Sjeltur

This decade the government of The Netherlands launched a full force attack on the civil rights of Dutch citizens. The list of new laws that brings the police state closer is getting longer and longer. Even local governments now think citizens should obey when government officials knock on the door of innocent people to conduct a warrantless search of their private property.

Another law passed recently, starting in September everybody who applies for a new passport has to give up their fingerprints to the government. Especially the Dutch should know that this is a very bad idea. A similar history made it possible that the Nazis were very successful in The Netherlands deporting Jews to concentration and death camps during World War II. Two names come up, one very well known, and one that nobody seems to remember…

The first name is Anne Frank. When the Nazis took power in Germany she and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933. The Nazis occupied The Netherlands in 1940 and when the persecutions against the Jews increased the Frank family went into hiding. They were betrayed and Anne and her family were transported to concentration camps. Only her father, Otto Frank, survived. After the war he returned to Amsterdam and he discovered that the diary of Anne had been saved and in 1947 the now world famous diary of Anne Frank was published.

The second name is Jacobus Lambertus Lentz. He was a Dutch civil servant and his work was to improve the Dutch civil registry. In 1936 it became mandatory for Dutch municipalities to register every person living there. Lentz invented the ‘persoonskaart’ (‘persons card’) to record all information about those people. That was not enough for Lentz, he wanted that everybody in The Netherlands should carry a identification card at all times. This was rejected by the Dutch government in March 1940, just before the invasion of The Netherlands by the Nazis. According to Dirk Jan de Geer, at the time prime minister of The Netherlands, the identification card would make everybody a potential criminal in the eyes of the government and this was not acceptable.

But Lentz got a second chance when the Germans arrived. He developed an identification card for the Nazis and in 1941 it became mandatory for everybody to carry it at all times. The card Lentz developed was high tech at the time. It had a fingerprint of the card holder on it and a special ink was used.

The Nazis were very happy with the new identification card and the already existing persons cards in the civil registry. This is the reason the Nazis were very successful in The Netherlands deporting and subsequently murdering of Jews, compared to other countries. The Netherlands had the best civil registry in Europe, together with the new identification card it was relatively easy for the Nazis to find the Jews. Before World War II there were about 140,000 Jews living in The Netherlands. The Nazis got their hands on about 108,000 of them. Only 5,000 of those 108,000 survived the Holocaust.

Now let’s fast forward to 2005. In that year it became mandatory for the Dutch to carry an identification card. And now starting in September 2009, the Dutch have to give up their fingerprints to the government when they apply for a new passport. The European Union (EU) demands that new passports have a chip that contains those fingerprints. What the EU doesn’t demand, but the Dutch government is going to do it anyways, is that all those fingerprints will be stored in a big, centralized database. Once again, the government of The Netherlands wants to have the best civil registry of Europe, perhaps of the entire world.

The Dutch population doesn’t seem to care that much now history is repeating itself. The Dutch have a naive trust in their government, and more worrying, a naive trust in all future governments. The only way this new system can’t be misused for malicious purposes is that we always will have a “good” government. Forever, our government needs to be “good” in all eternity. But given all the new laws in recent years that is attacking civil rights of Dutch citizens, it looks like the government is going “bad”, and not staying “good”. Put a new despot, home made or from foreign origin, in the mix some time in the future and a new disaster will happen. One of the most important lessons of Anne Frank’s diary is that we should keep the government “dumb”. It’s extremely dangerous if the government knows too much about the people it’s ruling. Unfortunately, that lesson is not understood very well by the Dutch.