Climbing That Hill

11 Apr 20266 Apr 2026 nivtricLeave a comment

Everything I had once believed in suddenly seemed a lie. That was also true for my religion. Losing faith was a gradual process that took several years. I didn’t give up on it on a whim. I had friends in the Christian student club Alpha, and I could discuss the issue with them. In those years, Losing My Religion by REM became a number-one hit. I turned atheist but not hostile to religion. Some people hate religion because of trauma. But no one had forced me. I had chosen to be religious myself. My mother complained that I didn’t take care of myself. She kept telling me I was too skinny and looked like Jesus. And there was a lot to ponder. What is truth? And can we know it? Can we be sure about anything? Nearly every day, I went to the forest near the campus to ponder these questions. For several months, there was no end to doubt. Logic was the last line of defence.

I had been a simple guy, not aware of much. A******* had reproached me for being naive. It seemed imperative to fix that to fix my life. I followed the metaphysics course to learn what it was. It is about the nature of reality. The lecturer discussed ancient Greek philosophers. Some believed that earth, water, air, and fire were the building blocks of nature. Others addressed the nature of truth and what we can know. Then, the lecturer came up with something interesting. If truth doesn’t exist, then that must be true, so truth must exist. The non-existence of truth is logically impossible. At the time, it seemed the discovery of my lifetime. The truth is out there, somewhere, lurking, and it might one day take us all by surprise, which was somehow comforting rather than unnerving.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates sought the truth in his famous dialogues. The sophists were his opponents, the lecturer told us. Using clever tricks, these people made false suggestions. He had an example. A sophist would say to a peasant that he could prove that an empty glass equals a full glass. The peasant wouldn’t believe him. The sophist then challenged him to make a bet. He would ‘prove’ it as follows:

Sophist: ‘A glass half-full is the same as a glass half-empty. Do you agree?’
Peasant: ‘Yes.’
Sophist: ‘If two volumes are equal, and you multiply them both by two, they must still be equal. Do you agree?
Peasant: ‘Yes.’
Sophist: ‘If you multiply half-full by two, you have full, and if you multiply half-empty by two, you have empty, so a full glass is the same as an empty glass.

And so, the peasant lost his money. This sophist lived off defrauding people. The sophists weren’t popular with the general public, the lecturer said. More generally, they were relativists who didn’t believe in absolute truth. They thought the truth merely depends on perspective. Socrates opposed that kind of thinking. The truth is out there. It has always been there, is still there, and will be there. So, what I believed was fickle and could change. If I did my best, I could come closer to the truth. My doubts receded, but the comfortable feeling of certainty was gone forever. Something could always pop up, overthrowing everything I had learned so far. It had happened once. It could happen again.

Socrates believed that investigating matters with an open mind can bring us closer to the truth, and that greater knowledge is progress. In that sense, we have progressed. We can invent things, but forgetting inventions is much harder. That might require measures like burning books and murdering scientists. And we cannot undo our deeds. You can’t return to ignorance or inexperience once you have crossed a line into knowledge or experience. You might call that progress. Somehow, we think we are progressing. But are we? If it all ends in a nuclear Armageddon, it would all be pointless. So,

Making a career before the bomb falls
Working on my future before the bomb falls
I’m running around my schedule before the bomb falls
Safe in the health insurance fund before the bomb falls

And when the bomb falls
I’ll be lying in my suit, diplomas and my cheques in my pocket
My insurance policy and my vocabulary, aww
Under the apartment buildings in the city next to you

Just drop it then, it’ll happen anyway
It doesn’t matter if you run
I never knew you. I want to know who you are
I want to know who you are

Doe Maar, The Bomb

In the second-hand bookstore De Slegte in Enschede, I stumbled upon a booklet about Hegelian dialectic. The cover promised that it would be about progress using arguments. It began by stating that progress arises from a thesis (the current situation), an antithesis (a challenge), and a synthesis (a resolution), so that looked very promising indeed, and that was the reason for buying it. Once I started reading it, and to my great disappointment, it soon turned political. It was about framing questions with particular wording so that the solution would present itself, the book argued.

It looked like a textbook on propaganda, and a communist seemed to have written it. By using words, you define reality. It was also how the sophists operated, so it didn’t seem an honest quest for truth, because the facts don’t depend on the wording. But the question remains: what are the facts? Let’s illustrate the issue with a few examples. You can apply the tactic to the estate tax, like so:

You can call it a death tax, thereby implying that governments profit from the death of people, suggesting it is a bad tax, or that the tax is evil.
You can call it a parasite tax, thereby implying that the recipients haven’t earned it and suggesting that it is a good tax, or that not having the tax is evil.

People who have worked and saved have already paid taxes on their labour, and if there are wealth taxes, also on their estate. In that sense, it is unfair. Those who receive an inheritance usually haven’t worked for it. In that sense, it is fair. That is the problem with many issues. The opposing sides may seem equally reasonable. And there are practical consequences. Inheritance taxes can ruin family businesses, while not having them can lead to a class of billionaire oligarchs ruling society.

Framing can be misleading. Climate activists label tax breaks that corporations receive on fossil fuels as subsidies. These weren’t subsidies but lower taxes. These tax breaks exist because of competition. Corporations elsewhere don’t pay these taxes either, so a corporation would go bankrupt if it had to pay them. Production would move elsewhere, and nothing would change for the better. Climate is one of the most pressing global issues. The reason to mischaracterise the situation in this manner may be to fire people up by making them angry and inspiring them to take action, but it won’t help.

Hegel’s idea of a hidden truth behind seemingly irreconcilable views greatly helped me. There is a higher truth, and instead of taking a side, you can investigate opposing views and try to resolve them. A resolution is a more profound insight rather than a compromise. It is a brutal process as I have experienced firsthand. We don’t depart from our views unless we have no choice, so we usually do so only after failing utterly and being cornered with no options left but to admit that we are wrong. It is often also unclear who is right, so you can stick to your opinions until you fail. Hegel’s idea is that a competition of ideas drives history, so superior ideas replace inferior ones, and that this may require revolution and warfare. That would be progress, but there can be no progress without a goal.

Hegel envisioned that God’s plan worked like so. We would end up in God’s paradise through progress. That was the goal. In doing so, he laid out the scheme for a dialectical struggle between progressivism and conservatism, leading to achievements such as the end of slavery, workers’ rights, universal suffrage, equality between men and women, equality among races, LGBTQ rights, and the like. That progress came with activism and sometimes with warfare, such as the American Civil War. Marxists and the communists built on Hegel’s scheme and replaced ‘God’s plan’ with ‘historical necessity’, claiming that we would end in a workers’ paradise rather than God’s paradise.

Both sides of an argument represent different realities that can be equally true. One side’s reasoning may appear stupid to the other, and the right choice depends on the weight of the arguments. Hegel was far more important than I realised at the time. His philosophy is a foundational pillar of Western civilisation, and perhaps the only way in which Western civilisation might be universal, as it promises a path towards a world civilisation. At the time, all that eluded me. Still, the idea that opposing arguments both reflect an underlying truth put my mind at ease. I couldn’t live with the idea that there is no truth and only perspective. My previous ideas hadn’t become worthless overnight. They were as true or false as before, and so were my new views. Nothing had changed, except my perspective. The truth exists, and my beliefs are irrelevant. My doubts faded,

You say the hill’s too steep to climb
Chiding
You say you’d like to see me try
Climbing
You pick the place, and I’ll choose the time
And I’ll climb
The hill in my own way
Just wait a while, for the right day
And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds
I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today

Pink Floyd, Fearless

I came to relate this song to the challenge A******* had given me and conveniently ignored a second part that didn’t seem to fit into the picture,

Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd, smiling
Merciless, the magistrate turns ’round, frowning
And who’s the fool who wears the crown
Go down in your own way
And every day is the right day
And as you rise above the fear lines in his brown
You look down
Hear the sound of the faces in the crowd

Pink Floyd, Fearless

For nearly a year, thoughts filled my mind. If I had done this or that differently, then things would have turned out differently. After initially being kind, A******* turned hateful within a few weeks. Having been hated all my life and not knowing any better, I accepted it. Yet, the dormitory felt like the place where I belonged. It was Paradise. Only, I didn’t fit in, and that was because of what my life had been like. Living there made me realise that it didn’t have to be that way. My childhood could have been different. At the time, I blamed my parents, but they had done their best. And that was the past, and the past was gone forever, so there was no point in dwelling on that. The future might be better if I changed my ways.

