Amsterdam's Containment Camps

The city of Amsterdam that is world famous for its liberal policies that draw thousands of tourists who go there to buy sex and smoke marijuana openly in coffee shops, has announced a new social containment plan to house what the Dutch are calling "antisocial tenants." The rather unconventional new plan is to warehouse people and the city’s mounting population of surplus labor in converted shipping containers.

Amsterdam may appear to be like a libertarian playground to some as the Labor party mayor recently gave the government's promise that the city would tolerate marijuana sales at pot-selling coffee shops even after the passage of a new law tightening down on drug tourism and the popular prostitution spots continue to attract customers and gather social attention. The new social plan includes putting "nuisance neighbors" in villages created from shipping containers as part of Labor Mayor Eberhard van der Laan’s multi-million dollar plan to confront what the Dutch officials are calling "antisocial behavior residents" in order to better protect victims of social abuse and homophobia from harassment.

A spokesperson for the mayor did not address the terms "anti-social behavior" or "nuisance neighbors," but he did specify that the new containment camps, or what have been referred to as "villages" by the Dutch media, are not for "the regular nuisance between two neighbors where one has the stereo too loud on Saturday night" but for "people who are extremely violent and intimidating and in a clear situation where a victim is being repeatedly harassed." People who cause what the Dutch call "extreme havoc" are to be evicted from their current homes and placed in the new temporary containment units. The Dutch authorities have said the containment homes will be isolated outside existing residential areas of Amsterdam and will instead be located in the industrial-zoned segments of the city. Despite the optimistic new terminology of the plan, many observers are saying that the containment camps are the modern day equivalent of concentration camps that will be filled with “worthless” citizens as identified by the city’s upper class.

The Amsterdam government says they anticipate moving around ten families a year into the program, which is scheduled to start in January of 2013. It will be interesting to see if the new “soft totalitarianism” embraced by the Dutch will be emulated by other liberal democracies going forward.