Double Dutch
From Mike Farish Sir: The apparent swing from ‘liberalism’ to ‘neoconservatism’ that Rod Liddle detects among the Dutch people in the wake of the murder of Theo van Gogh (‘No tolerance, please, we’re Dutch’, 5 February) isn’t quite the pendulum shift it appears. The Netherlands has always been a place where quite contradictory attitudes can co-exist. In the second world war, for instance, the Netherlands was both the only country occupied by the Nazis where there was an act of mass public disobedience against the treatment of the Jews — a general strike in Amsterdam on 25 February 1941 that spread to other cities — and also the country that produced the highest number of volunteers as a proportion of its population for the Waffen-SS.
Mike Farish
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