Comments by "Lynott Parris" (@DenUitvreter) on "Liberty Vault" channel.

In defense of those Dutch people, it is sometimes hard to identify Dutch culture because we import a lot from our neighbours and friends and from all over the world as a cultural trait. We eat French, Italian and Indonesian, we drive German, we watch English spoken entertainment. Also we have been so successful exporting Dutch culture we don't see it as Dutch anymore. From religious tolerance and LGBT tolerance, modern capitalism, equality and upward social mobility, multilingualism and internation orientation, those have been embraced so widely over the West those are not recognized as Dutch culture anymore.
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I believe we are getting demoralized by years of amoralization and immoralization. There are so many things that should be a scandal but don't become one, there is simply too much to be outraged by for outrage. Laws have become more technical and goal oriented and often lack morality of fairness or other right and wrong. When people who were foreign student in Ukraine refuse to go back to thier safe home country but want to abuse the war to get a residency permit from the Netherlands we offer them 5000 euro to leave. That is rewarding an immoral deed with quite a bit of money, and people say "well that's much cheaper than them staying here", which is it. But it's also without morality, 5000 lashes instead would be at least of some morality. We see it in tax laws too, not even elementary fairness as a consideration. End then there is the unpunished looting in the USA as a very clear example, more basic than theft morality hardly gets.
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The moral question was much older and had been answered for the North-Western European societies. The moral issue was whether to extend those values to overseas business in different cultures or just adapt to local customs and profit from it. The Dutch calvinists in charge of the early WIC (Dutch West-Indies Company) loathed slavery as a catholic sin because all people were children of god, blacks could have a career in the WIC and often ended up marrying Dutch women in church. Only when it became hard to run a former Portuguese plantation colony called Brazil without slaves in 1637, there was a biblical excuse prepared that blacks were descendants of Ham and a Portuguese slave fort in Africa was captured too. The British were top down protestants, so they tended more towards biological excuses and extending their classism. But they also developped towards more control over those different parts of the word, as direct rulers. Of course when you are in control of the situation there, the question how to handle all the people pops up more than when you are just doing business with the local rulers. Power comes with the responsibility to answer moral questions. Double standards or the same standards throughout the British Empire?
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