Episode 363 - The 1977 Dutch Train Hijacking

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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 Choo 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 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 support free-range trains, but in reality reality, the train is a wild animal that cannot be tamed by man they call it the the iron horse but i call it the iron dog and the only way to tame a true dog is to let it fight

one of its own kind mate how do you teach your trains to attack other trains 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 a train and I decided from that moment forward, fucking 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 going to get so pissed off, they're going to have to take it out on them because 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's close to my heart.

I'm going to fucking kill all of them, but it's just the mind games.

Y'all got to play with them.

Otherwise, you know, they start trying to manipulate you.

They try to be your friend.

And to me, I just flash back to probably the most informative experiences of my life was playing.

Final Fantasy VI, because if you play a Saban 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 a train.

They ain't that smart.

I love that we all defaulted to being southern.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Joe, you know as well as I do, and I think David Cross did a great big 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 Hampshire County, Indiana, or Juneau, Alaska, or Fairbanks, Alaska, or fucking, I don't know, Stockton, California.

There are going to 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.

What the fuck do you think was going to happen?

I only learned because I lived in Texas and Kentucky.

And also being an enlisted person in the military, nine out of every 10 of your coworkers are from the South.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The art of it 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.

Like that's just.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They've got it on a different level.

I should point out here that we actually love trains.

It's an established fact.

The show loves trains.

Maybe a little too much.

Maybe it's a little uncomfortable to those around me whenever I climb aboard one.

Real slow, real sensual.

touching the handrails as I walk up the stairs.

So what you're saying is that the Dutch kooksturl is meant for you.

Yes.

That's the sensitive, sensual seat, the solo seat.

It's the most sensual seat on an NS train 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.

And the Hague, anyway.

Amsterdams are a fucking nightmare.

But the 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'm like, I am ready to turn 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 on the floor.

And all the grown-ups, 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 it was like all the grown-ups of every race were just like, I'm just going to move to another subway car.

There's not shit I can tell these kids.

Yeah.

Just play dice, kids.

You know, play dice, shooting dice on the floor.

This is your Pokemon.

You've got to catch all the dice.

I was just thinking, too, it was like, Joe's going to a concert, and he lives in the Netherlands, so he's got to take a tram.

Good thing you don't live in Italy, because I'm sure there's some U.S.

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 he could do what Air Force pilots and U.S.

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 going to be talking about the longest train hijacking in history, which happened only a couple of hours from where I'm sitting.

Have either of you ever heard of the 1977 Dutch train siege?

Or train capping?

We're train capping.

Like, are we talking 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 racist of like judging trains by the size of the smokestack 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, since we're talking about Holland, this is the 30-second amnesty for me and all my co-hosts to get their very, very bad blackface jokes out of the system.

Get those Varte Pete jokes out.

I will give you another point later on in the script because for some reason it will be on subject.

But this is your 30-second amnesty.

Feel free to use it.

30 seconds, go.

I wasn't even going to make a Tvarta Pete joke.

I was going to make a joke that if the trains are all blue and yellow, then this implies that there's a guy out there who is a train racist, but because he's Belarusian, 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 mad, including Tom, about how I kept saying Thomas the tank engine.

You kept saying Thomas the Train Engine is Thomas the Tank Engine.

Thomas the Train Engine, which in my defense is what it was called when it was on TV in the United States when I was a very small child.

It was not called a tank kitchen.

Oh, so they did like the

sorcerer stone.

Yeah, they philosopher 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 reason, before we talk about a train takeover, we have to talk about the history of the Malacca's

because we're talking about a Malacan terrorist group who storms a train and a nearby school and once attempted to kidnap the Queen of the Netherlands.

We're talking about the straits of Malacca, like the Indonesia, Malaysia, that area.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Now, we have to go way back in time to the establishment of the Dutch East Indies in 1814.

And I swear to God, we're 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, 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 Artur Rambeau, enlisted in the Dutch Marines in this similar thing, got to Java and was like, this fucking sucks, and just bolted, immediately deserted.

Like,

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.

