I’ve thought a lot about MP Bente Becker (VVD) this week. More than I would like, and also more than this embodiment of Western vanity and laziness actually deserves. Her motion to keep cultural data of people with a migration background is not only a suspicion of norms other than Dutch. It also suggests that Dutch values deserve to be followed. As if Dutch culture contains the highest possible civilization (a scornful laugh is appropriate here).
Her short-sightedness reminds me of the young men and women I met in high school and later at university. Neat boys and girls who grew up in a well-organized world in which they were the only perspective, so that in their own experience their perspective was the whole world. Unlike my own formative years, in a working-class neighborhood where Turkish women picnicked in Dutch dunes and taught their children to pick blackberries without staining their clothes too much. It was a childhood with Moroccan neighbors playing tag, and Dutch housewives who opened their windows in the summer to smoke self-rolled cigarettes, BZN at high volume, providing unsolicited commentary on everything that was happening under their balcony.
My Surinamese perspectives sometimes conflicted confusingly with the Dutch ones, during Sinterklaas and his black-faced servant, or with Muslim friends whose culture just didn’t fit with my family’s Mohammedan background. That confusion ultimately turned out to be enriching because, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, I knew more because I had experienced more. More than the neat VVD youth, who are now politically working out their unworldliness in the person of Bente Beckers.
She was shocked by the reactions to her motion, Becker said herself. It was absolutely not intended to treat non-Western Dutch people differently from natives (although that is exactly what the motion entails, which does raise some questions about Becker’s intelligence) but rather to conduct ‘the debate’ on the basis of facts. What debate is that? Oh yes, the debate in which every argument is aimed at reconciling citizens with the idea that every conceivable problem in the Netherlands is the fault of immigrants. “Leave us the fuck alone,” sighed the Leiden historian Miko Flohr. Let me add: fuck off with your evil unworldliness, Becker. I’m busy enough trying to explain to people like you what real civilization means. That it is not Western, but universal. Something that starts with humanity, with protecting the weakest among us. And also: self-criticism, something that the Netherlands seems to have unlearned a long time ago.
Because where Becker in her semi-soft apology video says that “we must investigate where things are not going well”, she of course means that we only investigate where things are not going well among immigrants.
Political civilization, I would say to Becker, also means thinking about what you and your party have done that has set society back points. Or: what life-threatening decisions your political friends have now pushed through. Such as the malicious decision by Minister Faber (Asylum, PVV) and State Secretary Coenradie (Prison Service, PVV) to stop psychiatric assistance to asylum seekers. Regardless of the inhumanity of the decision to deny help to suffering people, society only becomes less safe when people with war or other trauma end up on the streets. It is then a matter of time before there are victims – after which politicians can again point to the perpetrators: foreigners.
So leave the immigrants alone, Bente Becker, and focus on what is really going wrong: a lack of insight, because our political leaders are too busy bullying immigrants to realize that their extreme right-wing cabinet is doing more and more every day. becomes alienated from the multicultural reality. It is an unworldliness that endangers us as citizens, but also as a civilization.
Karin Amatmoekrim is a writer and man of letters.