After the war, and especially since the nineteen-sixties, the
Dutch prided themselves on having built an oasis of tolerance, a kind of
Berkeley writ large, where people were free to do their own thing.
Liberated, at last, from the strictures of religion and social conformity,
the Dutch, especially in Amsterdam, frolicked in the expectation that the
wider world would not disturb their perfect democracy in the polders. Now
the turbulent world has come to Holland at last, crashing into an idyll that
astonished the citizens of less favored nations. It¹s a shame that this had
to happen, but naïveté is the wrong state of mind for defending one of the
oldest and most liberal democracies against those who wish to destroy
it.
--Final Cut, The
New Yorker, Jan. 3
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