So 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 Malacan Islands, specifically the Ambanese.

The reason for this is very, very simple.

They were the first people in the region to run 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's 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 and 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 Mahometians or whatever the fuck.

Yeah.

You can presume the Mohammedans.

But just drop some J's in there, and then you've got the Dutch equivalent.

Yeah, it's, and you have the South Malacans 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 Malacans, was cloves.

So

they're stepping up their Jarum game.

It's like you could.

I just imagine like

the Dutch coming into the South Malacas 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.

VOC regulations 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 starfruit.

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 100 degrees Fahrenheit and like 100% 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.

That is, that is Jakarta.

And I'm saying this in a positive way, because Jakarta fucking rules, but it's just the most insane city I've ever been in in my life.

You would say that you were having a serious problem.

I was having a serious problem.

I will give you this 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 just like four lanes of scooter traffic.

It's so densely populated.

The traffic is insane.

And one time I 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 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 immediately have an asthma attack and die.

And honestly, like, you just know my skin color.

Like, I'm going to die of skin cancer, even in Europe.

So they call it.

They call that the Dutch disease there.

I don't think other diseases they call 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 smoked cloves.

They make you feel like you're going to die.

You've eaten worse hangovers on the planet.

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 were my middle and high school experience.

Jaegermeister 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.

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 and then had to come over the next day and clean the vodka out of the window.

The Ambienese and the South Malacans 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.

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 shit itself and 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 Malacans to do to make up for this loss of income.

So the Ambiene's 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 U.S.

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 champion the Ambanese.

Same shit.

Same thing.

Because of their race, they're good at fighting.

They're loyal.

They follow commands, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And they're Christian, 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 shit.

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 champion 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 and now they're also a religious minority.

And they happen to share a 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 Cloves 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.

Dutch men also married into Ambanese 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 Dutch men to Ambanese women kind of way.

You did not see it flipping the other way.

Yes.

The Netherlands is strange in the sense that it became less tolerant of mixed marriages over time and interracial marriage.

Like it's changed now, but there was like a famous story.

Oh, don't say it, don't speak too soon, Nate.

There has been news lately.

I mean, quite frankly, the fact that the reason why we had to suffer through the era of dudes with big hair on cocaine and really tight, like neon-colored pants rocking out with huge guitars 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.

Put that in your pocket for later.

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 thinks the Malacans 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 released the Ambanese back home, like go forth and welcome to the greater Asian co-prosperity sphere or whatever.

And all of the Ambanese soldiers quickly turn into vicious guerrilla fighters against the Japanese occupation.

Meanwhile, Sukarno and his nationalist followers see the Japanese occupation as a means to 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 Malacans, 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, Sakarno 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 the divide in Indonesia even deeper, with the reconstituted East Indies Army, now almost entirely Ambanese, fighting against a 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.

A lot more.

Java is, I believe, the most populous island on the planet.

Like hundreds of millions of people.

And the Malacca's are not.

They're a vast minority, ethnically, religiously, loyalty-wise.

The Ambanese are definitely on 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 a 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.

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 on to 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 Balacas demanded that their former colonial government recognize the differences between them and the majority government and their generations of of service and effectively give them a republic of their own, what they call the Republic of South Maloku.

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 and goes, ah, 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 called West Papua now, that the way that the Indonesians treated Papuans is fucking awful as well.

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 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 Stephen Sumakil and Johannes 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 decided 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 Malacans 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 Sikarno would be couped or something.

And they'd all be able to go home.

Tens of thousands of Malacans made this trip to the Netherlands, leaving their homes behind.

They get in and 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 did.

Joe, can I guess are they going to be put in a sort of ramshackle uh residential areas not suited to uh large-scale uh migration of people oh boy are they

the malacons 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 and you were happening to be a European nation conquered by the Nazis, where would you put them?

Where would you have just laying around and opened suddenly?

Yeah.

Are you thinking a spare concentration camp?

Because that's what happened.

Oh my god.

They got put in Vesterbork concentration camp.

Jesus fucking Christ.

