Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 363 - The 1977 Dutch Train Hijacking
Episode Date: May 19, 2025COME SEE US IN LONDON: https://bigbellycomedy.club/event/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-big-fat-festival-southbank/ A Moluccan terror group took over a train in the Netherlands, leading to the lo...ngest train hijacking in history. It only ends when Dutch Commandos launch one of the worst rescue operations in European history. Sources: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789048555796-004/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOopTs6kSVyzglNe9ZE0NzwO_2weL5McjhDU6iWQ3mOsH7_gDPyjF https://www.sbs.com.au/language/dutch/en/article/40-years-on-questions-remain-the-extraordinary-story-of-the-1977-dutch-train-siege/4y5ex2171 https://nltimes.nl/2017/05/30/dutch-govt-releases-transcriptions-1977-train-hijacking https://www.dutchnews.nl/2018/07/court-clears-marines-for-killings-in-1977-moluccan-train-hijacking/ https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/hansina-uktolseja-1955-1977/ https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/16/archives/20day-ordeal-aboard-the-hijacked-dutch-train-as-described-by-those.html https://nltimes.nl/2018/07/25/dutch-state-accountable-1977-train-hijackers-deaths-court-rules https://nltimes.nl/2018/05/08/moluccan-train-hijackers-die-new-witnesses-say https://web.archive.org/web/20070716051414/http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/article721950.ece/Herdenking_voor_kapers_van_trein_bij_De_Punt_1977_ https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/view?query=Treinkaping+bij+De+Punt&page=7&sortfield=datedesc&cql%5B%5D=%28dategte+%2201-01-1977%22%29&cql%5B%5D=%28datelte+%2231-12-1977%22%29&coll=ddd&redirect=true&identifier=ddd:010959646:mpeg21:a0156&resultsidentifier=ddd:010959646:mpeg21:a0156&rowid=2 https://nltimes.nl/2014/11/20/unarmed-hijackers-killed-train-hijacking https://www.dutchnews.nl/2017/10/marines-in-court-over-shooting-of-activists-in-1977-de-punt-train-hijacking/ https://apnews.com/general-news-b390fa1dad6147ab9179c262a49f80b4 https://time.com/archive/6848782/terrorists-the-commandos-strike-at-dawn/
Transcript
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the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lines Ed by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is Tom
and Nate. We're here, live at the trained fighting pits of the Chu Chu Coliseum at the heart of
Neo-Holland.
As I stand here, I'm surrounded by the discarded remains of locomotives, their life-sustaining
oil and fluids soak into the wooden floor.
Other men come and sprinkle sawdust to absorb the gore.
In the distance I can hear trains trains locked in their crates,
screeching and honking,
tormented by their handlers. Tom, how do you ethically support such a barbaric form of entertainment?
Well, I think a lot of people they they support free-range trains,
but in reality the train is a wild animal that cannot be tamed by man.
They call them the iron horse, but I call it the iron dog and the only way to tame a true dog is to
Let her fights one of its own kind
Nate how do you teach your trades to attack other trades to be quite honest with you?
I don't really have any empathy for trains whatsoever because me and some of my friends was raising dirt bikes when we was 15 years old
And he got hit by train and I decided from that moment forward fuck trains are my enemy
Ultimately what I realized is that if you treat one train better than the other the other trains in their cages are gonna get so
pissed off
They're gonna have to take it out on them because they want they want to be the favorite train
They want to be the choo-choo that's closest to your heart now deep down ain't no choo-choo close to my heart
I'm gonna fucking kill all of them, but it's just the mind games. Y'all gotta play with them. Otherwise, you know, you get,
they start trying to manipulate you. They try to be your friend. And to me, I just flash back to
probably one of the most formative experiences of my life was playing Final Fantasy 6. Because if
you play a Sabin and you suplex a train, the man literally jumps and picks up the fucking train and
then jumps it into the ground. It's possible to do it. And I said to myself, I will do that someday.
And then I realized they're heavy as fuck.
So I got to make them do it to each other.
But like I said, you know, you can manipulate anybody else in your life.
You can manipulate training that smart.
I love that we all defaulted to being Southern.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no fucking thing about this is that redneck voices it transcends region in America if I talk like this I could be from Bloomington Indiana or Pampst County
Indiana or Juneau Alaska or Fairbanks Alaska or fucking I don't know Stockton
California there's gonna be guys who talk like this and just that's just
fucking redneck voice however my parents would lose their shit if they're like
wait you know how to talk that way like yes you intentionally moved us to
Indiana where the fuck do you think was gonna happen I only learned to live in
Texas and Kentucky and also being an enlisted person,
the military nine out of every 10 of your coworkers are from the South.
Yeah. Yeah. The army just kind of like makes you absorb Southernness somehow. Like I would
just say too that, yeah, it's always funny to me because Texans have a whole different
way of it. Like the idea that y'all is actually singular and all y'all is plural. Yes that's just, yeah, yeah, yeah. They've got, they've got it on a different level.
I should point out here that we actually love trains. Uh, is it established fact this show loves
trains? Maybe a little too much. Maybe it's a little uncomfortable to those around me. Whenever I
climb a board one real slow, real sensual touching the handrails as I walk up the stairs.
So what you're saying is that the Dutch kookstuurl is meant for you.
Yes.
That's the sensitive, sensual seat, the solo seat.
It's the most sensual seat on an Edes trade that's probably covered in garbage.
Yeah.
Other than actually funny story, I recently went to Amsterdam for a concert and I have
to take a tram to get to the central station before I go on the NS train.
But on the tram there, normally the trams are very clean in the Hague anyway, Amsterdam
they're a fucking nightmare, but the Hague they're quite clean and I get on it and it's
like a dumpster exploded.
And in the middle of all of it is like two teenagers eating cookies and spitting them off the floor
I am ready to get turned around and just go back home. This ruins everything
I remember one time being in the subway in New York and there were teenagers literally playing dice
And all the grown-up like you could look at them and one of them was like missing two of his front teeth like not from
That night, but you know Like in general clearly and there's like all the grown-ups of every race
We're just like I'm just gonna move to another subway car. There's not shit. I can tell these kids
Yeah, they've just play dice kids. You know play dice shooting dice on the floor
Your Pokemon you gotta catch all the dice
I was just thinking too is like Joe's going to a concert and he lives in the Netherlands
He's got to take a tram
Good thing you don't live in Italy because I'm sure there's
some US Air Force pilots who fucking hate this show. And if the only way for you to
get to a concert was to take a gondola, like one of them would schedule it just to make
sure you could do what Air Force pilots and US Air Force pilots in Italy do best, which
is clip cables of gondolas.
Now the reason why we're talking about trains today is not in fact to create some kind of podcast lore about a train fighting
Michael Vick instead it's because we're gonna be talking about the longest train hijacking in
History which happened only a couple of hours from where I'm sitting. I have either of you ever heard of the
1977 Dutch train siege
Train cap in the train capping.
Like, are we talking like longest as in length of train or length of time?
Length of time.
The train was solidly normally length.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know about its girth.
I assume that was also standard.
Tapping into Nate's Southern train race of stuff like judging trains by the size of the smoke stack is like don't trust those long stacks
I have to inform both of you that all of the NS trains are blue and yellow
So make of that what you will which means right here is that we're talking about Holland
This is the 32nd amnesty for me and all my co-hosts to get their very very bad
Blackface jokes out of the system Get those of our day Pete jokes out.
I will give you another point later on the script because for some reason it
will be on subject, but this is your 32nd amnesty. Feel free to use it.
30 seconds go.
I wasn't even going to make it to art to Pete joke.
I was going to make a joke that if the trains were all blue and yellow,
then this implies that like there's a guy out there who is a train racist,
but because he's Bella Russian and he's just like, fuck all those Dutch trains, they're NATO
cucks. All the trains have gone to fight in Ukraine said the fat controller. Oh
no, we don't need electrified trains in Belarus. We power them with potato, the
potato power tray. I do need to stand here in self-defense
during our live show in London. Everyone got really bad, including Tom about, I
kept saying Thomas, the tank train engine. You kept saying Thomas, the train
engine is Thomas the Thomas, the train engine, which in my defense is what it
was called. What it was on TV in the United States when I was a very small
child, it was not called a tank. Oh, so they did like that the the the sorcerer's yeah
They first stoned us. Yeah, because they're like americans americans don't know words
I assume thomas is significantly less transphobic than harry potter is but i'm not entirely sure so
Amnesty is over but for some, before we talk about a train takeover, we have to
talk about the history of the Malakas. Because we're talking about a Malaccan terrorist group
who storms a train and a nearby school and once attempted to kidnap the Queen of the
Netherlands.
We're talking like the Straits of Malacca, like the Indonesia, Malaysia, that area.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Now we have to go way back in time to the establishment of the Dutch East Indies in
1814. I swear to God, I'm trying to make this as concise as possible. What is today part
of Indonesia amongst other places, but for the sake of simplicity, we're going to focus
on Indonesia today. Now as any empire does, when the Dutch spread across the many, many islands of Indonesia,
they were going to select different groups of people to be closer to them
as the colonial administration for various different reasons and various different ways.
We've talked about this multiple different times on whatever we talk about something like this on
the show. Divide and conquer colonialism is a thing. Now for the sake of this episode episode we're going to focus on the Dutch East Indies Army. The East Indies Army was
not part of the Dutch military but rather was a completely separate thing and unable to use the
pool of Dutch conscripts that the normal Dutch military would use. They eventually adopted a kind
of foreign legion vibe as anything like this would and like the French foreign legion it quickly became a landing place for men with
nowhere else to go
You know quote-unquote adventurers and mercenaries and outright psychos like my grandfather
I wanted to interrupt you really fast to tell you that one of the more famous ones people don't know this is the French
Romantic poet are turambo enlisted in the Dutch Marines in this similar thing, got to
job and was like, this fucking sucks. And just bolted immediately deserted.
Yeah.
