Netherlands ours again

For my minor I studied at the Universidad Catolica San Antonio de Murcia in the city of Murcia in Spain. The first assignment we had to do there was write an essay about your country of origin. I thought that it would be interesting to share it on my page considering it shows my perspective towards my country.

Netherlands ours again

The Netherlands, the little country in top Western Europe that most people know nothing about, this little country was the owner of half the world at one point and still to this day has had the biggest company ever. But besides our great (and forgotten) accomplishments we are also a proud folk. We share our country with all kinds of nationalities and we are, to our own believes, very open and accepting. But on the world’s media stage there is another picture being painted of my ‘great’ country. Voiced by one man who thinks that he speaks for all of us.

Like the United States we have our very own Donald Trump in the making. His name is Geert Wilders and he wants to ban the entire Muslim society from our country. According to Geert these people are supposed to be the root to all of our problems and he believes it is time to ‘Make the Netherlands ours again’. This is the image that the world is being presented with when it comes to the Netherlands right now. This one man sends out a picture of the Dutch in which we all look like racists who hate the Islam. And even though he has a lot of followers (which are mainly uneducated people). The most of the Netherlands does not share his ideas. 

I grew up in a small village, in the middle of the Netherlands, where most people were Catholic. Until the age of 9 I went to school with only ‘white’ people and I was not used to seeing people of different cultures in my own village. But after the age of 9 we moved to a different village where half the inhabitants came from Turkey, Morocco or Somalia. In this new place I went to an ‘open’ school (which has people of all different cultures) and I started making new friends from entirely different cultures. At first it felt weird to me, I didn’t know anything about these other cultures and yes it scared me a bit. But as any 10-year-old boy I was able to adapt. I made friends, met Muslim families and by the time I was 16 living in a multicultural village was the most normal thing I could think of. With this story of my life I’m trying to explain that in the Netherlands it is the children who give the good example of what is right. We learn not to see colour and we adapt to our environment, we become multicultural. 

Some of these families I’ve met have been living in this country for generations and are allowed to believe what they want (Freedom of Religion). Geert Wilders wants to break this very important amendment and is shouting it of the rooftops for the entire world to hear. While in the Netherlands most people don’t care about the fact that there are people with other religions. Most people I know don’t even exercise a religion anymore. The people with the loudest voices (like Donald Trump en Geert Wilders) are the ones who are ruining it for there own countries. Like a lot of the inhabitants of the US, we too are worried that this man is becoming too popular by just being a racist.

The statement ‘Make the Netherlands ours again’ is in my eyes still a very good one. Wilders just implies one thing wrong. ‘Ours’ does not mean the white people in the Netherlands, ‘ours’ means everybody who considers himself a Dutch person. We have been the country that has been accepting of everybody and if we want to stay ourselves we will have to continue with that.

References

Afshin Ellian Prof. mr. dr. Afshin Ellian (Teheran, 1. (2017). Angst voor premier Wilders doet denken aan periode-Fortuyn - Elsevier.nl. [online] Elsevier.nl. Available at: http://www.elsevier.nl/nederland/blog/2017/01/angst-voor-premier-wilders-doet-denken-aan-periode-fortuyn-430907/ [Accessed 11 May 2017].

En.wikipedia.org. (2017). Dutch East India Company. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company [Accessed 11 May 2017].

Engelbart, T. (2017). PVV’ers zijn laagopgeleid, vrouw en stemden op Fortuyn in 2002. [online] De Dagelijkse Standaard. Available at: http://www.dagelijksestandaard.nl/2015/10/pvvers-zijn-laagopgeleid-vrouw-en-stemden-op-fortuyn-in-2002/ [Accessed 11 May 2017].

Sovereign Man. (2017). This was the most valuable company in history (Worth 10 times as much as Apple) | Sovereign Man. [online] Available at: https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/when-adjusted-for-inflation-its-highest-market-capitalization-would-be-worth-over-7-trillion-today-15654/ [Accessed 11 May 2017].

Vyse, G., Jones, S., Heer, J., Armstrong, E. and Atkin, E. (2017). Republicans are already cowering in fear of Donald Trump.. [online] New Republic. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/139446/republicans-already-cowering-fear-donald-trump [Accessed 11 May 2017].