Did Dutch secular progressives expel their enemies?

Great Debates
1

I spent several months living in the Netherlands and can vouch for the Wikipedia description that it values “social tolerance and today is regarded as a liberal country”, “one of the most secular countries in Western Europe” which for example in 2001 “became the first nation to recognise same-sex marriage”.

But that “today” is a key caveat. The Wiki entry also notes that “During its colonial period, the Netherlands was heavily involved in the slave trade…Treatment of the slaves by their owners was notoriously bad”.

It was Dutch settlers in South Africa, who came to be known as Afrikaaners, who instituted the harsh racial policies of apartheid.

And in the U.S., the most heavily Dutch county in the U.S. is Sioux County, in northwestern Iowa. Per Wikipedia: “As of 2011 80% of Sioux County residents were descendants of Dutch immigrants.” Sioux County gave nearly 83 percent of its 2012 congressional vote to Steve King. (All four of the counties that border on Sioux County and also have substantial Dutch population gave King from two-thirds to three-quarters of their votes as well; thanks to this region’s overwhelming support, he squeezed out a win over Christie Vilsack with under 53 percent of the vote overall.)

If you are not familiar with the inflammatory King, he has said, per Wikipedia:

“Pretty soon, white men are going to notice they are the ones being excluded.”

“Some claim that the Arizona law will bring about racial discrimination profiling. First let me say, Mr. Speaker, that profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can’t profile someone, you can’t use those common sense indicators that are before your very eyes.”

And this is not just a conservative-liberal disparity. His own party’s leaders in the House, Eric Cantor and John Boehner, have to their credit called his comments about immigrants “hateful” and “inexcusable”.

His voting record is also extreme:

He was one of only 11 in Congress to vote against Hurricane Katrina aid.

A 2009 bill contained the following summary:

It passed, 399-1. Steve King was the 1.

All this was before he got those overwhelming 2012 vote totals from the Dutch-Americans in northwest Iowa, in a race against the charismatic and popular wife of ex-governor Vilsack.

So what is up with this disparity between Dutch emigrants and the Dutch people who remain in the Netherlands today? I can’t find any mention in summaries of Dutch history about the secular progressive types telling the intolerant fundamentalist crowd to GTFO, or making them feel so stifled that they left on their own. But clearly, *something * must have happened, as the differences are so stark.

2

And Thomas Jefferson, the guy who wrote that stuff about all men being created equal (not to mention quite a few other American leaders, who blustered a lot about freedom) was a slave owner. Things in politics and ethics are complex, and just because sometimes people act hypocritically, it does not follow that they do not believe in, and are not influenced by, the principles they profess but do not always live up to.

As for the rest, peoples whose ancestors emigrated from the Netherlands over a century, or even several centuries ago, have had different historical experiences, and have developed a quite different culture, from those who remained in the Netherlands all that time. There is no mystery at all as to why they should have developed different political attitudes. Neither tolerance nor racism nor (for the most part anyway) liberalism or conservatism, are bred in the genes (though a racist might suggest otherwise).

3

Genes or more likely culture, it is clear that these descendants of Dutch immigrants are not just garden-variety rural conservatives but are particularly hardcore racists. Not more so than white supremacist groups who assemble together after having grown up here or there; but for a contiguous group of people who live in the same area and descend from the same ethnic group, it is pretty remarkable.

4

So you are saying it is their race that makes people racist, are you? :rolleyes:

5

Reporting for forum change.

6

Considering that one site to visit in Amsterdam is the hidden church in someone’s attic - it was OK to be a Catholic in Amsterdam as long as nobody knew about it or your church… There is a limit to their tolerance there way back when.

7

I think it’s not necessarily that the Dutch, per se, are or were conservative. It’s that the Dutch Reformed Church is/was very conservative. Largely responsible for Apartheid theology in South Africa, and racist/xenophobic/homophobic attitudes in areas where they’re influential elsewhere. Although precisely speaking, the DRC hasn’t existed as a separate entity since 2004, when they merged with some other denominations to form the Protestant Church In The Netherlands.

