If there was one constant in the commentary about Karst T.'s bloody suicide attack it was disillusionment over a perceived sudden loss. After all, Queen's Day was the day we celebrate " saamhorigheid " (togetherness). Before Apeldoorn, where T. killed six people by driving his car into a crowd watching the queen's parade, it seems the entire country had been united and free of care - an idyll that was brutally shattered on Thursday by one man in a black Suzuki Swift.
Quickly forgotten was the fearful speculation in the hours preceding the press conference: what if the driver is a Muslim? An expert invited by NOS tv news was unequivocal: if this was an organised attack by a certain population group, "all bets were off". He didn't have to explain what he meant by that - we had a pretty good idea. The implication was that we Dutch would not react "stoically" - like the Londoners after the 2004 underground attacks. No, the Netherlands would be quite utterly lost and at a loss.
This fear says a lot about our society, as did the national sigh of relief when it turned out the driver of the Suzuki was a (native Dutch) madman, a "loner" who had prepared his attack in splendid isolation. "There is no foolproof protection against loners," Uri Rosenthal of the institute for safety and crisis management told the daily de Volkskrant. When someone decides to crash into the royal bus during Queen's Day, and he doesn't care how many victims he makes in the process, there is not much you can do.
In no time at all what happened in Apeldoorn went from a possible terrorist attack to something akin to an earthquake - a natural phenomenon we have no control over. There will always be crazy people. Nobody said: if there were always crazy people, why hasn't this happened before? Why did we have to wait until last Thursday for one crazyDutch-person to suddenly decide to seek salvation by attacking the royal family with a Suzuki Swift as his weapon of choice?
Some people pointed to the mentally disturbed woman who tried to run over former minister Jozias van Aartsen in The Hague in 2004. No one was hurt in that attack. But then as now the question that was never asked was why a mentally disturbed would chose to attack a public figure in the first place? It used to be that crazy people imagined they were Napoleon; these days they want to make the evening news with a spectacular attack.
It is too soon to say anything definitive about Karst T.'s motives, but it seems absurd to look at his case as something that doesn't require context. What little information there is about Karst T. places him firmly in the company of the likes of Volkert van der G., the murderer of populist politician Pim Fortuyn , and Mohammed B., the murderer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh . All three were loners. All there suffered from a malignant form of narcissism, in which personal frustrations were channelled into anger against high-profile public figures.
Of course, they each have their own story. In the case of Mohammed B. there was even a ready-made ideology that he clung to with a vengeance until his trial, when friends of Van Gogh concluded that he wasn't so much a jihadist fighter as a "loser".
No other European country has seen murders like these.
As little as we know about Karst T. there is an obvious pattern: that of the loner who feels belittled or ignored by society and who seeks revenge through (self)destruction.
In a profile of Karst T. de Volkskrant there were subtle hints that T. might have a right-wing extremist background. "He sometimes dressed alternatively, with rolled up pants and combat boots. His hair was shaved off on the sides."
For all we know Karst T. was indeed a weekend skinhead. Or maybe he was a tough-gay. Or both. It's a matter of time before all the details emerge and the finger-pointing can begin. You see, people will say, the car came from the extreme-right! (1)
But this will only serve to emphasise how thoroughly polarised our country has become, both politically and socially, how deep the resentment, how intense the bitterness. Because three high-profile attacks in less than seven years do say something about a society.
Karst T. may be deranged or derailed, but his mad act did not come out of the blue. In no other European country has the relationship between society and the individual become sodisturbed. In no other European country is personal frustration vented so easily and readily on society as a whole. Seven years after Fortuyn the Netherlands are a desperately unstable country.
