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 outcome 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 also one of the least nationalist countries. In their preparedness to die for their country, the Dutch score low, according to a Reddit survey. The country is most closely tied to both the continental European and Anglo-Saxon worlds. Together with Great Britain, the Netherlands is the most oriented toward the United States. 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. And being culturally close to Scandinavia, it was one of the least corrupt countries. These facts are noteworthy the role of culture in the script.

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, to a degree uncommon in most countries. In many ways, the Netherlands has progressed the furthest. Yet, 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, including Muslims, the crossroads of world civilisation. That wasn’t on my mind at the time. 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. That dates back to the Dutch Republic, which became an attractive place for Jews to live in. There had long been parallel societies with Protestants, Catholics and socialists living separate lives. 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. That same tolerance was the stance towards immigrants for a long time. Yet, in that sense, the Netherlands didn’t differ much 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 as immigrants continued to arrive, causing increasing unease. The progressive values many Dutch cherished didn’t agree with the conservative worldviews of many immigrants, most notably Muslims. These feelings needed a catalyst 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 desired to limit immigration, most notably of people who had trouble adapting. Only, no politician said it that plainly as Fortuyn did. The others were 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. If there is ever to be world peace, the world must unite and become one multicultural society. Living with people from different cultures isn’t easy and could easily go wrong, and I knew that because of what had 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 as it represented a clear break with the past, occurring in what many believed was the world’s most liberal country.

Having lived in neighbourhoods with ethnic minorities myself, it was clear to me that the picture fascists presented was not reality itself. Yet, we are spectators of history unfolding. Had you tried to stand in the way of the marching brown shirts in Germany in the 1930s, you would have ended up in a concentration camp. 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 returned years later to IEX, he praised me 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, I am not alone. 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, and they were the most colourful ones. 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 usually a bit edgy and irritable, making me think that his life as a parasite didn’t work out so well for him, and he would have to work for a living again. I didn’t make those kinds of comments, so that was not why 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 so about my upvote, which was particularly odd, as he had done the same to me several times before, never missing a single opportunity. That made me think that he was, as Gung Ho implied, on his way to a nervous breakdown, thereby confirming the prejudice of psychiatrists choosing their profession because of having mental issues themselves.

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. And I believed 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 kindled my interest in Muslims and their beliefs. And why is there trouble? That made me join the message board Maroc.nl for people with a Moroccan background in 2004. They are a disregarded minority. Most notably, young Moroccan men cause trouble. Some other minority groups also have issues, but Moroccans receive the most negative attention. Indeed, 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.’

Historical causes have contributed to the issue. The Netherlands had 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 long been secondary citizens in a country dominated by Arab culture. That came with brutal repression in the past. Today, the Moroccan government recognises their culture and language. The Dutch expected them to return home, so they 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 youngsters found their way into gang culture. Their culture of 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.

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. I have been on it for two decades, not every day, but regularly. 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.’ That goes a long way in explaining the issue. A psychologists might call it a inferiority complex. Like Pim Fortuyn, they act out hysterically. Yet, if you are a bit self-critical, and less hostile, others will like you much better.

There were a few agitators from both sides, so Moroccans and Dutch, 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. 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.

Violence against LGBTQ people is one of the issues at play, and also Jews. Some posters on the message board 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. 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. Statisticians look at percentages of the population, which makes more sense. The message board had a diversity of opinions and an exchange of views. 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 for a considerable time, and for no obvious reason, so the only reason could have been that I was Dutch, 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. Again, a psychologist might attribute it to 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 alone. 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, and that goes a long way in explaining violent incidents against Jews. Islam itself, like Christianity, is not hostile against Jews, but Muslims and Christians can be, and Jews can be hostile to Muslims and Christians where they are the majority, like in Israel. 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 have 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 don’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 and merit. As a Hegelian dialectic indicates, there is an underlying truth, whatever that may be. In any case, the West was not morally superior. 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 Netherlands has been a major contributor to the American war effort in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that 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 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. That may also be because 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 not everyone would openly write about having been in prison, and 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. 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 has a problem. One is that 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 makes matters worse for those who do well, but it is hard to change opinions among the Dutch as long as there is a problem.

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 Moroccans 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 has a Moroccan or Turkish heritage. That is not due to neglect of Dutch government. 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 was fine 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. A black American woman working at the United Nations raised the issue, and black 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 issues, some apocalyptical even, making the conflict resemble a fight on the deck of the sinking Titanic.

Finally, there is the question of allegiance. Moroccans can’t renounce their nationality, and their children born in the Netherlands automatically become Moroccans. 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. Yet, 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. And it works two ways. Western culture is also problematic. 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. Yet, few places in the world are better. As for discrimination, it only stops once we have become one people. There will be no gain without pain, which I experienced firsthand as a student. For those who cause trouble and don’t change their ways, the consequences will, at some point, be brutal, like it was for me.

Latest revision: 4 May 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.