Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff.

You're a weekly reminder that when people do bad things, there's people around trying to do good things.

And one of the people who I think is often trying to do good things is Samantha McVeigh.

Hi.

Oh, that was such a nice introduction.

Thank you.

You might know Samantha from stuff Mom never told you, and you might know Samantha from a lot of episodes of this very show, including some of the first ones.

I actually the Jane one is so burned into my brain as like one of the foundational recordings, and like, oh, this show is going to be fun and good.

It was like that recording.

But so I actually don't remember each other, but even on.

Like four rep Yeah, so one of them was an Asian one.

And you told me after the fact that you were like, I hotly.

Just because yeah, I overthink this shit, which.

I was like, no, no, because they were about their having their own village for those who were I think my polar and schosophenic or any time.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah remember in Japan.

Yeah, And I was like, oh, I thought you knew I was a social worker, and that's what my Schupter was so it was a beautiful culmination that there's been I'm not gonna lie, I can't remember because I never've been on a few more.

Oh yeah, yeah, But anyway, all tho, those are good.

I've actually met people who by listening to those, have like gotten really involved in social work.

Yes, I'd love when good social work stuff actually happens when you get plans, because they're so much bad, especially in the US.

The way that it's set up is minimal, and obviously the government today is making even worse.

We're kind of getting into that.

Actually.

Yeah, but when I see a good program, which oftentimes is not in the US, it makes me envious and really excited to see things.

I will say, have you seen I know this is very far off script Christian Bales initiative that he's doing believe in California, No, I don't think so.

He is investing millions of dollars to create his own community, okay, set up for un housed people.

I believe this could go either really bad or really good exactly, but I trust you, so I want to hear about it.

I don't know.

I don't know, because it's all new.

I've only seen the headlegs on it, and that was my exact thought, macpay.

I was like, that could be great, that could be really bad.

Yeah, I will tell you, as a person who's been in like especially like working with teens and working with runaway teens and those types of communities because of their home life, we oftentimes talk about our dream of having millions of dollars and creating our own community that is sustaining, that also has social workers that live within the buildings, that get enough pay that helps provide essentially healthcare within like all of those things.

If that could be in place, what that can look like.

And also one of the biggest conversations is allowing for mistakes.

When I say mistakes, those who make choices that they feel like our survival mode choices and oftentimes, yeah, when we have these programs, they do not allow for that.

And I get it because you don't have the resources to handle that.

A lot of big conversations, but yeah, we will see what his plans are for when things do fall apart.

Because there's always bad players, there's always mistakes made, there's always survival most or trauma responses that never truly go away.

So I don't know, but it does sound like something that most of us social workers who have been in that field would love to do.

Is according to who he brings in.

That makes sense.

I'm thinking about one of my friends once, a social worker in a southern city, who is like, trying to buy a million dollar empty hotel, Yeah, for this purpose, and what's trying to do it?

And not like I personally going to do this thing.

They were like, I work with this organization, We're doing this thing.

And in the end they wouldn't sell to them even if they were to do it, because the people who are selling it were like, no, we don't want sketchy people here or whatever.

I think.

But oh, I have to correct myself.

It's for foster siblings.

It's for foster kids who could be right, That's how I was.

Okay, So, because I will tell you as a person who has been in the system, have worked with the Department of Family Children's Services, foster care is one of the most corrupt.

Foster care is one of the least funded.

Yeah, foster care is probably one of the worst setups, especially when it comes to governmental ways that it really is almost impossible for families to remain together, like it's set up to fail.

That's a whole different conversation.

No, but actually that's the kind of thing that, like some other time, if you have examples of people doing that, well, I would love to cover that kind of stuff because I love social work done right.

That's like one of my favorite genres of cool.

People when it's done right.

Yeah, And it's like interesting because like I remember when we did that.

I think it was the beginning the battlehel episodes, like Oh, I'm to tell you about this thing, and you're like, oh, I hope that did.

Right, you know, because there's so much corrosion within those systems.

But I don't know much about Christian Bell.

He's not my favorite actor.

I don't know if there's a movie that I've seen that I'm like, he's amazing.

I knew he was an actor.

That was all I knew.

Used to be a Batman.

Okay, yeah, see Batman.

Okay, there you go, Oh Batman.

He's no Scars Guard.

Is that what we're saying?

He's not a Scars Guard.

I'm sorry.

He was in a Shakespeare okay take off like movie.

I do remember that as well.

But all of that to say is if he does as well, it'll be interesting to see and I think the idea behind it seems like a great idea, but yeah, it's really matter another episode to who that he.

Brings on and like write, yeah, well, let's talk about people fighting in defense of immigrants in the Netherlands, and we.

Could talk about how the US uses immigration as a way of selling goods.

But a, we've covered that a little bit on episodes that we did around Oh, I don't remember.

There was a side piece in one of these stories about how the Catholic Church was particularly guilty of, like in the nineteenth century, taking immigrant kids from New York City and selling them to rich people in the Southwest, and like at one point a priest like went with the kids and was like, WHOA, none of this is okay, And I think I ended up in a gunfight with the people who were trying to take the kids.

Like wow, But it has been a minute, sins I remember this story.

Yeah, no, the whole I've actually never quite found a way to talk about adoptees' rights movement that like everyone I know who's adopted who have talked to about this has real issues with the adoption system and it's so hard to bring up because people are like, but everyone who adopts a kid as a saint who has personally saved a person, I'm not adopted, and so it's like so hard to like get over.

I'm like, but isn't that good, right, you know, and you're like, oh no, it's it is messy at best.

