Rambo and Bin Laden in NL

The ghost of past mistakes desolates the conscience of any person. And as ghosts are well known to do, they haunt our dreams, threatening with invading our reality.

What else could have fueled the blockbuster of Rambo, that seminal film? How comes that a huge amount of people went to the movies to see the history of their own soldier declaring, in the sluggish voice of a crying Stallone: “there are no friendly civilians, sir”? Only a sort of penance, I believe. Perhaps the recreation of the nightmare worked as the needed exorcism, bringing the worse fear to the screen, to the hopefully unreal screen. Rambo confronted the North American public with a monster that themselves created, a monster that was eating their own entrails. A monster, among many.

How to otherwise explain the amount of attention that Osama Bin Laden and his video apparitions creates in the North American media? Is the real fear of another September eleven, or is it rather the fearful confrontation with a monster or own creation? Bin Laden has the fascination that Rambo enjoyed. The freedom fighter, the soldier feed and trained with the taxpayer money, suddenly decided to kill friendly civilians in an act of megalomaniac rapture. Rambo and Bin Laden made headlines. Not because they are a couple of sonofabitches, but because they are our sonofabitches.

The newspapers of the NL have recently discovered their own monster. This society suddenly has awakened to the fact that terrorism is not only the work of crazy soldiers, or bearded schizoids. Terrorism is also the work of well-integrated citizens, ranging from Mohamed B to the youth that throws a molotov, not anymore in the streets of A'dam to bash the birthday of a queen, but to protest against the education of Muslims children. We stare at our television screens, and slowly began to digest a new phenomenon: the progressive and tolerant Netherlands has also created her own monsters.

A question looms for the years to come. The newspapers and governments of our days produced the only answers that they are capable of. Faced with the horror, they try to move it away. Mohamed B is the sad result of an international brainwash, and the Lonsdale kids are simple pubescent misfits, misguided and perhaps dangerous, but ultimately kids that will grow out. Or so they say. But the question looms untouched. Is our society able to deal with the monsters that had created? Are we able to recognize and analyze the simple fact that Londsdaler's and Mohamed B’ers are as Dutch as Balkenende? Today is impossible to know. Our certainty, in this troubled moment, is that we are awakened to a nightmare. A nightmare of our own making. Integration is a double side issue, where the person should fit to a society and the society should fit to the person. The lack of integration is also double sided. If the Dutch society wants to awaken, in ten years or more, to a better situation, we should start to recognize our own part of blame. What is it that we have done to give Mohamed’s and londsdalers their existence? That is a question that needs not only answers, but actions.