PJ Media

I realize that the Flemish Vlaams Blok has nothing to do with the Netherlands, nor does the Schweizerische Volkspartei – and yet, ever so surprisingly, both parties seem to be studying German history with a certain fanaticism, shall we say? And attracting a significant number of followers who seem to feel that these parties represent a chance to restore the social balance to what it should be. With a fist, if necessary, but only in self-defense, of course.

Years ago, one of the most interestingly distasteful things I saw in Austria (apart from the place of honor for fallen Austrian SS soldiers in a Catholic church’s cemetery) was a book describing how only J√∂rg Haider was strong enough to save Austria from the ‘bad’ Nazis. It was prominently displayed in several bookstores, by the way, in those pre-Amazon days.

You may be quite correct that no modern Dutch citizen would do what some of their parents or grandparents did. After all, rounding up Jews tended to be the sort of work the Nazis let the locals handle – and only in the case of the Danes were the Nazis broadly mistaken.

I am sure that the same government that finds protecting a Somali-Dutch citizen too much of a burden will never commit any acts of moral ambiguity, much less anything actively evil. Like exposing one of its citizens to death due to her freely expressed opinions. (Ironically, when checking the spelling for Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch woman with a Somali-Dutch passport, I found a link saying that various Danish communities had offered her shelter – http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1192380568544&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull )

And though this may be more than a bit unfair, you still remember the picture of Dutch soldiers toasting with murderers, right? ( http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,425024,00.html ) Please don’t tell me that there is something so special about the Dutch nation that it would never stand and watch a massacre, as ‘literally’ no Dutch person would have believed that such would happen, before it did. ‘Some of the Dutch United Nations soldiers who failed to prevent the massacre of Srebenica in July 1995 gave the Serbs a back-slapping welcome, handed over their uniforms and even actively helped to separate Bosnian men from their families, say relatives of the 8,000 men and boys who were murdered….After all, many people in the Netherlands do not want to reminded of the events in Bosnia….why did the Dutch commander in charge, Colonel Ton Karremans, even drink a toast with mass murderer Ratko Mladic whose Serbian troops were wreaking havoc outside?’

Yes, I know – the facts are from a German media source, but as noted, when you want to find out how horribly wrong scapegoating a minority population for political gains can turn out, Germans are definitely a reliable source. They no longer have the comforting illusion that barbarity can ‘literally’ never happen.

Having such confidence, oddly, is considered to be a weakness by Germans, but then, they have all too much reason to doubt themselves. After all, they were toasting with the Catholic Croatian Ustaša regime back then, not the Orthodox Serbian one ten years ago.