[Grojlach]

Originally posted by MagiK: quote: Originally posted by johnny: It's not a very violent place, but when you make statements like: Closing the borders for all immigrants that's what you can expect. Well, either that or eggs, tomatoes, pie, stuff like that. And if you say it out loud on TV, someone might even take a shot at you.

Im still trying to figure out what was so offensive as to prompt people to commit assault? Can you help me out here? I am still missing why closing borders is such a bad thing? Especially in lite of big a problem the illegal alien issue is. How does Holland handle illegal aliens? [/QUOTE]MagiK, don't pay too much attention to Johnny. He is, of course, exaggerating.
The problem is that after some lunatic killed the right-winged politician Pim Fortuyn, a very strange atmosphere emerged in our country, one in which voicing your (left) opinion was not done. In the weeks after the murder, the leftwingers were more or less gagged, directly given the blame for the drama because they were seen as Fortuyn's political "nemesises". As in, they disagreed on practically everything he stood for, especially the immigration policies Fortuyn had in mind; Fortuyn also made some offensive remarks about the islam, called it a retarded religion.
Unfortunately, a part of the Dutch people saw him as some sort of Messiah, "because he said what we we were all thinking" (yeah right ); and when he was killed, people voted en masse for him a week later (he wasn't taken off the list), giving his party a huge amount of seats for the Parliament, enough even to participate in a Government coalition. Which resulted in a crisis of Government in our country within a hundred days (a new record! ), as this new inexperienced party couldn't stop fighting with eachother... In that period, there was at least one schandal a day, whether it was about false credentials, supposed bribes, harassment or just childish fighting.
The thing is, ever since Fortuyn first made a political appearance there's a much clearer difference between left and right again in our country; a bit of an "us against them" mentality. And both sides can't help but annoy the heck out of one another, pushing themselves in the victim role and pointing the blaming finger for not being able to voice their opinions freely in the other side's direction, like Johnny just demonstrated. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
In truth, airing anti-foreigner sentiments is already so accepted that it's almost frightening, despite what Johnny said. Like I said in an earlier post in the International Hatred thread:

There are a lot of anti-foreigner sentiments in our country just the same. Not necessarily racism, but at least an unhealthy and narrow-minded bias against other people's culture, ways, opinions *and* presence. Sure, there are some criminals among those foreigners (or actually most of them already have the Dutch Nationality, but apparently some people can't help but call people "foreign" for simply having a different skin colour ); just like there are criminals in every society, race and religion. It's just that generalizing has become so "normal" and "accepted" in our country, up to a point that it makes me feel sick in the stomach when I turn on the News. Every loud-mouth can just yell whatever he/she wants, never mind that it's highly generalizing, unfair, biased and against any law or International resolution whatsoever. For example... We have politicians who are against expansion of the European Union, which is fair enough, as long as the argumentation is a bit sound. But no, this politician (Winnie de Jong) is against this expansion because she doesn't want all those gypsies from Eastern-Europe to travel freely to our country because "they're all criminal" (!). And that's a politician, apparently representing a part of our Society...

Furthermore, our Minister of Immigration actually talked about sending "foreign" criminal people with the Dutch Nationality out of our country; people with the Dutch Nationality! In other words, banning a member of our Society from that same Society, sending them off to a country they've probably never even been before (second generation Morrocans, for example); something which is against the Dutch law and against any possible International law. And there are many more examples as well. Oh, and neither of these people ever had eggs or rocks thrown at them. In fact, the fact that they never had eggs thrown at them is probably the best indication how normal it is nowadays to voice anti-foreigner sentiments.
Though the atmosphere in our country *is* harsher after the murder; right after Fortuyn was killed, a large group of lunatics was rioting in front of the Government building, yelling "murderer!" in the direction of the politicians within, making many others at home fear for a possible lynch mob. About every important left party member has received at least one death threat, loaded guns by mail, you name it... Some of them still can't leave the house without bodyguards. One of them even had to flee our country because of those threats (Melkert, the biggest political opponent of Fortuyn). Heck, even the later leader of Fortuyn's party received death threats from his own voters, "because he wasn't able to push Fortuyn's ideas into the Government plans well enough".
The political situation in our country is one big mess at the moment, let's just keep it at that.
Anyways, if Johnny had made the above statement back in April, I would have agreed with him; people voicing anti-foreigner sentiments back then *were* met with eggs and pies being thrown at them; but ever since Fortuyn had been killed, none of that actually happened any more. The situation in our country has changed so drastically in that period that Johnny's words can't be applied whatsoever anymore. In fact, the very opposite of what he said is true, as now people just yell whatever the heck they want without ever getting the egg against their head that they actually deserve; saying the borders have to be closed partly is one thing, but currently there are far worse things being said that are closer to racism and generalizing than Fortuyn's opinions ever were. It almost makes me feel ashamed that there's so much hatred in a large number of fellow Dutchies.

[ 11-02-2002, 07:20 AM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]