Most people get there, they realize the pay is not good. The malaria is higher than my
salary and I'd rather not do this. And they have different echelons of people, the white
foreigners, those being mostly Dutchmen, Belgians, Swiss, and Germans,
make up the officer corps, while the enlisted were almost entirely local Indonesians from
various different ethnic backgrounds. Though in the beginning, many of them were Javanese due to
them just being the, it's the population dynamics. They were the majority in the colony. So of course
they're going to be the majority in the military. But the closest to the Dutch and the terms of the group of people the Dutch
are going to pick to be their quote unquote chosen ones were the people of the
South Malaccan Islands, specifically the Ambanese.
The reason for this is very, very simple.
They were the first people in the region to run in the Europeans hundreds of years
before, and specifically of all of these islands, the islands of Ambon were very
receptive to Protestant missionaries of the Calvinist persuasion. So by the time the Dutch
officially take over, they already have a pretty large population of people with the
exact same religion as themselves. So it's not that big of a stretch to realize that,
oh, you're our boys. There is also a population of Ambonese Catholics
owing to previous Portuguese trading footprints there,
but in short, the majority of them are Protestant,
the Dutch like them more than the other indigenous people
because of their faith, and they begin to treat them better.
Though I need to point out here, this is not saying much.
This is the VOC we're talking about,
and later the official Dutch government as well,
but that's not saying
that they're much better. It's like arguing over what kind of diarrhea is best to have
of how you're being treated better by the VOC of the Dutch government.
Being treated is given here, but just in case you were not aware, Indonesia's population
is overwhelmingly majority Muslim. It's the most populous Muslim country in the world.
There are small minorities, I believe, of Shia Muslims, but they're almost entirely Sunni Muslim.
And yeah, so one can presume that if you go back,
you'll find some old-timey, not even like slurs,
but just weird ass words in English
that is when colonists show up and talk about
the Mahomedians or whatever the fuck.
Yeah.
You can presume that just that. The Mohammedans.
But just drop some J's in there
and then you've got the Dutch equivalent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's, and you have the South Malachans who are Christian.
So the Dutch are like, yeah, sure, why not?
They are not treated well.
They're treated almost as shitty as everyone else.
And the way the VOC treats their colony is everybody is forced to farm whatever the VOC
says they want farmed, which, Nate, you'll like this.
In this case for the
South Polakans was cloves. So they're getting, they're stepping up their jarum game. It's
like you could, I just imagine like the Dutch coming into the South Polakas and setting
up the world's first hot topic. Yeah, exactly. It's like also if you carry money, you need
to have a wallet attached
with a chain.
Yes. The BOC regulation state. You have to have many chains in your jeans.
Your hair is already probably, probably pretty dark, but it needs to be darker. It needs
to be dyed unnaturally dark. I was just laughing too, because I'm like, I guess in the grand
scheme of things, it would be funny if the Dutch just had them grow weird tropical fruits
because they were freaks. Like, no, you're going to grow star fruit. I don't know why. I wouldn't even eat that shit, but you're
going to grow it just because I said so. I'm sorry, Johan, star fruit doesn't grow here. I said
grow star fruit that I could smoke like a clove. I just remember being in Jakarta one time and
having to take a phone call and it was just like, it's so loud and so hot. And if you want to
experience the true Indonesia, it's not Bali. It's imagine it's a fucking hundred degrees Fahrenheit and like a hundred percent humidity. And it's
like, it smells like the exhaust from a lawnmower. It's as loud as a lawnmower. It also smells
like clove cigarettes and you're under a star fruit tree. And then suddenly you realize
you have ants on your feet. And I'm saying this in a positive way because Jakarta fucking
rules, but it's just an it's the most insane city
I've ever been in in my life. You would say that you were having a serious problem
One anecdote about Jakarta it is always wall-to-wall traffic and then there's like a side
Channel on the left and right sides of the lanes where there's like four lanes of scooter traffic
It's so densely populated traffic is insane
And one time was in a cab ride that just took forever because it was just wall-to-wall traffic.
And as we were doing like an off-ramp from the highway
to like the neighborhood street,
I saw what looked like a kind of like a private taxi van,
like a minivan full of just people on their phones
commuting, whatever.
And there was a guy in there just wailing
on a fucking ukulele and screaming in a not musical way.
And no one seemed particularly bothered
or even noticing him.
Hey, he's dropping sick beats man.
Indonesia is just pure chaos.
Absolutely love it there, but I think that I can't bring my wife there because she'd
have an immediately have an asthma attack and die.
And honestly like, let me use some of my skin color.
I'm going to die of skin cancer, even in Europe.
So yeah.
They call that the Dutch disease there.
I think they have other diseases they that the Dutch disease there
Also that now eventually the VOC dies the Dutch crown takes full control of the colonies
Crop prices in general plummet and the clove market specifically collapses because Nate wasn't born yet I never spoke close. They make you feel like you're going to die. Yes, they do. They give you the worst hangovers on the planet. Oh, fucking awful.
And when you're 18 and you're drinking like just slugs of a bottle of Jack Daniels,
the last thing you need to introduce to the mix is cloves.
Pop off vodka and clove cigarettes.
Where my middle and high school experience.
Jägermeister chase with Jack's.
Was it Mike's Hard Lemonade or those like weird for a while they did Jack and Coke in a bottle?
Oh, they still do that. I mean, at least they do here. I mean, i'm sure they do. They're sure you could buy it in switzerland
Too. I don't know. This is in indiana
I threw up out of the car window of my friend's car that had come over the next day and cleaned the vomit
Yeah
Now the ambienese and the south malachans in general had become completely dependent on the colonial government to survive through this forced clove
Cultivation which was of course the point of why the colony was set up that way completely dependent on the colonial government to survive through this forced clove cultivation,
which was of course the point of why the colony was set up that way.
They make the people completely dependent on it so they don't try to set up any parallel
kind of economies or anything.
But the economy now should itself have died.
With the built in forced crop system of the VOC gone and the crop market itself destroyed,
there was nothing left for the local people
of the Mlockens to do to make up for this loss of income. So the Ambienese men instead
turned to service in the Dutch East Indies Army as a replacement career. And within a
very short amount of time, these men made up a majority of the entire East Indies rank
and file, despite the fact they were not even close to the majority
ethnic group in the colony.
This is basically replicated in the structure of the enlisted ranks of the US Navy with
Filipinos.
The Dutch colonial authority quickly came to love these guys and their so-called fighting
spirit.
Now we've talked about this before on the show.
This was the martial races theory all over again.
But instead of the British doing it, it's the Dutch.
The British, they championed the Gurkhas
for their so-called quote martial races theory.
The Dutch championed the Ambanese.
Same shit.
Same thing like that.
Like because of their race, they're good at fighting.
They're loyal, they follow commands,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And they're Christians, so that's like a bonus.
It's the exact same shit the British do to the Gurkhas.
And, spoiler alert here, they also treat them as badly in the modern day.
So, surprise.
There's a shock.
Surprise.
Actually, I would...
I'll leave it up to you two to decide at the end if the Dutch treat the Ambanese worse
than the British treat the Gurkhas. But hold on to that thought. There's a lot of reason for this unbreakable
loyalty the Dutch championed in these guys. Many accounts put much of this up to their
widespread acceptance of Protestantism and Christianity. They were already an ethnic
minority in the area and now they're also a religious minority. And they happen to share
religion with the colonizer, which made them move closer to
the colonizer.
That's probably part of it.
Another part of course is the main job for the men now.
Being soldiers, being enlisted men for the colonial authority.
It provided for their families, their homes, and their communities.
Any break from that would take away everything that they had gained all over again, just
like when Kloves died.
But as the rank and file of the colonial army, they became the main tool to oppress other
indigenous groups, mainly Muslims, who rebelled, stepped out of line, whatever. So before long,
the Ambanese were hated by fucking everyone else, for another reason on top of the other two reasons,
which again made them
closer to the Dutch authorities. Now being close to the Dutch was the only thing keeping them safe.
And the Dutch rewarded them in a way a colonizer tends to. Money, privilege, status. Dutchmen also
married into Ambany's families. Intermarriages were not uncommon. There's a lot of mixed race
children floating around. There was some kind of assimilation, but in the very weird only Dutchman to Ambonese
women kind of way. You did not see it flipping the other way. Yes.
The Netherlands is a strange in the sense that it became less tolerant of mixed marriages
over time and in racial marriage. Like it's, it's changed now, but there was like two,
the famous. Oh, don't say it. We're leaving and going to America. and the reason why they were so racist was because the Dutch were so racist to Eddie Van Halen's family, which is a mixed Indonesian white family, that they were like, fuck,
the Netherlands, we're leaving and going to America.
Oh, we'll get to why that happened because we're getting there.
Well, I was going to say, if you're an Ambanese soldier in the Dutch military, it's the only
way that you can provide for your family.
And so when your instructor says jump, you might as well jump.
But the instructor says, yump.
Now, one of the people that they'd end up fighting was an Indonesian nationalist and independence organizer, a man who'll become very important for their story.
Going forward, Sukarno.
No moving forward in time, World War II happens.
The Netherlands falls to Germany, and many
of their colonies fall to Japan.
And in a funny turn, the Japanese authority think the Malachans were forced into military
service and would welcome them as heroes.
They only held them POWs for like a couple weeks, and for the Japanese anyway, they treated
them comparatively well.
They then release the Andes back home
like a go forth and welcome to the greater Asian co-prosperity sphere or whatever, and
all of the Andes soldiers quickly turned into vicious guerilla fighters against the Japanese
occupation.
Meanwhile Soekarno and his nationalist followers see the Japanese occupation as a means of
further his goal for Indonesian independence and become collaborators.
Sukarno himself helps form the Defenders of the Homeland, an Indonesian collaborationist
volunteer army that worked for Japan, which would eventually become the beginnings of
the National Army for Indonesia after independence.
So once again, the Malachkans, the Ambanese, find themselves at odds with the most powerful other Indonesian
group in the country.
