When the Mt Hermon Missionary Baptist church offered Section 8 housing in Columbus, Ohio two thousand applicants, mostly Somali immigrants, rioted for the first-come-first-served application forms. The cops were forced to mace the crowd and the event had to be canceled due to the chaos. ‘Free stuff’ really isn’t free. It’s rationed. It’s only free for those at the head of the line or on the inside track.
Entitlements attract dependents until the point where government can’t afford it any more. Then the system breaks down. Take Amsterdam which is creating shipping container ‘villages’ to house its riff-Raff. Years of tolerance attracted them like flies. Now its Mortein time.
“First there was an effort to clean up the red-light district in Amsterdam. Then came new laws regulating who could frequent “coffee shops” in the city and elsewhere in Holland for a joint. Now, the Dutch capital is introducing a plan to punish bad behavior by sending chronic neighborhood bullies and vandals out of the city center for a punitive stay in uncomfortable housing containers.” Ironically the proponents are the center-left Labor Party.
Van der Laan, a member of the center-left Labor Party, has been mayor of Amsterdam for the past two years, a period which has seen accelerated efforts in the city to shed its image as being a hotbed of prostitution and drugs. But his new plan is not uncontroversial. Many have pointed out its similarity to the proposal by right-wing populist politician Geert Wilders to set up what he called “tuigdorpen,” or “scum villages,” for repeat troublemakers. “Put all the trash together and leave normal people alone,” Wilders, who is virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Islam, said at the time. Indeed, “tuigdorpen” has been nominated as the worst neologism of the year in Holland as a result.
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The Daily Telegraph explains how it works. “The tough approach taken by Mr van der Laan appears to jar with Amsterdam’s famous tolerance for prostitution and soft drugs but reflects hardening attitudes to routine anti-social behaviour that falls short of criminality.”
There are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police.
Under the new policy, from January next year, victims will no longer have to move to escape their tormentors, who will be moved to the new units.
A team of district “harassment directors” have already been appointed to spot signals of problems and to gather reports of nuisance tenants.
Of course City Hall’s powers will be used only in the most necessary cases. UPI reports: “A City Hall team has already begun identifying the worst offenders, The Irish Times reported … The new rules will be enforced only in extreme cases, such as for violence against gay people or intimidating police witnesses, officials said.”
Critics say the camps are coming back. Of course they’re called something else. And maybe not just the camps. The Guardian has an article written by the wife of a Labour Party politician who described her husband’s death in the care — if you could call it that — of Britain’s National Health Service. “My husband died like a battery hen in hospital,” the Labour MP said.
Ann Clwyd has said her biggest regret is that she didn’t “stand in the hospital corridor and scream” in protest at the “almost callous lack of care” with which nurses treated her husband as he lay dying in the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff …
Clwyd, the Labour MP for Cynon Valley since 1984 and Tony Blair’s former human rights envoy to Iraq, told the Guardian she fears a “normalisation of cruelty” is now rife among NHS nurses. She said she had chosen to speak out because this had become “commonplace”.
Describing how her 6’2” husband lay crushed “like a battery hen” against the bars of his hospital bed with an oxygen mask so small it cut into his face and pumped cold air into his infected eye, Clwyd said nurses treated the dying man with “coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt”.
“He had been in the flagship hospital for ten days.” But at least it was free. Yet if that’s the flagship what does the fleet look like? It must look great, according to a perceptive commenter at the blog Samizdata. How can it not look great, he wrote, when we’ve always been told how great it was.
It’s the NHS first got me thinking how the power of the narrative distorts so much of how organisations & ideas are viewed. This one starts; “Staffed by dedicated doctors & caring nurses the British National Health Service is the envy of the world…….” It runs for a couple of paragraphs, was first written the day before its inception & has been repeated so many times it’s probably encoded somewhere down in our DNA by now. It’s not just that the public believe it. Almost everyone connected to the NHS do as well. Doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians. Even most of the media. It makes it impossible for any of them to view it with a clear eye. The incidents quoted above. others much worse we’ve heard about in the last few years. They should be part of the narrative as well but it just rewrites itself over them. Edits them away so the next time comes as exactly the same shock as the one before & the one before that. No-one actually learns any lessons or does anything because the narrative reassures them it’s not necessary. They’re just aberrations. Momentary & inexplicable blips in an otherwise perfect system. Or just signs that even more money needs tipping into it. That the engine that’s coughing & banging & spewing out smoke & broken parts would be running as sweet as a sewing machine with just a little more fuel.
It’s a very perceptive observation. Imagine how outraged everyone would be if Clwyd died in the care of a “monopoly”. A private monopoly, not a broken down, unaccountable, government monopoly. We are happy to accept a situation which we would not tolerate under any other circumstance if it’s just labeled right.
Geert Wilders biggest sin was the temerity to call the camps what they really were. But the enlightened officialdom of Amsterdam are smarter. They give as their reason for exile to the “tuigdorpen” the tendency to anti-gay “hate crimes” among the sequestered individuals. It’s not concentration community, it’s prevention community, meant to re-educate, not to punish.
Wilders openly identify the troublemakers as Muslims who refuse to assimilate and instead view themselves as hostile colonists rather than genial immigrants. Leftists such as Amsterdam’s mayor would finger them as people who disproportionately engage in violent “hate crimes” against homosexuals. Either way, it’s roughly the same group. Whatever you deign to call them, it’s becoming unavoidably obvious that no, we can’t all get along.
The European welfare state, like that in America, still chugs along blindly unaware that it is unsustainable. Multiculturalism is a delusion that all cultures are compatible, when it’s obvious that multiculturalism is only compatible with itself—and then only temporarily, because it inevitably splinters into gays fighting against blacks against women against Muslims.
But what’s in a name? Truth in packaging, that’s what. To some extent the Muslims being identified for transportation to the “tuigdorpen” by “harassment directors” are victims of a monstrous bait and switch. They were lured into a ‘tolerant’ European society by the promise of multiculturalism, which meant if anything that their behavior would be tolerated, even celebrated. It turns out that multiculturalism just means learning to speak in code.
We forget that the horrors of the mid-20th century were not due so much to the prevalence of unenlightened people but to the existence of state structures which permitted absolute control over the lives of their citizens. Once the machinery was there someone was bound to push the buttons to set it clanking. Politicians have conned voters into handing them near-absolute power in exchange for the promise of limitless benefits and tolerance. What could go wrong?
Maybe anything big enough to have the power to grant you everything you want has the power to strip you of everything you have. But don’t worry, its programmed to build a paradise on earth even though in principle the same machinery can assign people to a “tuigdorpen” or let them die in a battery cage.
Western literature is full of warnings about such the dangers of creating false gods over yourself, the story of Babel, Faust, Frankenstein’s monster, Skynet. It is perhaps no coincidence that Joseph Stalin’s standard for literary excellence was in fact Goethe’s Faust. But nobody reads those old stories any more. And today things are old after only 70 years.
“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge until, when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer.”
Nah.
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
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