There are three forms of unimaginableness. Three moments, I mean, when you can imagine something impossible. There is unimaginability before, after and during.
You cannot imagine in advance that something is going to happen and so you do nothing for the time being. During you can’t imagine that something actually happens, at least not here, not in the Netherlands, not in Europe, so you actively pretend it doesn’t happen. And afterwards you can’t imagine that something could have happened, but it actually happened and so after fifty or a hundred years you apologize.
Prime Minister Rutte has had the task of apologizing on behalf of the government several times in recent years. Two weeks ago to the people of Indonesia for “the systematic and extreme violence” during the Indonesian National Revolution and “the consistent look away by previous cabinets”. In 2020, he apologized for government actions in World War II. “The bitter consequences of registration and deportation were not recognized in time and not sufficiently.”
Slavery, police actions, cooperation in the deportation of Jews: in retrospect it is difficult to imagine that a society would ever have considered such a thing permissible. That there has been a culture in which violence or persecution has been deliberately ignored, tolerated and facilitated. After you start to wonder a little more about it every year, after half a century comes the moment when you apologize for it.
In the year 2072, the Prime Minister will apologize for the way in which the Netherlands treated animals in slaughterhouses fifty years earlier. According to reports from 2022 of the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, pigs are still poorly sedated in red-hot water. A state secretary said a few years ago that such an excess does not occur in the Netherlands, but it does.
Slaughterhouses violate welfare rules, employees do not meet training requirements, violations take place in the presence of inspectors and cameras, supervision intervenes sparsely. Reports about it crop up every year, and then disappear again. Animals suffer terribly and end up in the supermarket in packages with all the twinkling stars of the Beter Leven Keurmerk on them. This way you can eat kale with bacon without imagining that the pig may have been cooked alive.
Frankly, you can’t even imagine it actually happening. And that’s handy, because then you don’t have to do anything about it for the time being.
In the year 2092, researchers will investigate why in 2022 Dutch municipalities, police and ministries used Chinese cameras for surveillance. Why could officials not imagine, they will ask, that it is unwise to outsource politically sensitive IT solutions to parties outside Europe? To countries with little sympathy for the democratic constitutional state?
It is unimaginable, they will say, that the Netherlands protected itself so little against foreign domination and with the approval of the Dutch Information Security Service IBD open all the gates innocently. Nota bene in a world where war was waged via malware, where foreign elections were influenced via disinformation, a time when Dutch servers from Russia were used to carry out cyber attacks on Ukraine†
And it is incomprehensible, they will add, that the smartphone was introduced as a method of enforcing rules from above, without thinking about the rule of law consequences of enforcement by app. It is unimaginable that no thought was given to the power shifts that occurred by digitally controlling citizens for their behavior.
Citizens were hardly interested. They sent risky information in all directions and acted en masse like the infamous gossip journalist who revealed online during a hostage situation that there were hostages hidden in the closet. In the Netherlands and Europe of 2022, physical borders were closed to refugee flows, but the cyber borders were wide open to dictatorial regimes.
It was not a bad thing, the Prime Minister will conclude in 2072 and the researchers in 2092. It was lack of imagination. imagination. You couldn’t imagine that something terrible was going to happen and then couldn’t imagine it happening—and in hindsight, you couldn’t imagine for the best that it had happened. So that only excuses remained.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of March 1, 2022