There were notable differences in backgrounds between A******* and me, and somehow they proved an unbridgeable gap. A******* appeared progressive and had lived a cosmopolitan life, while I was conservative and rural, and had not seen much of the world. Nijverdal was a rural area. Art and literature didn’t interest me. The incident foreshadowed a conflict that you can see today in several Western societies. There is a growing disconnect between leftist city people in intellectual jobs and rural people, like farmers, who lead an entirely different life. And so, came to see these cultural differences as a major contributing cause to the most epic disaster of my lifetime.

Until then, culture had seemed a vague concept debated by academics. Suddenly, it became very real to me, making me feel an urgent need to understand people who were different. I had to adapt and fit into various environments. It didn’t come naturally to me. Years later, I found out that I was autistic. And so, studying culture and human conduct became a conscious effort. My intuition had failed me, so I learned to understand differences and cultures by seeing the relationships between what people said and what they did, and by identifying patterns. People with similar backgrounds or properties display identical behaviour. Over time, it made me as good as, if not better than, others at understanding and predicting behaviour. After a few years, that began to show itself.

After finishing her education, my sister had difficulty finding a job. Yet my first application succeeded, and to a great extent, that was due to my understanding of the company’s culture, which allowed me to provide answers that made it appear as if I fit perfectly within the new corporate vision. That was not the case, but I had succeeded in making it seem that way. Despite applying for dozens of positions and being talented in fashion sales, my sister received no job interviews. My mother then asked me to review one of her application letters. The letter was boastful and without substance. For instance, it claimed that she had excellent commercial skills without any evidence to back it up, followed by more bluster without proof. And so, I asked my sister, ‘Where did you get this letter from?’ It came from a friend who had applied to the Dutch telecommunications company KPN. They hired her as a manager.

That made sense. KPN’s recruitment advertisements suggested they were hiring arrogant, boastful people without substance for management positions, which explained why they hired her friend. Most people would reject unsubstantiated bragging. After all, it was the Netherlands, not the United States. It might have worked in Amsterdam, where the cheeky people lived, but not in Arnhem, where my sister was. I told my sister that she could say she had good commercial skills, but should back it up with evidence. She had done an internship, and the company was very pleased with her, so I said, ‘Mention that to back it up, and tell what your job role was and tell about a few things you did.’ She then revised her letter, got interviews, and was hired soon afterwards. And you can see the consequences of not understanding culture. KPN was in a different league because it wanted to shed its dusty government image and play with the big boys in telecom. That didn’t end well, but that is another story.

Dutch public television featured human interest programmes about people living far away. You could learn about how people lived on the Mongolian steppe and their thoughts and beliefs. Minorities like Muslims and Hindus had airtime on Dutch public television, so that you could learn about them as well. Once at the Utrecht Centraal train station, a few Hindus handed me a book containing some of their Vedas. I had never encountered such a hazy prate, except, perhaps, Hans van Mierlo’s, making me quit reading after a few pages. When discussing what had happened at the dormitory with my best friend Arjen, he said, ‘You do not mince words. You say what you think.’ It is a quality that doesn’t help you in life. It can annoy people. Since then, I spoke my mind less often.

Featured image: El Uruguay a través de un siglo. Carlos M Maeso (1910). Public Domain.

Pim Fortuyn on 4 May 2002, two days before his assassination

Troubles in the Multicultural Society

23 Feb 202626 Apr 2026 nivtricLeave a comment

Crossroads of civilisation

The Netherlands has been ahead of the rest of the world on liberal reforms like gay marriage and the right to decide about ending one’s own life. It was the result of the political manoeuvring of the left-wing liberal party D66 and, most notably, its leader, Hans van Mierlo, who had schemed to make it happen. The Christian Democrats, who had always been in the government, had long blocked progressive reforms. In 1994, after the Christian Democrats had lost the election, D66 forged the purple coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA and the right-wing liberals of the VVD. These parties set aside their differences and focused on their shared progressive values to implement amendments. A large section of the Christian Democrat electorate supported these changes, including most Roman Catholics, so they remained uncontested afterwards.

The Netherlands is one of the least nationalist countries. In their preparedness to die for their country, the Dutch score particularly low, according to a Reddit survey. It is most closely tied to both the continental European and Anglo-Saxon worlds. Together with Great Britain, the Netherlands is oriented toward the United States. It may explain why the Dutch provided more NATO heads than any other country. If geographical distance indicates cultural distance, it is worth noting that the Netherlands lies between Great Britain, Germany, and France. Being close to Scandinavia, it was also one of the least corrupt countries.

The Netherlands long ranked highly in sexual liberty. Prostitution is legal and performed openly in red light districts. It was not all good. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, paedophiles could operate in the open until the focus returned to the damage they do to children. On the work floor, equality is the norm, as the Dutch balance work and private life, which is uncommon in most countries. In many ways, the Netherlands has progressed the furthest. The Netherlands doesn’t lead on all fronts. For example, the country lags in the number of women on boards and in parliament.

On top of that, the border between the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds runs through the Netherlands. And so, it became the crossroads of Western civilisation, and with more minorities coming in, the crossroads of world civilisation. That wasn’t on my mind at the time, but in hindsight, there is more to it. The Netherlands means ‘the Low Countries’ because half of it lies below sea level. The word ‘Nederland’ almost translates to ‘humble country’. The most unpretentious part of it might be Twente, the region I came from.

The Dutch are known for their tolerance, which is close to indifference. There had long been parallel societies with Protestants, Catholics and socialists living separate lives, so it was mind your own business. For long, Protestantism had been the official religion and Catholicism was illegal, but Catholics could hold masses in secret. That was tolerance. Today, smoking weed is not a problem. The Netherlands was also a haven for Jews until the German occupation during World War II. That same tolerance was the stance towards immigrants for a long time. In that sense, the Netherlands didn’t differ from several other Western European countries.

It was a fairy-tale society, with Van Kooten and De Bie seeking the nuance. Their characters represented the so-called conservative, ignorant and xenophobic undercurrent in the Dutch culture, and of course, hustlers, such as Jacobse and Van Es, infiltrating politics with their corrupt schemes and dubious deals. The undercurrent didn’t go away. Instead, it grew stronger. Immigrants continued to arrive, causing a growing unease. The progressive values many Dutch cherished didn’t agree with the conservative worldview of many immigrants, most notably Muslims. These feelings only needed a catalyst, like the Germans needed Hitler, to give the anger and discontent a voice.

