were invented; Dutch people with an interest in genealogy trace their ancestry back to German immigrants or refugees like the French huguenots. The worst nationalism of those days could not excite Dutch hatred against these foreigners as high as it ran against two groups of exotics: Jews and gypsies. They were, after all, coloured.
Antisemitism - or, more correctly, racism - was common in Western Europe and probably all other parts of Europe too; I haven't heard of any part of Europe - with the possible exception of, how ironic, Scandinavia - where Jews and gypsies were not discriminated against. But the Netherlands had a wave of "foreigners" - coloured immigrants - all its own: the Chinese. This is not strictly true, as Chinese immigrants have settled all over the Western world: any self-respecting Western metropolis has at least one Chinese restaurant, and possibly a Chinese laundry service. What was special about the Chinese immigrants in the Netherlands was that - very roughly speaking - they came via Indonesia, or East India as it was called at the time. This is why the fare served at Dutch "Chinese" restaurants is different from that of Chinese restaurants elsewhere, and why some restaurants explicitly label themselves "Chinese-Indian": many of their dishes are Indonesian. While the Dutch invaded, subdued and plundered Indonesia, took Indonesian wives and taught the natives to be good little Christian hypocrites after the Dutch fashion, the "Chinamen" who sought their fortune in the Netherlands worked hard, had little to show for it, were despised and ridiculed, and suffered for their popularity with Dutch women. Why one form of racial intermarriage is okay and another is not, is just one of the little mysteries of racism. Anyway, it is safe to say that the Chinese immigrants never really integrated into Dutch society - the men never learned to gob and fart, the women never learned to discuss other people's private lives publicly in loud voices - and yet their descendants, still unintegrated, are both invisible and quite respectably making a living. In fact, Chinese people are still immigrating into the country and utterly failing to integrate, like the women running a laundrette in Rotterdam who speak three words of English and no Dutch, yet have not resorted to crime and violence. And it's not because the Chinese are incapable of either, or "Chinatown" would not have its maffia-esque connotations. Clearly, the much-emphasized integration into Dutch society is not as necessary as Dutch society would have me believe.
Then came the immigrants from the Netherlands Antilles, another Dutch colony and ethnic melting pot. Natives mixed with imported black slaves and Indonesian labourers. Where both the Chinese and Indonesians had a general culturally instilled meekness and industriousness - neither of which stopped the Dutch from calling them "dirty foreigners" - the Surinam immigrants were not so humble. They were and are known for the following: petty criminality including drug-trafficking; being too lazy to work; being loud and quarrelsome (well, the loudness is based on fact) and as usual the men were blamed of sleeping with our wives and daughters. Yes, the so-called black invasion caused real shockwaves, which currently have totally subsided. Despite the fact that there still is a lot of drug trafficking going on. And the other fact of many unwanted pregnancies because the men sleep, not with our women, but with their own, and consistently without a condom. There was a time when Dutchies cried: "They're not just coming to our country and stealing our jobs, they're breeding!!" They still are. Nobody notices.
A short, sharp burst of immigration from Indonesia followed its so-called independence, meaning, the Dutch despots that had replaced the native despot were replaced by another native despot, and those natives who had been "corrupted" by hanging with the Dutchies - working for them, sleeping with them or whatever - had to flee. Not that they fled on time. First, the Japanese invaders of WWII came to "liberate" the East Indies by sticking white colonists in prison/torture camps. After they left, the Indonesians themselves stuck anyone who had been close with the white colonists, in similar camps. This little truth was revealed to me by a child of immigrants whose father had spent a number of years in such a camp before the whole family fled to the Netherlands. Here, they were utterly unwelcome, even though the Netherlands was partly to blame for their predicament, and traumatized as they were, they were expected to integrate into Dutch society chop-chop. Like the Chinese immigrants before them, they have become invisible. Almost. Women who look "Indonesian" are still seen as sexually available by Dutch white men. Pop ex-icon Patty Brard played in some almost-soft-porn film and had her own show, "Brard Extreme", in which she exploited her image of oriental beauty. Dutch men don't really want coloured women to integrate in Dutch society. They want these women to be foreign, exotic, an exciting challenge. Anyway, these Indonesians, and the fear caused by their massive invasion, have faded from memory. At most, their "successful integration" is held up as proof of Dutch racial tolerance.