8

Your two groups of Dutch emigrants is not enough to establish even a weak correlation between intolerance and being a Dutch emigrant. And a whole lot happened in the whole frickin’ world between the time the ancestors of the emigrant groups in question left and today. The intolerance of the Afrikaaners for instance is more likely to be due to their history in South Africa than some cultural trait their emigrant ancestors didn’t share with their stay-at-home cousins.

Also relatively progressive Norway started out with an 1814 constitution barring Jews, monastic orders and Jesuites from the kingdom, but things change.

9

Don’t make the mistake of thinking just because they spoke a Dutch language, Afrikaners were just Dutch - there was a mix of European nations in there - as much German as Dutch, almost as much French, and others, not to mention non-Europeans.

And even then it’s a huge mistake to label the emigrant Dutch as “racists” - some of the staunchest White opponents of Apartheid were also Afrikaners, conversely lots of English South Africans supported it just fine (and look at British Rhodesia…)

10

I think this is more suitable for Great Debates.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

11

It’s all a plot! :mad:

12

So what were the circumstances that led them to emigrate while leaving the secular, tolerant Dutch behind?

I honestly don’t get why this is in Great Debates now. What are we debating on, whether extreme xenophobia and racism is okay? This is a group of people that are so extreme as to be indirectly denounced by the conservative congressional leaders of their own party, so unless we have a lot of northwest Iowans (or Afrikaner Party types) here, I don’t know who’s going to take up the debate for their side.

13

As a descendant of those Nederlanders who left the lowlands between 1847 and 1905 to come to the US, I can say it was a multifaceted situation. (I also once gave a talk to our local historical society about why the Netherlanders came to the US, wish I could find my notes from that 1986 address.)

Religion, and the ‘modernizing’ of the Reformed Church (the State religion) did play a role. Many folks didn’t care for the liberalization of the church, and were vocal about it. A good summary can be found here, about the Seceders and their conflicts with the government church, and their migration to America. To summarize, the conservatives were concerned about changes regarding baptism, catechism, church order, the form of subscription, use of Gospel hymns, and freemasonry. The modernizers were rather intolerant of this resistance to change, and the force of the government was selectively brought down on many of the old guard. But the old guard was not so much expelled from the Netherlands as it decided to move to the US and form one large Dutch religious community, untainted by change.

However, the Old Guard splintered over doctrinal differences, and often ended up in greater dispute with each other than they did with the government. As a result, many small colonies of Dutch emigrants sprang up around America, rather than one large one.

The Netherlands, rather than encouraging emigration of its own, often discouraged it, unless one was emigrating to a Dutch colony such as Indonesia or the Netherlands Antilles. Indeed, at times in history, it was considered treasonous to leave the country, unless it was in service to the Dutch nation or its business. As a result, fewer than 300,000 people emigrated from the Netherlands to the US in that time period , a miniscule number compared to the likes of scandinavians, germans, irish, italians, and poles. The seceders were considered traitors by many of their contemporaries for even contemplating leaving the country.

Economy. Times were quite tough economically in the Netherlands during those times, and if one was not the eldest son destined to inherit the father’s land/business, one could look forward to having a career as a farm laborer on one’s older brother’s estate. The promise of one’s own 40 acres of farmland was a powerful draw.

It was definitely a movement driven by more than just the desire for religious freedom (defined as the desire to worship your way and make everyone else do it your way too, quite often.) Dutch catholics and Jews were also leaving the Netherlands during that time, more for economic than religious reasons.

And while it’s true that the most well known Dutch communities in the US (in Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin) are quite famous for extreme conservatism, one still finds such extreme views in force in such communities in the Netherlands as Staphorst and other more rural areas.

So no, I don’t believe the Dutch government forced the dissenters to leave. Abused them to some extent? You bet! Kicked them out of the country? Not so much

Qadgop op 't Mercotijn

14

I think what people are saying is that the Dutch who emigrated to South Africa or Iowa weren’t particularly less secular or tolerant than the ones who stayed in the Netherlands. If it should be that they became so since, that’s due to cultural changes in those places and the Netherlands.

