An ancient Dutch Clipper
The last great battles of the Netherlands to gain colonial wealth ended in the 1940s in the battle of the Java Sea. Soon after, Indonesia broke free from political Dutch rule.
The failure of the social democracies of Western Europe and Scandinavia has to be fed to Europeans gradually.
The rich, of course want to stay rich.
Diverting attention is required in this task.
Recently the lovefest emerging between the political figureheads for capital, Sarkozy and Bush - USA and France - demonstrates that disunity of the money mongers is only temporary. Or it may have always been an illusion.
Yet ordinary people, almost always the Europeans that are beyond 25 years in age seem rooted in the thought that the sky is falling. And that the foreigners are pulling down a great society. It isn’t as heavy handed as the American xenophobia in all locales. Dublin, Ireland, parts of the place called England, Swedish interior towns, tiny but populous Denmark, corners of the region of Flanders in Belgium, fringes of Paris, France and remainders of Franco loving Spain approach the racist American hatred against “strangers.” In Paris and it’s outer reaches, the fear and loathing I felt all my life in America is projected onto North African descended youth. Though I sat with relative ease among them with my partner on a speeding train bound for central Paris, French people stood rather than be seated, crushed together with strained faces in a corner of the coach.
A glance around showed me youth mostly Brown and Black, gesturing, talking loudly and dressed in clean sportswear, only the speaking was in rapid Paris slang. Thousands on thousands are restricted to the French banlieue, a bantustan and not anything to do with ?galit .
According to the assassinated scholar activist Walter Rodney, Union Minire de Haute Katanga, the Belgian metals exploiter, took in a single year in the late 1800s at least 27 million British pounds worth of copper from the Congo. A hundred years ago, the incredible wealth that was passed from its King Leopold to the state, and Belgium, a nation of ten million today became the center of the European Union, politically and economically.
But in some parts of Belgium, Sweden, Ireland and other places, I have met people who have never met anyone that is not White. These are people from age ten to eighty. Racist comments about Africans having tails and the public touching of hair does still take place in 2007.
Greece, often quoted as the birthplace of Western civilization is not only on fire because of drought and arson. In June, 2007 members of the EU delegation looking into Greek migration called for the closing of detention centers for refugees because they lacked light, sanitation and in general were inhuman, especially for children. I recall a Greek fellow of thirty I met once who refused to work alongside me and continually questioned my intelligence. He could not believe that I was not in the American fantasy he had always known in his mind. Once he saw that my dignity is real and not an act, to his credit, he started to attempt to be humane.
One of the richest of nations is the Netherlands, also known as Holland got that way through shrewd trading but also conquest. There is no coincidence that Shell Oil’s Anglo Dutch division is a titan of capitalism employing private armies to protect profit making from the Niger Delta to the Pacific Ocean.
The home of the International Criminal Court in Den Haag, Amsterdam and Rotterdam is also seen by outsiders as a liberal place. If you are White man and want to visit to smoke drugs in Amsterdam and find a prostitute or blend into the Dutch society, I suppose it is liberal and a lark. But the infamous Ms. Verdonk has made the arrival of desperate refugees and former colonial peoples who come to take some cake a nightmare. Detainees from Asia, Africa and South America, indeed recently even an American, are often kept on prison ships in Holland’s harbors.
While some serious activists determinedly showed us a fresh and forceful resistance to an entrenched capitalist and racist Dutch society, the heavily policed below sea level country of 16 million is not progressing. While Sierra Leone’s Tony Amos, long established in the Netherlands, is in detention as a suspected illegal, so too is Charles Taylor of the Sierre Leone horror being judged in Den Haag. West Africa’s recent history was shaped by any, and nearly all of these small but deadly European states.
I recall lately when a shocked European activist noted that the rush to Europe by asylum seekers includes criminals and killers. The “development” that Europe puts on the world inflicts itself on the non-White masses with little regard for individuals. As he spoke I wondered if he knew what private medicine, private prisons and American banking and corporate debt impregnating Mother Europe would do to his mind. In some states, if a person doesn’t work the thirty to thirty five hour work-week, there had been the possibility of remaining on the dole for life. But this sixty and seventy year tradition is about to end. Capitalism is bleeding. Even war is not profitable anymore and certainly isn’t popular.
As in Stockholm, London, Dublin and Paris, the reactionary European disease of inhumanity in Rotterdam, Brussels and Berlin is in place for the 21st century.
Whether the Europeans can come to grips with their history before there is a catastrophe is a question that every person here needs to know. The fog will have to lift to see a future free of war and genocide.
The dying Europe is not the fault of the historically dispossessed but the fortress of capital buys brains.
26 August 2007
From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exile2002
References:
[1] Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900-62
[2] How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
[3] Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
[4] Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe
[5] A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present
[6] Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe
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