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 have this fenced-in compound laid around still.

Yeah.

Go in there.

Hey, guys, we've got this

village where we filmed the movie Come and See.

Can you guys live there, please?

Now, the Malacans were completely isolated from Dutch society, and the Dutch government created a representative body to manage these camps, because there were several of of them called the Commissariat Abanzesorg 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.

And when I say easiest, I also mean the dumbest.

So I thought, 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 got the Dutch sergeant commission.

Just creating a fucking microcosm of a military haunter just in the Netherlands.

That's what happened.

They even armed them.

Fuck off.

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 were 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 marchesais 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, by the way.

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, and the only thing that goes in is cans of dip and energy drinks.

Is this being run by a cabal 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.

IND, if you're listening, I do need to renew my visa this year.

I love you.

Don't deport me.

Now, it 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, an Indonesia ruled by Usakarno, 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, Soharto famously basically required all Indonesians living abroad, I believe this was in the 60s, to come back to Indonesia or have their citizenship and passports canceled.

Yes.

And that's why they're not.

So a lot of these cases, yeah, a lot of these, and the people who came back, and typically they were so they could arrest and so you could be murdered.

Yeah, execute these people.

And so I imagine that, like, yeah, there were a lot of of people who suddenly, not only were they, were they, you know, not going to be able to go home for political, you know, social reasons, but also, like, they might not, they might literally be at the point where, like, they're stateless unless the Dutch government is not.

That's exactly what happened.

So, when Suharto does this, he renders all of these Malaccans without Indonesian citizenship.

But because they are Dutch subjects and not citizens, by the 1960s, all of the Malaccans in the Netherlands become legally stateless.

And the government did nothing to change their policy regarding the Malaccans 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 looked awful lot like a concentration camp, but not in Vesterbork.

But they even had that stolen from them by the state and were thrown out into the street.

By then, the Malacca 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, let's call it passport regimes, still relied on you having a legal status

somewhere.

These people had nothing.

Yeah, and borderless travel or the ability to Schengen stuff, 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 people probably didn't have them or if they were damaged why would they bring them they're only temporary going yeah exactly and so it's one of these things where yeah you you create the situation where people are a permanent underclass and also like they are very much um vulnerable to being victimized because like they don't have any protections and remember it's now the 60s and into the 70s the original people are having children and that statelessness is passed on it it sure is if we have a couple generations removed from the original people who temporarily, quote unquote, temporarily came to the Netherlands.

They had kids.

Now, these kids, now, some things have changed in their status.

Like they could legally work now in the Netherlands.

They could go to school, things of that nature.

However, most of the schools, obviously there's 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 Malacca neighborhoods.

They did not live in Dutch neighborhoods.

Look, I realize the blueprints do refer to it as Conkerschole, 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 Malaccan terror groups being formed with the break of the old and with the new.

And this old guard, you know, 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 Malacan Youth Movement, but there's a lot of them.

They break with traditional leadership and they 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

the bike lades.

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.

We're 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 an armed takeover of a foreign consulate.

This reminds me of our Red Army faction series of like

getting caught doing terrorism in the 70s is like barely a misdemeanor.

Just like taking the Dutch version of, you know, poisoning the water supply that just like puts spices in the mayo supply and just the Dutch people just can't handle it.

But it's also interesting, too, because it's like back in those days, it's like you get five years for possession of heroin, but like, you know, you know, you did a little

Symbionese Liberation Army shit on a consulate.

Doesn't value, you know, 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 of 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 Sozdyke 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 rabbing 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 Konigsdach the other day or King's Day, which is the king's birthday.

As I understand it, it's nowhere near as ensconced in the actual running of things as it is in the United Kingdom.

You never really notice they exist unless it's King's Day, 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.

Yeah, they do.

Royal family, like that kind of thing.

Yeah, it still exists, sort of.

Britain's the only place that takes it that fucking seriously.

From my understanding, there's a recent story about the Danish monarchy, which will surprise nobody if I 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 can kind of ignore their existence for 99% of the time.

Yeah.

