Political taboos

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Recently, I came across an intriguing issue. In my country, approximately 15% of the population is not ethnically European. There are several large ethnic minorities - most notably Moroccans, Turks, Chinese, Indonesians, Surinamers and Antilleans. All of these groups came to the Netherlands in roughly equal conditions. However, their pattern of development has been vastly different. Indonesians and Chinese people have rapidly taken on a respectable role in society. In some areas, especially around The Hague, Indonesians are very common and friendly people. Chinese people are exceptionally notable for their wealth, respect and level of education.

A very different pattern of development has taken place for ethnic Moroccans, Turks, Surinamers and Antilleans. They're over-represented in crime both violent and financial, unemployment and self-chosen segragation. Until recently, asking why Chinese and Indonesian people had worked their way up starting with the first generation born here while the other groups have lived in the same neighbourhoods for decades and have traditionally been over-represented in crime, self-chosen segragation and unemployment was a crime in itself, and Hans Janmaat, a far-right politician bringing that issue up in the 1980s, was convicted for it.

Why is it that there are so many political taboos? Why can't we address the issues we feel are important, or even issues widely known to be facts? Why is it that facts are sometimes silenced in favour of ideology? The truth will not change if your ideology dismisses it and substitutes it for something that suits your ideology. Eventually, political taboos are broken, and ten years after a very popular right-wing politician and a movie maker who supposedly insulted Muhammed were assassinated by an activist and an islamic fundamentalist, the government has finally come to terms with the fact that there is something wrong. But by now, a lot of damage has been done. We now have neighbourhoods bordering on traditional ghettoes in terms of subjective appeal, crime rate and density of certain groups (one of them has three times as many Turks as it has ethnic Dutch).

Are there any political taboos where you live? And what do you think of them?

Truth is not an absolute quality.

Black are over-represented in United States prisons and aboriginals are over-represented in Canadian prisons. These are facts--but they aren't truths.

The truth only comes out when we look to reasons that underlie the facts that we observe. Are blacks and aboriginals more likely to be criminals? Or are they simply more likely to be convicted? Or are the crimes that they commit more aggressively punished than the crimes committed by white offenders? It is only when we can start to properly deal with questions like these that facts become truths.

In that light, facts tend to get silenced because of the tendency of people to abuse them. It's a pretty easy jump in (false) reasoning to say, "There are lots of Surinamers in our jails, so Surinamers must be committing lots of crimes, so Surinamers are criminals." But, of course, we know that all Surinamese are not criminals.

In my experience, the racist who claims, "I'm just stating the facts," is certainly stating the facts--but then utilizing them in an intellectually dishonest exercise of bias confirmation. And that sort of lazy thinking should be challenged--often and loudly.

On the other hand, the serious thinker who comes forward and asks, "Why is it that there are so many Surinamese in our jails, and what can we do about that?" is engaged in an open minded exercise that should be encouraged.

Of course, I'm not attempting to be racist here. But one thing I have noticed is that the culture they adhere to - and, as a reason for their distance from the rest of society, they prefer communicating solely or mostly with their own ethnic group. In the past, when this problem was actively denied, there were neighbourhoods where the main language was Turkish. People who lived there, eighty per cent of those neighbourhoods in some parts of The Hague, had no connection to the rest of society at all, lived and died in their own culture and refused to accept Dutch values and rules, even if their substitute included justification for felonies. Some parts of The Hague and Rotterdam are joked about, but with a core of truth: 'there are more islamic headscarves in The Hague than in Ankara'.

The worst thing about it until now was the complete denial of problems. The first people to mention it in an acceptable way were eccentric, popular right-wing politicians like Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders. Pim Fortuyn had the idea that these people would need role models, and would need to be detached from social groups and areas where some crimes were considered alright or even good. Unfortunately, he was assassinated. And that's the problem - his solutions might have worked, but the solutions offered by politicians since 2002 haven't.

The reason I think it's a cultural thing is because Chinese and Indonesian people have assimilated properly, and are on par with Dutch people in terms of wealth, education and values now.

HisDivineMajesty: Our taboos are your taboos, but they are probably even stronger in the UK than they are in the Netherlands. We haven't had a PVV style party win huge numbers of seats as you have had.

I read an interesting debate piece in a paper not to long ago on a similar topic. It essentially boiled down to "How come the politically correct left, crucify neo-nazi groups for being anti-semitic but excuse the very same anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviors amongst certain groups of Muslims?".

I guess the answer would go something along the lines that neo-Nazis aren't fashionable, whereas Islam is amongst some.

YES ALL OF THIS. Also, less politely: OP, we in America also have a political taboo against racism, because it's racism.

