Cogs can think.

The Netherlands has a very intricate and complicated television landscape. To even be able to grasp this landscape, we need to dive deep into this country’s history.

The Netherlands is a very diverse society; words like open, tolerant, and respect for individual freedom come to mind. This is not something of the last few decades - this has actually always been the case. The Netherlands has always been on the forefront of social equality; we were the first modern republic, the first state not to be based on either religion or a monarchy. The Republic Of The Seven United Provinces, as it was called, became the most successful state of its time, becoming the biggest economic, military, and colonial power, with the Dutch having an empire that stretched the world. We call this The Golden Age, but this is a rather cruel name since during this period, we not only advanced the world of science, art, and economics, but we also deported millions of slaves from all over the world to the Americas, killed thousands of native people all over the world, and so on. I always try to keep this in mind - we must never forget the price the rest of the world paid for our wealth.

The Republic lasted from 1581 to 1795, and set an example for all modern democracies in the world today - the founding fathers of the United States of America were influenced heavily by The Republic, and so any claims made about the US being the first modern republic are debatable, at best.

Anyway, the fact that The Republic was not based on religion paved the way for a rudimentary form of religious freedom, where Protestants and Catholics lived side-by-side in one country. I specifically say ‘rudimentary’, since even though Catholicism was allowed, they had to practice their religion in relative silence, leading to “secret” churches - churches everyone (including the government) knew were there, but none acted upon. Over the course of time, religious freedom got stronger and more absolute, leading to a society where you had multiple Protestant churches, and a strong Catholic presence, augmented by non-religious people - liberalism has always been prominent in this country, as have leftist and Labour parties, and even communists.

So, when radio came along, and the airwaves had to be spread evenly and openly among the different population groups, columnification began. We speak of columnification when different groups of people in a society live in their own separate columns; they have their own newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, schools, political parties, sports clubs, and so on. This lead to quite an orderly society, where you had a Protestant column, a Labour column, a Catholic column, a Liberal column, and so on. Elections were predictable, and only the top layer of each column (politicians) interacted with the top layers of other columns in order to form a government and run the country.

As a consequence of columnification, each column had their own radio/TV station. If you could get enough members as a station, you could earn airtime on one of the (now) three (tax-funded) public TV channels, and thus, various broadcasting networks shared the same three channels. Ironically, this also meant the end of the columnified society: people in The Netherlands finally had a window upon other columns via their television sets, and they started to realise that the other columns weren’t as wrong and ‘evil’ as their leaders and education had made them out to be. This started the ‘decolumnification’, which lasted until somewhere in the ’90s; we are now at the point where the columns are basically all gone, and this has led to the situation we have now where election results are highly unpredictable.

However, our television system is still in place, the original television stations from the columns still exist, and still broadcast to this day. Their ideological base has eroded over time, and the differences between them have faded - but some of them are still quite religious, and have a very religious programming. Being tax-funded also allows smaller stations to get airtime, such as the Muslim station we have, which airs stuff on Sunday mornings.

Why did I give you this quick history lesson? Well, something funny has been happening the past few weeks. Two non-religious, youth-oriented major stations want to air a ’70s pornographic film - Deep Throat. And now, the religious folk in this country (and contrary to popular belief, this country is actually quite Christian and religious) are all over each other to condemn this, and politicians have even tried to force the public channels to not broadcast the film - they obviously failed, since the government cannot influence the contents of the three channels and their stations.

So, they started a marathon prayer to ask God to stop the broadcast. And now we come to the sole purpose of this post, something I’ve been wanting to say here ever since I heard of the ‘prayathon’.

If the prayathon fails in its goals - does that mean God likes ’70s porn?