Edinburgh of the dead

And so, I strayed,
To places that made me afraid,
A city of many hills,
That surely gave me the chills,
It has so many ghosts,
Beware they might be your hosts.

By Regent's Park, I walked,
In the wariness of the stalked,
To wit, in the rubble, I saw,
A hand outstretched live and raw,
Before fear gripped me so to run,
My senses deigned it belonged to someone.

In this stroll, I wrote and thought,
What a place to be highly wrought,
Stones and memorials mark the places,
Of souls and works of long gone faces,
A city strewn with graves,
Of the dead, we became as slaves.

Known unto God

Unknown to man but known to God

The grave stone read “A soldier in the 1939-1944 war” at the top, some had the rank, others did not and at the bottom was written “Known unto God”.

Of the 1680 graves of men who perished in Operation Market Garden [1] over a period of 6 days between the 19^th of September 1994 and the 25^th of September 1944, some 245 carried the epithet of the Unknown Soldier – buried with honour for their service but unknown for all sorts of reasons.

On one tombstone, the inscription started with “Believed to be” it made you wonder when doubt should be removed and the truth be known, but should the truth be known or the situation be left for believers to believe as they will?

Believing might well have been difficult too because one tombstone marked the grave of the chaplain; on such an evil day, where would man have found comfort and succour in their last minutes on earth? With whom would they have left the “Kismet” [2] messages to dearly loved ones back at home?

The root of goodness

We were there - Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery [3] - to visit the grave of someone we never knew but from whom came friends, families and good fortune. The people who lived through the wars of old never talked about how it affected them but we saw the scars as they stoically went about their business without grumble or discontentment.

The lady married to this gallant soldier already had a son by him and her daughter was born the day her father was declared missing, her grandson is my dear friend and for the first time, I finally found opportunity to pay my respects and see why she visited Arnhem every year from 1969 during the memorials up 2005 after which she was too indisposed to visit again.

As we approached the cemetery, it was so unexpected, my friend just burst into tears, I was taken aback, but cemeteries bring a quiet contemplation of serenity and mortality, memories of things past along with things not known the palpable sense of pilgrimage that accompanies knowing that someone from whom you came is rested in a perpetual memorial in a foreign land.

The dear lady died last year and her ashes are scattered where her husband is laid, the only love she knew and it is with poignancy that one recognises that she never remarried but brought up two children on her own.

We must not forget

However, one must not forget that the ravages of war has taken away young men, many not even in their 30s, the register of graves showed the name of the soldier, who the soldier was a son of and if the soldier was married, to whom he was married. Nothing was said of the offspring of the fallen.

In 1951, the British Government signed an undertaking with the government of the Netherlands and therein was established a number of Commonwealth graves as a memorial to our fallen men.

The grounds are well tended and clean, the memorials stand as beacons of great men who gave their lives for king, country and the freedom of mankind in a very dark hour of tyranny and humanity.

As the memorial to the fallen stands, one remembers Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen [4], for therein we find the lines

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old

Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

And so we would, we who are left to mourn and pay respects will remember them.

Sources

[1] Operation Market Garden - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Kiss me Hardy or Kismet Hardy

[3] Commonwealth War Graves Commission – Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery

[4] First World War.com - Prose & Poetry - Laurence Binyon:

Dancing on their warm graves

Another week of events are consummated in this posting having lost the work-time link to the sudden uneasiness of some malevolent who found that a useful service to external consultants was just a too good thing to have.

Somehow, the Bayesian filters on the firewall links this blog site to a sexuality issue and hence gets blocks.

How it arrived at that conclusion escapes me, but there goes when you offer what should characteristically be within human judgment to some sophisticated software robot.

Aping your politicians

However, what has been nagging me all week is the commemoration of the 11 victims of a fire blaze in an Immigrant detention centre at the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

As the story goes, a fire started with the responsible personnel adopting the hard-line indifferent stance of the hard-talking politicians of ignoring a critical issue till it had moved beyond desperate.

Well, before the inquiry set had submitted their report on what went wrong, both the Justice and Interior ministers had commended the staff for having acted adequately and appropriately.

The loss of human life be that criminal or victim had paled into insignificance for intemperate analysis and the hardening of resolve in terms of the actions rather than the actors.

This in the light of the fact that it was revealed that the alarm systems were faulty in some parts, switched off in others and too sensitive at the fire doors that they were not opened when people needed to get out of danger.

As the poor “criminals” raised alarm, their cries were probably ignored by idling guards swilling you know what and smoking what you may not desire and the “criminals” perished such that the prevailing intemperance in this rather so tolerant country concurred that criminal life might just be of no value.

Just as the bodies were released to the families of victims who in the majority were ethnic European, a service of remembrance took place with the Justice and Interior ministers crying crocodile tears of compassion and concern.

Before their graves were dug, they already had the indignity of someone dancing on their graves, it is just so despicable.

Being your public

Just as that nasty chapter closed, another minister who had approved more early aircraft activity in a nether region which involved deafening fighter aircraft flyovers got woken up at 5:00AM with the sound of such aircraft relayed to her well-appointed home far away from her disconnected approval.

My heart bled with empathy when she first expressed shock at the noise and that it could happen near her home at all. No! Never!

