Dutch Concern - Let's Not Get Divided Over Our Similarities

The Netherlands and the United States share a resemblance. Both have plural names. That's because both were historically just a collection of loose states which joined up in a Republic to form a nation. In fact, the Netherlands was almost the first Republic in modern time (when one doesn't count the Republic of Venice), dated 1588. But it was not voluntarily so. You see, there was just this bunch of small provinces that saw these larger powers growing around them, and were kind of forced to join up. We tried to get a king, we asked everywhere, but we couldn't find anyone willing. So we formed this here Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

Of which Holland was one. It would later come to be the major power of the Republic, that's why our little country is to this day also known by that name. This land is not much larger than your smallest state, I suppose. You call our language Dutch, which is more like 'Deutsch' which is German for 'German', than like 'Nederlands' which is Dutch for 'Dutch'. We are of the Germanic people though, and there's no language which more resembles ours than German. That's why we were so mad at them for what they did last war (that is, our last war). Because one can hardly get more infuriated by someone than by one's next of kin.

Typically hypocritical of us now, because we really aren't that sweet and innocent either. But I think we're learning to get over that by now. While popularity of Germans in Holland is growing, popularity for us is dropping in Germany. I guess they grew a little tired of our constantly making stingy remarks and nasty jokes. They still come for our beaches though. Many of them have to, since we hold a large strip of their beachhead towards the open North Sea. We also hold the river delta of one of their major rivers, the Rhine. And the delta for another continental European river, the Meuse originating from France. Also we border two more deltas of regional-size rivers.

That's how we held off our most next of kin the Flemish. Situated on our southern borders we hold the entrance of our even smaller than us neighbour's major river the Scheldt towards open sea, and over the centuries we blockaded it as we saw fit. To this day our nation geographically fends off Belgium from the heart of industrial mainland Germany, the Ruhr. There's this railway called the Iron Rhine they want to use which goes through our territory and we give them all kinds of trouble. Mostly, we ignore them. Meanwhile we just finished a new major industrial railway from the harbour of Rotterdam to the German border.

The Flemish was our little brother, they was. But we couldn't let 'm get too big though, now could we. Germany wouldn't become a big brother to us until the late 19^th century. Still, the cultural borderlines were there already for centuries, the Germanic peoples in the northwest continent, the Latin peoples on the Southwest, and the Slavic peoples in the east. Those go back a long way even before the Netherlands existed, all the way back to ye old Roman days. Most major European wars have been fought along those dividing cultural lines.

The whole delta thing then was the secret of our success. Like the ancient Egyptians flourished on the fertile banks of the river Nile, the Netherlands became the gateway to continental Europe. Our first system of government was formed to deal with one issue mainly: how to control the water. A nation-sized swamp was cultivated. Eventually we would even take land from the sea. We were protected in a triangle of major powers: England on our east, separated from us by sea. France on our south, separated from us by a piece of no man's land which is now called Belgium (and at this point in time it literally is no man's land). On our eastern flanks German states smaller than us formed no real threat. On their very far end there was this extensively hibernating big bear, from whence people did come to work for us, but we never really felt threatened by far off Russia. Nobody really could take us over unpunished. Some tried. Most silly, the Spanish did from way down south. It didn't work.

Maybe you ever did wonder how come a nation of two million inhabitants at that time held a world empire on the far side of the world, over ten times its own size, at that time, when they couldn't fly yet. For 400 years. Well, lemme tell ya how we did it. We did it of course by divide and conquer. We played out all these little tribes over there against each other. As a people they were in the majority by far, so we played them to go kill each other. We used all kinds of malignant superiority on them. Like we put the already existing African practice of slavery to our own use. That's how black people eventually became US citizens. We thought we were very smart. In the end it would be the Germans though who would put us off of any kind of superiority thinking. Nowadays we are once again a transit-nation, where all kinds of people come and go, and this is what we have been for centuries.

We also hold the honour of harbouring under our flag, which was red-white-blue long before yours, the very first ever multinational company, being the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, which is more widely known as the VOC. It mainly traded spices for which it held a world monopoly for a considerable time. We held it also with blood. Other people's blood. Many people living and working on a daily routine in the homeland were not aware of what was being done in their name on the other side of the world. Getting by was hard enough. And it brought a lot of wealth to the country, so why bother asking where it came from, or how it was gotten. Us natives never looked beyond our own borders anyway. We never went abroad, getting familiar with other cultures, learning that our way is not the only way. When in the end we were forced to face facts, it was long past too late. We are still trying to deal with all that.

The Mayflower sailed from our shores. If you are offended by my thinking of America as kind of our offspring, than let me at least call you siblings, or kin, like nephew and niece. Because white Americans are of European descendant, there's no escaping that. Black people over there are also historically bound to us. I don't even mention your Hispanics, because over here in Europe Hispanics don't exist as an ethnic group, especially not in Spain. There's just white people, living amongst peoples from all over the world. And I'm telling you: over here in the Old World we are worried. In fact, the whole world is very apprehensive towards the United States right now, it's not just us. Apprehensive like so many of your own parents are, when they send their kids to high school. Like a child can be so entertaining, but o so dangerous. That's why I write this: please don't just take all the bad things from our history.