www.bacteria.nl/makiladoras-niemandsland-12-lp-2012/

After releasing our last record ‘In Eigen Hand’ we were so relieved that we had finished this themerecord. Now we could just write songs about anything that popped up in our heads, instead of being chained to the subject of genetic manipulation. Yet, only people with strong, well-balanced personalities can survive such true freedom. So what you have here is some sort of unplanned themerecord: all songs, except Lentilsoup, are about social problems and politics in the Netherlands, our beloved No-mansland. Of course a lot of stuff happening in the Netherlands also happens elsewhere. I’m sure we’re not the only country that’s infested by self-proclaimed patriots or greedy managers. Still, there are some things that you probably never wanted to know about the Netherlands. Well, I’m telling them anyway.
Anybody looking on a worldmap can see that it is a small country, it has more than 16 million inhabitants though. Most of them live in the west of the country, were the big cities are. When this crowded area is behind me and the long, empty road to my northern hometown Groningen stretches out in front of me… well, I almost cry. The 1,7 million non-western immigrants are a constant topic of debate for as long as I can remember. When I was in primary school one teacher used to ‘joke’ about how everything turned dark around him. I wonder what he would say now, because white people are pretty scarse in some neighborhoods in the bigger cities. There are many political parties because of the system of proportional representation. Therefore governments always consist of coalitions between two or more parties. The two biggest parties are the christian-democrats and the social-democrats. Normally the christian-democrats rule with help from either the social-democrats or the conservative liberals and a third party. At present the third party is the Christian Union, a fast growing religious party. In the past the role of third party was often fulfilled by the social liberals. This party relies on the swarms of undecided voters, so its size varies quite a lot, nowadays they are very small. Small or not, this is the party that gave us the legalisation of euthanasia. Steadier parties are the very small christian fundamentalist party and the somewhat bigger green party. The new stars on the political market are the socialist party (16%) and the anti-islamparty of Geert Wilders (now 6%, but predicted to be the biggest party in the next elections). The fact that we have three christian parties in parliament doesn’t mean that Dutch people are very religious, 48% has no religion. What keeps the country together is not god, but the collective trauma of the second world war and the german occupation from 1940 to 1945. This trauma is basically shame about our cowardice as a people: the majority of Dutch jews were killed by the nazi’s, the majority of the Dutch didn’t lift a finger to prevent this, or even actively helped the nazi’s. Any public debate in the Netherlands ends up as some kind of remake of this tragic film of the second world war. All parties will accuse each other of helping, or being blind to, the latest incarnation of Hitler.