I didn’t go on vacation this summer, but I did go into hiding – which is also a kind of vacation. I hardly read newspapers, I did not watch the news. The reason was that a book had to be written and a new house furnished (which turned out to be surprisingly easy to combine with writing). Also, a father had to be buried, mine to be exact. Grief and a soft kind of contentment went hand in hand this summer, and I was careful to count my blessings because what more can you do when the most important things – I think love, health, safety – are beyond your control.
Summer was coming to an end, so I read the headlines, the op-eds, watched the television interviews, and returned to the world outside my new home, outside my new book. I saw sensation-seeking men drinking beer and posting racist slogans at asylum seekers’ centres. They set off fireworks, threatened politicians, hung the Dutch flag upside down and complained, remarkably giggly, about the danger posed by foreigners, as if they didn’t quite believe it themselves. I certainly don’t believe that fear. A baby died in a sports hall, and healthy Dutch men still chose anger over compassion. This was not fear, I saw. This was a complete lack of civilization.
A country gets the barbarians it deserves, and these are ours: people who get lost in conspiracy theories, get stuck in a mistrust of politics without wanting to bring real change in return. They pelt refugees with eggs and yogurt and claim to want to dismantle democracy, blissfully unaware that every other political system harbors a thousand germs of violence.
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I know, I now put a lot of things in one heap, but that is only allowed once. The fact remains that these are them, the barbarians in their own ranks. The grinning, flammable because secretly very bored men and women who are blind to their own inability to adapt to a changing world. The man who would rather invent an enemy than try to imagine how he would feel if he had to flee himself. I can’t blame them because we created them ourselves.
These men and women have matured in a country where for decades the multicultural society as a source of misery has been talked about so much that they have come to believe that the Self is eternally comfortable, and the Other simply the danger. So much attention and energy has been devoted to hate speech in recent years that there was nothing left for any civic education, for the transmission of that fragile and ephemeral idea that you can judge a people’s civilization by the degree to which it is the most vulnerable. protecting individuals. This is how we treat the most vulnerable people: we pelt them, we let them sleep on the street. We let them die in a gym.
The rest of the Netherlands looks on, shaking their heads, but does nothing. Keeping refugees away is still the top priority for most of us. We still think it’s the savage who come from outside, who want to take everything we hold dear. I feel we should count our blessings as passionately as possible. To be thankful for the freedom we still have, and the security. Because look at us sitting down; entrenched behind the walls to defend us, along with those barbarians we ourselves have created – and no wall to protect us from them.
Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 6, 2022