After a recent spate of grim political coverage, this post is designed to be a refreshing change of pace. How about some discussions of fun miscellany that I found on the Internet? Here goes…
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Great crime stories reveal so much more than one dastardly person’s motive. They offer a closeup of a social reality, in forensic detail. And so it is with Patrick Radden Keefe’s account of the Holleeder family. Seventies Amsterdam had a rough criminal underground, quite at odds with the Dutch reputation as progressive and tolerant. A political economy based on free exchange and a robust welfare state do not eliminate humanity’s baser instincts. When Wim Hollleeder demands the equivalent of a $30 million ransom for a kidnapped Heineken heir, you start to consider whether effective crimefighting is about raising the costs of misdeeds or just maintaining an equilibrium, that is to say, not disturbing the corruption at the heart of a bourgeois society. Wim went to prison for a while but resumed his chicanery afterward, pulling all his friends and relations into the underworld. Wim’s sister and former lawyer Astrid testifies for the prosecution and becomes the toast of Dutch publishing with her memoir Judas. Charismatic Wim with his tough working class-accent, redolent of the Jordaan neighborhood, managed to turn himself into a local folk hero, perhaps in part due to organized crime’s domination by Indonesian and Surinamese gangsters. Native-born Dutch kingpins appear to be passing into history. Keefe has a great comment on this nationalistic attitude: “[I]t seemed a bit strange to herald someone as the last of the dinosaurs when there was a distinct possibility that all the other dinosaurs were dead only because he’d killed them.”
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I love stumbling upon websites that feel like those informational kiosks at national parks and monuments. They suggest the existence of respectful tourists who almost certainly don’t exist. For instance, this page with hagiographic tributes to “EU pioneers.”
Voters love to express their hostility to the European Union, but that’s only because they haven’t been given trading cards featuring the various bureaucrats that established it. The EU’s democratic deficit would certainly be eliminated if we had kids in Rotterdam excitedly collecting images of Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian socialist who proposed the Benelux customs union. Or if more of us appreciated the voluminous mustache of Joseph Bech, who foresaw a greater role in world affairs for small nations like his own Luxembourg. Don’t forget about Dutch social justice crusader Marga Klompé, who skillfully expanded the competencies of the European Coal and Steel Community. International cooperation is a passionately important pursuit, and kids these days had better learn to appreciate that, dammit!
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John Gabriel Stedman’s memoir is prized by historians as an authoritative source for descriptions of Dutch plantation life in colonial Suriname. The soldier/diarist deployed to South America to put down rebellions. Stedman positions himself as both a participant in and an observer of the local scene, thus gaining a favorable vantage to record one of the Americas’ most brutal slave systems. The son of a Scotsman and a Franco-Dutch mother, Stedman’s narrative offers insight into the transnational quality of the colonial project, particularly as practiced by the Dutch. The tale is full of duels, insubordination, and sexcapades.
But Stedman is not content to creatively shift his vocation, his national identity and his role as slavemaster and colonist. He has the gall to write Chapter 26 of his memoir in the voice of a slave boy named Quaco. Stedman’s subjectivity dissolves into Quaco’s, which Duco van Oostrum points out is an act of colonization just as sure as the sugar harvest. Stedman and Quaco fuse into one nostalgic reminiscer by the end of the chapter: “where e’er we roam/His first best country is ever at home.” Whatever sympathy Stedman had for Quaco seems oblivious to the difference in how the two arrived in Suriname, one a free man, the other via the Middle Passage.
Stedman later brings Quaco home to Maastricht then hands him over as a gift to Countess Rosendael. A recent graphic text by Ineke Mok and Eric Heuvel attempts to give Quaco his own personhood back.
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On the southern slope of the Vaalserberg there lay a big zinc deposit, and great powers Prussia and the Netherlands both wanted it. This was the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. To the chagrin of the Prussians and the Dutch, the Vieille Montagne Zinc Mining Company saw to it that their holdings were outside the jurisdiction of any tax-levying power. And so it was that Neutral Moresnet became a Low Countries vice district – attracting draft dodgers and other malefactors in the shadow of their lucrative resource extraction project.
Besides the zinc mine, the scoundrels that gathered in Moresnet had one other place to visit: a casino. An Esperantist named Dr. Wilhelm Molly introduced the famous artificial language, which gave Moresnet a patina of utopian respectability, as though the place had been an intentional experiment, instead of a leftover bargaining chip that no great power could claim. After World War I, the area became Kelmis, a German-speaking town in Belgium.
I have never lived near a mine but I imagine that such zones are the least likely places on Earth for social experimentation. Leave it to Belgium to somehow produce a politically neutral zinc mine.