I mean, like, to be fair, from your perspective, Joe, is 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.

It's 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 going to be like, I'm going to sell peach on the fucking internet.

Wouldst thou like to see the royal hole?

Yeah.

Her royal hotness, H-R-H.

Would you like to see?

Royal Royal Pearl Necklace.

I mean, Switzerland doesn't have...

It hasn't had a monarchy or anything like that.

And 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

anime about Europe, but like fantasy Europe, where there's just like the secret council that meets in CBO Switzerland.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like straight up, it's like the guy who decides that guts has to be put to death in fucking berserk.

Like the council meets behind closed doors.

That's basically Swiss normal government.

They're like, okay, we've gotten together and decided women can't vote.

And I do have some good news for you.

Not about that.

That's bad news.

But I did say the blackface joke would be applicable at one point.

And that's because in December 1975, there was a Moloccan 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 Sinterclaus.

Which is kind of like children's Christmas for people who don't know.

There's also, that's where the Zvarte Pete 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 hardline 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 their first counterterror group uh as well so for the same reason that everybody else does also kind of the era of hijackings like the zenith of hijackings just around the world it's the golden age of european terror uh where you where you could do all sorts of shit and get like six months in prison and then go and do it again 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 a parachute from the fucking plane in your garage after you've died.

Like, oh, my dad was D.B.

Cooper.

You know, even though you can start a podcast in Switzerland,

my dad is nowhere near cool enough to do that, okay?

I'm starting a new conspiracy theory that your dad was D.B.

Cooper.

I mean,

if you look at the Identicate sketch, it doesn't look that far off.

My dad would have been like, fuck, this is like 18, 19 in 1972.

So I don't think he was that bald yet, yet, unfortunately.

Is your full name Dick Butt Cooper?

Yeah, if you open up this passport, it's just the illustration of the Dick Butt cartoon in the passport photo.

Like, it's the guy.

So, when the Malaccans were confronted with the fact that the Dutch government just ghosted them effectively, they began killing hostages.

So, this is the first like fatal Malaccan 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 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 threaten to kill multiple people but that is when the dutch government deploys a woman named josina simo kil to intervene now she is the wife of christian sumo kil the the dead Malacca and 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 Malacca community.

She holds a lot of sway.

So when she told them all, release the hostages and surrender, because what you're doing is hurting Malaccans.

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 Molochan youth movement worked pretty much like every other terror group we've ever talked about.

That has 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 kind of self-actualize to their goals.

And the cell we're going to be talking about is controlled by 25-year-old Max Papalaya.

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 late.

Or at all, for that matter.

By all accounts, Max is is a really nice guy.

He's joined by nine others in this plot.

I'm not going to name all of them because it's kind of pointless in the grand scheme of things, but there are two other people that'll become very important for obvious reasons.

One of them is Hinsina Uktolseya, 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 South Balaka at all.

Rather, her boyfriend was, a guy named Rudy Lumasil.

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 in 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 Let 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

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.

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 of people.

And you would be right.

They were.

They'd been onto Max for quite a while.

But the Dutch internal security agency, which back in the day was called the Beve Day, ran into two main problems while trying to figure these people out.

One is that the Beve Day had multiple assets within the Moloken 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 with and did not communicate with.

So their assets didn't 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, and that was simply speaking to one another in Ambienese, 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 fucked up with that.

Yeah,

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.

We're fucking stupid.

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 Yope reporting for duties.

Which one?

The fucking undercover cop version of white men can't yomp.

White men can't yump.

White men can't yump.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck.

It's a buddy comedy, but

the guy who's better at basketball is actually the Ambienes dude.

He has to teach the Dutch guy Ambienes so they can communicate how they're going to hustle people in the basketball court.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So Max was doing this planning.

They decided that the taking of a train that's traveling between Assen and Gronachen 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 a 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 Bovensmilde.

So the first part of the plan before they switched to the primary school 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 Bovinsmilde primary school.

Everybody's like, good.

All right.

None of us are like fucking laborers 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 Beslan on their own hometown, basically.