An invited wave of immigrants were the "gastarbeiders" - guest labourers - from Turkey, who were supposed to help rebuild the post-war Netherlands. They were not stealing anyone's job; they had been invited because there were more jobs than people, a rare situation. The hippie revolution had started, and so whites suddenly opposed practices like arranged marriages, which is what the whites themselves had been doing right through the Middle Ages and beyond. Turkish society as a whole was even more misogynist than Dutch society, considering any woman who ventured out of doors a whore who deserved sexual harassment, and the Turkish immigrants brought this attitude along at a time when such attitudes were being critically questioned. Leading to the following mental shortcut: foreigners are wife-bashing brutes from whom no woman is safe, and who must be not only integrated into but re-educated by Dutch society. The old paternalist "the foreigners are sleeping with our wives and daughters" changed to the pseudo-feminist "we'd better teach them how to treat their wives and daughters". And yes, at that time Dutch women were protesting about lack of safety in the streets, especially late at night. But the men who made the streets unsafe were not purely Turkish immigrants. In fact, the image of the rapist Turk is purely a racist mental projection (rapists can be of any nationality and will only operate when they feel safe, ie. not in a hostile foreign country) and the male chauvinist pigs that the feminists were fighting, and who likewise considered any woman out of doors late at night an easy prey, were white cloggies.
The Turks have not quite become invisible yet. The ethnic and genetic group which settled in a long horizontal streak along Siberia's underside into today's Turkey - formerly part of Greece - descends from the Mongol hordes. The Balkan has a long history of Turkish marauders. Turks are, to make a very sweeping statement, tough and warlike. They are not so docile. Conformist as their own communities may be, they don't give in to Dutch social pressure so easily. They are colonists, not colonized. For once, the eternal complaint about foreigners who've come to take over the country had the slightest grain of truth in it. Ironically, this means they integrate quite well in Dutch society, that is, their offspring can compete aggressively with the natives. That is not the kind of integration the Dutch had in mind! What makes it harder for the racists is that modern Turks are already half white - fair hair and/or grey eyes are not totally unusual even for full-blooded Turks - and that once they've learned the Dutch language and gestures (unlike previous immigrants with their stereotypical accents and mannerisms) they are hard to set apart. That doesn't just apply to the Netherlands; I happened to see, in some TV-programme, a group of "Turks" - Germans with a Turkish ethnic background - interviewed at a protest march. These were "Turks", were they? The only Turkish trait about them was the characteristic dark, thick, curved eyebrows. And that is not uniquely Turkish any more than sallow skin tone; Iranians have the same.
After the unpleasantly successful cultural integration of the Turkish immigrants and their descendants - you still don't know what abuse goes on in their own homes, but the same goes for Dutch families, as I can testify - the "foreigners" currently being limelighted are the other kind of "gastarbeider", the so-called Moroccans. Another sweeping statement, supported by personal experience: Moroccans are culturally entirely different from Turks. Where Turkish society is tough and macho and about preserving the family honour, Moroccan (indeed, North African) culture is about being acceptable and socializing and avoiding conflict as much as possible. Turks have vendettas. Moroccans don't, or rather, it's not considered normal. There have been North African pirates, just as there have been Spanish and Dutch pirates, but the current drug-based criminality of northern Morocco has to do with contact with the modern West. What do Turks and Moroccans have in common? A religion imposed on them by a foreign country. Herd instinct. The unpleasant habit to not only interfere with but decide another's choice of marriage partner. All very Dutch, really. The Dutch attempt to integrate both into Dutch society by taming and civilizing them, a modern version of the White Man's Burden, was totally off where Moroccans were concerned. To them, it was the rude, coarse, detestable Dutch who needed to be civilized. Something of which the rude, coarse, detestable Dutch have always been blissfully ignorant. Both Turkish and Moroccan moslems see the Dutch as godless and sinful, of course; but I'm willing to wager that many North African labourers who work among proles and live in accommodations not even suitable for students, and whose opinion is never asked, would, if it were asked, say that the Dutch are savages. Which the few North African immigrants I've known were emphatically not.
The immigrants were not so bad. Then they had their spouses come over and live here with them. (Usually the men imported their wives, but the reverse also happened. Coloured women are not as submissively unfeminist as the whites assume.) And they had children. And the children grew up and had children. And in two or three generations the Moroccans metamorphosed into cloggies: rude, coarse, detestable savages. With coloured skins and irritating accents; in short, "foreigners". The (white, native) Dutch are quite happy with this: now they really can blame everything on the foreigners! They can insist on the importance of cultural integration, which is not something they really want and which has already happened anyway. What the cloggies really want is for coloured people of all races and nationalities to accept the role of Untermensch. Coloured people are scary, they are so visibly not One Of Us, therefore they must be chained and controlled. Apartheid in the Netherlands. White schools and black schools, the former labelled "Slegs vir blanke". That is how Dutch white racism works, inside and outside the country. The Dutch are boundlessly tolerant towards "foreigners", not out of real tolerance, but because they're in denial about their extreme, historically proven racism. Plus: it encourages said "foreigners" to stay underdogs.