The existing political parties had become complacent and didn’t see what was coming. Nor had I. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a maverick politician, Pim Fortuyn, rose to prominence with his strong views on immigration and Islam. Fortuyn claimed that leftists were to blame for immigration. He called them the Leftist Church for their moral superiority claims, who would call you a racist if you opposed immigration. Many Dutch people wanted to limit immigration, most notably of people who had trouble adapting. Only, no politician said it that plainly as Fortuyn did. The others were more careful not to promote division in society. Most immigrants did okay, and inciting hatred wouldn’t improve things. Keeping a good society is not a simple affair. It is like a juggling act of keeping many balls in the air. Fortuyn didn’t seem to understand or care and sought personal fame.

Balls on the ground

Fortuyn attacked the fairy tale of the multicultural society, and called it a failure. I had believed in it or wanted to believe in it, for if there will ever be world peace, the world must unite and become one multicultural society. Living with people from different cultures isn’t easy, and I should have known that, given what happened to me as a student. Culture can be an unbridgeable gap. Some Fortuyn supporters seemed to anticipate civil war and hoped that it would start sooner rather than later, when the authentic white Dutch were still a majority. The atmosphere quickly turned grim. Under the guise of free speech, the sewers opened, and the rivers of hatred flooded freely into the open. Fortuyn’s rise made headlines in the international press because it represented a clear break with the past, occurring in what many believed was the world’s most liberal country.

Fortuyn supporters overran the IEX message board with their vile and racist comments. When someone created a new account on IEX, started posting, while suggesting he was a Turkish restaurant owner with some money to invest, to test the mood, others viciously attacked him. Fortuyn was openly gay, and his objection to Islam was that it didn’t agree with Western liberal values. He further pointed out crimes committed by immigrant youth, especially those of Moroccan descent. Racists and bigots jumped on his bandwagon. However, and that was where leftists like me got it wrong, the movement was more than bigotry and racism. People from different cultures differ in their conduct and can harm one another, leading to a struggle over societal rules. A liberal society can be open to everyone as long as everyone lives by its values. And also, having tribal identities within a country is as problematic as the existence of nation-states.

Having lived in neighbourhoods with ethnic minorities myself, I held different views and was not willing to give up on them. Yet, we are spectators of history unfolding. Perhaps people would calm down over time, and reason would prevail. A leftist poster with the avatar Kingie launched a new website, BeursKings (MarketKings), with help from Danger Money, who programmed it. A small group left IEX and joined the new message board, including me. BeursKings remained in operation for several years. Kingie once posted photographs of himself. That was a shock. He looked like my double. In hindsight, that is remarkable because of his avatar name. Others who remained on IEX also joined the BeursKings message board. I was part of the so-called Leftist Church and had tried to rein in the bigotry. One of the IEX posters once called me ‘vicar’ for my moralising.

Somehow, I had come into his crosshairs. A spectacular profit he had made on a semiconductor stock might have made him think he was a genius. He was not the only one. The Dot-Com bubble led some people to believe, for a while, that they were stock-market legends, beating investment gurus like Warren Buffett, until the bubble imploded. My investment returns have never justified those kinds of ideas, but I could write stories people liked to read. This guy was a physicist working in a laboratory, or so he once wrote, and a Czech, a relative of Franz Kafka, he further confided on the message board. He thought that his excellent investment results came from ‘observing the herd and anticipating where it would go next’ rather than from luck in picking a winning stock. He was eager to pick on me, but when I later returned to IEX, he praised me excessively for identifying interest charges on money and debts as a root cause of financial collapse.

Shortly before the 2002 elections, a left-wing loner assassinated Fortuyn. Fortuyn had hinted at that possibility. If something were to happen to him, he claimed, it would be because establishment politicians had demonised him. The socialist-in-name-only Marcel van Dam, who lived in a luxurious mansion far away from multicultural neighbourhoods, and who had always been eager to take the moral high ground, once called Fortuyn an ‘exceptionally inferior human.’ And so, you may ask yourself, who of the two was the most superb Nazi? Fortuyn gave a presentable at-your-service salute that might go well in some fascist circles, but his ‘inferior human’ remark gave Van Dam an edge.

Others called Fortuyn ‘extreme’ or ‘demolishing society’ because he was stirring up public sentiment. Fortuyn was a man of theatre, hyping the wrongs others did to him while being a jerk himself. The Netherlands is not a violent country. It was the first political assassination in 400 years, so no one saw it coming. The civil war didn’t arrive, but death threats to politicians have become common. The attitudes toward immigrants and Islam have also changed. Fifteen years later, the United States saw the rise of a similar leader, and they are more alike than most people would think.

Fortuyn’s assassin, Volkert van der Graaf, was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He was someone like me. To him, Fortuyn may have been a new Hitler on the rise. He feared Fortuyn would tear down Dutch society so that the weak, such as the poor and refugees, would suffer, and also animals, as he had been an animal rights activist. Van der Graaf drew a logical conclusion from the facts, or so he believed. The problem with this kind of thinking is that we don’t know the future. Mass immigration can destabilise a country. Van der Graaf had good intentions, but Fortuyn also believed he was serving the Netherlands. Yet, there was something evil about Fortuyn. I am not a trained psychologist, but Fortuyn was someone who wanted to be the centre of attention and wield power, and didn’t care about the consequences of his actions, much like Donald Trump.

Harry Mens, a Dutch real estate tycoon whom you might call the Dutch Donald Trump, had promoted Fortuyn on his television show, Business Class. So, like Trump, Mens had a television show. Fortuyn’s appearance on his show foreshadowed a new type of politics, common in the United States but not in the Netherlands, in which wealthy money men fund the politicians. I found Mr Mens to be a questionable character, boasting and flaunting his wealth. At the time, I didn’t think of Trump, but there are parallels. His programme was about investments with people in suits and dresses promoting their investment services. A few advertisers on his show turned out to be frauds, such as Palm Invest.

I see Pim Fortuyn and Donald Trump as narcissistic psychopaths. These are not official diagnoses, but personal impressions. However, some psychoanalysts concluded that Fortuyn was a narcissist, possibly because of feelings of inferiority that he needed to compensate for with praise. It was all about him, and other people were just utensils. His neurotic disturbances and unresolved personality flaws made Pim Fortuyn such a powerful force. One psychoanalyst said, ‘Imagine if he had to go on a state visit to US President Bush. He would exhibit Sun King-like behaviour.’¹ To Fortuyn, the US President would have been a mere extra in the Pim Fortuyn show. Even though the psychoanalysts didn’t raise that particular issue, Pim Fortuyn seemed to enjoy hurting other people’s feelings, making me think he was a psychopath as well.

If you consider the characteristics of narcissistic psychopaths, you might discover they are the opposite of Asperger’s syndrome. I name a few: (1) thriving on chaos versus thriving in order, (2) desiring to be the centre of attention versus not wanting attention or praise, (3) manipulative and lying versus honest and forthright and (4) charming versus impolite. At first glance, Fortuyn and Trump seemed impolite rather than charming. That needs further explanation. First, you don’t have to check all the boxes to be autistic or a psychopath. And second, the impoliteness of the autistic person comes from being honest. By being rude, Fortuyn and Trump catered to the fear and anger of their supporters. They told them what they wanted to hear. Still, I think that Fortuyn and Trump both believed that what they were doing was necessary. What can make psychopaths successful as leaders is that they are willing to hurt people, which may be required to do what is necessary. With these words, I conclude my psychoanalysis session.

Life went on

Beurkings also attracted a few posters who remained on IEX. One of them, Xzorro, didn’t believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories and thought that the success of the attacks was due to the incompetence of the American authorities. Yet, his conspiracy thinking went in another direction. He believed the allegations that a high-ranking Dutch Prosecution official, Joris Demmink, had had sex with underage male prostitutes and that there was a conspiracy within the Dutch government to cover it up. An investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist, Micha Kat, had pursued the matter relentlessly for years. In the 1990s, there had been a police investigation into possible child abuse by four high-ranking government officials.

