I just realised how our collective cultural undoing can be summarised in one word: 'xenophobic'. What does it mean, fear of the unknown, fear of change. In this very word lies the assumption that change is a good thing per se, why is that, why this fundamental believe that change is always for the good, for the blind left it doesn't matter how it changes as long as it does. We ask the muslims to integrate, but we have no idea who we are, so they should integrate into what exactly? They know they live in a changing country, and it's only natural that they claim their place here, they only step on the space we give them. That is why we need a dominant culture with a clear identity, so that we don't give any false expectations, must be confusing as hell for them. The real fundamentalists can be found on the multicultist left, they are the real destroyers, muslims are also taken for a ride in this change-blitzkrieg, and that isn't good for any of us.

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So your question is:

What is truly, exclusively, Dutch?

Or something else?

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Or are you pointing out some kind of contradiction: on the one hand the "Dutch left multicultists" agree that muslims have to integrate into "thé" Dutch society, id est accepting its' legislation, learning its' habits and customs etc etc, but on the other hand they stand for an ever changing society thus constantly changing what they want the muslims to accept making it impossible for them to fit in said society?

Is that what you mean Fragony?

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yes, but you said it better

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Wouldn't it be easier if you just all became muslims then ?

just asking

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Try suggesting that in Urk, Staphorst and Giethoorn

My god we Dutch are just as bad, had an away match in Rijssen once, and when I play bad I swear at myself, and out loud. I will never do that again in Rijssen, I bet they still now it's me even tho it was last year ... ofcourse some say that it isn't nice to swear using "the lords" name, but seriously, they would have lynched me if that wouldn't be illegal.


We always say our Dutch culture is superior, but do we have one? I mean what is the Dutch culture? Hasj, Coke, Weed? Urk, Staphorst and some other Religious fortress in the countryside. Nah we should be happy they are here, we invited them here, to do the jobs we didn't want, and still don't want, and they are happy to help us. Ofcourse sometimes there's a rotten apple, but for every rotten apple there is an entire basket of good and tastefull apples.

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The Allochtonen (yes it's actually English) are the only real Dutch.
They don't pay their taxes, they live of a compensation they get from the Goverment because they can't work

And in Venlo, damned Wilders, I mean if someone is a fundamentalist and danger for the country it's him (and his gang), not the guy from Marocco that lives at the end of the street here

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How can de maroccan guy at the end of the street know when he is crossing boundaries if there is nobody to tell him? Not that I like him but I do agree with Wilders, we need one dominant culture, where there is a place for the islam.

Ordnung must sein ;)

We always say our Dutch culture is superior, but do we have one?

Oh boy do they got you.......

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Ja, und Arbeit macht frei

No no no, Wilders says there's no place for the Islam.
Personally I would rather have the SGP, they're bad, but atleast they aren't racists. Which Wilders is

Yes Calvinists ... dangerous

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Me.

No the question is, why the assumption that change is always a good thing, why are we talking about 'fear of the unknown' aka 'xenophobia'. Let me give you an example, let's say a muslima that refuses to give males a hand in her profession, and the immediate backing she gets from the all these organisation that protect the rights of majorities, why do these organisation do this? I think it's the blind believe that we need to trancend into something else, don't want to join the party, then you are afraid, a xenophobe.

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They can't integrate no matter what leftist think. You can't change Islam, and make it to be another idea and product in market.

Bolded - TRUE.

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In some places they have integrated, ie. most parts of the UK, the vast majority of islamic immigrants "integrate" fairly well, and seem comfortbale with western tradition etc. living completely "british" lives, no matter what politicians say, there are an unfortunate minority who hold for extreme religious and cultural views who are unable to integrate, and as a result perhaps shouldnt be allowed to try too, the problem is seperating the two groups

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Right. You tell that to my favourite poster children, the Russian Muslim Tatars who've been living here quite peacefully for, oh, round two centuries now. A bunch came over as merchants and craftsmen after the Russian conquest, you see, and they've had an inconspicuous mosque right in the middle of the city for ages now.

...and, humans being what they now are, they initially despised the refugees from Somalia (co-religionists as they may have been) about the same as the Finnish majority...

