Amsterdam is to create "Scum villages" where nuisance neighbours and anti-social tenants will be exiled from the city and rehoused in caravans or containers with "minimal services" under constant police supervision. The plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party. Holland's capital already has a special hit squad of municipal officials to identify the worst offenders for a compulsory six month course in how to behave. – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: We need to be free of these thugs and thieves.
Free-Market Analysis: We've written many articles about the advent of private cities – run by multinationals in league with local or national governments.
But it never occurred to us that the elites organizing this particular form of infrastructure would provide us with the other side of the organized corporate city – the criminal city.
One can already hear the computers being revved up as a thousand science fiction books are soon to be churned out. Actually, "Escape From New York" already mined this particular meme.
We understand the larger dominant social theme, of course. The best and brightest live in special cities while the rest of us struggle to get by. A subdominant social theme would be that "some are deserving and others are not."
But now there are to be cities devoted specifically to have-nots – the socially maladroit. Let's wait and see how soon that definition changes. We will watch as the definitions change. Soon those who want different and freer societies will be targeted, in our view.
The initial social engineering is always justified to resolve the problems posed by a criminal element. But the target is inevitably those who oppose the enlargement of Leviathan. Consigned to a 21st century Hell, they will be attended to, guarded and watched over by the larger judicial system. Here's more from the article:
Social housing problem families or tenants who do not show an improvement or refuse to go to the special units face eviction and homelessness.
Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam's Labour mayor, has tabled the £810,000 plan to tackle 13,000 complaints of anti-social behaviour every year. He complained that long-term harassment often leads to law abiding tenants, rather than their nuisance neighbours, being driven out.
"This is the world turned upside down," the mayor said at the weekend.
The project also involves setting up a special hotline and system for victims to report their problems to the authorities.
The new punishment housing camps have been dubbed "scum villages" because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers.
"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum," he suggested last year. "Put all the trash together."
Whilst denying that the new projects would be punishment camps for "scum", a spokesman for the city mayor stressed that the special residential units would aim to enforce good behaviour.
"The aim is not to reward people who behave badly with a new five-room home with a south-facing garden. This is supposed to be a deterrent," he said.
We would expect no less from modern municipal planners. The article goes on to tell us that this project has already been tried out on a small scale using "10 shipping container homes ... The residents are under "24-hour supervision from social workers and police."
How this is different than an actual prison is hard to say, from our point of view. And how those who are pursuing the project are going to make it successful is hard to tell, as well.
After all, we learn, "In the 19th century, troublemakers were moved to special villages in Drenthe and Overijssel outside Amsterdam. The villages were rarely successful, becoming sink estates for the lawless."
That's no surprise and neither is a quote from the Mayor's office: "We have learned from the past. A neighbourhood can deal with one problem family but if there are more the situation escalates."
Yes, it is ever thus. The state uses force in order to "protect" the middle class. But really, no protection is ever intended. What are being set are precedents. And eventually these same precedents are to be used against the middle classes that believe their governments are working on their behalf.
They are not.
Governments are run these days by a power elite that is intent on creating world government. The sorts of social engineering schemes we are seeing nowadays just scratch the surface of what is to come.
The basic animating force is that people society favors will be rewarded. We see this already in the US, where "favored travelers" with security clearance are whisked through airports while those who are less "trusted" wait in line, stigmatized by the label of "potential terrorist."
But the future the power elite wants to create will be far more complex and subtle than this. It will also be all encompassing and brutal. The idea will be to create a permanent subclass of subservient humans who will be adept at producing the tools that global governance demands. The rest will struggle along in varying degrees of obscurity and desperation.
And those with the most imagination – the ones that are endlessly problematic for the top elites – will find themselves consigned to "scum" villages.
Conclusion: Orwell had no idea ...
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