Insulting people to their face

On May 5, 1945 the German occupational forces in the Netherlands surrendered. Since then May 5 has been celebrated by the Dutch as Liberation Day.

May 4 is Remembrance Day.
On this day the Dutch victims of the Second World War (more than half were Jews) are remembered with commemorations. In the evening a remembrance ceremony is held on Dam Square in Amsterdam with the king and queen and other Dutch dignitaries in attendance.
They stand or sit in a cordoned off area in the middle, surrounded by some 20,000 spectators who have come to either show their respects or see the dignitaries.

At 20:00 a two-minute silence is observed to honour the fallen.
In 2010 a man started to scream during the two-minute silence. This resulted in a general panic; the spectators thought it was a terrorist attack. People tried to flee in all directions and 63 were wounded.

The man who had caused all the commotion was arrested. He became known as the “Dam shouter”.
He was a nonentity, an intellectually and emotionally challenged hater who used to spend his days roaming the streets of Amsterdam provoking and insulting people. His idea of humour was a sneer.
This was the only way he could get attention.

He enjoyed his notoriety and even published an autobiography in 2016. Eventually he became yesterday’s news.
Why did he not take to social media?
After all, social media is full of nonentities who crave attention by provoking, insulting and sneering.
I think because keyboard hating did not give him any kicks.
He was old-fashioned, he liked to insult people to their face.

The economy über alles virus

Local and national authorities in the Netherlands collaborated in the persecution and deportation of Dutch Jews during the Second World War.

The local police rounded the Jews up and the national railways transported them to a transit camp and later to the German border. 
There was not one case of sabotage.

Eichmann praised the Dutch effusively for the efficiency of the operation. He is reported to have said: "The transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see."

The Germans paid for the collaboration. If they did not pay on time they were sent a reminder.

This is not as strange as it sounds. The deportations took place early in the war when the Germans were still trying to lure the Dutch into becoming junior partners in their new empire.

In 1941 the German occupiers established a Dutch bank known as the Limor bank. The purpose of this bank was to systematically register and then rob Jewish property (money, securities and valuables).

Money from the Limor Bank was used, among other things, to pay Dutch authorities for their collaboration in the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands.

After the end of the war, on 17 September 1945, the new Dutch Minister of Transport, Steef van Schaik, addressed a group of railway workers in Utrecht.

He praised them for their collaboration in the deportation of the Jews. He said the income was essential for the economy and more important than the lives of the Jews ("the unfortunate victims").

The sacrifice was necessary to save the economy.

We are now in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.

I was reading a Dutch article about the negative economic consequences of restrictions that had been imposed to save lives.

The writer called for the removal of these restrictions. He realized that this would lead to many more deaths.

However, the sacrifice was necessary to save the economy.

Better than the rest

In my youth, my friends and I defined ourselves literarily. We always had a copy of a personal thin paperback with us.
I remember one friend who was into James Joyce. His carrier book was “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. He would have preferred “Ulysses”, but that was too thick and heavy to always lug around with you.
My taste was the Collected Essays of George Orwell.

We also used to trash popular television series. The kind of series my sister liked.
These were some of the ways we positioned ourselves as not being part of the low-brow herd.
No, we were not cultural snobs, we were just better than the rest.

Nowadays, some of this television trash of yesteryear is viewed fondly. The series are seen as examples of earlier British culture.

Nowadays, I always have a copy of my medicine list, not a paperback, with me.

Holocaust, a dog and a tape recorder

Holocaust survivors usually did not like dogs.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis not only used dogs to guard Jews. They were also used to attack and kill them.

Ronnie and Michaela, a Belgium couple from my garin (group), arrived at the kibbutz with a small, friendly dog. The Romanian Holocaust survivors on the kibbutz were upset about this, but it was not forbidden.

It was not a major ideological problem like Danny’s tape recorder.

Danny and Judith were a brother and sister from a rich, left-wing Swiss Jewish family.
Judith arrived first. She was a bit too fancy for the Marxist-Zionist kibbutz. It was rumoured that she trimmed her pubic hair.
I never had the inclination to find out if the rumour was true or false. My friend Tzvi from Austria said it was true.

Danny arrived later with a (big) tape recorder, which he wanted to keep for himself because he could not live without his music.
This was a direct attack on the principle of equality in our garin.
We did not even have radios and we were still living in huts. Yet he refused to give up the tape recorder.
A solution was found.
He gave the tape recorder to the kibbutz library but kept it in his room, as he was allowed to borrow it indefinitely.

A solution was also found for Ronnie and Michaela’s small dog.

Someone poisoned it or it inadvertently ate some poison.
I remember seeing them distraught in the communal dining room after the poisoning. They were crying and shouting that the kibbutz had killed their dog. They did not get much sympathy.

Ronnie and Michaela left the kibbutz, as did Judith.
Her brother Danny is still there. He is quite important nowadays; sits on the Board of a number of peace organizations.