Here's an interesting perspective. People who like football, and have nicknamed one football club, Ajax, 'the Jews'. When they visit matches, they yell obscenities involving those words. Action is often taken against it, even though players and fans acknowledge the nickname as being theirs, with one of their historic rivals being nicknamed 'cockroaches'. On television, a Moroccan young man in a store said he hated Jews and wanted to stab all Jews he came across. Nothing was done. That's another political taboo - calling them on their disrespectful behaviour. My mother was branded a 'white whore' for walking the dog. You're a racist if you try to say something.

See, there it is. If you politely ask a muslim to not imprison his wife, you're a racist. If you ask Moroccans why exactly they beat a Moroccan woman up for dating a black man, you're a racist (the irony, the irony). However, my criticism is not of their race, but their culture. Their culture involves importing illiterate women, sticking together in neighbourhoods with 80% Moroccans and the highest crime rates in the country, suspected honour killings, drug deals, bicycle theft, car theft, burglary and forced prostitution. White people do that, too, but in no town does half of them have a criminal record(!)

And all this is why people are continuing to vote for freedom, independence and anti-immigration parties across Europe in ever-greater numbers.

How long will it be before Geert Wilders is Prime Minister of the Netherlands?

Unfortunately, as a voter here, you're torn between two choices. Economically and socially sound parties that want to let everyone in, and economically and socially destructive every-man-for-himself parties that want to keep them out. In 2010, Wilders started supporting a minority coalition in exchange for power over some immigration policies. Unfortunately, the only parties he could co-operate with were socially conservative, fiscally right-wing parties with a religious undertone. If you vote for Wilders, you get two pro-European, fiscally right-wing parties for free. That's withholding a lot of people. A very large portion of the population would vote for Wilders if his non-immigration policies were defined a bit better, and he wouldn't exclude co-operation with social democrats.

Wilders and his party are themselves anti-EU though, I take it? I suppose what you're saying is that due to the nature of the Dutch political system, you're not just voting for Wilders but other people's policies that you don't agree with either.

That's all correct. His party wants to leave the European Union altogether, a view I share. As long as we're in the European Union, we're forced to accept everyone - even illegal migrants - who walks over our open borders. In theory, anyone who could take a boat to Spain, Portugal or Italy could come here. Hundreds of thousands have done so, and on a European scale, hundreds of thousands a year do so, causing a lot of unrest. The European Union, though, being a bureaucratic organisation headed by people who dismiss problems from their almost all-white bunker in Brussels, doesn't care. People who've known nothing but chauffeur-driven luxury cars, and are hated by a lot of people.

Thing is, we have a system of coalitions. No party can realistically expect a majority in parliament. The only parties remotely willing to do something about immigration, about the focus by migrants on the nasty parts of their original culture, general petty crime and disrespectful behaviour, are the ones that are also addicted to the free market, leaving people in the cold and showing health care bills to the elderly to remind them of their 'burden on society'. Luckily, I recently visited a meeting by the Jonge Socialisten, our Labour Party's youth group (up to 28, for some reason), and even they said we should be able to close our borders to people who have no future but a criminal one.

These are problems caused by poverty. The various things you mentioned were all things people accused the fin de siecle European immigrant waves of doing in America. Think about it. Do immigrants from poorer countries have the same opportunities as you? Is it possible they might be more vulnerable to exploitation and misconduct within the justice system? Do people treat them the same? Don't tar all members of an ethnic group with the same brush, because that is racist.



Girl, check your privilege.

Absolute BS - it is not caused by poverty, it is caused by people behaving like barbarians. It's nothing to do with poverty - people of all classes commit those kinds of crimes but I'm afraid that these kinds of problems are unfortunately a major problem within the Pakistani and Moroccan communities in a way that they are not, say, with Indian or Chinese immigrants. It's frankly disgusting and inexcusable to try to minimise and excuse this sort of behaviour from anyone.

Honestly, you read like an apologist for the worst kind of far-left meddling that has led to the behaviour we see in many of our inner cities across Europe.

All of this can be summed up by what I said earlier. Chinese and Indonesian people here, and European immigrants in the US, arrived under worse conditions, and worked their way up in two generations. We're into the fifth generation of Moroccans, and except for some of the women, there's still no sign of improvement. You see, part of what makes them so obnoxious is that they have a habit of importing brides from Morocco because any women born here, even ethnic Moroccans, are 'sluts' because they want more than being locked up at home and taking care of the children. Another problem worth noting is that employment rate was highest during the first generation, and disappointing for the next four. The disappointment is shared by judges in inner cities, I suppose, as half the Moroccan young men there had a criminal record. There's been little change in their behaviour in the past thirty years.

And even though some neighbourhoods are bad, other ethnic groups, regardless of skin colour, living there do seem to be capable of behaving.

It is in fact the same in England. Many of our immigrants have integrated very well within just a generation or two. The Pakistani Muslim immigrants are on their fourth generation here and still show no signs of integrating - in fact, many of them have gone backward rather than forward. Many of those third- or fourth-generation immigrants that are born here are in sort of a no-man's-land and hate the country that they are born and live in and therefore become easy pickings for extremists.