That may seem tempting, but if you think about it a little longer, you should soon come to the conclusion that this is a fallacy. These kinds of problems, including the riots, are not at all new, nor are they reserved for young people with a migrant background.
In this context, also think of the youth from Gooi who visited the Belgian seaside resort of Knokke-Heist in July unsafe. Moreover, in the not yet very distant past, such behavior was mainly associated with less educated fellow countrymen in the poorer neighborhoods.
So it wrote Algemeen Dagblad on January 2, 1960 about the traditional New Year’s riots in the Schilderswijk: “The new year was barely five hours old when the notorious Schildersbuurt looked like after a civil war: broken pavements, smoldering fires, smashed street lamps, shattered windows, bent traffic bollards and damaged cars. The roads were littered with stones, sticks, broken bottles, half-burnt furniture, shelves and furniture. ”
When a group of youths challenged the police, they intervened by order of the police chief, nicknamed ‘Jan Hak’, with the infamous ‘white saber’, in which a 16-year-old student on his way to the hospital suffered an arterial bleeding. died.
Thirty-five years earlier, according to many residents of The Hague, things were already running out. So is in a letter sent to the liberal newspaper The Fatherland (March 27, 1926) to read: “It is unfortunately a sad truth that the Dutch youth, especially those of the big cities, is known for their extraordinary tendency towards wantonness and street violation”. The ‘Committee Against Folklore’ pleaded in that context for the deployment of civilian police.
In Sweden at that time they went a step further and the Social Democrats, who came to power in the 1930s, used eugenics to combat the ‘underclass’ problem. In addition, some 63,000 people were forcibly sterilized between 1934 and 1975. Moreover tried the state to remove children as much as possible from the sphere of influence of their parents by setting up crèches and after-school care on a large scale.
In short, rioting youth, crime and social problems are nothing new, nor are rigorous plans to combat them. As in the past, many – including on the left – saw this not so much as a consequence of socio-economic disadvantage, but as a cultural and even genetic problem. Only then it concerned the own indigenous ‘Lumpenproletariat’ and the – rather short-sighted – arrows are now aimed at immigrants and their descendants.
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