The investigation had collapsed after someone had leaked information. During raids, the police found no incriminating evidence on the suspects. Fred Teeven, who had led the investigation, later stated that Demmink had not been a person of interest in that investigation. The Dutch newspaper AD later claimed that Demmink had contact in the 1980s with a pimp of underage boys. Kat was onto something, but he was also a nutcase. Kat later claimed that children buried in a Bodegraven cemetery were victims of Satanic child abusers, which was nonsense and easy to disprove. And Kat had a conviction for making death threats to a fellow journalist.

Another noteworthy poster on BeursKings, Gung Ho, who lived in the Dutch countryside, favoured traditional US conservatism and posted lengthy pieces copied from American conservative websites, including some claiming that US Neoconservatives were Leninist agitators. He enthusiastically promoted a penny stock, Clifton Mining, and believed that colloidal silver was a cure against many diseases. That made him the subject of mockery, most notably by Amoricano, an American of Dutch origin who long had been on IEX. Gung Ho might have been in the military and had friends in the American military, or so his sparse remarks about his personal life suggested.

Gung Ho posted comments about the Neoconservatives in the Bush Administration being chicken hawks, so cowards who send others to war while having done no military service themselves. His use of language was odd, which made his lengthy texts amusing. The connection he made between Neoconservatism and Leninism seemed obscure to me at the time. Still, like the Leninists, the Neoconservatives use Hegel’s dialectic to promote social progress via revolutions and wars. The conflict between the West and Islam was their latest project, founded on the clash-of-civilisations ideology, and the Iraq War was one of its consequences. Traditional conservatives like Gung Ho opposed these methods.

There was also a psychiatrist on BeursKings. He had quit his job and tried to make a living by day trading. He posted under the name Kindval, a soccer player from the 1970s. He didn’t seem to like me. When someone attacked me personally or for my political views, he consistently upvoted these comments. He was a bit edgy and irritable. His life as a parasite didn’t work out so well for him, and he would have to work for a living again, or so I surmised. I did not make those kinds of comments, so that was not the reason he disliked me. Once, Gung Ho went loose on him by suggesting he had psychological issues. I upvoted that comment. It was a rare occasion for me to upvote a negative comment. Kindval became agitated about Gung Ho’s comment, but even more about my upvote, which was particularly odd as he had done the same to me countless times before. That made me think that he was, as Gung Ho implied, on his way to a nervous breakdown.

No gain without pain

Fortuyn’s rise had made me curious about the troubles in the multicultural society. The fallout of my student years of not fitting in had made me interested in cultural differences, thinking that the multicultural society had to work because the existence of nation-states and tribes causes warfare. So, what stands in the way of success? Is the gap between Islamic and Western culture unbridgeable? It made me interested in Muslims and their beliefs. In 2004, I joined the message board Maroc.nl for people with a Moroccan background. They are a disregarded minority. Most notably, young Moroccan men cause trouble. Some other minority groups have similar issues, but Moroccans get the most negative attention. They have a serious likeability problem. When the nationalist politician Geert Wilders singled out one minority for deportation, he chose the Moroccans in his infamous ‘fewer Moroccans’ quote, ‘Fewer Moroccans. Let us take care of that.’

There are historical causes. The Netherlands selected poorly educated country dwellers from the Rif Mountains to work in Dutch factories. They were Berbers who call themselves Imazighen, meaning ‘free people.’ Their culture comes with a deep distrust of government. In Morocco, they have been secondary citizens in a country dominated by Arab culture, which came with brutal repression in the past. Today, the Moroccan government recognises their culture and language. The initial plan was for them to return, so the government didn’t invest in their integration at first. Most didn’t return, also because they had stayed for a long time and had raised families in the Netherlands. And because they felt like outsiders and disrespected by the Dutch, many found their way into gang culture. Their disrespect for authorities adds to the problems. It is mostly youths who misbehave. Many change their ways as adults, but by then, a new generation of troublemakers has replaced them, so that the issue persists.

The issues Moroccans in the Netherlands face, and how they relate to society, compare to those of blacks in the United States. The message board was open. Everyone could join. It featured discussions about religion and social issues. Various people shared their opinions and discussed them with one another. People came and went on the message board over the years. Occasionally, there were heated exchanges, with Moroccans complaining about the racism of the Dutch and Dutch complaining about the misconduct of the Moroccans. What they call racism is often discrimination. Cultural groups favour each other, which makes the issue harder to solve, except by reducing differences, so that people mix more easily. Muslims generally do not mix well with non-Muslims.

A Dutchman sometimes asked why Moroccans don’t openly distance themselves from fellow Moroccans who misbehave. A Moroccan would argue that he is not responsible for the conduct of others, and there is no reason to make excuses for what others do. He also doesn’t ask the Dutch to excuse themselves for the misconduct of fellow Dutch. It is a fair point, but that attitude causes problems. Pride and honour mean less to the Dutch than to Moroccans. On a Dutch message board, I found the following observation: ‘Moroccan youths have a macho attitude and a short fuse. They see criticism as a personal attack, and if they don’t aggressively go against it, their friends will see them as sissies.’ Yet, if you are a bit self-critical, others will like you much better already.

There were a few agitators from both sides, but overall, the discussions were insightful, thanks to the diversity of posters expressing their opinions. On the board, the moderators sometimes discriminated against the Dutch, who received bans for lighter offences than Moroccans did. So, as far as discrimination goes, Moroccans are no better than the Dutch. Still, it was an open message board nonetheless, and in most cases, misconduct preceded a ban. Likely, the message board had received a grant and was obliged to keep it a safe space for a variety of opinions. There were Christians, Jews, Muslims, former Fortuyn supporters, and leftists. There were also gays seeking to counter the hatred of LGBTQ people because of street violence against them.

Some posters on the message board have argued that native Dutch commit more hate crimes against LGBTQ people, which is correct because there are far more native Dutch. Likewise, you can point at soccer hooligans or drunk Dutch causing trouble abroad at holiday destinations. It is how you can twist the numbers, as the sophists did in ancient Greece. Statisticians look at percentages of the population. For problem-solving, this tactic isn’t helpful. If you do that, you make people angry. The sophists were unpopular, and it wouldn’t surprise me if angry peasants had hanged a few. The message board featured a diversity of opinions and lively exchanges. It allowed me to learn by watching them dispute and considering the merits of their opinions.

Some Dutch have complained about annoying individuals who demand respect up front before they accept you, whereas you normally take a neutral stance toward new people you meet and give respect when you think someone deserves it. One poster acted like a complete jerk to me, and for no obvious reason, until I upvoted one of his comments. From then on, he saw me as his best friend. To be fair, I have had a fair share of people acting like jerks to me for no reason, but unlike this particular fellow, they weren’t looking for respect. A psychologist might argue for an inferiority complex. He may have presupposed that I didn’t respect him based on the assumption that every Dutchman hates him, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if that belief leads him to act like a jerk.

Traditional Muslims are strict on religion, much like conservative Christians. They have more in common with each other than with liberals. So, why many liberals like Muslims, and conservative Christians dislike them, is quite an enigma if you reason from their beliefs. Terrorists usually are young men who seek meaning in life and find it in Islam, and then fall prey to extremist preachers. There aren’t that many, but a few hundred can already be a serious threat. During the first year, there was uproar over the Dutch publicist Theo van Gogh, who was indeed kin to the famous Dutch painter. Under the guise of freedom of speech, he called Muslims ‘goat fuckers’ and Muhammad ‘a pimp’. The people on the message board didn’t care much about being called ‘goat fuckers,’ but insulting Muhammad was a red line that genuinely upset them.

