So, you know, there is an election this week in Holland, Wednesday in fact, to choose a new government.
And we all know the Dutch to be a tolerant, democratic people, a beacon in the dark for more than 400 years of European history, from the time they broke away from Spain and became a Republic about 1600; a people open to change and discourse, democracy and diversity. That tolerance plus windmills and ice skates, tulips and a boy’s finger in the dike are our images of Holland.
But now, it seems, there is a chance that the boy will pull his finger out of democracy’s dike and let loose in Holland the worst and ugliest impulse of humanity, which is hate and fear that is always aimed at the other, whoever the other is deemed to be. Today in Holland some deem it be their Muslim community.
In fact if the Dutch do not like dealing with the Islamic world, if that’s what propels the way they vote, then who do they have to blame for their involvement with it but themselves?
Ever hear of the Dutch East Indies? Today we call that Indonesia, which has 260 million people, of whom 90 percent are Muslim. Indonesians constitute one fifth of the world’s Muslims.
That’s why, in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Dutch fleet in the Pacific rallied to our cause, engaged with the Japanese in alliance with us and with Britain,which was defending Singapore, Burma, Malaya and Hong Kong. The fate of the Dutch fleet? Total destruction in those first months of the war in the Pacific.
So if there are Muslims in Amsterdam and throughout Holland today it is for the same reason there are Muslims in Britain (Pakistan and India) and in France (Algeria and Morocco). That reason? Unbridled, unyielding, imperial and imperiously murderous 19th and 20th Century European colonialism.
That being so, can you really turn around 150 years or 100 years later and protest the fact that you have a Muslim population because you took what was theirs and misappropriated it to yourselves?
Why did the Japanese want the Dutch East Indies, have to take it, have to take what is now Indonesia? Oil. Indonesia has a lot of it. It was their main strategic resource target in the Pacific because, before Pearl Harbor, we embargoed oil delivery to Japan to press them to reduce their imperial expansion in China and southeast Asia.
Now. the circle is square or the square is circled, but it all comes full circle in the person of Gert Wilders, the fascist who is challenging everything that we think of as Dutch, selling the same stuff Trump sold — selling hatred of Muslims.
There is the chance, remote, but the chance that he and his party, which really is him, could gain sufficient traction in the election to steer the choice of Holland’s next government, which will necessarily, with well more than a dozen parties, have to be a coalition.
It isn’t likely he can win but Wilders might get up to, even north of 20 percent of the vote. No one knows or will know until the votes are counted. But the decision is less than two days away and everyone is worried.I am. You should be too.
They should be too, the decent Dutch. I think there are enough Hollanders with enough sense to wall him off. But we won’t know that until they count the votes, which they are going to cast with paper ballots this year because they watched what happened here. Paper ballots are low tech, not electronic. Russians can’t screw with them.
And you are reading about this and find it astounding? Coming from the Dutch? Coming from the people who sheltered the Pilgrims before they set sail on the Mayflower and the Speedwell? Yes, there were two ships.
Astonished it could be coming from the people in whose capital city, Amsterdam, Ann Frank and her family were protected by Dutch men and women? Until they weren’t, until they were betrayed by other Dutch people.
Well we know Dutch resistance to Germany was fierce during WWII and that the Dutch, many — many but not all — did their utmost to resist.
But Wilders — who actually was at the Republican National Convention this year to support Trump and addressed some delegates — Wilders represents a strain of Dutch thinking you don’t want to know much about, much less think about. But you have to know it if you want to understand where we are — not where the Dutch are — where we are.
Dutch is a form of old German, the language. To the Germans, those Germans circa 1933 to 1945, the Dutch looked kindred. Tall, well formed, blond — all that “Aryan” stuff. So the Germans set out to recruit the sons of Holland to their cause.
You can read about it here in the Wikipedia article I’ve linked, how tens of thousands of Dutchmen enlisted, willingly enlisted with and fought and died for Nazi Germany.
That being so and it is/was, Gert Wilders should not be the surprise he seems to be. He represents a miserable but real strain in Dutch political, public and, yes, private life. It is not the majority, far from it so far. But it is and has been a formidable minority in Holland. It was there in 1942. It’s there now.
For that history, see this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23rd_SS_Volunteer_Panzer_Grenadier_Division_Nederland
Let’s wait to see what the Dutch decide.
It will tell us a lot about where Europe is headed; and that could tell us still more about where we are headed.
Peeling the Onion 
Good historical reminder. The whole mass migration from the global south to the global north world over the past couple of decades is definitely problematical and quite complicated. The roots, as you say, are definitely in the era of European colonialism, and we’re watching the fruit come to ripen now. In the aftermath of colonialism, so many former colonies more or less self-destructed under greedy, corrupt, and rapacious local leaders, e.g., Amin, Mobutu, Muzorewa, et al, in Africa, Sukarno and Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, the current regime in Malaysia. All these places have either an Islamic majority or substantial minorities. But religion is not the driver of the migrations; economics is. Even in predominantly Christian countries in Africa, for example, many are heading north to the colonial “parents” to find a better life. At the American Church in Paris, we experienced a virtual flood of economic refugees and refugees from the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. They were virtually all Christians, but they were still coming. The modest German Methodist congregation in Hamburg, which numbered about 150 people or so, opened their doors to welcome some migrants from former German or Anglophone colonies, and within just a couple of years, found themselves outnumbered three or four to one in their own facilities. Such rapid shifts in demographics do tend to awaken peoples’ worst nativist instincts and their economic/cultural fears of being overwhelmed. And the whole Syrian chaos and the Iraqi chaos that we created have only made the whole mess worse. Every country has its populist “rednecks” who want to blame the migrants. I desperately hope that Wilders in Holland and Le Pen in France, and their counterparts in the other EU states will not carry the day, but after watching our own debacle with mounting horror, I’m not terribly optimistic that a peaceful and humane solution will be easily found.
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