Well,

I don't want to put that much evil on them because

none of the bad stuff we're going to 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 take a primary school hostage?

Like, to me, you're starting to get into like, you got to 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.

Swooshing the cape, carving a silent J into someone's chest.

Dutch Zoro.

Yoro?

Yosh, my name is Yoro.

No, he's carving the Dutch letter, the IJ letter.

That's like when it's capitalized, it looks like someone's keyboard is fucked up.

You have to capitalize the I and the J.

I understand.

Arzoro is 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 Malaccan 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 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 Uzi's.

That is the most Amsterdam story ever.

It's like, yeah, should come to the fat bar.

Do you want to buy an MP MP5 or a peach?

Do you want a heroin?

Do you want heroin?

Child pornography or three pints of Amstale?

We have three things on the menu.

We have heroin, we have Heineken, and we have Israeli submachine 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, I 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 early 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-date newspaper isn't the best idea.

Maybe they just knew it was going to be, they were going to be there because this goes on for 20 days.

So maybe they assume they're going to be in there a while and want something to read.

But what the newspapers are for is they're going to take the train and they're going to take the newspapers and paper over all the windows so the cops can't see inside.

So it's not like proof of life statements.

No, no, it's just to cover the inside the windows.

Yeah.

And the bike locks are for the doors of the train.

So the train, the entirety of the train during the siege or the hostage situation is 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 ASEAN, 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 because he was cold.

And then he was like, I'm not getting up today.

It's like, my feet are cold.

They're not covered in aunts.

The aunts keep my feet warm.

I'm trying to stay optimistic.

I don't have ant feet.

But his actual excuse was

his head was surrounded by a mystical haze that morning and would not allow him to leave his bed.

I get it.

I've also been hungover.

Yeah, I was going to say he took exactly one puff off of like what the Dutch considered swag in the 70s.

Absolutely blew his mind.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, he's

closed-eye hallucinations.

He's like, someone airlift me a bunch of recordings of the doors.

I'm ready to fucking see God.

I shouldn't have smoked that bowl full of ants.

I love the idea there's like an ant that 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 to sprinkle ants on it like it was PCP.

Exactly.

You want to get wet?

No, the Dutch wet.

That morning around 9 a.m., one of the now nine terrorists pulled the emergency brake as the train was riding near the town of De Punt,

and guns were pulled out, though, oh, like I said, only a couple of them, not enough for all nine.

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 am in public transportation, this happens, I'm good.

At least to know I'm safe.

They're pulling up the color card from Family Guy.

It's just like, uh,

if 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 resistance?

That's the weird part is they can do that again, and I end up doing it again.

Yeah, I end up getting the only pan-Turkic Indonesian terrorist taking over my train.

But I also like the idea, like, we have to cover and let all the non-Dutch people out because if the Dutch police, it's the 1970s where the Dutch police have snipers, like you do know all these hostages are just going to get killed.

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 Bovins milled the primary school, they capture 105 children and five teachers.

And after this, they publish their demands to the Dutch government.

First and foremost, to keep the promise of recognizing the South Malacan 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 in to 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 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, you know, an ethnic minority from Indonesia.

So like 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 strikes going 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 Malacca 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 one of the leaders of this whole episode is the Minister of Justice, again, named 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 in Dutch prisons before becoming prime minister.

He's a character.

His boss is Prime Minister Jop den Oil.

So we actually have a Yope in play.

A second Yope has hit the episode.

And this Dutch triumvirate of governance was rounded out by Minister of the Interior of Delhi, De Gay Fortman, or in English, DeGay Fortman.

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, yeah, you know, the Netherlands isn't real.

Dutch, Joe, I know you live there, but like, it's not real.

All right, the current prime minister's name is Dick Schop.

But it's funny if you pronounce it Dick Schouf.

Dick Schoof.

Now, then Ocht demanded immediate action.

Exactly.

Like, he didn't want to wait like last time.

He wanted to immediately send in the Royal Marines and then all 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 with any of them, but they wanted to keep them on the line and it worked.

