Amsterdam proposes “scum villages”

Say, didn’t the Soviet Union and China try this out for a few decades?

BY ED MORRISSEY

Can we count just how many horrid 20th century chapters of humanity this might evoke?

In a move that sounds straight out of Orwell, Amsterdam allocated 1 million euros last week to a plan that would relocate trouble-making neighbors to camps on the outskirts of the city, the BBC reports.

The “scum villages,” as critics have called them, would lie in isolated areas and provide only basic services to their unwilling residents. According to details of the plan reported by Der Spiegel and the BBC, residents will live in “container homes,” under the watchful eye of social workers or police. The residents themselves might not make very good company. According to the BBC, they’ll include families that engage in repeated, small-scale harassment, like bullying gay neighbors or intimidating police witnesses.

Or perhaps just people whose political and social perspectives annoy the ruling class.  Say, didn’t the Soviet Union and China try this out for a few decades?  They called them “re-education camps,” as I recall, where people who didn’t cooperate properly with enforced collectivism were kept under the “watchful eye” of the police state.  In the Soviet Union, the Kremlin transformed Siberia into an internal-exile internment province.  In some areas of the world — notably North Korea — this practice hasn’t yet ended, either.

If law and order are breaking down in Amsterdam, start building a prison and bolstering law enforcement, but don’t try to pass it off as a social-welfare program.