The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice – their choice
Dwight Eisenhower
A bugler blows taps at the close of Memorial Day service at the American Military Cemetery, Margraten, The Netherlands, where lie thousands of American heroes of World War II.
Via Eurosavant:
It’s now early May, the time of year when many West European countries celebrate their liberation at the end of World War II. Today is in fact Liberation Day in the Netherlands, a public holiday, while yesterday was Dodenherdenkingdag – Day for the Remembrance of the Dead. And at a ceremony in The Hague a certain Eberhard van der Laan, a former government minister for the Dutch Labor Party, gave an interesting, even provocative speech (covered here in the Algemeen Dagblad) calling for a line of a certain sort to be drawn under the WWII experience so that society can finally move on. (emphasis added)
The article continues:
The “hook” to Van der Laan’s speech, as it were, was the fact that it has now been 65 years since the end of the war – that’s the standard retirement age, at least within Europe, so why don’t we finally put WWII out to retirement as well? With this, the ex-politician was giving voice to what many in Europe surely have always thought in secret about the War (especially those too young to have lived through it): for how long will we have to keep paying respect, keep letting it influence our lives? (emphasis added)
According to Eberhard van der Laan, the average person need not concern him or herself with studying the history of WWII, it would be best to leave that to the “experts”
OK: So the common, uninformed people should talk about the War less, while researchers should look into it more. In fact, one reason he offered for upping that research effort was to revise any idea that Dutch behavior under occupation could be characterized as a slappe houding, i.e. spineless. Sure, the Dutch were the European champions – other than Germany itself – in ensuring that their Jews were delivered to the Nazi gas chambers. (About 75% of Dutch Jews met this fate; that particular number, however, is nowhere to be seen in the AD article nor, one supposes, in Van der Laan’s speech itself.)
These are the people that Liberals want us to emulate.