The militant 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 to 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 Josinus Omikiel showed up again to speak with 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 needed 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 overladen.

Dude is dead.

I believe overladen 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.

There were regular Marines present, just like there were 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 Marines Special Support Unit, or the Bay Bay A.

The Dutch, like a lot of other countries in Europe, prior to the Munich massacre in 1972, had no dedicated counter-terror unit, and they quickly slapped the 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 this, 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 had 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.

And over the time, they sussed out that hostages were put into 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 fair, 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 11th, 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 5 a.m 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, but see, that's the thing.

Like, you make a big-ass noise, whatever.

I thought it was going to be like, okay, and then that's when the frogmen, because navy frogmen seal 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

I guess there's a part of me that's just sort of like, this is starting to be like, did they have like a fucking advisor from the Spetsnaz on this or something?

Oh, we need to soften the target up by killing all the hostages by Swiss cheesing the fucking train.

I realize 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 sub-machine 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 fully automatic.

Not really important, but I think it's funny.

Well, ask yourself, do I feel lucky?

Well, do you punk?

It's a shitful 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 facts 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 just 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.

Train fights, listen, man.

I gotta be honest with you here.

Like, I think that by the time that you become a frogman in the armed services of your home country and you've done all the training and the, you know, 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 a similarly confined environment, you kind of have to go in under the assumption that you just will not have suppressive fire, 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 Neue, Dutcha Zeitung, or whatever the fuck is slapped all over the windows.

Like, all of this just, I don't know, this feels like someone's doing a Twitch stream of like the training level of a Call of Duty level.

Like, how wrong can we fucking do it?

The Minister of Interior play.

It's like, remember, the most important part is if you 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 that's where we are.

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 hairy shit or like to slide the gun forward from taxi driver and instead your own guys are just 50 counting the fuck out of you?

You don't understand.

I have my black belt Dutch gun caught up.

I really need to be able to use it.

Oh, God.

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 going to 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 to 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 was 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 is 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 in 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.

Oh, 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 report that 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.

Amarie 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 jets doing the fake bombing run to the end of the assault takes 10 minutes, but the assault itself takes slightly over two minutes.

Six militants are dead, as are two hostages.

Not a single person is killed by terrorist gunfire.

Remember that school that was taken?

They surrender immediately without a fight.

So, law of that rescue operation sounded a lot like what could be considered, couching my words here, as a tactical execution by the state, right?

Well, about 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.

It's 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 extrajudicially 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 of the time, Den Oil, recorded in 1987, 10 years after the operation leaked.

Up until this point, it 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 Den Oil, he said that him, Van Aach, the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of the the Interior, sat down and they voted on if they were going to go in and stop 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 ontopsy 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 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 apiece, and it was the one to their heads.

It's called, it's not spalling, but what is it 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, 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 Malacca 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.

Yeah, yeah.

But like, you know, this is in part like a

repercussion of like a lot of the police action against like groups like the Red Army Faction in the late 60s, early early 70s, 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.

Yeah, and I mean, even in countries like France where 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 Marchesse, 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 you'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 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, not 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 it 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 i was like 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 Marines' statements made any sense regarding how exactly Max and Hessina 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 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're 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 Vila 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.

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, there's 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 cannot find them in Dutch or anywhere else.

Nobody was ever hemmed up or got in trouble for anything.

Most of the Marines' names are redacted, so they don't know.

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 literally like your commander is like, stop fucking shooting, and you keep shooting.

A dead body.

That you know to be dead.

That to me is like.

And all the while you're like, hee,

he.

Yeah.

Like taking out all the sort of like roads we've come to and crossed and decisions we've rethought and all the things that have happened in our lives post-military service i don't want to be in a fucking unit with people like that i don't want because i don't trust those people to actually have my back and like to make decisions that aren't going to get us killed you know like i genuinely that's horrifying i will say that there was one marine who was interviewed um 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'd 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 Hessina's families 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.

And this would hardly be the last attack staged by Malaccan 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 can 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, like, How did they not notice?

Would you?