Several posters also expressed fury about the Somali lady Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had left Islam for a liberal lifestyle, and had, together with Van Gogh, made the short film Submission about the suppression and mistreatment of women by Muslims. To Muslims, the film was blasphemous as it showed the bodies of abused women with Quran verses on them that the filmmakers claimed Muslims use to justify mistreating women. Hirsi Ali also had called Muhammad a ‘pervert.’ She faced death threats. The anti-immigration and anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders also faced death threats and requires security to this day.

Hirsi Ali had escaped an arranged marriage. The Dutch police prevented her family from abducting her from an asylum seeker centre in Almelo. She later moved to the United States to work for the neoconservative think tank. Van Gogh paid for his Islam-insulting binge with his life. A youngster of Moroccan descent slit his throat, precisely 911 days after the Fortuyn assassination. That was on 2 November, which refers to the European emergency services telephone number 112, the European equivalent of 911. So, in the first year, the atmosphere on the message board was tense.

Western interventions in the Middle East and Western support for Israel also angered quite a few people. Israel illegally occupied Palestinian land, and Palestinians kept on committing acts of terrorism. It has proven to be an irresolvable conflict. Several posters on the message board viewed the West, including the Netherlands, as anti-Islamic. Some Dutch argued that they are ungrateful, as the Netherlands provided them with a good life and freedom of religion. If it was so bad over here, why wouldn’t they move to an Islamic country where life is better? I tried not to offend people with my opinions. At first, I was making up my mind anyhow. It is a conflict between two worldviews, each with its own logic. There is an underlying truth, whatever that may be. In the first years, the American gangster heist called the Iraq War was still in progress. For me, the Iraq War became an unexpected mental dip. The Americans had tricked me into believing that Saddam Hussein had a stash of WMDs, so that I hadn’t opposed that war.

Once I saw live on CNN how the bombs fell on Baghdad and how gung-ho Americans ran over the country’s defences, and murdered the defenceless Iraqis, with the Iraqi Information Minister vehemently claiming until the very end that there were no Americans in Baghdad, and that all American forces had been obliterated, my mood suddenly swung to dim. And then there were no WMDs. That was the year before I joined the message board. They had bombed a country into ruins and killed thousands for no good reason. The Americans had bombed a country into ruins and killed thousands for no good reason.

The Netherlands has been a major contributor to the American war effort in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. The Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende had praised the Dutch VOC mentality of the former Dutch colonial enterprise that had invaded and looted the Indies under the guise of trade. The United States had merely copied that proud Dutch tradition of the looting oligarchic merchant republic of the Netherlands. The United States now has the true VOC mentality. Shell was a Dutch company, so the Dutch had to be in on the action, or so Mr Balkenende may have reasoned.

That, and Dutch liberal values, explain, to some extent, the negative views about the West and the Netherlands among the Moroccans on the message board. Some may have used these issues as an excuse for their misconduct and crimes that they would have committed anyway. Some could get angry at you simply for being Dutch because they think they know what you think. Some Dutch came to the message board only to lecture the Moroccans about the backwardness of Islam or the misconduct of Moroccan youngsters. That didn’t work out so well. You also wouldn’t change your mind when someone you have never met before came out of the blue to tell you how stupid your religion is and that your community is a bunch of criminals. As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Dutch would say that Palestinians keep on committing acts of terrorism, thereby challenging a much stronger adversary, and then whine about losing the fight. There was also a private messaging system. Over the years, two ladies contacted me as they preferred a Dutch husband and hoped that I was a Muslim.

Three posters once wrote that they had been in prison. One even posted from jail, so he had access to the Internet or a smartphone. They were discussing the Dutch police. Some were racist, they claimed, but others were professional. There had been hundreds of posters on that message board over the years, so that says little, but it is illustrative of the prejudices many Dutch have. If, as the statistics suggest, crime levels in their community are three times those of native Dutch, their community stands out negatively. Some have argued that you bear no blame for other people’s faults, which is what the law says. Still, if a group’s culture contributes to these issues, the group itself becomes a problem.

The Dutch dislike Moroccans more than any other ethnic minority. As the most-hated child of the entire school, I have been there. It was not entirely my fault, but I was part of the problem, and the only one I could fix was myself, not the others. Some other minorities face similar issues, but Moroccans, more than other minorities, seem to have an attitude problem of not acknowledging their own faults and blaming Dutch society. There is a lot of negative sentiment festering among the population that the mainstream media hardly reports on. Negativity can make matters worse for those who do well, but it is hard to change the Dutch opinions as long as the problem persists.

The Moroccans on the message board hardly expressed pride about fellow Moroccans who did well in the Netherlands, such as Ahmed Aboutaleb, the mayor of Rotterdam, who was popular among the Dutch and would have had a good chance of becoming Prime Minister if he had demonstrated that ambition, or Khadijah Arib, who became Speaker of the House. Some called them bounty, so brown on the outside, but white on the inside, hence traitors of their Moroccan identity by siding with the Dutch or accepting their values.

Bounty politics means that the Dutch accept diversity as long as the migrants accept Dutch values. The Dutch question the allegiance of someone with a Moroccan or Turkish background more than that of someone from Sweden or France, due to the greater cultural distance, so they would ask questions they wouldn’t ask someone from Sweden or France. And whites in New Zealand wouldn’t ask such questions of the Maori because the Maori were there before the whites came. It touches the core issue with diversity. It works better if we identify as one nation and believe in a common destiny.

The majority of Moroccans do all right, but the minority that causes trouble is large and problematic enough to drag down the group’s image. That well-known guy with a tainted skin on a scooter, who regularly features as a suspect in crime reports, ranging from street intimidation, robbery, and harassing women, often comes from that particular ethnic group. The most notorious ‘Dutch’ criminal, Ridouan T, is of Moroccan descent. And the pimps luring or forcing vulnerable girls into prostitution are also often of Moroccan or Turkish descent. That is not due to neglect of Dutch society. As a result of investments made in opportunities for minorities, some of the best Dutch schools are Islamic. There is not much more that the Dutch government could have done to help them.

Another issue causing upheaval in the Dutch multicultural society was the tradition of Saint Nicholas, in which a long-bearded, centuries-old white man from Spain arrived with a group of black servants to deliver presents to children. For long, that didn’t cause trouble as it was an old tradition and there had not been slavery of blacks in the Low Countries itself, so the Dutch didn’t associate the helpers with enslavement of blacks. As a child, I believed their faces were black because they went down chimneys to deliver the presents. Americans who saw it were appalled as the tradition involved blackfacing. An American woman working at the United Nations raised the issue, and a group of activists in the Netherlands began protesting. The issue remained contentious for over a decade.

The compromise gradually became the soot-stain helper, a helper with soot-stain marks from going into chimneys. For the remainder, nothing changed. Yet a significant group of Dutch didn’t like black people telling them to change the tradition, which they claimed was part of Dutch cultural heritage. There had been some agitated encounters with the activists. The black activists had a point, but it was mainly a pissing contest between white egos and black egos. Whites could have accepted that the tradition had racist elements and that the soot-stain helper didn’t meaningfully change it, while the black activists could have understood that it was a quaint relic of the past, and that altering it wouldn’t change the lives of blacks in the Netherlands. And there are far more serious, some apocalyptical even, so the conflict resembled a fight on the deck of the sinking Titanic.