15

The Dutch Bible Belt makes America’s Evangelicals looks like Socinians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt_(Netherlands). These are basically a Calvinistic version of the Amish community in the United States where the theological views of 17th Century Reformed Churches survive essentially intact.

In addition the Reformed Political Party is one of the religiously most conservative parties in the First World: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Political_Party

So I would disagree with your assertion that the Dutch who migrated out of the Netherlands were particularly conservative or fundamentalist.

16

Why? There’s no need to disagree. The fact that a very small part of the Netherlands remains fundamentalist doesn’t negate that those who left were also particulary conservative.

17

Agreed, Latro. I was so mesmerised by the “Bible belt” map at **Qin’s **link, I think I must have neglected to read the rest of his/her comment, and failed to catch that this was posted in *disagreement *with my premise. Ah well, still a really interesting contribution that fills in pieces of the puzzle nicely.

Qadgop, thank you much as well for your informative answer. Loving the information even if it still seems like the wrong forum.

Aha, I wondered if there might have been something like this going on.

Fascinating to look at that “Bible belt” map. It is kind of hard to conceive that in such a small country, there could be such disparity of political opinion that can be represented by starkly different colours on a map. The areas I spent my time in (Heemstede, Haarlem, Zandvoort, and of course Amsterdam) are really just a few miles from this “belt”; but they are nevertheless in the “< 1 percent” zone and so I just never caught a hint of there being any local culture of this sort. Boy, they must just feel they are living behind enemy lines all the time! Crazy.

Your mention of Staphorst matches up well with the map on the Wiki page Qin linked to. But again, it’s strange: this “belt” is so notably contiguous with just a few mild light-coloured exceptions. Yet Staphorst represents the largest “blob” of the darkest colour, but to its north everything drops off to essentially zero (less than one percent support). Is there some (cultural, political, or physical) geographic explanation for that sharp divide? In other areas it is more as we would expect on these kinds of maps: the darkest “blobs” are surrounded by lighter gradations in a zone of transition between this “belt” and the rest of this secular, progressive country.

Man, now I want to go back and poke around in the “belt”.

18

I’ll point out that many Muslims in the Netherlands would be a bit puzzled by this talk of how “tolerant” the Dutch are. Not to say that the Netherlands is more racist than most, but they’ve certainly had huge problems with racism and failure to integrate immigrant populations into their society.

For that matter I’m not sure how many Jews would appreciate hearing at soccer matches “Hamas, Hamas, Juden an het gas, Juden an het gas!”(Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas, Jews to the gas) followed by fans making a hissing sound meant to symbolize the release of Zyklon gas.

This is not meant say that they’re Nazis but people talking about Holland and if its some sort of utopia are talking out of their ass.

19

Nobody is defending their racism. I, for one, however, am concerned about your racism in ascribing theirs to to the fact that they are of Dutch descent.

The reasons for the Afrikaner tradition of racism are not far to seek, and it had nothing to do with their specifically being Dutch. It arose because they were a successful, well established, white colonial culture in Africa who were then displaced and lost status by another distinct group of white colonials, the British, moving into the Cape area, and eventually (after much heroic struggle, which they could later mythologize) humiliating them militarily. As often happens when a former racial elite is cast down by other members of, essentially, their own race, they maintained a feeling of superiority by stressing the notion that they were still racially better than the blacks, and when they eventually got back control of the governance of South Africa, this, by now deeply engrained racism guided their policies.

I do not know anything about the history of the Dutch of Iowa, but I have little doubt that their current racist tendencies (if you have indeed correctly identified such) are similarly a product of that history, as experience subsequent to leaving Holland, and have nothing to do with Dutch genes, and probably little to do with specifically Dutch cultural heritage.

20

My impression of Dutch issues with Islam is that they are of a piece with the issues they had with conservative Calvinists: i.e., that Muslims are not tolerant enough and that their values are at odds with those of a modern, secular, progressive society. I’ve never heard of this “Hamas, Juden” thing, so I can’t comment on that.