Now literally as soon as Japan surrenders and World War II ends, Soekarno and his nationalists
declare independence.
This of course pisses off the Netherlands because like every other colonial empire of
the day just wanted to pick back up where things had left off.
This does not happen. This makes a divide in
Indonesia even deeper with the reconstituted East Indies Army now almost entirely Ambanese fighting
against the nationalist movement, which is almost entirely Javanese. There's a lot more people on
the island of Java than in the Straits of Malacca. Just saying. Oh, so many more. Java is, I believe,
the most populous island on the planet.
Like hundreds of millions of people.
And the Malakas are not.
They're a vast minority, ethically, religiously, loyalty wise.
The Ambanese are definitely at the wrong side of this equation at the moment.
And to be fair, all of the other hatred that have been piled on top of one another
at this point was only made worse during the Japanese occupation because the Ambanese and Sukarno's nationalists fought an absolutely brutal guerrilla conflict.
Horrific violence on both sides of that one. So now they have a whole other hatred on top of all the other ones. And now the Dutch are back in play. As a small side note here, I do intend on covering
this period of history much more in depth at some point in the future. I'm still getting my hands
on resources here in the Netherlands because it's actually, surprise, a great place to find them.
So don't get mad at me right now for not going into this more. But slowly the Dutch begin to lose.
The entire world turns on the Netherlands for trying to hold onto their colonies because
I guess this was a time in history where people did that.
And by 1949, negotiations end with the Dutch government accepting a United States of Indonesia,
giving up everything other than western New Guinea.
This is despite the fact that the Dutch faithful allies in the South Malaccas demanded that
their former colonial government recognize
the differences between them and the majority government and their generations of service
and effectively give them a republic of their own, what they call the Republic of South
Maluku.
The Dutch government in general does not give a single fuck about any of that.
There is no international support for it and it is very, very clear that Sukarno will invade them if they even dare
So the Netherlands just kind of shrugs goes. Yeah
What could you do get fucked guys? There's nothing we can do you just have to stay part of the colonies
I'm pretty sure that once the Dutch did eventually leave
What's called West Papua now that like the way that the Indonesians treated Papuans is fucking awful as well. Thankfully that has completely ended and everything over
there is all good now. Yeah yeah yeah and the Indonesian military doesn't
literally own resources like mines that it just runs for its own profit in
places like West Papua where don't worry they're really respectful of people's
property rights. That's right. And labor conditions. Yeah. In 1949 the Dutch
government officially disbanded the colonial army and told the thousands
of Ambanese soldiers that if you want to continue your career, you'll have to join the regular
Indonesian army.
Obviously, this would have never happened, even if they wanted to do it.
Sukarno would not have had them.
And instead, a very long process of demobilization was taken. Christian, Robert Steven Sumakil,
and Yohannes Manahutu were both leading figures in the Republican movement and they declared
independence from Indonesia. At the time, the entire body of the colonial military had
not been fully demobilized and it was kind of spread throughout multiple Indonesian islands. And Sikarno
purposely did not let them all go home because he knew if they did they would
just take off their uniforms and become guerrillas or support this Republican
movement. So you kind of get these weird pockets of Ambanese soldiers all over
Indonesia waiting to be demobilized by the Dutch government but the Indonesian
government isn't letting them. So you get they're all in this kind of strange gray zone.
This country obviously did not work out as it does not exist today.
Indonesia eventually invades it and conquers it.
And the Dutch government decide the only way to handle this and to stop what was probably
going to be a mass slaughter of tens of thousands of people was to evacuate the Malakans that
supported them. Their soldiers, their families, a ton of local civil servants, and take them just
all back to the Netherlands. And that's what happened. The idea was that this would be
temporary. Things would settle down in Indonesia. Maybe Sukarno would be couped or something,
and they'd all be able to go home. Tens of thousands of Malakans made this trip to the Netherlands, leaving
their homes behind.
They get in, it's like, y'all like wind? Y'all like rain?
I hope you like it moist.
Y'all dislike the sun? Do we ever have a place for you?
The Dutch government prepared for their arrival the way that everyone probably sees coming
and that is, they didn't.
Joe, can I guess, are they going to be put in a sort of ramshackle residential areas
not suited to large scale migration of people?
Oh boy are they!
The Malachans, despite being Dutch subjects illegally, most of whom spoke fluent Dutch,
were not Dutch citizens and as such, they could not legally work in the Netherlands
and they could only live in places designated by the government. Remember, it's 1949.
So basically it's like Dutch Danish handshake, but it's Denmark today versus Netherlands
1949.
Well, it's 1949. It's only a few years removed from World War II.
Now, if you suddenly had thousands of people
to put places that you were happy to be a European nation
conquered by the Nazis, where would you put them?
Where would you have just laying around and open suddenly?
Yeah.
Are you thinking a spare concentration camp?
Because that's what happened.
Oh my God.
They got put in Vesterborg
concentration camp Jesus fucking
Fuck me. I do have to point out. It was not still being run as a concentration camp and there was also repurposed military barracks But yes, the Dutch government was like well we we have the spenston compound later house still yeah
Hey guys, we've got this uh this village where
we filmed the movie come and see can you guys live there now the malachans were completely
isolated from dutch society and the dutch government created a representative body to
manage these camps because there were several of them coming called the commissariat Abansesorg or the CAS. Now the CAS took the
easiest way to govern this new group of people in the Netherlands as anybody has
ever done it but I say easiest I also mean the dumbest. So it's like well we
already had a lot of community leaders let's just put them in charge and since
this community is mostly soldiers and soldiers' families, enlisted soldiers and soldiers' families,
the entire government was made up of former colonial NCOs.
You get the Dutch Sergeant Commission.
Just creating a fucking microcosm of a military hunter just in for the Netherlands.
That's what happened, they even armed them. We'll get into it a little
bit later. But like the Dutch didn't want to have anything to do with these people.
When remember they're supposed to only temporarily be there, but there were so many, they needed
to be policed. And obviously the Dutch are not going to send police or the, the, the
Marsha say, or the army to police these people so they
simply deputized former sergeants and gave them guns and created their own
colonial police force to police their colonial subjects in the Netherlands
which just created a mafia inside a former concentration camp as well inside
Vesterborg concentration camp. Yes
Yeah, it's like we it's like the guy who'd figured out about the slave trade in the Congo free state by looking at the import Export stuff and it's like yeah, the only thing that comes out of there is dead bodies
The only thing that goes in is cans of dip and energy drinks
Is it being run by black ball of NCOs?
It's being read by a whole bunch of like 20 year old sergeants and corporals becoming
feudal lords in a concentration camp.
Well done.
If IND, if you're listening, I do need to renew my visa this year.
I love you.
Don't deport me.
Now it quickly becomes apparent that this temporary relocation is definitely going to be permanent.
To make a very long story short, trying to sell these people on returning to Indonesia,
in Indonesia ruled by Ustukarno and then by fucking Suharto, who is a story of pure evil
for a different time, but like you're not going to sell these people on moving back
there.
And some people
did go back. Some people actually went back to Indonesia following promises by the government
that everything was going to be okay. And the first thing they did was tell their families
and friends, stay your asses in the Netherlands. Do not come back here.
I mean, so Harto famously basically required all Indonesians living abroad, I believe this
in the sixties to come back to Indonesia or have their citizenship and passports canceled. Yes. And that's what
happened. These cases. Yeah. A lot of these and the people who came back in typically
they were so they could arrest and so you could be murdered. Yeah. Execute these people.
So I imagine that like, yeah, there were a lot of people who suddenly not only were they,
were they, you know, not going to be able to go home for political or social reasons, but also they might literally be at the point where they're stateless unless
the Dutch government...
That's exactly what happened.
So when Suharto does this, he renders all of these Malakans without Indonesian citizenship.
But because they are Dutch subjects and not citizens, by the 1960s, all of the Malakans in the Netherlands become legally
stateless.
And the government did nothing to change their policy regarding the Malakans living there.
They did not have any kind of status.
They had nothing.
They didn't have asylum.
They didn't have anything.
Eventually the Dutch government abolished the camps, moving people from the camps into
new housing projects.
But the government did not build enough of them, so some people refused to leave, so the government moved them by force.
Many people found themselves suddenly homeless, despite the fact that a lot of them were living in a concentration camp or
things that look awful lot like a concentration camp, but not in Westerbork.
But they even had that stolen from them by the state and were thrown out into the street.
By then the Malaccan people living in the Netherlands were left in complete and total
purgatory.
The Dutch government refused to grant them citizenship and the rights that came with
it.
They couldn't return home.
And in fact, they couldn't leave the Netherlands.
They were stateless.
The EU, the Schengen area, none of that exists.
You can't go somewhere else. You don't have a passport. You have nothing. You don't legally exist anywhere on Earth.
Yeah, because this would have even been before the ECC, like the European coal community as well.
And mind you, all of these previous regime pilots called passport regimes still relied on you having a
legal status yeah somewhere these people had nothing yeah and borderless travel
or the ability to shang and stuff that I don't believe that took effect until
like the early 2000s no of course it wasn't around back then and so yeah so
quite frankly yeah if you were stateless I mean and also documents were paper
maybe you probably didn't have them or if they were damaged.
Why would they bring them? They're only temporary going to the Netherlands.
And so it's one of these things where, yeah, you create the situation where people are
a permanent underclass and also like they are very much vulnerable to being victimized
because like they don't have any protections.
And remember, it's not the sixties and into the seventies, The original people are having children and that statelessness is passed on.
It sure is.
We have a couple of generations removed from the original people who, quote unquote, temporarily
came to the Netherlands.
They had kids.
Now these kids, now some things have changed in their status.
They could legally work now in the Netherlands
They could go to school things of that nature
However, most of the schools obviously is this huge influx of people so the Dutch like oh we'll build you schools
For you, you don't go to our schools. Oh, no
I don't want to make it sound like there's a legal segregation, but it was a functional segregation
They lived in I don't want to make it sound like there's a legal segregation, but it was a functional segregation.
