remembrance day

yesterday it was remembrance day, today is actually a day with a more appealing name overhere, liberation day. but thats a liberation of one thing only day, i rather have it a liberty day,

so yesterday, admittedly naively i decided to once again have a peek about what netherlands is doing on a day like that. its been decades since i joined in on any of these themes and now i again know why..

i was tired as a dog since i hadnt slept in 29 hours by the time i arrived at the scene, a small and pretty park in a city close. it features a memorial and it was burning 3 huge flames of petrochemicals. i had actually been having a small nap of half an hour short ahead so i was silly sleepy.

before the time i had been pondering, who will i remember.. who do we need to think of most..
who do we forget, what is a decent way to look at the masses and masses of dead caused by armed violence, etc. in short i had been worrying a whole lot about what i were to be thinking there.

i can be an unreasonable optimist, and assumed it might have changed in 30 years, that would have people being serious about , i don't know, todays dead, iragi deaths, jugoslav even or maybe the russians. so many things changed in 30 years, i used to primary associate days like these with sectarism, and sectarism has gotten of a much lesser importance. perhaps, i thought, we will remember all the dead.

so it went on, loads of people arrived, some crowds of them in suits, with a 10 percent odd representation of coloured people in netherlands it was a pretty white scene, i accidently counted the relations and they were only a factor 100 off. (we are not even a division i thought but a bombardment here would make an incredible scene)

so i got suspicious, i assumed we were not going to repent the 100000s or millions we killed in indonesia after all, but lets wait and see, after a lone and sad trumpet blew we had our two minutes silence.

rather impressive, altho i hadnt said a thing a couple minutes in advance for fear of disturbing the occasion wich is a thing that seems to come more natural to me then joining in.

i remember i thought it was a hypocrit event for decades, but i kinda had forgotten why, and remembering the dead is sth i think is usefull. it happens to often people get killed in bunches and noone really notices.

there we stood, and i tried to remember whom i would be remembering, the iraqi's? communists? serbs? russian? dutch? polish? jewish? ooh now i seemed to get in tune with the masses, it was mostly the jewish victims of ww2 they were thinking of besides the dutch..

well ofcourse i agreed, that is a very terribly sad example, yet, except for acute dutch selfpitty, it has allways been the great recurrent theme of celebrations like this,

and actually it showed it hadnt moved up the slightest in all the time i'd stood aside uncompromisingly. but i didn't want to think of the jewish, if there is one genocide i am overly confronted with it is that one, and it is just not even close to thinking of all death , hurt and maim we keep causing.

so thought very loudly .. no i don't want to think of that, and someone thought, how about the polish. ok ok the polish..
well the minutes were over, ppl did the "church scrape of throats", amazingly how so many non smokers have to clear their throats, and soon starting singing..

the national hymn, i don't like it, but that besides it wasn't saying a thing about any dead at all, exactly the monarchy went unscathed, (quite contrary to the text) and i am anti-monarchistic. antifeudalist.. antinationalist besides.

so off i went, after years still forced to comply a remembrance were i wasn't in a position to remember the dead in a human way. still subject of nationalist indoctrination and authoritarianism.

i could guess to the rest, a speech about nationalism, heroism and afghanistan perhaps, well i was glad to leave. i had tried, and 40 years after we still remember the same racially biased things, still keep the mouths shut about our crimes and the numberless victims since that period.

what should be about all those many faceless victims was still about the promotion of a class system.