Of all the real foreign import at the moment - Poles, Yugoslavians, Rumanians, Egyptians and assorted Africans - anything white is ignored, and anything non-white is also ignored when in small numbers. Anything non-white in large numbers is reviled and panicked about until it's been around long enough to prove it's no threat to white supremacy. The Dutch "Moroccans" with their threats of jihad and religious takeover are like the USA's radical blacks dreaming of "Afromerica" - underdogs whose snarling upsets the top dog. The only people they ever bite are other underdogs, and when those underdogs complain, they're "racist", even though, indirectly, they're the victims of racism. Yes, I'm sure they've started to believe that yob behaviour really is a matter of skin colour; I've been lucky enough to grow up in white neighbourhoods and so know what assholes the white Dutch are.
Racism means falsely attributing something to a person's race, which is the same as genotype. The average cloggie, no, the average human is too ignorant to understand either race or genotype, so Dutch white racism means falsely attributing something to anyone who doesn't look white: in short, any "foreigner"; and to assume that it applies to all "foreigners". When two people are lumped together because they don't look white, that's racism. When someone becomes a public figurehead for not being white, that's racism. When a non-white social group makes trouble and this is blamed on its non-whiteness, rather than traced to the real cause, that's racism. When a non-white social group makes trouble and this is deliberately ignored because "we don't want to be racist", that's racism.
Take a criminal, sex offender, brute, barbarian, whatever, and stick a holy book under his arm. Now he's a prophet. Take a prophet and yank the holy book out from under his arm. Now he's a criminal, sex offender, brute, barbarian, whatever. That is the point Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes about Islam, but it applies to any religion: the deliberate double standards people apply when divine superbeings are concerned. Double standards of which she was a victim and against which she's leading a rabid campaign. That is not racist. I question her actions of allying herself to the most right-wing and racist people in the Netherlands to support this campaign; it's like becoming friends with the imams in Iran to campaign against the Bush administration. Such allies will subvert her campaign into racism. Typically, she's about to be thrown out of the country on trumped-up charges - she "lied" to be accepted as a refugee, yes, a lot of refugees do that, they fake passports and personal papers to escape their own country and illegally enter another to ask for asylum, this was known when her so-called political career was launched - and will now continue her campaign in, of all countries, the acutely racist and intolerantly Christian United States of America. Good luck.
Certain parts of Amsterdam are terrorized by hoodlums. To say so is not racist. Even to say that the hoodlums are Moroccan - more accurately, with a Moroccan ethnic background, though in this case that makes no difference - is not racist. To pretend that Moroccans are hoodlums and vice versa, because they are coloured, is racist. It's also quite obviously untrue. However, there are hoodlums, and their behaviour is ignored by the authorities. This is the point made by Ebru Umar, and it is not racist.
Wow, say the Dutch! Two foreigners, and they both hate foreigners! They must be good friends! (Where "foreigner" means "coloured person".) That is racism pure and simple.
What did Ebru Umar write in what was formerly Fatso's column? She was approached to write a piece about the Ayaan feeling (??) as part of a publication to boost Ayaan's political career. This independent publication was going to be printed by Ayaan's publisher. Independent, yeah, right. And this was only the latest attempt of the Dutch media to hitch up the two together. Except, they are not the friends they're thought to be. One doesn't want to know the other, while the other has some pretty critical questions to ask. I don't see what they have to do with each other. They operate in entirely different fields. Ebru Umar makes it clear that she considers Islam a sham, which it is, but she's not the one campaigning against it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has nothing to say about the behavioral problems of children of immigrants. Her campaign is totally irrelevant to the Netherlands or, for that matter, to the US. There are no points of contact between them. They have two things in common: a basic intelligence (which is more than the average cloggie can claim) and being victims of racism. Of a racism so dirtily hypocritical that it has the nerve to call them racists.
I won't have to mention these two again. People come and go, but white racism remains. It will find other coloured people, figureheads or not, to fuck around with in such a way that any intelligent person will just gape, or vomit, or manifest some sign of insanity like starting to sing "It's a small world after all". The Dutch are, on the whole, so completely twisted that just living here, being exposed non-stop to their deliberate, mind-numbing debility - whether manifested as racism or in some other way - is both literally and figuratively maddening.
I'm intelligent enough to know that white Dutch behaviour
is not a matter of skin colour. Though I'm tempted to believe
that it is.
