Stephan Anthony

Independent bookseller on Herengracht. Amsterdam.

Chad: “Sometimes I have people tell me, “You’ve been here five years. You should start being a little more Dutch.” So my question to you, as a person born and raised here, “What does it mean to be Dutch?””

Stephen: “What does it mean to be Dutch?” *Whew* Yeah… I won’t be surprised [if] we look at your ancestors, you’ve got some Dutch ancestors. I don’t know! Maybe you know better than I do. I think you’re already Dutch. I don’t know what they’re complaining about.

“What does it mean to be Dutch?” A Dutch passport could save your life all over the world. Holland has [political accords] with over 190 countries. When you go to jail in one of those 190 countries, Holland is going to get you back. So, it could save your life. “Dutch” means that your life can be saved because you have a Dutch passport. It’s valuable in many, many ways.

That’s what it means to be Dutch for me in the first place because we are all citizens of the whole wide world. But it’s only this paper–this passport–that’s what [makes the difference.] That and the money, of course.

I think Holland’s got a responsibility to the rest of the world because [for] three, four, five, six hundred years we robbed all the gold of South America, we killed half of Africa, we killed Indonesia. We were the worst slave drivers [in] the world. So yeah, we set the world on a course… (his cell phone rings and he takes a short call with his lady)

Back to my point… I think Holland’s got a responsibility to the rest of the world. We invented bookkeeping–I think–together with the English. We invented capitalism. So we took the world on some sort of course.

In Limburg there was a very rich industrial who was telling the very high bishop in the south of Holland, “You keep them dumb and we’ll keep them poor.” We put the world on some sort of spiritual course and when [it goes wrong] it’s going to be like in the Bible at the end of times.

We’ve got a very big responsibility. So “Dutch” also means responsibility for a better world, because we made chaos of it; also the Spanish and the English and some other European… religious people.