They lived in Malaccan neighborhoods.
They did not live in Dutch neighborhoods.
Look, I realize the blueprints do refer to it as Konkerschool, but it's actually a perfectly
good school.
That's just the nickname the architect came up with.
So you get this new generation of people being raised in the Netherlands in this way, being raised by their parents who are very loyal to the concept of South Maluku Republicanism.
But they're still set in the old ways, the ways of loyalty to the Crown, for example, loyalty to the Dutch state, service to the Dutch state, things like that. Whereas the new group of people kind of get rid of all of
that, their children, are like the Dutch state is not going to be the one that gives us the republic.
We will have to create it. And the only way to create that is violent action.
Terrorism.
We get a South Malaccan terror groups being formed with the break of the old and with the new.
And this old guard, they serve in the colonial military, all that.
They also control pretty much everything in the Malaccan community for obvious reasons,
as you can imagine.
But now you have these pro-Republican radicals.
One group that we're going to be talking about today is called the Free Malaccan Youth Movement,
but there's a lot of them.
They break with traditional leadership and begin to plot direct
attacks in the Netherlands to draw attention to the Republican cause and to remind the
Netherlands of what they see as the Dutch's responsibility to them.
I mean, I feel like you could do this with terrorism, bombings, hijackings, or you could
do the thing that's going to really cut to the heart of the point and get all Dutch people paying attention, which is sabotage every
single inflatable crocodile in the entirety of the Netherlands right before summer. And
then all of a sudden it's just like, but we have the song and there are no inflatable
crocodiles.
I was going to say just put like spike strips on the bike lanes.
Guess where you get the rubber from? Fucking Indonesia. Now you're paying attention, aren't you?
The first attack that they launched
was an attack on the Indonesian consulate
in The Hague in 1970.
This is not very well thought out,
which will become a trend in their operations.
They rush in armed with guns and knives.
They found the counselor and his family were not home.
So they took some hostages
and they just quit a couple hours later, turned themselves over
to the police.
And probably one of the funniest legal outcomes I've ever read, their actions were seen by
the Dutch government and the Dutch Ministry of Justice as the actions of some misguided
youths and nothing to be worried about.
And the 10 men involved got little more than a slap on the wrist.
Less than a year in prison for a,
for an armed takeover of a foreign consulate.
This reminds me of a red army faction series of like getting caught doing
terrorism at the seventies. It's like barely a misdemeanor.
Just like taking the Dutch version of a, you know, poisoning the water supply.
They just like put spices in the mail supply and just the Dutch people just can't
handle it.
But it's also interesting too, cause it's like back in those days, it's like you get
five years for possession of heroin, but like, you know, you did a little Symbionese liberation
army shit on a consulate. Doesn't value it. Oh, kids, kids get a little crazy summertime.
You know, the days are so long. It just makes people act weird.
You'll get two months with good behavior. A few years after that in 1975, another group
of men were arrested for plotting to ram a truck through the gates of Sosedijk Palace and kidnap the
Queen of the Netherlands. This plan failed due to the car that was carrying a few of them being
pulled over by the cops. The cops had fighting it full of guns and they couldn't steal the truck
they intended on using for the ramming attack, and also the Queen wasn't even there.
Because that's not where she lived at the time.
Well done boys!
You only told me like the other day that the Netherlands still has a monarchy, which I
find fascinating.
Yeah, it was Konigsdag the other day, or King's Day, which is the King's birthday.
As I understand it, it's nowhere near as like ensconced in like the actual running of things as it is in the United Kingdom.
You never really noticed they exist unless it's king's day, uh,
because it's the holiday where everybody goes out and gets blind fucking wasted.
I think they do have like in, I want to say Denmark, they have a king as well.
They do the royal family like that kind of thing. Yeah. It still exists.
Sort of Britain's the only place it takes it that fucking serious.
From my understanding, there's a recent story about the Danish monarchy, uh,
which will surprise nobody. I say there's a recent story about the Danish monarchy, which will surprise
nobody to say there's something about turbo racism going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
I'd rather not have a monarchy, but if I'm going to have one, I'd like to have one that
I could kind of ignore their existence for 99% of the time.
I mean, like to be fair from your perspective, Joe was like the king of the Netherlands seems
like a pretty chill
guy. If you go up to Scandinavia, like all their royalty are now just like Instagram
influencers. And then you just have like the sicko, pedo, cabal of Britain is like, you
could be an Instagram influencer or you can run the biggest sex ring in the country.
Somewhere out there is going to be the first Royal only fans Oh fuck me like a prince or a princess is gonna be like I'm gonna sell peach on the fucking internet
What's now like to see the royal hole?
Her royal hotness HRH
Would you like to see the royal pearl necklace? I
Mean switch isn't doesn't have it hasn't had a monarchy or anything like that
I pretty much ever I mean the way that it was always it hasn't had a monarchy or anything like that. I pretty
much ever. I mean, the way that it was always like subjects of things and then they became
independent, but I don't know. They also have a system of government that sounds like something
you'd only hear in like an, like a fucking anime about Europe, but like fantasy Europe,
where there's just like the secret council that meets in see, yeah, exactly. It's like
a straight up, it's like the guy who decides that guts has to be put to death and fucking berserk like the council meets
Closed doors. That's basically Swiss knows normal government. They're like, okay, we've gotten together decided women can't vote
And I I do have some good news for you not about that
That's that's bad news
But I did say the blackface joke would be applicable at one point and that's because of December
1975 there was a malaccan separatist
train hijacking outside the town of Weister, and they concealed the guns they used in this
operation in boxes that they told everybody were gifts for Sinterklaas.
Which is kind of like children's Christmas for people who don't know.
There's also, that's where the Zwarte Piet thing comes in.
This happened at the same time as another group working together stormed the Indonesian
consulate in Amsterdam.
Aboard the train, things began to go wrong quite quickly because the Dutch government
had a hard line stance at the time when it came to dealing with a terror attack or a
hijacking or a hostage situation, which boiled down to, we do not negotiate with terrorists
for any reason whatsoever.
And I mean, like they don't even talk to them.
I mean, this is not too long after the 1972 Munich attacks.
So I think that there was a lot of,
well, there was an example that they could point to.
And then also I think it was before,
this was right around the era when counterterrorism stuff
in law enforcement became a thing in Europe because of what happened.
This is around the same year that the Dutch actually formed the first counterterror group
as well. So for the same reason that everybody else does.
It's also kind of the era of hijackings, like the zenith of hijackings just around the world.
It's the golden age of European terror, where you could do all sorts of shit and get like
six months in prison and then go do it again.
Yeah. Or in America, you could just jump out of the back of a plane and then everyone thinks
you died. And then randomly decades later, your kids find the parachute from the fucking
plane in your garage after you've died. Like, Oh, my dad was DB Cooper, you know, even in
America,
a podcast in Switzerland. Uh, my dad is nowhere near cool enough to do that. Okay. I'm starting a new conspiracy theory. Is your dad was DV Cooper.
I mean, if you look at the identity sketch, it doesn't look that far off. My dad would
have been like, fuck it. This is like 1918, 19 and 1972. So I don't think he was that
bald yet. Unfortunately. Is your full name Dick, but Cooper. Yeah. If you open up this
passport, it's just the illustration of the dick butt cartoon and the
Like yeah, it's the guy is so way that the malachans were confronted with the fact that the Dutch government just
Ghosted them effectively. They began killing hostages
So this is the first like fatal malachan terror attack in the Netherlands and the consulate they didn't start killing people
But they did take dozens of hostages and one of the hostages died because they tried to make a break for it.
They got to a window, began climbing down out of a homemade rope made out of sheets and like a curtain and they fell
and they died, which sucks. The hostage takers threatened to kill
multiple people but that is when the Dutch government deploys a woman named Josina Simokil to intervene. Now she is the wife of Christian Simokil, the
dead Moroccan former president of the fallen Republic, and he is about the
biggest martyr of the Republican movement that there is. And since she has
come to the Netherlands, she kind of became a leader in the Molochian
community.
She hold a lot of sway.
So when she told them all, release the hostages and surrender, because what you're doing is
hurting Molochians.
So put down your shit and surrender.
They did like immediately.
One hostage taker also noted that he was surrendering because he was getting very cold and wanted
a blanket.
One of the core tenants of a hostage negotiation is establishing the core needs of the hostage
takers and he was just a little bit chilly.
Yeah, I was not cozy in this consulate, which also like how shit was this consulate that
was really cold in there?
I do feel like, yeah, you're getting to the point where the mission had to be aborted due to tummies being upset. I got ants on my feet. I quit.
Fuck this. For a while separatist activity died down. The Dutch government
thought this is because you know they got scolded by a leading member of their
community you know because the people who killed people actually got serious
time in prison this time around.
So they thought like maybe those two things combined made people give it up.
But really it's because they were lying low and in planning.
It kind of goes without saying that the Malachan youth movement worked pretty much like every other terror group we've ever talked about.
That is, small cells that were individually organized,
which makes it much harder for them to be taken down by law enforcement and much easier for them to self-actualize to their goals.
And the cell we're going to be talking about is controlled by 25-year-old Max Papalai.
And by all accounts, he doesn't fit the standard look of your normal freedom fighter, terror
type guy.
He's a government employee, first of all, and in his free time, he isn't exactly leading
ideological book circles or whatever.
He's a local youth minister.
And he probably showers every day.
Big difference between him and the RAF.
Big difference is that he doesn't seem to only be doing this to get laid, or at all
for that matter.
By all accounts, Max is a really nice guy.
He's joined by nine others in this plot.
I'm not going gonna name all of them
because it's kind of pointless in the grand scheme of things, but there are two other people
that will become very important for obvious reasons. One of them is Hensina Uctolcea,
a woman, which as we've talked about before is a little uncommon in the annals of terror.
What is probably even more uncommon though is that everyone says that she was not ideologically
driven whatsoever.
Nobody ever said that she really said anything about South Malacca at all.