Finally, there is the question of allegiance. Moroccans can’t renounce their nationality, nor can their children born in the Netherlands. Morocco is firmly in the Western camp, so the consequences so far have been limited, with a few instances of Moroccans spying for their country, but we don’t know what the future brings. The same goes for Turks, with many taking their orders from the fascist Erdogan, who called the Netherlands a fascist country after the Dutch government had prevented a Turkish minister from politically campaigning in the Netherlands for a referendum in Turkey to give more power to Erdogan.

Some ethnic groups cause more trouble than others. The underlying issue is usually cultural differences. The multicultural troubles weren’t constantly on my mind, but I couldn’t let the issue go. I remained on the Maroc.nl message board for two decades. In 2024, after twenty years, shortly after the Gaza War had started, the message board went offline permanently after being filled with anti-Israel messages. That was very suspicious indeed if you believe that the Jews are running this world. By then, I had arrived at some conclusions. People aren’t willing to change. They always have their reasons. Moroccan malcontents may believe that they have it bad in the Netherlands and that they are not to blame for their misconduct. But few places in the world are better, including Morocco itself. As for discrimination, it only stops once we have become one people. And so, there will be no gain without pain, which I had experienced firsthand as a student. For those who cause trouble and don’t change their ways, the consequences will be brutal.

Latest revision: 11 April 2026

Featured image: Pim Fortuyn on 4 May 2002, two days before his assassination. Roy Beusker (2002). CC BY 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

1. Een heel vervelend geval. Joris van Casteren (2002). Groene Amsterdammer.

School Newspaper

9 Dec 20259 Dec 2025 nivtricLeave a comment

When I was sixteen, the school newspaper retired. The editors lacked inspiration. It had become an infrequent occurrence, filled with political activism over cruise missiles, with little to do with the school itself. My experience with the funny newspaper made me figure that I could be a newspaper editor. My friend Arjen found it a good idea. Arjen contacted Erik to join the editorial board. Arjen believed Erik was a popular guy, which could help the newspaper. And even though I didn’t like him, I accepted him on the editorial board. Erik was a bully, and we had fought once. He proved to have good writing skills, and his editorials filled the first page.

We figured we could write six pages every three weeks instead of 100 pages once or twice a year. We named the paper Ikzwetsia after a humorous paper that circulated among the fifth-graders a few years earlier. Another guy in our class, Hendrik, added a few drawings. We filled the rag with juicy gossip about teachers and fabricated stories to make it more amusing. To give you a better insight into what our rag was like, I list a few gossip items,

Mr. Van den Brink’s lessons from economics are not particularly interesting. Remarks from pupils, such as, ‘The snow goes more up than down,’ make this clear.

During a heated discussion, the truth came out. ‘We teachers are not people,’ said Mr. Blaak from mathematics. We had always thought this, but never dared to publish it.

At the school’s back entrance, a garbage container has been defaced with the inscription ‘new janitors’. So far, no one has dared to open this container.

Mr. Nauta from business accounting recently walked to the emergency building 400 without glasses, while he was supposed to be in the main building. He explained this coincidence with the strange statement, ‘You can only see from the inside if someone is crazy.’ Mr. Nauta forgot to mention that this can also be noticed in someone’s words.

There were also some rude jokes, like,

There is a particularly great interest in Mr. W in Hollywood. This interest has been the case since it became known that the ET doll is broken.

Some teachers were in a difficult spot. If we were aware of that, we didn’t make jokes about them, or we complimented them in disguise,

Mr. Kamps, from religion, does not believe in paranormal phenomena. So, we have at least one normal teacher walking around the school.

Mr Kamps had lost his son. These news items were facts mixed with fiction. There had never been any interest in Mr W in Hollywood, but somebody had written ‘new janitors’ on a garbage container. The part about no one daring to open it was a joke. Mr Kamps definitely said he didn’t believe in paranormal phenomena. Finally, Mr Nauta likely had forgotten his glasses while ending up in the wrong building and did explain the coincidence with that bizarre remark, but I wasn’t there when it happened.

There was a film section. A group of film enthusiasts who considered themselves cultured organised film evenings at school. Their film selection centred on artistic content. Not all of these films proved suitable for a conservative Protestant school. One of them, Narayama, featured a scene in which a man had sex with a dog. It generated a lot of ado, or, as Erik put it, the suspense became too much for some people. Art must shock people for some reason. Otherwise, there needs to be a deeper meaning.

Geraldine wrote some of the film commentaries. She was a girl in my class with a striking hairdo, was a bit alternative, dressed outspokenly, and flaunted her interest in art and literature. She had written a particularly lengthy commentary about the classic All About Eve. To fit the page, I shortened it a bit, which offended her, probably because she believed the editing violated her artistic integrity. I didn’t see my writing as art, so it had to fit the available space, but she did, and she believed the space had to adapt to her writing. Marilyn Monroe, who was building her career, played a small part in the film All About Eve.

I indulged myself in writing an imaginary story about the school, a crime detective series with the Cultural Council, which had, amongst its tasks, overseeing the school newspaper. It had a secret service stealing the newspaper’s secrets. The editors were the police detectives solving the crime. It was a loony story featuring a teacher disguised as a standing twilight lamp, a preparation for a theatrical play that looked like a love affair between two teachers, a wild-west-style shoot-out and a dangerous-looking Basset hound with a degree in psychology. And it contained witticisms like, ‘He lay there as lifeless as a soccer match in Enter.’ Some children came from Enter, a village near Rijssen, and the guys were fanatic supporters of the local soccer club Enter Vooruit (Enter Forwards). So, apart from them, everyone had a good laugh.

Ikzwetsia became popular very fast and was a headache for the school board. Children brought copies home. Some parents complained, while other parents enjoyed reading the rag. We presumed the name Ikzwetsia would be telling enough, as it referred to the Dutch word for talking nonsense. But some people took it seriously nonetheless, so we added a cautionary note on the front page, saying, ‘Whoever takes this rag seriously is not taken seriously.’ Unlike the previous school paper, we didn’t need money from the school board because I had prepared a budget. We covered the expenses with subscription fees.

Featured image: College Noetsele by Historische Kring Hellendoorn-Nijverdal, from MijnStadMijnDorp, CC-BY 4.0

Under the Bridge

22 Aug 202515 Apr 2026 nivtricLeave a comment

In 1993, I moved to Groningen and rented a small apartment in Kraaienest, Lewenborg, a multicultural neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. Bus line 3 brought you there from the central station, which featured a statue of a horse named ‘Peerd from Ome Loeks’ and was opposite a colourful construct named Groninger Museum, designed by a famous architect. Also making up the local skyline were office buildings of the national telecom provider KPN. As for the central station, I was there often, as the train was my way of getting somewhere else. There, I once witnessed a dove challenging a bus by not flying or walking away as the bus was about to run over it. I saw and heard the dove get flattened with a juicy plash. Doves are pretty dumb, my father explained. Their nests consist of a few loose twigs that can barely hold the eggs. A little bit of wind, and the eggs or chicks fall on the ground. Despite all that, there are plenty of doves.

The Lewenborg quarter featured apartment blocks mixed with family homes. When telling my colleagues at work that I lived there, they felt sorry for me. ‘You live in Lewenborg. Oh… poor thing.’ It was not particularly upscale, indeed. Lewenborg had a questionable reputation, but that was grossly exaggerated. Those who didn’t live there didn’t know what life was like there. I had lived there for four years and never felt unsafe. Yet, if you look for ‘Kraaienest Groningen’ in a search engine, you may find that someone died there in 2014 as a result of a violent incident of a rather particular nature. There was drug dealing going on in the area, or so I had heard. I often wandered around, but never noticed it, probably because I didn’t know where to go. Likely, it was inside a home, and not on the street.

