The Dutch showpiece

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, 14 April 2005 13:17.

There’s been another survey showing a disintegration of Dutch national feeling. The survey found that 32% of the Dutch wish to emigrate and that only 51% feel proud of their country.

Why such negativity? According to the researchers, people complained about “political developments, multiculturalism, over-population, criminality and socially distant people.”

What makes this situation especially interesting is that The Netherlands has always been held up as a showpiece of liberalism. It is what we are all meant to be heading toward. And yet multiculturalism has already been so destructive of a sense of Dutch national community that a third of the population wants to leave.

This confirms one of those thoughts I have long harboured as a conservative: that after the ethny is destroyed people won’t care so much anymore. They won’t have that sense of connectedness to a particular place, people and tradition which once existed. The liberal appeal to the “nation” will ring increasingly hollow.

What of the resistance in Holland to the multicult? I came across an article recently which reported a ban on a march through Rotterdam by a group calling itself Nieuw Rechts (New Right). The article associated this group with “extreme-right” youths, who distinguish themselves by wearing Lonsdale clothing.

I journeyed to the group’s website expecting something like the National Front. But instead I found a manifesto which was surprisingly liberal. Yes, it seeks to preserve a Dutch culture, but one which is defined largely in liberal terms of freedom of the individual and equality. The alternative to multiculturalism it proposes is for “people of varying descent and ethnicity” to be united by such “common values”.

So is there a liberal opposition to liberalism? In a way, I think so. It’s long been noted that liberalism has a self-destructive quality: liberals support mass immigration by people who are radically hostile to liberalism itself.

In The Netherlands, this process has advanced far enough for liberals to have to face the problem. Some liberals, it seems, are quite logically concluding that for liberalism itself to survive mass immigration has to stop, assimilation to “Dutch” (liberal) values by migrants has to occur, and those migrants unwilling to assimilate should, as the New Right manifesto suggests, “be enabled to return to their homeland.”

Of course, I would much rather a more explicitly conservative opposition to multiculturalism. One which is willing to say openly that individual autonomy is not the only political aim of a society and that an established, mainstream ethnicity is important to the life of an individual and ought to be conserved.

Nonetheless, it’s still a real step forward for a section of the political class to turn against mass immigration and “diversity”. It ought to encourage us to know that even liberals can learn from reality, even if it takes a crisis to force such a rethink.

Tags: Immigration

Comments:

Posted by Stuka on Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:45 | #

Yes, it seeks to preserve a Dutch culture, but one which is defined largely in liberal terms of freedom of the individual and equality. The alternative to multiculturalism it proposes is for “people of varying descent and ethnicity” to be united by such “common values”.

Hmmm. Sounds like the same old liberal wolf—in Lonsdale clothing, this time. Progress will be made in Europe only when true Nationalists—not faint liberal imitations—acquire power.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:52 | #

What I want to know is: what kind of psycho dresses up for liberalism?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:55 | #

Well yeah, Mark, little Holland’s in pretty rough shape right now—but that’s only to be expected: the racists, the anti-LGBT( * ) crowd, and other bigots are still hanging around. But just think how GREAT it’ll be once the fascist third of the population who want to leave will have cleared out for good and been replaced entirely by Moroccans, with the new multi-culti government there cracking down hard on Dutchmen who stay, just in case they get any—you know—“funny ideas” (white racists like that are capable of anything)! Why, it’ll be paradise on earth—a new Dutch Golden Age to make Rembrandt jealous! I can’t WAIT!
_____

( * ) for all you bigoted out there who don’t know what LGBT meanth, it’th Lethbian, Gay, Bithekthual, and Twanthgender. So there, you fascithtth!

Posted by Phil Peterson on Thu, 14 Apr 2005 19:28 | #

for all you bigoted out there who don’t know what LGBT meanth, it’th Lethbian, Gay, Bithekthual, and Twanthgender. So there, you fascithtth!

Fred, I didn’t know you spoke fluent yiddish!:)

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 15 Apr 2005 14:41 | #

Phil, I don’t know if I represented a “lithp” convincingly there, but I trust readers understood I was venting some frustrations. Actually, <u>Steve</u> points out (somewhere in his archives) that the male homosexual lisp isn’t actually a “lithp” but more an exaggerated sibilance (which may or may not include a very slightly lisp), sort of “lissssp,” or “lisss(th)p.” Al Gore, not a homosexual apparently, was doing it during his campaign and it made him sound like a homosexual—it certainly did to my ear. He may have lost some votes because of that subtle pronunciation defect (but who knows?—maybe he gained some and it balanced out). Two more points: in my attempted “lisping parody” of a liberal, above, I was only partly thinking of the male-homosexual variety of liberal. There are plenty of whiney, limp-wristed male liberals who aren’t homosexuals, who talk in a grating, effeminate, self-pitying fashion that it’s easy to think of as “lisping” though it seldom actually is. Rush Limbaugh quite often parodies this kind of liberal male by putting on a whiney, high-pitched, weak-voiced, lisping, mincing way of talking as he imitates what they say, so I’m not the only one who pictures them as lisping, childish sissies though they usually don’t actually lisp. It’s easy to picture the groom in <u>this</u> New York Times wedding announcement (also gleaned from Steve) as the kind of liberal male who speaks like that (whether or not he does in real life). The other point is I don’t go round making fun of people’s speech defects or other personal imperfections, real or imagined, but there are times when liberals really and truly just push their crap too far, to the point where others just “let them have it with both barrels.” Sorry about that ... (hey I never claimed to be perfect ...)

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sat, 16 Apr 2005 09:53 | #

Fred,

Those liberal encounters were probably the direct consequence of living for far too many years in liberal “Noo Yoiek”.