Rather, her boyfriend was, a guy named Rudy Lumisil.
He was a guy who had a fair amount of power over her and over the movement in general.
Rudy's brother had also been one of the terrorists involved in the storming of the Indonesian
Council on Amsterdam, and two other members of his family were known to be actively involved
in the movement in one way or another.
There's also the small fact that their relationship was not going well, on account of it being
forbidden in their community, because they were cousins.
Ah, we're back to the cousin fucking. The universal tendency of episodes of Lions Lit by Donkeys to involve some kind of cousin
slash niece relationship.
We got our Indonesian patent here.
Once again a plot propagated by Big Nephew.
I should point out that like they were close enough related that their own community was
like this is disgusting please stop but their relationship continued in secret because
EWWWWW
And the end of the plan
Involved them flying away to a foreign country like they wanted to continue the relationship and their hope was to do it
Away from the judgment of their community who thought that shit was kind of gross
away from the judgment of their community who thought that shit was kind of gross.
So they're doing radical cousin fucking with the goal of
getting to somewhere where it was acceptable to do so. I assume, I don't know, Arkansas?
Now in a country like the Netherlands, you'd probably assume that law enforcement or the intelligence community, something would be tracking people associated with a group that has launched multiple attacks and killed a couple people and you would be right
They were they'd been on to max for quite a while
But the Dutch internal security agency was back in the day was called the Bay Bay day
Ran into two main problems while trying to figure these people out
One is that the Bay Bay day had multiple assets within the Moroccan community
But they were all the old guard types
The same type of people that max and these radicals hated and wanted nothing to do it
That did not communicate with so their assets that know anything that was going on or what max was planning
then when they sent ground agents to trail max max and the other militants came up with a
Revolutionary intelligence security apparatus, so that was simply speaking to another in ambientbianese, a language which none of the baby
agents spoke.
So it's kind of like improvised Navajo wind talkers.
Because the Dutch couldn't be fucking bothered.
So yeah, they just, like anyone who has a mind for plotting a violent terror attack,
they probably saw two tall pale dudes with
blonde hair and buzz cuts following them around everywhere like oh we just won't
speak Dutch and the Dutch guys followed like shit we didn't think of this
it must be like super hard to be a Dutch undercover agent because you stick out
so much yeah you know you're not being sent to trail white people like that's
not what the Dutch government does. I love the idea
Yeah, exactly. It's like being as inconspicuous as you can and it's like both agents are named yope and they're like seven feet tall
Agent yoke reporting for duties one
Undercover cop version of white men can't yelp
cop version of white men can't yump. Yeah.
Oh fuck.
It's a buddy comedy, but the, the, the guy who's better at basketball is actually the
ambient news dude.
He has to teach the Dutch guy ambient news so they can communicate how they're going
to hustle people in the basketball court.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So max was doing this planning and they decided that the taking of a train that's traveling between
Aasen and Hronikon would be the best way to go about this. They expanded it because obviously they want a diversionary attack, right?
So they also want to seize the school, primary school, Bovensmilde. So they're pretty much doing
the exact same plan as the last one and most of the terrorists involved were living in Bowensmilda.
So the first part of the plan,
before they switched to the primary school,
was someone suggested raiding the town's town hall, right?
One guy vetoed that plan because he had a job
as a carpenter in that building
and didn't want to lose his job.
So then they all decided,
well, let's raid the Bowman's bill, the primary school.
And everybody's like, good. All right. None of us are like fucking labor is there. We're
fine. Yeah. But what about your own kids or like fuck them kids? I'm just laughing. It's
like, yeah, they're going to do Bezlon on their own hometown. Basically. Well, I don't
want to put that much evil on them because the nothing nothing and none of the bad stuff
We're gonna talk about takes place at the school. Okay, I'm glad I mean as a parent and just human being
I'm glad to hear that but still like the fact that it's like
What if we what if we take a primary school hostage like to me you're starting to get into like you got a swoosh your
Cape sinisterly, you know level of fucking that kind of bad bad dudes making a bad plan bad because it's morally wrong and also bad because you
Just suck at planning swishing the cape carving a silent J
Euro yes, my name is your
Know he's carving the Dutch letter the IJ letter that's like's capitalized, it looks like someone's keyboard is fucked up.
You have to capitalize the I and the J.
I understand our sorrows are very confused.
Now soon the combined team grew to 14, 10 for the train, four for the school, and then
they go about buying weapons.
And this turned out was probably the easiest part of the entire planning stage.
We already talked about how the Dutch allowed a strange parallel Moroccan security force
with guns to exist.
A lot of those security guys were either sympathizers or just really corrupt.
And Max and the others just bought weapons from them.
But that still wasn't enough and they actually still wouldn't have enough guns for every
single person involved in the raid. It was like every other Stalingrad type
situation but rather because of a budget rather than material problems.
So they went to a really shitty bar in Amsterdam called the Fat Bar and
bought some guns from them specifically Uzis. That is the most Amsterdam story ever like yeah, she come to the fat bar
Do you want to buy an MP MP5 or a Pistol?
Do you want a heroin do you want heroin is child pornography or three pints of Amstel?
We have three things on the menu. We have heroin. We have Heineken and we have Israeli sub machine guns
Don't ask how they got there. Well, if you're going to be taking a primary school hostage, we've got some teddy bears
here, but you've got to take all the ecstasy out of them first.
Afterwards they got some heavy bike locks because this is a terror attack happening in
the Netherlands, zip ties and a bunch of newspapers to complete their loadout because I assume
they spent all of their money on the guns.
But buying the newspapers airily seems a bit of a folly because if you have to send like a
Verification of like I'm still alive surely an out of out of date newspaper isn't the best idea
Maybe they just knew it was gonna be they're gonna be there because this goes on for 20 days
So maybe they assume they're gonna be in there a while wants them to read
But you know what the newspapers are for is you're gonna take the train and they're take the newspapers to paper over all the windows
So the cops can't see inside. So it's not like proof of life statements
It's no it's just to cover the inside the windows
Yeah, and the bike locks are for the doors of the train the entirety of the train during the siege or the hostage situation
It's like the room they interrogate Theo in in the first act of Children of Men. Yes. That gives it a weird, a weirder vibe. On May 23rd, 1977,
the team of train hijackers, who we will be focusing on, jumped on public
transport, either buses or trains, to Osin, where they were then to meet up.
Once they got there, Max realized that one of his men was missing. It's because
he got cold feet
He got cold feet in the sense that he needed a blanket for his feet
Then he was like I'm not getting up today. It's like my feet are cold. They're not covered in ants the ants keep my feet warm
I'm trying to stay optimistic. I don't have ant feet
But his actual excuse was he had his head was surrounded by a mystical haze that morning It would not allow him to leave his bed I get it I've also been hung over yeah I was gonna say he took exactly one puff off of like what the
Dutch considered swag in the 70s absolutely blew his fucking yeah exactly
yeah he's a closed-eye hallucinations he's like someone airlift me a bunch of
recordings of the doors I'm ready to fucking see God
I should have smoked that bowl full of ants
In like the Straits of Malacca there's an ant that makes you trip and so like the best Dutch weed in the 70s
You had a sprinkle ants on it. Like it was PCP exactly
You want to get wet? No the Dutch wet
You want to get wet? No, the Dutch wet. That morning around 9am, one of the now 9 terrorists pulled the emergency brake as the
train was riding near the town of Depunt. And guns were pulled out, though like I said,
only a couple of them, not enough for all 9. And within only a few seconds, the entire
train is under their control. Along with the train itself, they had taken 94 hostages.
One of the first things the terrorists do is start letting people go though, deciding
that anybody old, anybody sick, or anybody not Dutch could leave the train. So on the
bright side, if I'm in public transportation this happens, I'm good. At least they know
I'm safe.
They're pulling up the colour card from Family Guy. It's just like, uh, get off.
Oh no, they take one look at me.
I'm too dark.
Well, it would really suck if they're Ambanese Azeri nationalists.
I'm ultra fucked.
I mean, isn't, the Azeris, aren't they like dumping money into like New Caledonian reduces?
Yes, that's the weird part is they could do that again.
They absolutely could have done it again.
Yeah, I end up getting the only pan Turkic Indonesian terrorist taking
over my train.
But I also liked the idea that we have to cover it and let all the non-dutch people
out because like if the Dutch police, it's the 1970s with the Dutch police have snipers,
like you do know that all these hostages are just going to get killed.
Yeah, the cops are going to kill these guys before we do.
Yeah, exactly.
So they had to let them go.
They also eventually start letting out pregnant women as well. Now, at the same time for terrorist
raid Bovensmil to primary school, they capture 105 children and five teachers. And after
this they publish their demands to the Dutch government. First and foremost, it's keep
the promise of recognizing the South Malaccan Republic and sever all official ties and business
ties with the Indonesian government. Then they must release all other Malaccan militants and failing to give into these demands
would end in the execution of hostages.
And the militants in the school specifically threatened to blow up the whole thing while
it's full of kids.
And after all of this was to be met, the militants were to be flown to Libya.
Gaddafi's back motherfuckers. Yes. He is kind of in his ascendant era at this point.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, failing Libya, they also requested Benin or Vietnam as well. They had
options. Benin is, I don't get, but sure. Why not?
Vietnam, they had some, some internal struggles around this time, immediately post end of
the U S war. Yeah, there were some things happening.
Maybe they really hated the Khmer Rouge and were like, if we go to Vietnam, we can invade
Cambodia.
They are an ethnic minority from Indonesia.
So the Vietnamese might be the people, only people on earth who hate the Japanese as much
as they do.
And so they're like, we have a natural affinity.
They have a couple of strikes going against, I'd like to see how that one played out, honestly,
but nope. Yeah. Now, what is interesting here is against. I'd like to see how that one played out honestly, but nope.
Yeah.
Now, what is interesting here is the Dutch government, like I said, had a standing policy
of never entering negotiations whatsoever.
This is something most countries have, to be honest, but the Dutch policy at the time
was like I said, just kind of ghosting them.
