Ian Buruma on the Netherlands after the Van Gogh murder.

[randomness]

from http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050103fa_fact1:

"After the war, and especially since the nineteen-sixties, the Dutch prided themselves on having built an oasis of tolerance, a kind of Berkeley writ large, where people were free to do their own thing. Liberated, at last, from the strictures of religion and social conformity, the Dutch, especially in Amsterdam, frolicked in the expectation that the wider world would not disturb their perfect democracy in the polders. Now the turbulent world has come to Holland at last, crashing into an idyll that astonished the citizens of less favored nations. It’s a shame that this had to happen, but naïveté is the wrong state of mind for defending one of the oldest and most liberal democracies against those who wish to destroy it."

(Btw, bryant, I thought of your email to me when I read this.)

Comments

[bryant]

Heh.

I keep thinking about Alan Berg when I read about the Van Gogh murder. Of course, Alan Berg's killers are winning the talk radio battle, so I dunno what that says about the future of the Netherlands.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Zounds, too true. For forty years, the main threats were other nation-states, Germany and the USSR, but the UK and US protected the Dutch from them. But the modern threats are individual fanatics, and the military-industrial complex can't really protect them from that.