It was also different back then, I think.

Like in some ways, it was even more precarious, but in other ways, too, I think that the kind of culture of sort of being,

you know, 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 just, it was enforced differently.

And remember, they have a Dutch passport.

They're traveling freely.

The only time, I mean, 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 Malacans 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 Malacan 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 it would amount 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.

Pretty much.

Yeah, it's because he 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.

You know, I'm really hot for teacher.

I want to pronounce my J's.

I'm moving to America.

But, gentlemen, that is an episode 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 through Patreon or in our 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 could 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, you know, it's the fart palette.

It's like 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, 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.

Because 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 is like the music, that's a very different vibe than like, you know, going out on the town, going to like a place to, you know, drink and hook up and whatnot and all those sorts of things.

The former, where the music is good and like the point is to go and dance and fucking have a good time.

Amazing.

The latter, nah, not really.

I mean, almost, I'm old as fuck now.

So like, I mean, and I'm supposed to 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 anyone.

Sure.

But I'm not really interested in that.

I got a bet.

I will say, in my defense, this is not a me, an old man yelling at the cloud situation.

I have 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.

I used to go to, when I always visited my brother, I'd go to the clubs in Roppongi, and it was, 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 I was like 19, so it was just cool because I could drink legally, but I don't know.

I've been to 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.

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'd say, like, but.

Yeah, see, 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

the kind of places that I also don't want to get like groped without my consent, which, I mean, probably wouldn't happen now, but when I was 20 did.

And that's the kind of a thing where I had a kind of like a measure out, like, okay, what that is definitely the place that it would happen at, for sure.

It happened a lot to me, to be honest with you.

I mean, I looked pretty young for my age.

And I just, it wasn't like I was like, oh, now

I quickly became homophobic, but more like I, I just, it was like, it did factor into your decision of what you wanted to do, like 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 now that I'm older, it's just like, you know, when you give them money, you are helping them just be horrible to people and you shouldn't do that.

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, yeah, there, 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, it's very funny.

You saying you're old guy at the club.

You You are the guy who'd be just at the C DJs trying to see the track ID.

He's 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 mix.

That's not the kind of shit I'm going to be interested in.

I'm going to be trying to get Wi-Fi in the club to fucking Shazam that shit because I think it's like some dude playing Italo Disco stuff, but like a really, really rare cut.

I'm going to love it.

I'm annoying.

You're going to slide up next to a guy.

I'm going to throw out a bird.

I took my phone out because I was trying to Shazam the music like that's a hundred percent i don't give a fuck i mean the equipment is

trying to shazam the flat meat packing sound of skin options i mean before

i got like into where i'm at now when it comes to 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 you're gonna slide up next to a guy uh who's spinning at the nightclub who's wearing a mesh t-shirt and white jeans be like hey bro what kind of headphones you got on

that's not shit i care about but like i would be the guy who's like i'm in the in in the club, Lorectum from the Gaspard No Way film, Irreversible, asking the DJ for a set list.

So I guess I'm the pure hater here.

It's good.

Change a pace.

I'm the hater.

I mean, I love going to the club.

Like, I spend like the vast majority of my 20s in clubs in different cities and stuff.

And it is like, you know, I find it fun.

And you don't know what you're doing.

The vast majority of your 20s, that's what, like, two years for you now?

I mean,

I'm 30 now, so it was a decade, if not.

Oh, you dusty old bitch.

You're one of us now.

I'm 40, you piece of shit.

Well, 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.

Try to like go to the bathroom the middle night of that, waking my dog up so I have 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 Guy Sucked.

Two 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.

So thank you for listening to it.

Consider supporting us on Patreon because if you like it, you can get more of it.

Uh, just five bucks gets you absolutely everything.

Years and years and years of bonus content, uh, every episode early, Discord access, e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on merch and live show tickets.

And speaking of live show tickets, you can see us live on June 22nd in London.

And there's still tickets available for that for the whole festival weekend, and you can get those in the show notes.

Until next time,

fly your Air Force dangerously close to the nearest commuter train.