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I don't think that many of the problems that are frequently associated with muslim immigrants are due to Islam itself.

That said, regardless of how peaceful many muslims in fact are, I still think we have enough Islam. I don't view muslim culture as necessarily hostile, it could co-exist, but if the trend continues it will gradually replace our own culture. Western birth rates (Dutch included) are abominably low, for immigrants they are high, and immigration continues. I think that this is a (very) possible outcome that many multiculture supporters overlook or are blind to. Like Fragony said we should get our act together first and foremost.

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Replace, bah. The word is mix. You're talking like nigh every "culture" in existence wasn't a Frankenstein mishmash of everything the cat, invaders, colonists, merchants, priests, beggars, monarchs with "foreign" affectations and God (and really pedantic cultural historians) only knows what else brought in. And let's not even start on the aforementioned influences being equally gumbo (as in, "has everything in it").

The sundry immigrants from Muslim regions are just another influx of new stuff. Nothing unusual. They'll influence the already established culture and will in turn be influenced by it, and on it goes like always.

Confrontational and dualistic attitudes on the subject - "They come and take over Our culture!!!!!" - tend to be by and large self-fulfilling prophecies, if not else then because they by default define the "native" and "foreign" as for some reason fundamentally separate and incompatible (if not outright inimical) elements. Sic vis bellum, para bellum as it were.

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That's assuming that both groups (the "natives" and the newcomers) are willing to mix. I'm not going to place the blame on one group, truth be told both are lacking.

Immigration was AFAIK never as large a factor as it is now. Besides, most foreign elements we absorbed were not actually that different- mostly European christians.
Eventually we will learn (we have to) to truly coexist with muslims and consider them as Dutch as ourselves but it's not going to be an easy and short process. Catholics can attest. Muslims are already a sizable minority here that isn't fully integrated, we should learn to cope with them and vice versa before we're ready take in much more then we already have.

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The newcomers tend to have a marked predisposition towards nostalgia for "the old country" and so on. They always do; people in general act like that when trying to fit into new surroundings. AFAIK it's not all that unusual for first-generation immigrants to cherish a pipe dream of someday going "back home" rich and succesful and all that as well, presumably another ecce homo trait; I'm willing to hazard a guess it's partly a coping mechanism people default to when they can't feel entirely comfortable in their, well, foreign environs. Culture shock and all that.

Anyway, if I've understood correctly first-generation "newcomers" normally do not, don't want to, and really cannot integrate fully into their new homeland; they tend to be too firmly rooted where they grew up in and moved from, even if it's on the opposite side of the damn globe. Fair enough, one shouldn't expect old dogs to learn too many tricks and people are allowed to be nostalgic and sentimental.

But if the "natives" for one reason or another can't accept this, there's a problem. And in that case it'd frankly be the natives.

That aside, the immigrant generations past the first have a whole different set of problems - namely, usually a bit of an identity crisis. Their parents, still clinging to their roots, tend to try to teach them one thing; the society around them teaches them something quite different, and they often end up in the middle confused of which way they should look, where they actually belong, and who they for that matter really are.

Throw this on top of the usual adolescence troubles, and it's obvious the second-generations have their hands seriously full. And something the already troubled equation could really do without, but sadly usually can't, is antagonistic "natives". People in general and insecure teenagers in particular are quite sensitive things; they can usually tell quite readily enough if they're Not Wanted Here, and although the way they react to such input varies it's usually troublesome (youths being particularly poor at such problem-solving).

And this becomes Major Trouble. If the young second-plus generationers with their identity insecurities feel like the surrounding society does not want them, they're more likely than not to respond in kind and turn their backs to it. Usually they can't relate too well to the "old country" of their parents (or grandparents or whatever) either, leaving them hanging in a sort of identity limbo.
Which is a Bad Thing, especially when it comes to young men. There's quite possibly no other population segment as potentially distruptive and open to very dubious influences as young men with identity issues and feelings of alienation; that's where the street gangs and extremist movements alike tend to recruit from, for example. Humans are social animals and have a built-in need to belong to some group or another, and when you think about it the limits of what they may be willing to do for their "mates" in one are somewhere very far away indeed - one need merely think of what he or she would be willing to do for the sake of a close relative or dear friend, what soldiers are willing to do for their comrades and fanatics for their Causes and/or Leaders.

