As in other western societies, in Holland there is painful surprise about foreign resentment against us. Dutch cartoonists and standup comedians who are critically commenting on Turkish president Erdogan get stiff resistance from many Turkish citizens in Holland, while being themselves up in arms because they feel their freedom of speech is at stake.
The resisting Turks do not value high this western principle of free speech. According to their Turkish culture they experience the comments as unacceptably insulting. And now that Turks get more assertive they let us know what they think of the western free speech principle.
I fear that this friction will not be the only one but that culture clashes are going to happen more and more in the world, with many westerners learning the hard way that their culture is not a universal culture but just one culture among many. Westerners will be forced to give up their topdog position and learn what underdogs know all along: there are at least two cultures, one of the topdog and one of the underdog.
If westerners want to survive relatively well, they need to come down and learn what French Queen Marie Antoinette did not when she kept saying that starving peasants should eat cake if they had no bread. She could not come down to understand that cake was even less available to the poor.
Marie Antoinette did not adjust to the reality of different worlds living next to each other and was beheaded. Westerners may wake up in time.
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