Yeah, the white saviorism that comes behind the conversation about adoption, especially international adoption, there is this bit of like concern and to to who they see as adoptedbull is a whole different conversation.

Yeah, But I will say one of the biggest conversations that has been had is through a case from Denmark and an adoptee filed the case against South Korea as an international adoptee, and that's what brought up this upheaval within especially Korean adoptees, and it has shone light on China as well.

But hey, so you know, yeah, they got some things that happen.

Yeah, there's people trying to do good things everywhere.

It's like, one of the main things I learned about history is that when we have these like really black and white way of thinking about things, obviously, like when states are doing really bad things, you know.

We're like like most of the Germans and nineteen forty in Germany were either in jail or doing bad stuff, but not all.

You know.

It's like it's like messy, right.

We love the underground swatters here, like the underground movements that happened that I know nothing about that Margaret was a part of.

Yeah, well, okay, so the Netherlands.

Yes, to continue to throw myself into this story way more than I actually feel comfortable.

I'm like so worried about being like I'm so cool because I did this stuff.

I'm like I am a fly on the wall for these movings.

Yeah, I think you are so cool back then that we wouldn't have been friends.

And I've been so intimidated by you, so I love hearing these stories.

I stuck around the Netherlands for three months, but this was I was on a tourist visa, so at the time you could have three months out of six without getting into potential problems, and so I had to fuck off for a while.

I went back to the US and I spent a miserable autumn and winter living in a loft and a punk house in Ashville.

Washing dishes at a late night diner and walking home in the snow at five am most mornings.

But this was also my most like Empire Records moment, was working in this diner where we would like we could play whatever we wanted, and especially after it closed, we could play in as loud as we wanted.

So we were just like listen to punk rock while like mopping the floors and like romanticizing her like kind of crummy lives and you know.

Really we're living the nineties two thousand movie era, I know.

And this was the first time I did a never get mad at someone who dresses up as a girl for Halloween because she just doesn't know she's a girl yet, okay, And so I like, yeah, absolutely, like went to work as like a passing trans girl because I was young enough to do that, you know, And well I still pass as a trans girl, but anyway, whatever.

So sometimes besides all that, so I'm living in the US when all this stuff happens, and I'm just sad, and meanwhile, shit is going down in the Netherlands.

On October twenty sixth, two thousand and five, and into the morning of the twenty seventh, a fire broke out at the largest of the airport detention centers, the one built right outside shit Bull Airport, the Amsterdam Airport.

Probably I read way too much of like a one hundred page report that's linked in the notes about the internal investigation about this.

No one is certain.

It probably started from a cigarette being cast off.

Two hundred and ninety eight people were locked up in cells in that detention center, again, most of them not even being accused of any crime.

There might have been some people who had swallowed some drugs and flown into the country, which is funny because that's why white people go to the fucking Netherlands, right, Like, this is kind of funny.

When I decided I was going to the Netherlands, I was going because of legalized squatting.

My parents and my parents' generation were like, ah, legalized weed, that's why you're going there, right.

I don't smoke weed.

It makes me too paranoid because I've had too many encounters with the police already in my life.

And my grandfather was like, Ah, the ladies in the picture windows.

The ladies, that's what I've heard, right, And.

So like people go to the Netherlands to do drugs.

That is the basis of their tourism is legalized sex work and drugs, right and anyway, But how dare Some people have swallowed drugs and brought them into the country, but most of them were asylum seekers, people who had not been accused of breaking a single law.

The center was a death trap, and eleven people died in the fire.

Fire safety.

We know it wasn't part of its planning.

The Dutch government admits this.

I read the internal report about it, and it conclusively states that poor planning led to this situation.

Planners had all along told them how to do things differently, but they ignored those people and those warnings.

Like the report is like things to have done differently, not ignored the following things, you know.

And it's so interesting.

It's so cold, right because it's written in this bureaucratic language, and it talks about being like fire safety is particularly complicated when everyone in the building is kept into cells, and it just like it's like admitting like prison is a trap, you know, right, Another similar center officials had already put together a report about how wildly inadequate the safety was there.

This was also ignored.

Apparently, the same detention center, the Shipbull Detention Center might have caught fire once already before, shortly after it had opened.

There was no pull this lever and all the cell doors unlock system.

During the fire, the guards, who were almost all private contractors for a private company, went sell to sell to let people out, and it took them a long time to start doing that.

When prisoners were like, hey, there's a fire, the guards ignored them.

Apparently there was no fire alarm system, because maybe there was, but the way that people heard about the fire was prisoners being like, hey, they were ignored for a long time.

Story after story has come out from the detainees saying they were held at gunpoint by these private guards when they were trying to help people escape the fire.

Like most of the news reports about us at the time, like don't worry, we got a helicopter to find the eight people who escaped.

Again not even criminals, not even by Dutch legal standards, but don't worry.

They all got tracked down.

It's twenty years later and I'm still mad about this.

I mean, it's murder, right, it's state sanctioned murder of the most vulnerable people in your carriage.

The way you treat the people who you have ultimate power over.

Is how you know whether or not you're a moral person.

And if you are this country and these people have come to you and say like, hey, I have nothing and if I go home they'll kill me, the way you treat them is how you should understand whether or not you're a moral person.

But don't worry right away.

Rida Verdonk was right on top of it.

She went and told the press that the guards had quote adequately handled the situation.

She's a real fucking Donald Trump.

Like she wasn't the prime minister, so she didn't get to.

Be one, right.

I mean her and Christy Nomes sound like they could be best friends.

Yeah, they could be best friends.