And it was one of the things that many people blamed the violence, the last Malachan attack
at the train and consulate on
like the Dutch government refused to talk to them. So they killed people. People blame the government
for this. Since then, the Dutch government policy had not changed, but tactically they understood
the importance of actually speaking to people in hostage situations. And when the leaders of this
whole episode is the minister of justice again, Andreas Van Acht. And he's probably most famous for what we're talking about today.
And of course, attempting to pardon the last Nazi war criminals held at Dutch prisons before
becoming Prime Minister. He's a character. His boss is Prime Minister Joop Den Oyl. So
we actually have a yope and play a second yoke has hit the ups
And
this Dutch
Triumvirate of governance was rounded out by Minister of the Interior of Wilhelm de hey Fortman or in English de gay Fortman
Hey, okay, G. Maas name
All I know is that there was at one point a Dutch politician.
I don't know what level he got to whose name was boy trip because his nickname was boy.
I don't know why, but his name was boy trip. And I'm just like, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, current Prime Minister's name is Dick Schoepf. But it's funny if you pronounce it Dick Schoof.
Dick Schoof. Now, Van Ocht demanded immediate action. Exactly. He didn't want to wait like
last time. He wanted to immediately send in the Royal Marines and then all of this shit.
He believed that the violence of the last hijacking was due to the fact that the government
waited for the surrender of the militants rather than acting immediately.
While the other two people in government said,
hold on, slow down, we need to talk to them, string them along for a while,
and then we can actually come up with a real plan so people don't die.
Like, dead oil has gone on record to say like,
I didn't want to kill the hostage takers either, he didn't want to kill anybody.
So, that is what they did. And it worked.
The militants and the government began talking.
Now the negotiations were completely fake. The government had absolutely no intention of following
through any of them, but they wanted to keep them on the line and it worked. The militants said,
you know, as long as you keep talking to us, no one will be executed. And it should be said the
guy that was overcome with the mysterious haze later said that Max had been very adamant
from the very beginning that they would not execute anyone no matter what. Going so far as
say if one of their hostages got up and just ran out the train, just let him go. So Max's goal was
never violence, if that man is to be believed. The negotiations went even more smoothly because
Yosina Somekil showed up again to speak with the militants and things were going fine.
Nobody was being executed, but this did leave them with a problem.
They did need to come up with a plan to rescue these people and it would be a rescue operation
that had never been done before anywhere, but specifically in the Netherlands.
A train with dozens of people on it in the middle of, as far as the Netherlands can go
in the middle of nowhere, but raiding a train with a counter-terror force and they knew that they need to do this
because the militants constantly said we have no intention of surrendering they actually said
multiple times on the phone quote plane or die or plane or dude actually i believe it's overlaid and dude is dead. I believe overlaid and has died.
But yeah, you know what I mean? They made it multiple times like we will not surrender.
So the government has to come up with a plan for this. It's often said and written that
the Dutch Royal Marines were the rescue force for this. But that is not entirely true. The
regular Marines present just like there are police, but they were put in place as an outer cordon
to surround the train to make sure nobody got away. The rescue would be left
to the Marine Special Support Unit, or the Bebe A. The Dutch, like a lot of
other countries in Europe, prior to the Munich massacre in 72, had no dedicated
counter-terror unit, and they quickly slapped one together in 1973, forming the Special
Support Unit. The Marines were selected to form this because they were not made up of conscripts
like much of the Dutch military, and they had a reputation for being good at their jobs. Also,
very violent, which is a fact not uncommon amongst Marines in general. However, this would be their
first ever counter-terror response. Previous to Previously, they'd only responded once during a prison riot at the Den Haag
Penitentiary, which is now better known for where war crime suspects are held. But that
didn't start until the 90s, so no war criminal prison riot here. And so they did use guns
by all accounts. They just beat the shit out of people with batons and tasers. In order
to facilitate the plan, Dutch intelligence hid bugs in baskets of supplies that they'd been
handing over to the militants so they could hear it on conversations they were having, which of
course was hampered somewhat by their dedication to not speak Dutch. They interviewed several
freed hostages that had trickled out over the weeks. They'd set up infrared cameras down the
length of the train so they could track the movement of the militants. out over the weeks. They'd set up infrared cameras down the length of the train
so they could track the movement of the militants. And over the time they sensed out that hostages
were put in two different compartments, one for men and one for women. And the militants themselves
stayed at the very front of the train or in those little corridors between the compartments
to stop the movement of hostages. But they never stayed in the same compartment as the hostages did.
Which made the Dutch government believe, wow, this will be very, very easy. It was not.
So the Dutch planners came up with a multi-tiered plan of how to suppress the militants in place
where they were thought to be sleeping, that in the corridors or in the front,
and then rush in and secure the train where the hostages were before they could get up, run over, and kill any hostages.
This all sounds like standard fare, right?
Like you would expect this to be the case?
I have to tell you this might be one of the craziest fucking hostage rescue operations
I've ever heard of that does not involve some arm of the Russian state.
On June 11, 1977, 20 days after the hostage situation had begun,
the Dutch Marines launched their rescue mission at 4 54 a.m. So this operation started with a
distraction. That distraction was a simulated bombing run on the train from six Dutch Air Force
jets. What? They dove in very fucking close to the ground just above
the train with full afterburners to create as much noise as humanly possible. And then
just as the jets were pulling up and away, a team of Dutch Marine Frogmen, that being
kind of like Navy SEALs, detonated two massive bombs that had
been planted nearby, making it seem like the train itself was being bombed by the Dutch
Air Force.
What the fuck?
And then, as soon as this ended, three machine gun teams made up of Dutch Marines just began spraying into the train cars they believed
housed the militants from the outside.
Just back and forth.
What?
I need to remind you they did not have night vision.
It is 5am.
It is completely dark.
And the militants had papered over every trade window with newspaper, like I said.
So these dudes could not see where they were shooting.
The only thing they knew is like, well, according to our infrared intelligence, this is where
the militants are.
Okay.
Diversion, your guess is as good as mine.
I have to say, at no point of your hostage situation, should you have suppressive fire?
Yeah. See, that's the thing. You make a big ass noise, whatever. I thought it was going
to be like, okay. And then that's when the frogman, cause you know, Navy frogman seals
shit. Normally they do demolition stuff. And so like underwater and above water demolition
blow the door on wherever they want to get in and start going through the train. But
the idea of that is coming, but not from the frogman. Right. But the, I guess there's a part of
me that just sort of like, this is starting to be like, did they have like a fucking advisor
from the Spetsnaz on this or something? We need to soften the target up by killing all
the hostages by Swiss cheesing the train. I realized it was just one section, but still
just like, Oh no, it was the whole train. You're fucking kidding me. Every car where
they thought there was not hostages got hit with machine gun fire.
Every single part. So outside of those two compartments where there's the men and the
women were kept, everything got peppered with thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Yeah. Okay. I was just laughing. I'm like, yeah, it's the, they took advice from the guys who
ran anti-aircraft guns for the U S military in Sicily when they shot their own planes full of fucking paratroopers. Exactly. Yeah. Normally, your hostage situation slash rescue becomes the worst it's going to be
when jet bombers are involved. But that is honestly the most innocuous part of this entire thing.
Because after this, the machine guns are going off, the assault teams need to move in. There's five of them.
They're armed with a combination of Uzi submachine guns and weirdly, 357 magnums.
I was going to make a joke earlier in this about like that somebody watched the Magnum
Force, the second Dirty Harry movie and got the absolute wrong idea about it.
But now I'm just convinced that is the case.
It could have been it.
Yeah.
You have guys with Uzis.
There's some interviews of some of these guys and they say they're given strict
orders that their Uzis could not be used on Folio Automatic. Not really important
but I think it's funny. Well ask yourself do you do I feel lucky well do ya punk?
It's a shippable question. God damn it. Now they would need to breach the doors
of the train which had been secured with bike
locks.
So they built homemade bombs and attached them to wooden frames that would be used as
breaching charges, which is honestly standard.
However, inside of the train, which is still being shot at, Rudy and Hasina were sleeping
at the back and they began crawling forward towards the hostages.
Hasina is hit in the leg and says, I cannot go on, at which point Rudy tells her to pray
and just leaves her behind.
Because his goal suddenly is he wants to kill all of the hostages for what's happening.
Despite the fact Max had definitely given them orders to not do that, but within seconds
he's in the passenger car with the hostages, meeting the Dutch plan on top of everything already being insane had already failed entirely before the assault
teams made it into the train.
The assault continues though.
One of the assault teams had to dive for cover because incoming bullets zip right over their
head.
They report they're taking fire.
They return fire by shooting into the train where they think they're being
shot at from, which is still full of hostages, mind you. Only, small problem here, the militants
never fired a single shot out of the train. The other Dutch Marine machine gun teams almost
wiped out the assault team.
The only way this could be stupider is if they decide it's like, the best way to do
this is to crash another train into this train and hopefully it shakes loose.
Train fights!
Yeah, train fights.
We got train fights!
Listen, man, I got to be honest with you here.
I think that by the time that you become a frog man in the armed services of your home
country and you've done all the training and the who dares wins bullshit, whatever the
fuck, every culture and military shit has this.
You kind of accept that if you are doing a hostage rescue in a train or similarly confined
environment, you kind of have to go in under the assumption that you just will not have
suppressive fire or covering fire.