The kibbutz must be doing well, it even has a listing on the Bloomberg site.
"The Company's line of business includes the manufacturing of synthetic resins, plastics materials, and nonvulcanizable elastomers". It has 250 employees.
According to the site of the "company", it is the largest international manufacturer of solar swimming pool heating systems, with wholly-owned subsidiaries in the USA and Germany.

The kibbutz, like the country, has changed. The Holocaust is an ever dimming memory and I do not think they worry about dogs and tape recorders any more.

Diversity and Cultural Divide

Nieuwe Zakelijkheid, translated as New Objectivity or New Pragmatism, is a Dutch style of modernist architecture that started in the 1920s and continued into the 1930s.
I have a distinct antipathy towards this form of architecture.

I live across the road to a synagogue building that is a prime example of Nieuwe Zakelijkheid. It is now used as an auction hall.
The actual synagogue is in a small annex that is not an example of any form of architecture.

Opposite the annex lives an old homosexual couple.
Their yellow roses are in bloom.
One of the men dresses like an old professor, the other like a young man from the 1950s.
The old professor type told us his partner’s legs were bad and he could not walk very far, but he wanted to keep up appearances by dressing like a young man.

Next door lives an older woman who used to be the madam of a brothel. 

Her red roses are in bloom.
She is a nice, chatty person who changes the colour of her hair every month. She once told me she had an invalid husband who she looks after, but I have never seen him.
There is always another old lady with her. I wonder if this is a sister, a friend or a lover.
I also wonder if she has a past with her homosexual neighbours.

My Dutch wife says I should stop wondering and ask her. This illustrates the cultural divide between us.
One does not ask these things, one speculates.

The shtetl Jews of Amsterdam

"The 'Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad" (Dutch for New Israelite Weekly), in short NIW, is the only Jewish weekly and the oldest functioning news magazine in the Netherlands.
Founded on August 4, 1865, it has tried to inform the Jewish community on issues concerning Jews and Judaism in the Netherlands and in the world."

It is also quite good, much better than English-language Jewish newspapers like The Forward and the Jewish Chronicle.
The NIW journalists can actually write.

The NIW was a newspaper of and for progressive "shtetl" Jews in the progressive city of Amsterdam. Most Dutch Jews live there.
"Shtetl" in the sense that they kept their heads down and relied on their contacts with people in power to resolve problems for the Jewish community.

Amsterdam used to be a fine city for Jews. The Dutch Labour party, where Jews often held prominent positions, had been in power there since the end of the Second World War.
Amsterdam mayors, who always came from this party, were usually Jewish. 

However, from the 1980s onward, Amsterdam began to change demographically.
The indigenous Dutch workers started moving to the small towns outside the city.
The guest workers from Morocco and Turkey stayed. They sent for their families. Waves of new immigrants came after them. 

Most of the immigrants were Muslims. The progressive Jews welcomed them enthusiastically.
There were those who warned that many of these migrants had been fed a diet of Jew and Israel hatred in the countries they came from.
This was dismissed as right-wing bigotry.
Job Cohen, one of Amsterdam's Jewish mayors, invoked the history of his family in the Holocaust to justify his identification with the Muslim immigrants.

The demographic changes led to changes in institutions of the city, like the political parties, civil service and police.
The city was no longer pro-Jewish and pro-Israel.
Instead, virulent hatred of Israel and anybody who supported Israel was growing at an alarming rate.
The shtetl leaders did not seem to notice.

Small antisemitic demonstrations started appearing regularly on Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam.
A group of Jewish activists who had no connection to the shtetl dignitaries staged counter demonstrations.
The NIW was furious.
The Jewish weekly demonized the activists in acrimonious articles. They framed the activists as irresponsible and right-wing.

Eventually the prominent Jews of Amsterdam did realize what was going on, in June 2015.
The mayor of Amsterdam had proposed a twinning agreement with Tel Aviv.
This was greeted with an enormous negative backlash on social media and from the "new" citizens of Amsterdam. The majority of the city council opposed the agreement and the mayor rescinded his proposal.

Jewish dignitaries took to Facebook, Twitter and articles in newspapers to express their shock at what had happened.
Their greatest shock was at the betrayal of the Labour party, who had also voted against the twinning.

There are now many more and much larger antisemitic demonstrations on Dam Square. The police only intervene to arrest people who protest the antisemitism.
The new mayor from the Green Left party and the new city council are not interested in the Jewish entreaties.

However, the Jewish activists do still turn up to protest.
The NIW now supports the activists (it used to demonize).
Unfortunately, it is too little, too late.

The Age of the Simpleton

I can remember the forlorn, solitary figures with sandwich boards around their necks who walked the streets of London in all weathers. The message on their boards was simple: "the end is nigh".
Sometimes the presence of these figures annoyed me. I thought: simpletons, why don't you just piss off.
Other times I felt sorry for them.

The advent of the computer and internet changed their lives completely.
They could now come in from the cold, communicate with each other and, as a group, spread their simple message with a keyboard.
The forlorn, solitary figures formed pressure groups and later political parties. 

Nowadays, they walk the corridors of power. No longer forlorn and solitary, but esteemed and worshiped.
Their message is still the simple: "the end is nigh".

And yes, they are right. When simpletons take over, the end is nigh.