Looking forward to going to Amsterdam for a couple of days next week. I shall need to decide what I want to do. In no particular order I want to visit the Stedelijk, the Rijksmuseum, and the Van Gogh Museum.
A trip to a Surinamse Restaurant is in order and perhaps a Rijstaffel. A visit to Piet de Gruyter and my old haunts in the Stadsliedenbuurt will fill in most of the time I have at my disposal.
The Surinamse restaurant I have in mind is the first one I ever visited. Spraang Makandra is the name. When I first visited in 1981 it was a real greasy spoon eatery. It reminded me of the old Khushi's in Edinburgh's Drummond Street.
I can recall my first meal there. Moksie Mettie. Literally translated as Mixed Meat. A linguistic reminder that Surninam used to be an English colony until the Dutch swapped it for New York. It was a super meal.
Surinam food must be the original fusion cooking. The South American country reflects a wonderful mix of European, African and Native American influences. These are leavened by the Javanese cooking introduced by indentured labourers shipped by the Dutch (almost literally kidnapped) from Indonesia which was also at one time a Dutch colony.
When I was living in the Netherlands I remember painstakingly reading a review in the newspaper Het Parool of the biography of an elderly Indonesian woman who was at that living (and ending her days) in a care home in Amsterdam.
As a young girl in the 1930s she had basically been kidnapped and taken without the knowledge of her family and shipped halfway around the world to a plantation in Surinam. In 1974 when Surinam finally got independence she was among the quarter of the population who decamped and came to the Netherlands.
There she finished her days, part of the flotsam of the twentieth century. Her story (I wish I could remember her name) reminds us of the minimal value placed on the multitudinous poor. The wretched of the earth as Frantz Fanon coined the phrase.
She did not find herself in Amsterdam by accident. People were paid to exploit her poverty and weakness. These people justified their actions by virtue of her being worth less than nothing. How else could one justify such a shocking violation of autonomy and the self?
When people become domestic beasts there is no outrage that is too vile. There is no cruelty which cannot be justified in the minds of those who are too far gone to recognise another human being and their worth.
And yet, lest we become smug in our own judgements, let us reflect how easy it is to turn people into torturers. We simply need to order them.
What research seems to imply is that one third will comply enthusiastically in order to please their superiors, one third will comply only when their superiors are watching and the remaining third will simply not participate.
This rule of thirds seems reasonably universal. From the My Lai massacre by American GIs in the Vietnam War to the work of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 in occupied Poland in the 1940s.
Until the chips are down none of us can know which third we would fit into. I hope that I would belong to the third that never took part in the massacre. How can I be sure?
One hopes and pray that one will never be tested. I was lucky enough to be born at one of the few time in the Twentieth Century to avoid compulsory military service.
Nevertheless I grew up in a state with armed forces which have been continuously in action in one theatre or another all my life. Not one day of my more than fifty years have passed without "British" soldiers being in an active service situation somewhere in the world.
That has to be a sobering thought.
More than thirty five years ago I was invited to spend a weekend with a workmate's family in Emmerich in Germany. Emmerich is just over the border from the Netherlands. I met the elderly patriarch of the family at that time in his 90s and a veteran of the First World War.
I was introduced as a Scottish person and the old boy (speaking through his great-grandson my workmate) informed me that he had fought a lot of Scottish soldiers in the Great War. We spoke about the "Ladies from Hell" as the Kilt-wearing Scottish soldiers were described.
What he told me was that one of the reasons the Germans feared Scottish regiments was because they had a reputation (deserved or not) for killing prisoners.
Naturally, such a reputation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If one side kills prisoners, then the other side will retaliate in kind.
It seems that statistics tell us that Scottish soldiers were under represented in prisoners of war during the Great War. Perhaps this prophecy did fulfil itself.
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