Maybe they are.

I bet they are, honestly could be.

She is still alive.

I believe there was one thing I will say about America over Europe.

I sure appreciate our press freedoms here now because it took me a while to understand.

Like later in this people are going to get in a lot of trouble for hanging up banners that say, hey, you killed these people.

Rita right, And I'm like, how is that illegal?

I'm like, oh, because they don't have free speech protections, not that this wouldn't happen in America.

Let's say we're teetering.

Yeah, so this became a massive political scandal when eleven people died, because I think people were able to say, like, oh, yeah, no, those people were in our care and we failed them right.

In response to the fire, squats all over Amsterdam hung up banners blaming Rita Verdonk personally for the fires.

These banners said things like, for Donk, still no blood on your hands because she it said, after the people had been killed in the Congo, she didn't have any blood on her hands because they hadn't died in her care.

And another banner read eleven burned alive thanks Rita, and another one.

And I believe this isn't the best translation eleven innocently detained dead by guilt.

There's a lot of not great translations that I found in various points to this story.

The mayor at the city was the famous Yop Cohen and Yop is spelled job, but it's yup or something that sounds like that.

And I never got good at Dutch pronunciation to the point where I got frustrated and gave up and started studying Spanish, and then my Dutch friends were like, you know, I appreciate their trying to learn Spanish.

You do live in the Netherlands.

You could be studying Dutch and I'd be like, yeah, the difference between cocain and cocaine is not something I can hear.

That is not a thing that makes any sense to me.

That was repetition to me.

Right, I'm doing it wrong.

I can't actually pronounce it.

This it's the difference between cooking in the kitchen.

Okay, it's two different vowel sounds that we don't have in English, and so it's just anyway whatever.

Yeah, yeah, Actually, some of the other people on the other side, some of the squatters are also named Yop.

So it's a common name.

Yeah, Yop.

Cohen was famous specifically for diffusing xenophobic tensions in Amsterdam.

He's actually like, he's an interesting character to throw into this reader.

Verdonk is his right wing figure.

There's no doubt about that Amsterdam was heavily Muslim by the mid two thousands.

I think it's like it was around like only half born in the Netherlands.

I believe at that point, specifically, he had been heralded as a hero for keeping shit together.

After that Van Gogh was murdered, and it seems like he genuinely did a good job.

His motto wasn't we must act firmly?

His motto was like we listened to all sides.

Riata Verdonk didn't like him at all.

In two thousand and six, after the events of this story, she accused Amsterdam of being a banana republic, which I actually don't think is a correct use of the word banana republic, but we're gonna it's what she said anyway, right, I honestly think she just straight up met a racist.

I actually think it was like probably straight up about like black people.

I was gonna say, is this supposed to be like racist towards black people?

I believe we're saying, okay, yeah, okay, interesting and.

A conflation of all like Middle Eastern immigrants with black immigrants.

And yeah, like she never said I hate black people, right, she just said I post multiculturalism.

Well, actually she might said I hate black people.

I did not find her saying that.

But she would complain about the lazy youth causing lots of crime by hanging around the corners.

Now Amsterdam's crime levels were the same as every other city in the Netherlands.

It's just where all the immigrants lived.

So anyway, Also, I'm guessing they're creating chaos to give them charges, as in like, oh, you're standing your jaywalking type of conversation and excessively giving out charges.

Totally.

But do you know what doesn't care about anything other than your money.

Tell me the products and services to support this show.

Actually, I can't promise that some of them might be racist, but if they are, we get them cut.

Yeah, let us know on our show too, we.

Actually do try to not have that happen.

Yeah, anyway, never made Sophie make that face with a that transition before.

Sorry, Sophie, here's the ads and we're back.

So this hero of moderation and acceptance that is you know, yop right, and it's telling about where Dutch society was, free speech and all of that in two thousand and five.

That he's the one who led the assault on the squats for hanging anti Verdonk banners.

And this is sort of the problem that people have with moderates and centrists is that if your primary concern is difusing tensions, you might not be looking in to see whether those tensions are justified.

All right, buses full of riot police rated squats all over the city to rip these banners down.

It's almost comical, except for the fact that people almost diet or in this but they don't.

Well, people died at the start of it.

But it's almost comical the level of overreaction.

We're talking about the banners that named Rita by name.

There was a legal argument that could be made that they were criminal to put up because defamation defamation.

Right.

The squats were generally speaking, legal residences, were people legally resided, but because they would eventually be criminalized by the state and then raided, like that was the fate of most squats if they weren't eventually legalized.

Also, a lot of times squats would be attacked by thugs hired by the owners of the buildings who left them vacant.

Like there was this a whole thing where I wasn't a very fighty person, but people would be like, Hey, we need everyone to come stay over at the squad because we think the owner is going to send people around to try and beat us up, so we all have to be there.

And I would be like, but I am but a little waif.

Why would you want to waif?

Is the body the numbers?

Yeah, they're like no, we don't care.

You're part of the squad saying you got to do this thing.

And I'm like, all right, I.

Want American, let's go.

This is what solidarity is.

If one of us is getting beat up, we're all getting beat up.

And actually a lot of them could beat up back better than I could.

So that's why he told you to go to the gym.

That I know, like honestly, actually, yeah, So the squats are very well barricaded because they are under assault a lot, right, right, Like a lot of squatters were like locksmiths and shit professionally, like, oh really yeah, you have whole teams of breakers who knew exactly how to get into a building as quickly and like non destructively as possible, despite what their name translates to.

So cops showed up outside a squat called the wilda Vestern the wild West, and it had still no blood on your hands.