Well, if that does not inform everyone of the fact that politicians are beginning to come out of a gene pool of people who are not everyday people then what else?

The problem nowadays is about people who make decisions so remote from the realities of what and who would be affected on some objective premise as if human consideration does not matter.

Similarly, last year, my neighbourhood had 5 bus services withdrawn in anticipation of a tram service that was to start in over 6 months after the service was withdrawn.

The computer model might have been fine, but the reality was 40,000 people deprived of a useful service just like that. They probably consulted the neighbourhood before making the decision, but what use would that have been if the consulted rode bicycles or drive cars?

Over the last few weeks, the Interior minister has been spat at in the main street and had a projectile thrown through her office window, not that I condone any of this activity, but frankly, the mean streets of our nation are beginning to arrive at the doorsteps of the people who should be preventing the mean streets from becoming our ultimate destination socially and politically.

As someone commented in my last posting, the police are measured on the wrong set of parameters such that more time is spend issuing fines on spitting spatters and protesters over noise injustices than fight real crime.

These politicians have the police at their beck and call, well, hopefully, somewhere along the line the police would realise that they have a public duty of protecting the majority without privilege than the cocooned minority who are far from reality, purpose and ideas.

Here lies ...

Greatest person competitions

It was with interesting amusement that we all witnessed the climax of the mockery of history shows that tries to extract from popular opinion the greatest personality of a nation.

When the BBC conducted this event in 2002, Winston Churchill [1] was voted the first, and then in 2003, Sir Isaac Newton [2] who was sixth in the previous year was voted the first.

What a difference a year makes, or some people have really done a biographical study of the contenders and begun thinking rather than following the media hype.

Mind you, the English seem to have a knack for inventing new shows that get copied by other institutions like the Weakest Link, Who wants to be a Millionaire and now this charade of greatest countrymen.

So the circus came to the Netherlands amidst a lot of noise, a murder, tensions between communities and the reminders of a very recent political event.

Striding past a villa in a village in the Veneto region of Italy, a slightly weathered tombstone bears a newly engraved message - Here lies the greatest Dutchman of them all. [3]

You would be forgiven for thinking it was Vincent van Gogh, the painter, who came tenth in the list, but he was buried in French; nor was it Anne Frank, the refugee Jewish diarist from the Nazi times whose nationality was contested during this event, she died in a concentration camp.

Nor was it Rembrandt van Rijn, another popular Dutch painter and engraver; William of Orange who at one time was King of England and considered the founder of the Dutch nation came second. Erasmus is someone you might have heard of and for football fans Johan Cruyff who came sixth.

All these people represent a very positive and recognisable image of the enterprising, tolerant, intelligent and innovative Dutch, just like Philips and the invention of compact discs.

More so, there are no populist politicians, but people who painstakingly went about their business and in the process were recognised for what they did, what they represented and who they are.

Pim who?

So, it was with utterly bewilderment that we received the information that Pim Fortuyn was voted the greatest Dutchman ever.

It is likely, that you do not know this man, but he has the unfortunate record of being the first political murder in the Netherlands in over 300 years. He was gunned down by an animal rights activist in May 2002 in the media park of the assembly of radio and television stations in a distant Amsterdam suburb.

In my previous blog, I made mention of him in relation to a more recent murder of a descendant to Vincent van Gogh and how his rise to prominence was as a result of challenging the unfriendly commentary of minority group Muslim clerics in Rotterdam.

However, in all that can be said about Pim Fortuyn [4], he was vocally on the political scene for less than a year, he had quite a number of personal achievements, he was quite eccentric and was not affected by his alternative lifestyle related to his sexual orientation.

However, he represented a seemingly popular view that no one would express regarding immigration, integration and Islam; however, those views earned him lots of votes.

The media in general compared his banter to that of fascists and extreme right-wing propaganda. His animosity to Europe was quite evident, and though he displayed a flair for exercising free speech, he was not an espousing of the Dutch values of tolerance and friendliness.

After his death, his party which was a tribute to egomania in that it was simply "Pim Fortuyn's List" came second in the elections, but fell into terminal decay that within 6 months they caused the government to fall and then lost most of their seats in the election that came there after.

However, the vote occurred in the light of the recent killing of Theo van Gogh who is mistakenly given the accolade of a champion of free speech. He was NOT.

In a twist of irony; Mr Pim Fortuyn who so spoke of Dutch values and expression, defending the history, culture and political soul of the Dutch to the very end, died in the Netherlands but was buried far away from what he was martyred in protecting - in a little village in the region of Veneto in Italy.

Just as the highest point in the Netherlands is the platform from which you view the "highest" natural point in the Netherlands [5], be not surprised if whilst on holiday next summer in Italy you wonder how you can across a piece of Holland, where the greatest Dutchman is laid to rest.

References

[1] Churchill voted greatest Briton
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/2509465.stm

[2] Newton voted greatest Briton
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3151333.stm

[3] Fortuyn buried after Dutch bid farewell
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1978602.stm

[4] Pim Fortuyn - Obituary
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1971462.stm

[5] Drielandenpunt - the highest point in the Netherlands
http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~vdmeulen/deeper/Articles/Drielandenpunt.html