Jay pointed me to this video in comments to my post on the Middelburg bombardment. A documentary made for one of the Dutch public broadcasting digital channels, it shows footage from Middelburg just before and after the attack. In Dutch, obviously.
Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
Liberation Day 2010
As with the National Remembrance yesterday, it would be nice to spare some thoughts on Liberation Day as well to those people who remember their liberation from us: the Indonesians, the people of Surinam, the others we ruled/oppressed for longer or shorter periods of time as the Dutch colonial empire waxed and waned and last but not least, our southern neighbours, the Belgians, who liberated themselves in 1830. For too long we have denied the more sordid sides of our national history and a national holiday like today, where we celebrate our own liberation from the German occupation, should be used to acknowledge that we ourselve used to oppress other countries too.
National Remembrance Day 2010
This year, could we please also remember the victims of the Dutch slave trade in Africa, on the plantations in the Caribbean and in Surinam, the victims of our colonial wars in the West and in the East, the people we killed trying to hold on to Indonesia, not to forget those victims we made in the past two decades, as part of US-led attacks against Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan?
It would make a nice change from only remembering the victims of wars we were not responsible for.
UPDATE: and then the two minute silence was ended slightly prematurely by an outbreak of panic, after somebody screamed and a thud was heard in the middle distance. People started running, the queen and other vips were bundled into safety and for a moment chaos seemed to get the overhand. But luckily there was nothing to it: somebody fainted, somebody else screamed, one of the safety fences fell down and that seems to have started the panic.
Garbage collectors on strike with Queensday
The picture above shows just a little of the garbage left over at the end of Queensday last year. Held on the 30th of April, the birthday of our previous queen, Queensday is one of our most important holidays, in which we can indulge in our traditional vices of drink and commerce. It’s a day when, as one wag described it, one half of the Dutch population is selling the contents of their attics to the other half and the city in which the most of this is done is Amsterdam, party central on Queensday. It all makes for quite a lot of mess.
And this year the garbage collectors are threatening to strike. Not just on the day, but the entire week from Queensday, which also includes a potential Ajax championship celebration as well as Rememembrance Day on May 4th and Liberation Day on May 5th. It’s perhaps the worst period in the year to have this strike, hence a good way for the unions to pressure the city.
For the garbage collectors are not just striking for themselves, but for all municipal civil servants. The demands are modest — basically wanting to keep salary levels matching inflation — but the Dutch city councils have refused so far to meet them. My sympathies therefore are with the garbage collectors and I’ll make sure to keep my own (modest) garbage safe until the end of the strike…
Bloody hell
Sometimes you just cannot believe what you see. Sven Kramer, the Netherlands’ latest skating giant, on track for gold on the ten kilometres, not to mention a new Olympic Record (as the guy in second place already has broken the record already) and then everything goes horribly wrong. At the point where he has to exchange the inner track for the outer one once again his coach is waiting for him to tell him he’s already almost three seconds ahead of his competitor, Sven changes and changes back again to the wrong track. The upshot? He’s disqualified and the South-Korean Lee Seung-hoon insteads wins gold. You can’t blame him, he did skate an Olympic Record as well after all, but how awful for Sven and his coach. With the television cameras lingering on them as the truth sank in, it was heart wrenching to watch them realise what the error cost Sven — Gerard Kemkers, his coach looked completely down. I’ve think we’ve all had that same sinking feeling when we made one simple mistake that fucked up something important.
Poor guys.