All of which only heightens the antagonism of the already surly "natives", which duly further isolates and embitters the "newcomers", which... you get the idea. The spiral should really be nipped in the bud, but here we come to the real problem - namely, the real roots of the original antagonism have an unpleasant tendency to be very structural things far beyond the influence of any single individual. Tolerance, after all, is something of a luxury good; it tends to abound mainly in an environment of prosperity, security and abundance. Mutual intolerance on the other hand grows well in times of need, crisis and uncertainity - which happens to be exactly what just about all societies on the planet are going through to a greater or lesser degree. The global economy is undergoing painful and disenfranchising structural changes; partly as an aside of this tensions are running rather high and conflicts flare up over control of resources (also in the abstract sense) and influence over developements (or in any case a hope thereof), and in the Global Village everyone is affected.

Which in turn has a tendency to cause a certain longing for "good old times" - an often surprisingly reasonable wish, it must be added - and give birth to funny ideas about "turning back the clock" one way or another, or at least hanging on to what remains of the "old days"; resustance to change, in other words. Resistance to the threatening New before which it seems as, quoth Marx, "all that is solid melts into air" and no stone left unturned.
Resistance to the Other, the different, the Foreign.

This is why I so dislike all this talk about "preserving our threatened Culture". It's just reactionarism, and particularist at that - "my stuff is better than your stuff, I don't want your stinky stuff; go away" - a knee-jerk rejection of change and "Otherness". And it is self-fulfilling; it builds its own bastions, "Traditional Values" that often likely didn't even exist, at least as such, in the first place but were "invented" or modified for the purpose; draws its own battle-lines, those between Us and Them, the good and the bad, the native and foreign, divisions which many largely ignored previously; and above all, it creates its own enemies to fight. For such self-definition forces everyone else to define him- or herself in relation to it, leading to a chain of similar crystallizations of Traditional Values That Are Better Than Yours as a counter-reaction - nothing defines symbols as quickly and clearly as outside hostility to them, after all.

Everyone does it, too. Xenophobic natives, supremacists of all breeds, religious fundamentalists and revivalists (virtually the poster boys of the whole phenomenom) regardless of exact confessional allegiances, embittered immigrants... whoever. Pointing fingers over "ho Started It is obviously a waste of time and quite counter-productive; the important question is Who's Going To Stop Doing So. People may not by themselves be able to do much about macro-level structural shifts after all, but they can most certainly affect how they themselves react to them. And when it really comes down to it, the aforementioned macro-level changes ultimately trace back to how people act and behave and decide...

Anyway, fighting with the other scared and confused guy over whose cuisine and dresscode are better isn't exactly a very fruitful solution, nor does it do a thing to fix anything. Rather it just causes more problems.

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...how'd it turn out that long again...?

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It's a shame that demanding that a certain place carry with it a certain culture is totally ineffective, eh? People are always just people, and each person will think as he pleases (read: as a product of his environment); the funny part is that manipulating this environment outside of the individual is impossible. You're essentially declaring, "Okay, everybody, act and think like this." It's hilarious!

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This assertion is incorrect. You take a narrow definition from one extreme and misinterpret it, then apply the inverse of the misinterpretation to a broad spectrum of ideas. Its wrong in the following:

a) Xenophobic is not fear of change or the unknown, it is fear or unreasonable hatred of strangers or foreigners. You could be Xenophobic and open to an ever changing culture.
b) Lets assume that your initial assumption was correct and that Xenophobics were afraid of change. Not being Xenophobic does not mean you have a blind acceptance of change. Xenophobic (frag version) would only mean that you are afraid of change. There is a range of other states other then fear and wild abandoned embrace of change...fear, distrust, dislike, neutrality, progressive, rational, change loving (1000 pair of shoes, skirts, lovers but no underwear) etc.
c) Back to the more traditional view of Xenophobia. If you are not Xenophobic it doesn't mean you don't fear strangers, like them, hate them, want them, unfettered flow of foreigners... being Xenophobic means you have an unrational fear... so Not being Xenophobic does not encompass all the other states, it just deletes a single one from the range.

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