It was an ordinary neighbourhood. There were families with children, but if you had better options, you might go somewhere else. There was a shopping mall nearby, and in the first years I had to hurry to get my groceries in time, as the shops closed at 6 PM. I only knew my next-door neighbours vaguely. Next to me lived an elderly couple who had retired and sold their home. They had a German Shepherd dog that could make a lot of noise and did so regularly. I visited them a few times. On the other side lived a good-looking lady my age, but she showed no interest in me. She soon had a fancy man, or may already have had him. He must have seen my name tag, because at some point he accosted me, asking about my father, his employer, and his job.

And so, I told him that my father was a board member at a road construction company called Roelofs. It turned out that his father was also a board member of Roelofs and held a higher rank than my father, which he was rather keen to point out to me. That is also why my last name had attracted his attention. In hindsight, it was a noteworthy coincidence as Roelofs didn’t have that many board members. As the bedrooms were adjacent, I once overheard the couple having steamy sex. After some time, she moved out to live with him, but not much later, she returned to the Kraaienest and took another apartment. The neighbour who lived opposite me seemed to want to befriend me first. She had been ensnared in an American multi-tier marketing scheme selling ‘environmentally friendly’ cleaning products to enrich those at the top of the pyramid. She viewed me as a sales prospect. After hearing out her sales presentation, I bought something out of politeness.

A group of about thirty black males with dreadlocks often hung out near the shopping mall, in what the Dutch call a coffee shop, but which was, despite the name, a place to buy and smoke cannabis. At first glance, they seemed intimidating because there were so many, but as far as I could see, they did nothing more than hang around and smoke weed. I suspect their hanging around contributed to the neighbourhood’s bad reputation because there wasn’t much else going on. If you passed by, they were friendly. ‘Live and let live,’ was the Dutch stance on cannabis, which was officially banned, but no enforcement of that ban was the official policy of ‘tolerance’ concerning soft drugs. For those who think that hard drugs might be for sale there, too. I have never seen anything suggesting it or overheard anyone saying it. And I didn’t go inside to check out.

As a teenager, I had imagined there would one day be a giant Rastafari party in Nijverdal, likely because the river passing through Nijverdal is named Regge, which sounds like reggae. The party would be on the banks of the river, and the Rastafari from all over the world would come to Nijverdal. In hindsight, this is a coincidence worth noting. Rastafari is an Abrahamic messianic religion like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Rastafarians see Haile Selassie I, the former Emperor of Ethiopia, as a reincarnation of Jesus. Significant dates in the Rastafarian religion are 11 September (9/11 American notation), the Ethiopian New Year, and 2 November (11/2 American notation), which correspond to emergency services numbers in the United States and the European Union. And there, they were hanging around in droves, near my home.

Life had turned for the better. I had a job and, more importantly, a place of my own. It was not marvellous, but not as bad as it had been. And if your life turns from miserable to not-so-great, you can be content. Your well-being greatly depends on things exceeding expectations, making me appreciate Garfield’s ‘If you don’t succeed, lower your standards’ quote. I went out often alone, hoping for the love that might come while dancing all night to rock music. Yet, the past still cast a dark shadow over the present,

Sometimes I feel
Like I don’t have a partner
Sometimes I feel
Like my only friend
Is the city I live in
…
I don’t ever want to feel
Like I did that day

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Under The Bridge

That day was 13 October 1989 when I left the dormitory. The city was Groningen, where I lived alone and without a partner. I started collecting Garfield comics. Garfield is a cat well-known for its fatness and cynicism. Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, could make cynical remarks about Garfield’s figure or laziness, which Garfield would then counter with even more cynical remarks on Arbuckle’s conduct or success in life. Arbuckle was an out-of-style country guy like me who had ended up in a city without a love life. Jon Arbuckle. That was the kind of guy I could relate to. And I didn’t even have a cat.

Women have become economically independent, and men, on average, crave women more, or perhaps sex, than women desire men, so more men than women end up involuntarily single. And women can be more picky because they don’t need a man to provide for them anymore. This problem didn’t exist in the past because men were the providers and women had fewer rights. Feminism solved a few problems but also created new ones, and this problem might have remained under the radar. Men don’t talk about their problems, so women’s issues get the most attention.

Once, I met a lady in Groningen. She had travelled a lot and seen much of the world, whereas I hadn’t. She immediately concluded, and these were her exact words, ‘I hadn’t much to offer her.’ I was a provincial, and there was no point in getting to know me. I agreed. There was no point in getting to know her. Her attitude was like,

I’ve known a few guys who thought they were pretty smart
But you’ve got being right down to an art
You think you’re a genius, you drive me up the wall
You’re a regular original, a know-it-all

Oh-oh, you think you’re special
Oh-oh, you think you’re something else
Okay, so you’re a rocket scientist

That don’t impress me much

…

Okay, so what do you think, you’re Elvis or something?
Whatever
That don’t impress me

Shania Twain, That don’t impress me much

And who do you think you are? Can you stop time? You can’t even handle the English language correctly. ‘That don’t impress me much.’ Women had long lists of requirements a man should meet. Men also have their wishes. They want hot supermodels, even if they’re not rich or good-looking, but they are more likely to compromise on their demands. Yet, with men and women being like that, hookers have a lot of business. Prostitution is the oldest profession for good reason. I never considered visiting a prostitute. It would have been a disappointment anyhow, or so I figured.

Some of my friends never found a wife. They would have made good husbands, much better than the jerks many women select. My friends weren’t particularly adventurous or glamorous. Every market has winners and losers, as does the market for spouses. Once, in a pub, an Asian woman approached me out of the blue. She asked me if I was willing to die for her. My reply was frank and prompt: ‘No.’ I wasn’t that desperate. And so, she moved on. In hindsight, the incident was yet another noteworthy coincidence. What was wrong with women? Did they think that men merely exist to please them? Not all women were like that, but those still on the market often were. And women had only brought me misery with nothing good to show for it. Women weren’t worth the effort, so apathy was setting in. Not that I entirely gave up trying.

A friend from my student years came over to Groningen. We went to a pub with a dance floor. A short but muscular man suddenly demanded that I leave. He seemed angry. In hindsight, I probably hit his face with my elbow while dancing, since he was close behind me, but I was unaware of it and didn’t realise there was a problem. I also didn’t recognise him as the pub’s bouncer, so I continued dancing. He then gave me a terrible beating and threw me out of the pub, severely injuring me so that I couldn’t work for two weeks. I filed a report with the police. I didn’t hear from them, so after a week, I called.

The police officer responsible for the case wasn’t in, so the police asked me to call again on another day. That happened a few times until, after a month, I managed to get hold of him. They weren’t going to do anything. It was a low-priority matter. And he began lecturing about police priorities. Justice was served nonetheless. About six months later, a local newspaper mentioned that the police had apprehended the guy for beating up an immigrant for no reason. It became treated as a case of racism, and at the time, racism had a high priority with the police.

We also visited Nijverdal. I had hoped to surprise my mother, but she wasn’t at home. From there, we went to Enschede. I showed Princess the university campus. We also went to the German border near Enschede, at Glanerbrug. At the frontier, Princess attracted the attention of some locals in a pub. When Princess went to the toilet, one of them came after her and offered her money for sex. It was at least one hundred guilders, as Princess described his offer as a pile of banknotes with a one-hundred-guilder note on top. And the guy became pushy, even though not threatening. He offered to drive us to Enschede or wherever we wanted to go several times. We had come to Enschede by train and, from there, by bus to Glanerbrug.