Rita banner, and the squatters barricaded themselves inside, and they called a friend.

They were like, hey, the cops are outside about her banner and the friend and came by to talk to the police, and he went up and he was like, if you believe it is illegal for that banner to be there, that my banner I put it there, arrest me and they would be like na, and he'd be like, take down my name and information.

I am taking full legal responsibility for that banner.

So he had to like make them take down as information.

They refused to arrest him instead, at five point thirty in the morning.

The next morning, the police raided the place, breaking out windows and pepper sprain everywhere.

The communal kitchen that they used to feed hungry people was destroyed, so the squatters put up a new banner that said burned alive thanks to Rita.

So the cops came back that afternoon with a knife attached to a stick and started trying to cut the banner down, So the squatters brought it inside until the cops left and then hung it again and the police raided again.

They stopped traffic in the streets and attacked passerby.

They spent ten minutes trying to beat down the door, but squatters know their business and they couldn't get through the door, so one cop gave another cop a leg up and they snatched the banner and then they left like it all fell into this weird game of capture the flag.

Right the whole time, that's same man kept telling the police like, hello, it's me right, that's my banner.

I would like to take legal responsibility.

If that's crime, please put me on trial.

If this is a criminal offense, we can discuss it in court.

And they were like, no, we want to do this weird thing where we have this knife on a stick, and we're really excited about the knife stick.

So I don't know what we're gonna do here.

You know who's not excited about a knife stick?

Though, come on, Margaret.

I know that's true.

That is a good point.

You know that things are bad in your country for law and order when the anarchists are more interested in law than the police are.

Right at another squad, the cops came and said, hey, take down the banner.

And in this case, the filde Western was like a kind of a social center, like people lived there, but I was also this communal kitchen.

I used to go to pizza nights there.

They were actually the first people were nice to be about the accordion.

They were like, Hey, we want to have a fancy dinner.

Come, come play accordion.

Wait so they made you do a fancy music time were their fancy dinner with the accordion?

Make is not the right word.

They invited me to Okay.

They asked you.

That's fantastic.

I know.

It's one of the first times I was like, oh, maybe people like me here.

They love your skills.

They found the youth for.

I think it's just that they like didn't know how to like we just socialized different, you know.

Yeah, music speaks to everyone, especially an accordion.

Yeah.

When I would bust all the time, I had a nemesis, who is the hurdy gurdy man?

I'm sorry?

What?

Yeah?

So, which is funny because hurdy gurdy actually means something different.

It's the name for a lot of different instruments.

Hurdy gurdy, as I understand it now, is a hand cranked, weird violin thing from the Middle Ages where you press keys and it pushes on the strings.

But the hurdy gurdy man, who is my nemesis, had a steam empowered I would call the calliope, or maybe it was gas powered, but it would like blow air through these like perforated sheets that had the music on them right, and so it was like carnival music, you know, And he would just blow away everyone else on the street.

He would just like push it around and no one else could busk because this man was just like infinitely loud yea.

And at one point get into kind of like turf stuff over busking.

And so at one point I'm like, I'm busking with my my French friend is also accordionist, and blow it and I'm trying to show her that busking is fine.

And she's like way better and accordious than me.

Anyway, we barely speak the same language, English as or third language, but we can talk about accordions.

So it's fine.

And he comes and he starts blowing us out of the water, and so I go over and I'm like, hey, man, like we were here first.

He was like I don't care.

I'm like fuck.

He was like I have papers because he had a permit to do it and we didn't have a parole.

Oh he had permit.

Yeah, And so we gave up.

I had to go home, and so he would just show up and ruin us.

But the violinist I started off in conflict with because we would try and get to the same spot at the same time every day when like the shopping district closed and you were allowed to bust, but there's still people around, and so I'm like walking down the street and he would start walking faster, I'd start walking faster.

And we did not share a single word of a shared language.

He didn't speak any Dutch, I didn't whatever anyway, And finally, like we like nonverbally communicated that like all right, this is my block, that's your block, and we like figured it out.

We became friends.

We'd like check in on each other at the end of the day and we're like, hey, how you doing.

You know, Okay, this feels like what I would imagine of the Netherlands.

I want you to know this, like this is very like Battle of the Accordion and like all of these instruments that are you're not your typical that I have seen, And I'm like, this is amazing.

I'm not gonna call it white nonsense.

What you can if you want the calliope, hurdy gurdy versus Accordian.

Fight, It's exactly what I'm like, this is, Yeah, this is what I would imagine as a Dutch story that is coming to me as not knowing anything about the Dutch people once again, and I love it.

I also love the ending with the violinists.

And in my head, I'm like whispering the background, now kiss, this battle in each other's face.

I'm like, uh, but now kiss and it becomes a rom com.

It would be such a good romance.

This is the turn in my head that that has happened on the Dutch streets that I know nothing of.

You know, there was a busking accordion Amsterdam romance story that I'm not going to say on Mike, but I'll tell you later.

Anyway, So this squad, not the Bildevester and this other squad that I'm gonna talk about.

Which, by the way, So they had a place that translate into the words wild West.

Did they have a like in Dutch culture, a wild West because that's typically a US battle of the cowboy thing.

So it's a reference to American cowboy wild west stuff.

But it was in West is the name of the district.

Oh okay, that makes sense, Okay, yeah, okay.

But there was nothing themed wild Western about it.

I'm like, please tell me you had chaps and cowboy hat.

No, they had like a pizza contest where it was two different squats would come over and try and make the best pizza to give away for free, and so whoever had the nicest pizza would win.