Certainly you wouldn't want them to be like, Hey guys, definitely shoot a lot of rounds
into a train that you don't have any observation on whatsoever because you know, the fucking I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like,
I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like,
I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like,
I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like,
I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like take incoming fire rapidly jump up and down. I cannot stress that enough again. I
don't think the important part of any hostage rescue operation is fire
superiority or an air force, but can you imagine how annoyed you must be if
you're like the Dutch, the Dutch Navy seal who's trained this entire time to
do the fucking dirty Harry shit or like the slide the Dutch Navy SEAL who's trained this entire time to do the fucking dirty Hairy shit or like this slide the gun forward from taxi driver and instead your own guys are just 50 cowling the fuck out of you
You don't understand. I have my black belt Dutch gun. God. I really need
But the important part is as funny as it is that they just got fucking almost taken up by their own guys
They now think they're being shot at. That's gonna be important. They think
they're taking fire. After this they plant blasting charges on the train. The
first bomb doesn't go off, which forces the Marines have to punch out a window
and crawl through. And then another team has a similar problem because there's a
team per compartment effectively. And the second team moves in,
plants a bomb, bomb doesn't go off. One Marine's like, fuck, because he was the engineer, it's
his job to build it. He steps forward to fix the bomb. Bomb explodes directly into his
face, peppering him with shrapnel. The rest of the team leave him behind and advance into
the train, running into two militants. One of them had been wounded from the incoming machine gun fire and the other one was laying on top of him. In the
next compartment there's two other militants, one dead from machine gun fire, the other
unhurt and the still living militants all surrender without a fight. The same team keeps
advancing until they run into Rudy, who was standing in the middle of the women's compartment.
Now he hadn't carried out his massacre like he originally planned, according to him he
just because he's captured alive.
He says later, I realized what I was doing was wrong.
So he doesn't shoot any of the hostages.
Now take his comment and put it in your pocket because this is what happens next.
He did see the Marines coming and he opens fire at them.
He does shoot at the Marines.
He gets off one single gunshot and wings a guy in
the arm before he's hit by at least six bullets. The incoming Dutch fire ventilates the skull
of one hostage sitting nearby and kills them immediately and wounds another one. Rudy gets
up and runs, grabs another hostage and holds him at gunpoint as a kind of human shield.
The Marines respond by throwing a flashbang grenade at him, which manages to blow a hole
at the floor of the train somehow, shower multiple hostages with shrapnel, and surprise
Rudy to the point that he flinches from it going off and shoots the hostage that he was
holding as a human shield.
Thankfully the hostage survives, but then Rudy surrenders.
Yeah. What?
Another team breaches through with a bomb. They advance into the train and run into Hessina
who's on the ground and wounded. According to one Marine, she is laying there, unarmed,
and screaming out for her mother. A Dutch Marine unholsters his revolver and shoots
her in the face. This is a big controversy afterwards. Oh yeah, don't worry, we'll talk about that.
Hell yeah.
Another team breaches into another car where they thought the militants were supposed to
be and had since been hit with machine gun fire, but it hadn't been full of militants.
It was full of two young hostages who were asleep.
One had been killed by the incoming machine gun fire.
The other was wounded.
Another assault team at the final compartment of the train reported they were under fire and they just start shooting through the smoke,
unable to see anything. They kill two more militants and they wound a third. A Marine
then walks up to the three men that they shot and finish off one of them saying that they
still saw them moving. All of this from the time the jet's doing the fake bombing run
to the end of the assault takes 10 minutes, but the assault itself takes slightly
over 2 minutes. Six militants are dead, as are two hostages, and that a single person is killed by
terrorist gunfire. Remember that school that was taken? They surrender immediately without a fight.
So, law that rescue operation sounded a lot like what could be considered as a tactical
execution by the state, right?
Well about that, when the militants' families got their bodies back from the government,
they were given to them in locked caskets with explicit orders that they could not be
opened and their autopsy reports were not given to the families.
Nobody is allowed near the train where the rescue took place.
And here's the weirdest part to me.
All of the surviving militants, Rudy included, were given virtually no time in prison.
The longest sentence was eight years, with the theory allegedly being that the government
did this so they would not have to testify about what happened on board during a criminal
trial.
So they just said, look, here's a fucking deal.
It's either this or we're going to get you with life.
Like, okay, all of it's gone.
Now I need to point this out here for the sake of clarity and for the
sake of my continued visa, the government and the minister of justice swear up
and down that nothing bad happened.
Nobody was extra judicially executed.
Only those that were armed and actively fighting
back were killed by Marines. That is the official story as of today in 2025.
But in 2000, an interview that the Prime Minister at the time, Dan Oil, recorded in 1987, 10
years after the operation leaked, up until this point had been suppressed because in
it he says, quote, it was an execution of people breaking the law but it was still an execution. In
the same interview he points out that oh don't get me wrong I'm innocent
because if you believe Denoil he said that him Van Ack the Minister of Justice
and the Minister of the Interior sat down and they voted on if they were
going to go in and stop the the hostage-taking with voted on if they were going to go in and stop the
the hostage-taking with force or if they were going to wait and according to Den
Oil he said he voted against it but the other two voted for it so therefore the
operation happened. Of course ignoring the whole part that he was the fucking
Prime Minister. Regardless either way an interview with the Prime Minister
calling something an execution sure raised
some eyebrows.
Now a few years after that, a journalist got their hands on hidden autopsy reports revealing
that the militants got shot a whole lot many more times than the government ever let on.
The fewest of them was shot 40 times, and that was Hasina and Max, neither of whom had
a gun.
Two of their wounds were
to their heads and those wounds had burn marks around them.
Which meant that the gun was pointed, put right at them.
And those wounds were from the revolvers, not the Uzis like the rest of their wounds.
They both only had one.357 Magnum wound a piece and it was the one to their heads.
It's called, it's not spalling, but I don't know what it's called, it's like when you
have powder burns because of the proximity of the barrel.
Powder burns.
Yeah, it's powder burns basically.
What that means is that like they were shot with effectively like the barrel either touching
them or very close.
Yeah.
Pretty much point blank rage.
The journalists put out a report regarding this newly revealed information, which leads
to the government of course launching an official inquiry, which says we investigated ourselves and we found that we've done nothing
wrong. Shocker. Shock. Now this does nothing to silence the families and the Malachan community
at this point, and they sue the government in 2014, revealing more information. The main
charges were that the family believed that the government had given explicit orders that all militants were to die, regardless if they were armed or not.
The government contended that their orders were to only shoot to kill people who were
armed and fought back, with added orders saying that shooting someone in the leg was perfectly
fine if they were unarmed in order to disable them, which I should point out is still the
policy of the Dutch police today. So that one isn't too weird for the context of the Netherlands.
But in the same trial statements from another Marine stated that one of their officers told them,
quote, remember their legs go up to their necks. Yep. Yep. But like, you know, this is in part
like a, a repercussion of like a lot of the police action against
like groups like the red army faction in the late sixties, early seventies and a lot of
other stuff that was happening in Europe where like people were being taken alive and then
it just makes the problem worse.
That is certainly part of it. I think in the context of the Netherlands was, and the context
of a lot of countries that followed the same track is like, you have a counter terrorist team, they're the military. They're going to act
like the military. They are not policemen. And I mean, even in countries like France, where the
the elite anti-terrorist group is part of the national police, like they are a military unit
in the way that they operate. Yeah. And like the Marines, the Bebe A is not a gendarme. That is the
Marchisais, the Royal Military Police. Those guys, I'm not like, again, I'm not saying I'm on the
side of cops here, but at least they have the concept of not murdering everyone in a room that
they go into. Hypothetically, I should say, when it comes to hostage rescue. Also again, they had
never done this before. And then now're including belt-fed machine guns into your hostage rescue operation. None
of this is going to go well and even with that the government said that
whether that officer said that their legs go up to their necks or not there
was no explicit order to kill all the militants. We did not give that order
which to be fair not all the militants died but multiple Marines have stated
in the interviews that
their officers openly said it would be easier and a good thing if all of the militants did die.
So there may not have been a standing order, but it may have been a wink wink hey if you want to,
you know. And not to put a not all soldiers or not all marines type thing on here, but other marines
said in interviews that they were told this and they ignored the orders of their officers
because that was fucking disgusting.
Like they would never do that.
Like one guy said like I had nothing against these people.
I would have rather have a beer with them.
Like Isaac and he didn't fire his weapon.
So like not every marine in there was a bloodthirsty psycho, but some of them certainly
seemed to be and were allowed to be.
I'm really not sure of what I'm allowed to say here, but during the trial, none of the
Marine's statements made any sense regarding how exactly Max and Hacina died.
The government nor the Marines had any explanation as to why it seemed to be that they were executed.
And then a recording of radio traffic between Marines
during the operation came out. Now, interesting fact about this, we do not know who they were
shooting and who the Marines were. Why that is the case, I'll let you figure out because I don't know
and I cannot say, but in that recording it's Marines reporting that they had been shot at,
which of course they had not been.
This is not the Marines that we know for sure. This is not the Marines that took out Rudy, who we know wounded a Marine with a gunfire.
This is a different group, of which group we don't know.
It says he's being shot at, but we know they're not.
The only shots in the recording that you can hear are their guns, shooting at unarmed people
multiple times, which they note they do not see a gun.
And they're laughing the whole time that they're doing it.
They fire several more times, saying they still see them moving, and then they continue
to shoot at them until their commander yells at them to stop.
The Marines ignore this order
and keep shooting at the people's dead bodies, only for the officer to finally order them
to holster their weapons because they won't stop giggling and shooting at dead bodies.
It kind of goes without saying if you were a commander in an area actively in combat
in small arms fire, you would never order your people to put their weapons away, which tells me they knew they were not being shot at and lied because they
knew that the radio traffic was being recorded, allegedly.
Again, we do not know which group of Marines this was or who it was they were shooting.
It's never been confirmed.
Dutch military after action report determines that the Viola Harry training program is probably
not worth
sustaining. That's not on the list of sustains. It's going to be on the improves list.
Yeah. I, yeah. I mean, to be honest with you, this doesn't surprise me in the sense that like,
I think that in these kinds of environments, like even when there is a culture of professionalism,
which this doesn't sound like it really had, this kind of thing can very easily happen.
And I think that when you know that you have the state to cover for you and that they're
going to do everything they can to prevent you from facing consequences, like you might
get hemmed up by your commander, but you're not going to go to jail for this.