Princess didn’t see any problem with stepping into his car. She was sturdy enough to handle the guy, but I smelled trouble and insisted on taking the next bus out. She was genuinely surprised. On the bus back to Enschede, she asked me, ‘Why do you allow me to chat with guys in the pubs in Groningen but don’t allow him to bring us back?’ Princess seemed to think I was possessive. I said to her, ‘He is an asshole.’ Then she suddenly turned thankful for me being protective. And it dawned upon her that the whole situation wasn’t quite right. That showed the conditions of the ghetto where she had grown up. She later married a German guy. We later changed addresses and lost contact by 1997. Around 2013, she found me on LinkedIn and reached out to me again. She worked for the US Army in Germany and was still married to him. They had a son together.

In 1994, I received an invitation to a singles party on a boat in Amsterdam. They had invited me because I had put in a personal advertisement the year before. On my way there on the train, I accidentally bumped into two guys from Almelo who were also going there. Nijverdal is close to Almelo, so we came from the same region, Twente. That created a bond and a mutual understanding. The guys from Almelo were discussing the disappointment they were about to get. One of them said, ‘The great thing about these events is the anticipation.’

After a decade of disappointments, there was hardly any anticipation on my part. And the previous five years had counted as twenty. When I moved to the university campus, I was twenty but immature, like a fifteen-year-old boy. Five years later, I had grown mature like a thirty-five-year-old. The intense memories still hung over me like a shadow. A clear division had emerged between life before and life after meeting A******* in the dormitory. These were two entirely different lives. When in Enschede, I sometimes returned to the campus to take a walk in the nearby forest and think about all that had happened.

Latest revision: 9 April 2026

Featured image: Kombuisflat in Lewenborg. H. de Vegt (2005). CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Secondary School

4 Jun 202530 Jul 2025 nivtricLeave a comment

Nijverdal had a secondary school, Noetsele College. It was a Protestant comprehensive school with 1,500 pupils. It was near my friend Marc’s home. The building impressed me. It was huge and three storeys high. Okay, this was Nijverdal, not Tokyo, remember that. It was one of the most extensive buildings in Nijverdal. My primary school had only 200 pupils and one floor. My mother once told me we had passed by that building bicycling, and I said decisively, ‘I want to go to this school.’ It was close to home, and perhaps I feared she would send me to Pope Pius X College in Almelo, a similar Catholic school where many Roman Catholics sent their children. That was eighteen kilometres from home, which meant bicycling that distance twice a day for years, no matter the weather.

In contrast to the liberal, loose, and left-leaning primary school, this school was right-leaning, disciplined, and conservative. Conservative Protestants had a significant influence. Nearby Nijverdal was Rijssen, a conservative Protestant village without a comprehensive secondary school. People from Rijssen thus sent their children to Nijverdal. About Rijssen, people said there were twenty-two different churches because of the various types of Protestantism that disagreed on a particular matter. Television was a device of Satan for many of them, so they didn’t have one or hid it in a sealable closet so the neighbours and the preacher couldn’t see it.

When we visited my grandparents on Sundays, we saw them attending church, the black-stockinged Protestants. The women wore hats. They didn’t observe the traffic, so my father had to stop the car when they crossed the street. Someone later told me that if they died in an accident, they considered it God’s will. To these conservative Protestants, Roman Catholics like me weren’t real Christians but idol worshippers of the Virgin Mary. Our days at school started with a lecture from the Bible and ended with prayer. Nijverdal was predominantly Protestant, but there were also Roman Catholics.

I did fit in much better there, so my former classmates didn’t give me a hero’s welcome at the secondary school reunion. Marc was my classmate during the first year, so I still had a friend. In the second year, they reshuffled the groups, and I ended up in a different group with a great atmosphere. That group included a few classmates from primary school, but Marc was no longer in it. On Ascension Day, we went out bicycling. We started early, at six AM. It was a local tradition in Twente called dew kicking. A few classmates, including me, continue that tradition to this day. After that, no major reshuffling of the classes occurred. I had a good time and hardly went out alone during breaks.

Instead of Marc, Patrick P. became my mate. He sat beside me. I knew him from primary school. He was a lively character with a vivid imagination, albeit a bit over the top. He made drawings of our business accounting teacher, Mr B*****, in various Superman outfits and then prodded me during the lessons to attract attention, ‘Look… look… SuperB*****.’ He had a small studio in an attic above a garage, where he could be a disc jockey. Patrick hoped to become a celebrity one day, which indeed happened, as he was on television and radio several times, even though not as a disc jockey, but as a traffic expert.

It was not all calm and peaceful. For all those six years, my math teacher was Mr. B****. We initially had a problematic relationship. When Mr. B**** entered the classroom the first time, I said sarcastically to Marc, who sat beside me, ‘Is he our mathematics teacher?’ Mr. B**** had an insignificant stature and a remarkable face. He had heard it, and ordered me to his desk, noted my name, and promised to ‘polish the sharp edges of my personality.’ To his very personal taste, I was a bit too feisty, so from then on, Mr. Blaak frequently punished me for insignificant offences everyone else got away with.

Nearly every week, I had to stay an extra hour, which was more time than all my classmates combined. I worked hard and had good grades. Still, Mr. B**** tried to catch me for not doing my homework. He meticulously inspected my notebook a few times. It was pointless. I always did my homework, and did it all. At some point, after being punished again for something everyone else got away with, I couldn’t take it anymore, and went into tears. That was nearly two years later. Mr. B**** had gone too far, and he knew. He stopped punishing me, but I didn’t stop making jokes about him. Once, I let my notebook go around the class with a fill-in exercise, allowing my classmates to use their imagination on ‘Mr. B**** is a … because he … while he ….’ My classmates came up with over twenty suggestions, some of which were rancid.

Once they were sixteen, many youngsters went to a bar named Lucky in Rijssen. I didn’t go at first. I lived on the road to Rijssen, so those who came from Nijverdal to visit Lucky passed by my home. One Saturday evening, a few classmates rang the bell at nine PM. They wanted me to go with them. Being already in my pyjamas, I put on my clothes and went to a bar for the first time. Going to bars and discotheques became a habit. I could dance, chat with friends, and hope for love to come. The encounters in Lucky were sometimes a bit physical. Some girls pulled me over to get a kiss. Others pinched me in the butt when I passed by. If I looked back to see who did it, these girls were grinning and pointing at each other. It always happened in the same spots. You could count on it. One of my friends later told me he had the same experience.

I became a member of the School Council, which advised the school board on some matters of lesser importance. This council comprised board members, teachers, parents, and three pupils. It wasn’t a popular job, so after showing a slight interest, I found myself a member. There, I witnessed firsthand how bureaucrats keep themselves busy at work. The school had a Financial Commission, which had overstepped its bounds by entering the domain of the Cultural Council. I don’t remember what the Financial Commission did wrong, but it caused a fuss. The discussions then focused on whether that had been inappropriate, thus a transgression, or inelegant, and therefore merely a matter of taste. It dragged on for several meetings because the head of the Financial Commission was also a member of the School Council. A member of the Cultural Council accused the Financial Commission of appropriating too much power and acting like the famous authoritarian French king Louis XIV, thereby creating, and these were his exact words, a ‘L’etat c’est moi’ situation, referring to something Louis XIV supposedly had said to stress that only he made the decisions. Louis XIV claimed to have the divine right of kings, thus unlimited authority, because God had appointed him.