I never paid much attention during history class. I still regularly tell an anecdote that during one of my years in high school I had two hours of history as my only two classes of the day, so I got into the habit of skipping those. It was an hour from home to school, which made the commute about as long as the classes themselves and since it seemed like no one was keeping close enough attention on our attendance anyway, I thought it was a waste of a day to show up. Needless to say I failed history pretty badly. Now that we’re many years later, I’ve gained a lot more of an interest in history. I’m watching a missing person YouTube channel that talks a lot about Native American history which is fascinating and I was watching an archeology related YouTube channel the other day. I was always more interested in this older history than more recent history.
With the way things have been changing in our world lately, the rise of antisemitism is a real worry. As someone who vehemently disagrees with the actions of the Israeli government, I find it very important to distinguish between the actions of certain individuals and the grouping together of an entire people. To give an example, my students were studying Jewish history as part of one of their classes. I was curious to what they were learning because back in my day the things I learned were pretty surface level from the few things I do remember. But to my pleasant surprise, they had relatively nuanced opinions and could hold a good discussion about it. One thing that I found very important to highlight there – as I explained my stance on things – was to separate the actions of the government from its people. I’m bringing all of this up because today is Dutch Liberation Day, the day we celebrate our freedom from Nazi Germany and the day that Jewish people in our nation could once again roam the streets safely – although I’m sure they weren’t exactly eager to immediately test that theory. So what happened here those 80 years ago. 80 years???? In my mind the second world war ended like 50 years ago, what happened to time?
During World War II, our country was invaded and taken over by the Germans. We would have liked to stay neutral but our neighbors thought differently about that. Towards the end of the war, we were eventually liberated by a combination of the British, Canadian, Polish, Belgian and Czechoslovakian armies. To celebrate this liberation, we declare May 5th to be a federal holiday every five years and on all other years festivals are held. This is the first time I have job where I normally work Mondays, so it’s the first time I have a day off for it, which is why today felt like the right time to talk about it.
As someone who grew up thinking history was a boring story of the past with mistakes we would never repeat anyway because we’re modern people and we’re a civilized bunch, I have been hit with reality quite hard over the past few years. Sure, my country is still wealthy and for as much as I (rightfully) complain about the housing market, discrimination against people on the spectrum, problems with immigration and the racism that follows those poor immigration circumstances as well as many other issues I have with the way our country is run, at the end of the day I have a job, a roof over my head and an income and I am free to come to you all on the internet and share my opinion of our government with the world. There are some people running our country that I strongly dislike, but I do think that most people at the top of our country want the best for the country. It’s just that their idea of “the best” is very different from mine. And on a day like this I think it’s good to remember how we got to have this freedom. Because many countries in the world came to our assistance and drove out the Nazi forces, freeing us and our Jewish population all at once. We need to be thankful for that and remember that none of this is a given. Antisemitism is still a plague on our society and we need to get rid of it somehow. People should never be judged on who they are or where they’re from. Judge people by their words and actions and the world will become a much more fair place.
One last thing I want to talk about is the National Socialist movement in the Netherlands, which was – understandably – banned the day after liberation day. They were a fascist party that later turned into a nazi sympathizer party. They had some success leading up to the war and were the only party that was still legal during most of this time period. Their party had a membership count of just over 100.000 people which is scarily high. What I read on their Wikipedia page is that they weren’t anti-semetic for their first few years, even having Jewish members. One of their founders also married his aunt against the wishes of his family, so you can make your own conclusions about what sort of weird people are likely to turn into nazis. What’s scary about this is how quickly some of these people were willing to turn on their own country and their own pride just to be able to be openly racist. I think the NSB – as it’s abbreviated – kind of gives away the game for more modern fascist parties. It’s never about national pride, caring for your country or keeping things wealthy for your own kind. It’s purely about being able to openly vile people who are very racist against others, without regard for the values you pretend to have. It’s a dark reminder that bad people are everywhere, just like how good people are everywhere. Both founders of the party have died – with their leader being executed after the war – by now, and we’re better off for it, but many of their ideas still live, although being sold in much extreme manners.
To end everything on a positive note, the party was fully dissolved and their members shunned, including their children – which is overkill, you’re not at fault for your parents actions – and we never saw such extremism again here in the Netherlands. I do think we over-corrected towards loving Israel far too much, but I think that originally came from a good place of wanting the Jewish population to feel safe again, and they should be able to feel safe here. With no more actual nazis here and many of the white supremacists shifting to hating on Muslims now, I think Jewish people enjoy a relatively safe time in our country and that is good. As I mentioned at the start of this post, I did pretty badly at history in high school, so if I got anything wrong in this post please let me know down below and I’ll add in some edits. On days like these we all need to be thankful for the freedoms and peace we enjoy without forgetting that the road ahead is still a long one. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 