But it was just a whiteboard where people would tally which when they prefer and no one policed who was tallying what, so people would just get drunk and start adding more and more tallies.

I love that kind of competition where it's not taken seriously at all, except the making of the pizza.

They took very seriously.

So was it some of the best pizza that you've ever had?

No, I don't like touch pizza very much.

American and Italian pizza is good everywhere else.

I can't.

It wasn't good.

It was fine.

It was fine, But you didn't tell them that, right.

No, absolutely not.

Yeah, I know, and if you're listening, I loved your pizza.

Everything was amazing.

Yeah, nothing hurt.

Nothing hurt.

So this other squad, it's just a residence.

People live there, including a four year old.

They still are like, we got to do it's right, you know, but we're also like, man, we don't want got to raid it a four year old lives here, you know.

They put up a banner, and the cops come and say take down the banner, and the squatter goes outside and he talks to the cops and or they actually don't know the pronouns of this particular person, and they're like, hey, look, I actually can't make a decision about this banner by myself.

It's actually owned collectively, So tell me what specific complaint you have against it, and I'll bring it to the collective and we'll deal with this.

Which is the most fun way to irritate cops is when you're like, hey, no one's in charge.

I'm sorry you have to go through collective process, because no one likes collective process, and it's really fun to do to people.

And once again the squatters were like, look, we'll let a judge decide the legality of the banner.

They're like, come here and tell us what the specific complaint is and you can have it.

In this case, when the cops left and they were like, all right, look, we can't have a raid.

If the cops come back, we'll give them the banner.

They all agreed, and instead the cops came back, batons swinging, so the squatters tossed down the banner, the cops took it and ran.

A few days later, they're still feeling kind of salty, so they hang up some new banners and they say, for donks, still no blood on your hands, And they say four banners more important than eleven human lives.

We demand justice, and my favorite one, I want my banner back.

I mean, that's simple, give me a banner back.

I know.

So the police closed off the entire street and arrested one squatter on her way home from work.

And the police saw a squatter with a power drill on the roof who was up there hanging up a banner, and they decided the drill.

You know how cops think everything is a gun.

They were like, oh, it's a gun.

Shots are being fired.

Squatters tend to monitor police radio, so they heard the cops saying things like the squatters are still shooting, even though we can't hear the shots.

What they're like, somehow it has to be a gun and they have to be shooting at us even though we can't hear anything.

Right, I think because they're listening to the radio, someone inside sorts out that the cops are freaked out over this drill, and that's why they're like on crazy lockdowns equivalent of swat outside.

And so someone walks out holding the drill over their head and it's like, hey, it's just a drill.

They set the drill on the ground and they are promptly arrested.

The rest of the squatters decide they don't want to be raided.

They surrender themselves.

They come out of their legal residence and get arrested one by one for someone having had a drill with a banner that the cops wouldn't even admit this defamation.

And interestingly, the owner of the house, who's like probably not a big fan of the squatters who are living in the house, was far more mad at the cops because they smashed up his doors right than he was at the squatters.

And they were released without charges or any paperwork.

A week later, the cops returned the drill, so they hung up a banner that said banners don't kill, ACU drills don't kill, which is the brand of drill the deportation policies do.

And then they came from my house the omstall.

But do you know what the ground floor of the Omstoll was it was a sushi restaurant that sold things.

And do you know who else sells things?

Add Peoples, Yeah, ad Peoples.

If nothing else, ads have been sold to be on this podcast.

Not actually all of them sell things.

Some of them are for very good podcasts.

I've started listening to some podcasts based on ads and cool Zone shows, so as you should.

Yeah, anyway, here they are.

Row back.

I'm being a little self important when I call it my house because in Dutch squatting terms, it wasn't my house because I didn't help open it.

So even though I lived there for about half a year and like had a room, it wasn't my house.

Could it be your residence?

Is that a better way to say it?

Yeah?

Yeah, it was just a kind of an interesting like like later I actually had a squat that was my squat kind of because I was like part of the group that got into it, you know.

But the Omstoles like it's where I lived, It's where I hung out and like slept and all of that.

Had lots of sleep.

Proalyssis dreams about strange demons, you know, all the important.

Stuff they try to get you.

It's a very old building.

I'm not really in this story, but I just care about it because this was where I lived.

I was back in the States, being depressed, washing dishes at the late night diner, renting a loft in a basement where if I sat up too fast I would hit my head on asbestos.

I was like paying a couple hundred bucks a month to rent this loft, and I was like, Man, I used to live in this mansion we stole from a mafia leader for free, for free, and among the most beautiful places in the world, right on the downtown Maine Canal of Amsterdam.

And now I live in a basement with asbestos and washed dishes and washed and pay for it.

So I got myself back to Amsterdam as soon as I could.

But the downside is that there are far more police rates when you stay at these places.

Oh.

Yes, this place was owned by a mafia family.

I've read a couple different versions about this.

I had always been told while I lived there that the mafia owner was in prison, and so that's why his building had gone empty.

Is that he was in prison, but he would send people around to try and roust us out every now and then, And so it was very well barricaded.

Two days after the fire, the omstill hung of a banner that said burned alive.

Thank you Rita.

One resident Shword wrote about it quote with this message.

We wanted to say that, according to us, eleven people died because of this minister's policies.

We wanted to stimulate opinions and make people think.

In my opinion, it is necessary for democracy to have discussions, and therefore it's necessary to put a cat among the pigeons, which is a Dutch idiom meaning to stir things up.

That makes sense.

My favorite Dutch idiom.

