Cogs can think.

As you all know, I love every little grain of sand in this country, and all that it entails. At the same time, this country is filled with so many complete idiots it is almost not funny anymore.

Princess Maxima, the wife of our Prince Heir (and therefore Queen-to-be), held a speech on 24th September. She headed a committee which investigated the integration process in this country for foreigners, and this speech preceded the final publication of the committee’s report. During that speech, she said something that apparently was very stupid or ridiculous, seeing politicians are tumbling over one another to criticise it. So, what did she say?

There is no such thing as a “Dutch identity”.

Of course, she is perfectly right. There is no Dutch identity. Just as there is no American identity. No Italian identity. No Russian identity. The world has gotten so open, so ‘travelable’, so within reach of everyone everywhere everytime, that cultural boundaries are vanishing fast, and stereotypes are eroding like a slope where the trees have been cut. Sure, you can still generalise, but when you really break it down, peoples don’t have monopolies anymore on certain ways of life, trains of thoughts, or attitudes.

This country has gotten so out of touch with reality, so filled with irrational hate and fear of everything that’s perceived as ‘different’, that little remarks like this can really turn it upside-down. A few weeks ago, Minister Vogelaar said something along the lines of “in a few decades, our culture will be founded not only on Judean-Christian principles, but also on Islamic principles”. This caused a massive stir among the right-wing anti-Muslim extremists, even though anyone with a sane mind knows that Vogelaar is perfectly spot on.

In fact, we already are a country partly built on Islamic principles - right from the moment the first Muslim decided to settle in this swamp. That’s what a culture is: the sum of all its participants. And fact is that we have one million Muslims living in this country, and they are just as much “Dutch” as I am. I call myself “100% Dutch” every now and then, but when I say that, I realise perfectly well that the Muslim man living in Amsterdam, doing his groceries at the Albert Heijn, working hard to provide for his family, is just as much Dutch as I am, despite the fact that his ideas are completely different than mine. He is just as much Dutch as the Jewish woman living in Oud Zuid, or the deeply Reformed Christian man walking to church on Sunday in Staphorst, in his black clothes.

The Dutch identity does not exist because it a sum of such diverse parts, that it is nigh on impossible to distill specific, typically Dutch characteristics. If your culture is made up of Jewish people, Christians, Muslims, and atheists, and many of them with an international background, who are influenced by television and newspapers and websites from all over the world, then how on earth can you call that a “specific Dutch identity”, and make that differ from the German identity? Or the American one?

So, what, then, is the typical Dutchman, according to the criticasters? When asked, as I just saw on the news, they couldn’t say anything else but, “uhm, err, uh, ah, eh, I don’t know.” Exactly. You don’t know because you haven’t a clue as to what “culture” or “identity” means.

Morons.