Yeah. And from my understanding, despite a lot of things being redacted, I could not
find them in Dutch or anywhere else. Nobody was ever hemmed up or gotten in trouble for anything.
Most of the Marines names are redacted so they don't know who they are.
I just, I don't know, man.
I mean, to me, the idea of like being in a fucking special mission unit like this, and
then you're, you're, you're literally like your commander is like, stop fucking shooting
and you keep shooting.
Like a dead body that you know to be dead.
That to me is like, and all the
while you're like, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, I don't trust those people to actually have my back and to make decisions that aren't
going to get us killed.
You know, genuinely, that's horrifying.
I will say that there was one Marine who was interviewed who kind of following what you
just said, said that he didn't know that the people in his unit were capable of these things
until he saw it because they had never done an operation like this before.
Like I said, the only operation
they did was responding to a prison riot without guns. Now we can only imagine what it would
have been like if they had guns.
Yeah, Jesus.
And despite all of this, of course, the judge ruled in favor of the state deciding that
everything they heard sounded totally fine and normal. In 2018, another lawsuit for compensation
for Max and his family's were also thrown out. Now today, all six of the militants are buried together, having been transformed into martyrs
whose funerals were attended by tens of thousands of people. This would hardly be the last attack
staged by the Malachan groups, though over time, as perception turned against violent action,
not to mention the punishments for terrorism went from being a slap on the wrist to decades in prison.
The most prominent of the groups, the free Malaccan youths, signed what was dubbed a
peace treaty with the government in 1986, ending their armed campaign.
However, the plight of the stateless Malaccan people trapped in the Netherlands would continue.
After the train hijackings, the Dutch government moved to grant the stateless more rights,
but not citizenship or even equal rights of a citizen.
For example, they still couldn't vote and the status was passed down through generations,
oftentimes with the next generation having no idea they were actually not citizens of
the Netherlands, but rather existing in a legally gray zone.
There are several accounts of people who thought they were citizens only to discover
they weren't. When they went to vote or register for college only to be told, by the way, you
have to pay foreign tuition.
For example, you could get a Dutch passport, but those passports said you were not Dutch.
There's a travel document and that was it. So a lot of these people had Dutch passports.
They traveled on Dutch passports. They thought they were Dutch citizens, but they were not. Why would you bother to look? Why would you
think, am I actually a citizen? Why would... A lot of people are probably going to say,
oh, how did they not notice? Would you?
It was also different back then, I think. In some ways, it was more precarious, but
in other ways too, I think that the kind of culture of being forcibly alienated by the state because of
documents, passports, borders, that kind of shit, it was just different back then. It
wasn't that it didn't exist, but it was enforced differently.
And remember, they have a Dutch passport. They're traveling freely. The only time...
They're also from a vastly disenfranchised community economically and otherwise. So a
lot of them are not going to university where they would figure out that, oh, I'm foreign or they weren't voting because community by
and large doesn't vote all that much. So they have the document that they think makes them
a citizen and nobody's telling them that they're not until it's thrown in their face. It was
only in 1991 that Malachans within three generations of the original ones who came to the Netherlands
could apply for citizenship.
Apply.
Now, that's good.
However, it requires you to know that you're not a citizen in the first place to apply.
You could see how this could be a problem as it snowballs as the generations keep going.
Today in the Netherlands, there's thought to be at least 1,000 legally stateless Malachan people who have been born and raised
here just like their parents. Some of this is political, some of them refuse to
accept Dutch citizenship because they're about to acknowledging the dream of an
independent South Black Republic is dead. Some. That is a very small minority
though. The majority of people have no idea. The end. Wow. And that will
lead to Eddie Van Halen riding eruption in 1977. Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. It's cause
you wanted to, there was a really attractive teacher at the primary school. They were going
to hold hostage. That's why he was saying, I've got it bad, bad, bad. I'm hot for teacher.
Yeah. I'm really hot for teacher. I want to pronounce bad bad bad. I'm hot for teacher Yeah, I'm really hot for teacher I want to pronounce my J's I'm moving to America
Yeah, the gentleman that is an episode of the of the podcast
We do a thing on the show called questions from the Legion if you'd like to ask us a question support us on patreon
You can ask us to patreon or in our discord. You'll also have access to
So I feel like this one is mostly targeted at me. You often
make jokes about nightclubs. Do you hate nightclubs? And if you do, say something nice about them for
once. I feel like this is joke coded. I fucking loathe nightclubs. You want to go to a place with
horrible music and worse people. Go to a nightclub. But to say something nice about them, it is a
place you can go to and you can fart as loudly and as often as you want because no one's going to hear it.
And it already smells terrible in there. So yeah, it's the fart palace.
We have a kind of like comedic sort of affect. So when one person goes in on hating horses,
we all just make jokes about how we hate horses. But like the, you can always tell the one
person who actually hates horses. And it's like Joe actually hates nightclubs. Nightclubs are horses to Joe.
I really, really do. If you catch me in a nightclub, I have been kidnapped. Please rescue
me.
I think it really depends on the kind of club to be honest with you. Cause I've been to
a lot of bad ones, but I've been to some good ones too. And I think it's also just like
when you're in a club because the point. I'm not a fan of the club. I'm not a fan of the club. I'm not a fan of the club. I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club.
I'm not a fan of the club. I'm not a fan of the club. I'm not a fan of the club. I'm not a fan of the club. I'm old as fuck now. So like, I mean, and I suppose it could be like, you know, old guy in the club and sort of like, you know, like Italian club sort of
vibe of like whatever you're just in the club, like anywhere, but I'm not really interested in
that. I got a bed. I will say in my defense, this is not a me and old man yelling at the cloud
situation. I've always hated nightclubs. I could have been 21 in a, like a metropolitan city.
And I would still hate on nightclubs just as much as me who was about to turn 30. When I was visiting my brother, I'd go to the clubs in Roppongi and it was a lot of
fun. The very, very insensitively named gas panic named after the sarin gas attacks in
1995 in the Tokyo subway. That was pretty fun. I mean, I was like 19, so it was just
cool because I could drink legally, but I don't know. I've been some good clubs, but
mostly bad. I don't know, Tom, what about
you? You're probably the most club going ass member of us.
I like, when I say nightclub, like I don't like, my problem is like, you know, I don't
like the kind of music that would be played in a nightclub. Sure. And I do like, but yeah,
see that I feel like that's the main divide. But I also like, I mean, to be real with you,
like there's an extent to which, uh, the kind of places that I also don't want to get groped without my consent, which probably wouldn't happen now, but when I was
20 did. And that's a kind of a thing where I had a kind of a measure out, like, okay,
what...
That is definitely the place that it would happen at, for sure.
Yeah. It happened a lot to me, to be honest with you. I mean, I looked pretty young for
my age and it wasn't that I was like, oh, now I quickly became homophobic, but more
like I just... It was like, it did now I quickly became homophobic, but more like it did factor
into your decision of what you wanted to do, going out for the night and stuff.
There's also another aspect of it is that it's like every club owner on earth when it
comes to nightclub is like an exploitative dickhead.
And this is not something that I would ever think about when I was younger, but not that
I'm older.
It's just like, when you give them money, you are helping them just be horrible to people and you shouldn't do that.
Speaker 2 Yeah. Like I, I love going to the club. I love, but I go to like places where I know I'm
going to enjoy the music and it's like, it's not necessarily like, Oh, I'm going out to like get
fucked up and try and pull. It's like, I'm going out to enjoy myself and I'm selective about the
places I go that like the music I'd like. Also Nate is very funny. You saying your old
guy at the club, you are the guy who'd be just at the CDJs trying to see the track IDs
like, Oh, what's this James Murphy mix of a liquid liquid song he's playing?
I wonder what kind of cables he has plugged into that mixer.
That's not the kind of shit I'm interested in I'm gonna be trying to get Wi-Fi in the club to fucking shazam that shit because I think it's it's like some dude playing
It'll oh disco stuff, but like a really really rare cut. I'm gonna love it. I'm annoying
You're gonna slide up next to a guy wearing a mesh t-shirt
Fucking I took my phone out cuz it's pretty shazam the music like that's a hundred percent
I don't give a fuck. I mean the equipment is to to try to Shazam the flat meat packing sound of skin. I mean, before I got like into where
I'm at now, when it comes to sound production and stuff, I probably would have been interested,
but like now, I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's just kit. Like that's not interesting.
The music, the music slide up next to a guy who's spinning at the nightclub is wearing
a mesh t-shirt and white jeans. Like, Hey bro, what kind of headphones you got on?
That's not shit I care about. But like I would be the guys like I'm in the, in the club,
the rectum from the gas bar, no way film, irreversible asking the DJ for a set list.
So I guess I'm the pure hater here. Change of pace. I'm the hater. I mean, I love going
to the club. Like I spent like the vast majority
of my twenties, like in clubs in different cities and stuff. And it is like, you know,
I find it fun. Um, and you don't the vast majority of your twenties. That's what like
two years for you now. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm 30 now. So it was a decade. If not, you're
dusty old bitch. You're one of us now. You piece of shit. Well, you're oh you're dusty old bitch or one of us now already you piece of shit
Well, you're ex you're extra dusty and old I can hear your fucking knees cracking over the microphone as you record
Sometimes when I'm trying to sneak around so my daughter doesn't wake up when she's napping I try to tiptoe, but then my knees start cracking and it wakes her up
Trying to like go to the bathroom
No, not waking my dog up stuff to take her out and the whole time my back and knees are cracking like fuck shit. But gentlemen, we're all old and this is a podcast, but you host other
podcasts. Plug those other podcasts.
Trash future. What a hell of a way to dad. Kill James Bond and no gods, no mayors. They're
all fun. They're all entertaining. They all have Patreons. So if you're interested, they're
out there.
Beneath the skin and this this guy sucked to history pods.
One about various historical figures who kind of sucked like Henry Ford and
Carl Schmidt, and one is about tattooing.
So check them out.
This is the only podcast that I host.
I think you've listened to it.
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fly your Air Force dangerously close to the nearest commuter train.