Instead of saying you can't get blood from a stone, they would say you can't pluck feathers from a naked chicken.

They're not wrong, I know there's no feathers to pluck.

It feels more accurate.

How many naked chickens do they have at the squad?

Yeah?

How many natural chickens do the Dutch have naked.

Rather naked chickens?

Yeah, probably not a lot.

I'm assuming if that's the process of like, you know.

But maybe you've already gotten all the feathers from cha.

You're plucking them because of the.

There's no feathers left.

No, No, I'm not sure.

I also like to think sometimes that like a Dutch idiom that someone taught me could have just been someone fucking with me.

It's kind of like when people get Asian character tattoos and people would just messing with them and be like, yeah, that's absolutely a word that you want on there.

Yeah.

One time I was in Sweden and I was waiting for this book fair to open, so I was I went to the store and I was like, I'm hungry, So I bought a green pepper and I was eating the green.

Pepper like a bill pepper.

Yeah, yeah, just a green bell pepper you ate like an apple?

Yeah yeah, huh.

Interesting, And the sweetish person is like, man, you Americans are so weird.

And that's when Americans are like, that's not common.

Yeah, that's not a thing we do either.

That's a Margaret.

Yeah, honey, don't make your decisions about Americans based on the like has it come out yet?

Trans girl?

The beard and a skirt.

Just really needed some There's a lot of iron in bill pepper.

I think.

When I am like the platonic ideal of a vegetable, when I'm like, man, I need a vegetable.

It is a green bell pepper.

A bell pepper.

It's like slightly bitter, has a nice crisp bite.

Does have a crunch.

Yeah, like Peaches, my dog, that's one of our favorite things, is a green bell pepper because she loves loves a crunch.

Yeah, she loves the idea that she's breaking something I assume, but that's an Okay, I'm sorry I stopped that story, but I needed to know that that's a bell pepper.

Moving on, Yeah, I just I really like the idea of me as the ambassador for America.

Walking around with a bell pepper.

Yeah.

At one point, actually years later from this, I was giving a talk in the Netherlands about the state of American anarchism and someone was like, yeah, but you're just talking about like the punks and stuff who dressed like you.

And I'm like, man, no one dresses like me, like like actually just funny as now people do, because like everyone's come out as trans but like like now, like a man in a long black pirate dress, that's not normal, Like that wasn't how my friends dressed.

I hope you correct it.

I'm like, boo, no, I'm an icon.

I am a trandsetter.

No one is like me.

Yeah, which is actually it led to the very first time I was recognized in public.

This is years before any of the shit.

Oh I was playing.

Accordion at Amsterdam, and I swear to god, I don't normally have that many stories about this, and this is like five years late.

This is like twenty ten touch.

Accordion has never come up more.

I love that that is like the main character in this story inside of the like squatters and the amazing rebellion and anti fascist but also Accordions.

Yeah, I'm gonna need a picture.

I could probably find one.

Yeah, I'm gonna need a picture of you in Yeah.

But I was busking in an Accordion and this woman comes up to me.

She's not subculturally dressed.

She's just like a you know, woman from Turkey.

And she comes up and she goes, are you American?

And I'm like yeah.

She's like, are you an anarchist?

And I'm like, oh man, uh yeah.

She's like are you Margaret Killjoy?

Oh hello, because she had seen a talk I gave with fucking Ursula Gwynn on YouTube.

Oh really, yeah that is so niche.

Yeah, I have that anyway, we became friends.

Obviously she wanted to be your friend.

Yeah, but I was definitely just like a couple of times in my life strangers have asked me if I'm an anarchist, and I've answered honestly and it's gone well every time, but I'm always a little nervous.

Yeah, it was a little bit of like why.

Yeah, how's this gonna go?

Anyway?

Back to your house?

So short who has that quote from earlier, who was at the armstrole, was my friend and probably still would be if we were on the same continent.

And frankly, I'm just gonna sidetrack about how much I respect this man.

He was one of my heroes and role models when I was in my early twenties.

We are not very similar and aesthetics or temperament.

He was always kind of macho, but he would listen when people would be like hey, including his partner, would be like hey, you're kind of being kind of chauvinistic, and he'd listen and he would try to change.

His partner was an Israeli anarchist who lived in the Netherlands to avoid conscription into the IDF, and the two of them regularly returned to Palestine to join demonstrations against the IDF in the West Bank, facing bullets and death.

Like a bunch of people died during those demonstrations.

She later died of cancer, very young.

Rest in peace.

Tall Short's primary interests were listening to Dutch hip hop, lifting weights, fighting Nazis, and playing Dungeons and dragons.

Yeah.

He's actually the one who got me back into Plaine.

Dungeons and dragons really yeah, and he had his jaw broken fighting Nazis.

And I thought you were going to say playing dungeons.

No, no, yeah, no, no, we didn't play that hard.

But I like, I don't know, whatever, here's the U, old friend.

I don't know.

If you listen, some of the squads had already been raided, and the residents of the omstill looked out, and they saw black mercedes parked out front with people with ear pieces inside the mercedes watching them.

The local news crew came, I think this squatters called the news and they filmed the banner and when they turned the camera on, the plane closed cops and the mercedes.

The film crew was told that they were not allowed to film the people in the mercedes.

The squatters decided that they would resist, but non violently, just in a more playful and active form of nonviolence, which is that they threw water balloons at the police.

Because the home alone moments are coming back.

One of the residents had experienced with climbing on ropes, like doing activist stuff where you go and you hang a banner and you hang out and you'd like lock yourself to the banner at the no blood for oil or whatever the style of the time.

