Twenty-five years after the arrest of Marc Dutroux

Marc Dutroux was arrested on 13 August 1996. The girls Laetitia Delhez (14) and Sabine Dardenne (12) were found in his house. Both girls were held prison by Dutroux. Delhez was abducted six days before Dutroux' arrest and Dardenne was held captive for almost three months. Later the Belgian authorities found that Dutroux was also responsible for the abductions and the deaths of four other girls: Julie Lejeune (8), Mélissa Russo (8), An Marchal (17) and Eefje Lambrecks (19).

The Belgian Marc Dutroux committed horrible crimes. Dutroux' wife Michelle Martin and a 'friend' of him, Bernard Weinstein, helped him with abducting girls. Bernard Weinstein was also murdered by Marc Dutroux.

The news about the Dutroux case gave a shock through Belgium and The Netherlands. This is totally understandable of course. But there was more about this case. Belgium and The Netherlands were in a total shock. The mass media reacted hysterically. Nuances about child sexuality were gone. Nuances about pedosexual relationships were also gone. The term pedophile was used even when people spoke or wrote about cases were 17 year olds were involved. Pedophiles were all bad people. People with pedophilic feelings were held responsible for the crimes people like Marc Dutroux did. And was Dutroux even a so called pedophile?

Before 13 August 1996, a witch hunt was already in the making. I noticed how child sexuality was more and more something society could not deal with. And I also noticed that society wanted to be one again. With soccer, you had to be in favor of the national team. Critics were not allowed. With our kingdom: you had to be pro our royal family. In times when people feel out of control they need nationalism and people feel the need to unite. Uniting people means that you also need scapegoats to do so. We saw this many times in history and the Nazi era is a good example. Women and children then are holy and they are portrayed as pure individuals instead of the persons who they really are. Because the feminist movement had much success, now the women were not so much the people to protect but the children were. A children's emancipation movement, which in the 1970s started to show its face, has not had much affect yet in our society.

I see the hysteria after the Dutroux case as a sign of fascism. This case was misused to shift society to the far right.

In Russia, Poland and Hungary there are laws against 'gay propaganda'. Margaret Thatcher did the same in the UK when she was in power. In The Netherlands the freedom of speech and the freedom of association are also under fire. The case against me and my friends is a good example of the totalitarian society we live in in or we are heading to. Everyone must believe the same things, even if these are lies. We need to grow One People. That is behind all of this repression. People are feeling orphaned in society and they aggressively need to get rid of all the 'bad elements' in society. Where will this end? In the 1940s it ended in total destruction of Europe and total destruction of millions of people.

It is always worth fighting for freedom of speech.

Totalitarianism

Some other signs of our totalitarianism society are the cancel culture, the probably upcoming law against gay conversion therapy and the law some years ago against the christian political party SGP, to force them to allow women on their election lists. The state should not discriminate against women or force gay people into therapy (what they did in The Netherlands until the 1970s), but why forbid grown ups to go to gay conversion therapy? Because it's bad for them and we must protect these adults from themselves. But will the alternative health circuits also be forbidden? And to buy unhealthy food? Or alcohol? Or religion, if in a churches and mosques unscientific 'facts' are preached? We live in a totalitarian society where the majority decides what is good for all the people. And we all know that the majority is and was always right. In the 1950s gay therapy was indeed needed. Forced. And in some cases people were castrated, otherwise they would be locked up for life.

By the way. That children are forced into gay conversion therapy is something that should be illegal. Many gay children in the USA were sent to gay conversion clinics by conservative parents. Now more and more states in the US are making laws against this abuse. And that is about time because for many years children were tortured this way. Also physical abuse was prominent in some of these clinics. In Europe these kinds of clinics for minors were not common. I never heard of such clinics here. But I could be wrong.

Children are denied to be sexual. When a school advises 14 year old girls not to dress too sexy, opinion makers write texts about the sexualization of these kids. Let them wear what they wanna wear, they write. And they argue that teachers who find them sexual are perverts, and that they are sexualizing these children. But children are sexual. And almost every adult is sexually attracted to minors. A column called 'bloot' (meaning nudity) by Özcan Akyol today in the newspaper Tubantia (and in some other 'local' newspapers as well, because they have a lot of the same texts in their papers), says that children must wear what they wanna wear. He also notes that schools only forbid girls to wear sexy clothes and that boys are not addressed what clothes to wear. This is not entirely true. For boys to dress sexy is such a taboo, that you never see boys dressed in an undeniable very sexy way. If a boy wears a tight short and a shirt where you will see his belly button, and makeup and so on, this would not be allowed. Boys are too afraid to dress up like this because they will be ridiculed and they will become victims of verbal and physical aggression. No, to dress sexy is still anno 2021 only allowed for women and girls.

If a girl of 14 years old would dress up in a bikini and went to school like that, would Akyol then still hold his opinion that children must dress in the way they want. And if the bikini is so sexy that only the nipples and the vagina are covered, so that she is almost naked, would that still be children's right to dress this way? And what if boys and girls will go naked to school?

I am the most tolerant person in the world, but Akyol, who wrote earlier that I should be locked up, because of using my freedom of speech, isn't. He is only columnist (and TV-host) because his family has Turkish roots and society needs to show how 'tolerant' we are. His intellectual attribution in his texts is almost nonexistent. The mass media use fools like Akyol for their right wing agenda.

People today are in need of fascism. Because they are too stupid to improve their lives themselves. They then want to destroy other people's lives and hope something better will turn op. United in stupidity and hate.

We need reason. We need freedom of speech. We need facts above prejudices. We need courage. We need not to give up on hope for a better world. We need to listen to each other, instead of withholding them to speak freely, instead of prosecuting them. Say no to fascism. Say yes to freedom of speech.

A day before (12 August) the twenty-five years after Dutroux' arrest, a court case will be held against a man who entered my bedroom with a knife shouting he was going to kill me. He was released after just two nights in a police cell. This gives a good impression about today's far right society.