So he goes up to the balcony, which is the third floor, but they call it the second floor because they don't how to count, and he's hanging there off with the banner.

Two platoons of riot cops, a van full of stillin which are the undercovers who don't actually try to look undercover.

They're like the obvious undercovers who are there to intimid eight people.

Yeah yeah.

And then the brata, who are the riot cops who specialize in evictions.

They all show up, so they're like, all right, this is about to get This hasn't gone great for us, messy.

All of these cops outside could have gotten a ladder and pulled down the banner.

They didn't.

They wanted to raid the building.

The Brataw went to the door with sledgehammers, water balloons rained down onto them.

The door didn't budge, so the cops got out chainsaws.

The Omstoll was a historic building.

It was protected by historical building laws.

The front door was this big ornamental wooden door.

It was probably like five hundred year old door.

The riot police chainsaw right through it.

Oh no, I want to quote sure directly for this next part.

Quote.

We, the four occupants and our guests had experienced evictions before.

To a great extent.

Evictions are ritualized.

There are certain rules of play, and we were keeping to that.

One of the most important ones is that you cease resisting actively as soon as the brataw are inside.

When the front door was destroyed, almost everybody went to the living room on the first floor, second floor, if you know what account, and waited for the brata to come in.

A friend and I stayed on the balcony of the second floor, third floor.

In America to assist the climber who was hanging off during the actions, there always has to be someone with the climber, the aid in case of emergency, the brata has experienced with this, and we assumed that they would respect it with a chainsaw.

They took on the hatch door to the stairs, like, okay, so if you like got in the front door and you go up the stairs, there's a hatch that could be closed that the squaders had installed to close it off because it's home alone.

Back to the quote, this hatch door was never meant to stop the brata, just the owner's hit squad.

It didn't hold out for long, making a lot of racket.

They stormed living room.

You're all under arrest on the floor.

Now.

They didn't give a reason for this.

Everybody was waiting on the couch peacefully.

There wasn't any resistance.

The room was surveyable and the light was on.

There was certainly no threat for the police at all.

The woman who was sitting closest to the door shouted, take it easy, jerk, and they immediately punched her in the face, causing a heavy nosebleed.

Anyway, no longer a quote.

They trashed the place, beat people while they were restrained.

The whole shitty nine yards.

They arrested the direct support for the climber, but they couldn't reach the climber himself, so they were like, you better come up, and he was like, ah, I'm not gonna.

So they pulled out a knife and held it up to the rope.

He's on the third floor of the building and an ancient building with high ceilings.

The cops didn't cut the rope, but they pressed the knife up to scare the climber.

The climber refused to scare, so they used the fire department to bring him down.

The fire department, though, they didn't like being used for political games, so when they go up and take him down, they are like, all right, we're gonna let you off on the far side of the police line, and so they do, and the cops still come over and they try to arrest him, and the fire Department's like, nah, you can't arrest him at least until the blood flow comes back into his legs.

We're gonna keep you away.

And they march all of the squatters out, all the people who are supposedly under arrest, and they lead him outside and then they're like, eh, whatever, we have the banner, and they let them all go and then drive away.

So it was absolutely about violence and forced compliance, right yep.

And not about the law.

Right.

The mayor, mister Moderation, said that the raids were perfectly legal because the banners were defamatory.

They said things that were against the fame.

So a bunch of the squatters they heard this and they're like, oh, they're defamatory.

Eh.

So the squatters went to the police station to file charges against themselves.

Oh.

They were like, oh, yeah, right, you're saying that this is a crime, right, fucking prove it, right, let's do this.

The police refused to accept the charges that they were trying to file against themselves.

So when the raid happened, was the press still there?

I believe so, And there's a still image I have of it.

It's actually a really funny image.

They stole the banner and they also stole the red and black flag, which is just an anarchist flag with no writing on it.

There's no way to consider it defamatory.

It's just a political flag.

And so there's this nice footage of the cops holding the big red and black flag.

Oh I love it.

Yeah, but I believe it was like local news in two thousand and five.

So I haven't been able to track down the footage of it, and what short said about it all afterwards is quote why the police did this.

They never told us and we were never told why it wasn't allowed to hang up these banners.

They never gave us any certificate of confiscation nor a writ of summons for libel, defamation, mayhem or any other kind of crime.

The miscarriage of justice was obvious, and the cover up over the fire was obvious, and more people started speaking up against both.

So posters went up all over the country saying things like travel agency, RITA, arrest, deportation, cremation, and then the part that isn't translated very well adequate to the bitter end.

I'm sorry.

I just love when people use like adequate or they are okay, yeah, totally insult yeah, some par okay mid exactly.

In Nimechen, which is another city in the Netherlands, one person was arrested simply for unrolling the poster in front of a TV camera.

Theoretically right, because it's defamation, so he showed the thing, but they, yeah, they just arrested him for it.

The activists filed a suit against the Dutch state to ban the city from taking down the banners referencing RITA Verdonk, and by November eighteenth, the Attorney of the state announced that they were no longer taking actions against the banners, which did not meet their criteria defamatory.

However, the last news source I could find was this that November eighteen it was no longer considered defamatory, and the article ends with the person who unrolled the poster is still going to court in January.

Oh well.

But what's really fun about old news stories is you can find the thing that says this thing is happening, and you cannot find follow up because it's not newsworthy to people.

You can only find that in the academic literature, and it's hard.

In this case.

There's actually decent archives of stuff from squats in Europe because they were all very techy and they were all like early Internet people.

But it's still kind of limited.

And it's a bit of a problem that the story of the repression of the activists became the news story instead of the deadly fire that killed eleven people seeking asylum.

I feel kind of sad that my story is focused around that, but the squatters and the banner hangars stayed on message the entire time.

This is about the fire.

This is about the treatment of migrants.

The same people doing this were like the same people who went to go shout their support at detention centers.

They're probably the same people who occupy the detention center, or at least like spiritually on the same side.

You know.

Yeah, there was a flag I saw all over the place around the Netherlands with silhouettes of people runnings as refugees welcome.

And unfortunately I can't tell you that these protests worked.

I can tell you that the cover up didn't happen.

They were not able to sweep this under the rug.

This stayed part of the national conversation because of the people who were willing to hang up banners in very public places and then stand by and get arrested over nonsense around it, right, But it didn't.

As of twenty twenty two, at least the deportation center Shipple is still in operation.

As of twenty twenty four, the Netherlands has what political calls quote the most right wing government in the country's recent history.

It joins the rest of Fortress Europe as the continent tries to crack down on the free movement of people.

In twenty twenty five, it enacted its strictest asylum policy ever, blocking family reunification and ending permanent residence permits, which are at least as the articles in twenty twenty five suggests, possibly EU courts are going to find those illegal at some point, you know, those particular levels of asylum restrictions.

And I want to tell you that the US is alone in this hard right word turn, but it's not.

But people in the Netherlands, no matter where they were born, are still fighting for people and for freedom.

And the future is famously unwritten.

Even the past, it turns out, is poorly written.

And there's far far more cool people in history than we assume, and they're in places that you might not expect.

And we can be those cool people right now today with accordions.

Yeah, all you need is an accordion.

Man.

There's so many good terrible jokes about like banjo's and accordions, which were all the instruments that all my friends played.

You know.

There's the joke about like, oh no, I like left my accordion in the backseat of my car, and then I went into the store and I came back out and someone had broken the window of the car to put another accordion in there.

You would be so lucky.

Yeah, accordions are great.

They're the perfect busking instrument because they're like loud and kind of unique.

They are.

For some reason, I picture them as like the Lady in the Tramp, not for some for reasons, I think of the Lady in the Tramp romantic spaghetti scenes with the backup music of the accordion.

Oh yeah, No, I like, I was like, this was not a very happy period of my life, as I keep hinting that, and like the way I coped with it was romanticizing the shit out of my life.

I'd be like playing music for the drunks, coming home under a street light by the canal, with the snow falling on me, and I'd be like, you know what, if fucking nothing else, my life is.

Beautiful right now, this picture is perfect.

Yeah?

Like, am I lonely?

Yes?

Do I have a hard time connecting with people both here and in America?

Yes?

Does it feel like my side's winning?

No?

Am I right where I kind of want to be?

Yeah?

Oh, it's true.

There are good people out there doing a lot of good work, including y'all who keep telling these stories and make sure that history is not erased when we see the good that we need.

Oh thanks.

Yeah.

It was funny because I was like, I learned about this story.

I heard about it because I came back and I was like, what happened to the door, you know, and they're like, oh, we got a story for you.

And then I actually learned graphic design from Dutch squatters who put together a Dutch squatter magazine called lev which means like shout, and they were like, yeah, you could use your help, you kind of know in design.

It was like a little bit and they were like, all right, you're doing it wrong.

You got to make it cool and punk like this, you know.

And it had a special insert that was in both English and Dutch about the Banner Wars as they called it, the Spendocan or Loch, which I'm pronouncing incredibly incorrectly based on a memory of someone telling me something a long time ago.

And even at the time, it was like, oh, this is kind of like an interesting like it wasn't as big of a deal as most of the protests, including in the Netherlands and in the US that I was like around, and so what I didn't realize is that they were making a historical artifact, and they were making a little bit of memory that opens up other things, you know, and like going back in in retrospect to it real differently, it would have a they didn't know the names of the asylum seekers who died in the fire.

The state didn't release that information too much later with the report.

But there's like other things that they could have included in it, you know.

But I actually really appreciate that they were, like, we're taking the time to document this thing that happened that and the the people who traveled all this way only to be killed, Like how we tried to not make them forgotten exactly.

Anyway, do you got anything you want to plug here?

At the end, come listen to our show, Steph Mom never told you.

We talk about intersectional feminist issues and beyond.

We even talk about that in relation to like gaming, D and D things.

Yeah, we talk all the different things outside of that.

You can find me on the social Media's on a couple of them, but I'm not very active.

I think it's McVeigh Sam on Instagram.

But there's pictures of pets.

There are pretty much only pictures of pets, But that's okay.

It's the best kind of social media.

I know.

I agree.

That's what I go for.

I am on Blue Sky as well.

I don't write on that either because I'm not witty and funny.

When it comes one liner is on Twitter, so or not Twitter, I'm not that, but Louis guy.

Yeah I understand.

Yeah, yeah, new Twitter.

You know.

Come and listen to us banter.

We even have had Margaret on the show.

We've even featured your book Real Hell.

Yeah, that's good.

People should listen.

And also I'll say that the best podcast series that I listened to last December was The Devil You Know by Sarah Marshall, and it talks about a Satanic panic in a way that I thought I knew the Satanic panic.

I thought that was like a I was like, I already know that information.

I did not, And it's incredibly well done.

So I highly recommend that me too.

That's my best friend.

That's so good.

Take care of yourselves and others and do what's right, not what's safe, but try to be safe.

Well, you do what's right.

And yeah, we're gonna get through this, most of us, hopefully.

Whatever I don't know, we're gonna try.

Everything is great.

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