Geert Wilders wants mandatory blackface at Dutch festival

How would Anne Frank look at the silly situation which happens so many decades after she saw the horror which came into existence because certain people became too serious about a pure race and typical morphology of the Caucasians.

Instead of seeing a “butterfly effect“ the Low Countries may have a Big Black Book or should I say a Big Red Book slammed in their face.

Photo of Jonathan G. Meath portraying Santa Claus.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

In many countries all over the world it is a tradition to come up every year with a very big lie for the children. All over the world we can find a ‘children festival’ were parents lie about the presents the children receive. In some countries it are the ‘Bells of Rome‘, in others it are ‘the eggs of Spring’ or the ‘Easter Bunnies‘,in others it are Saint Martin, Saint Nicholas the Santa, or even the elfs from High up North.

Best, naturally, we would not tell such lies to our children, but as people living in a democratic state we should allow such stories to stay alive and have people amusing themselves with fairy tales and traditional songs and feasts.

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Trying to be over politically correct is not doing good to society. We should know what happen in the past, be aware of differences and changes, and allow traditional fun to those who want to have such fun.

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We may have certain countries around us which may have a very philistine tradition and who are afraid to change things. Others do think they have to advance so much that they better get rid of all the past, like it never happened? We may find everywhere anti-intellectual groups which prefer to be a-theoretical an which to stay pragmatic. But we may encounter those people who seem to be much more afraid, instead of being sure of themselves and of their society where they live in. In case the Dutch people were sure enough they are liberal and free they should not make such a fuss about the old children songs and the tradition of Saint Nicholas, whilst they find nobody may touch Christmas because that is holy fro them, forgetting that it has nothing to do at all with the birth of Christ (who was born in October) in Palestine, where there are no fur trees and at that time no snow and certainly no elfs and flying Nordic men. Though the lie for the children about the man and his servants worries them so much that even shopkeepers become afraid to sell certain products which may relate to the servant of Saint Nicholas.

In the Netherlands the far right movement has won a lot of people. Is it not that we may find a lot of Right-wing liberals who are libertarians, who are fanatically pro-market and pro-United States, who would like to leave the European Union and join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and would therefore really just swap one federation for another? They also will feel happy with the many fundamentalist evangelicals who consider the white race the better and chosen people by their god Christ, who according to them was a white man and not a Palestinian nor a Jew. The others were lots of Dutch people are getting afraid for are those sympathetic to the far Right. Because both being against coloured people others think they have to defend the coloured in such a way, as if they can not speak for themselves, that anything which shows up a placing of such a coloured person should be considered as discrimination. They even do not want to take in consideration where the tradition came from or what it really meant, having a person becoming black because in the chimneys the soot made the servants black.

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Black Pete or Zwarte Piet may be a caricature of nineteenth century house slaves, in servant’s uniform, with big red lips and golden earrings, in the Netherlands even speaking with a supposedly Surinamese accent, and in Belgium with a French/Spanish or Afrikaans accent. If we have to going to erase all sorts of caricature we shall have a lot of work, like Kitty in her article also rightly points out. But the Dutch, Belgians and French shall have to seriously consider what they are going to do with all their rebellious old popular songs and even with their national hymns. With Austrian, French, British, Spanish, Dutch, coming to fight on our grounds and terrorising people in the past, the very young Belgium has lots of songs where is being mocked with those people. When protests against such lyrics will come up and children will have to adapt and re-adapt the songs they learned in childhood it shall only contribute of many forgetting all those songs and the old culture, having them at last no ground to be proud of to belong to such or such people. At last Europe seems to find a way to have the people loose all connection with their birth-ground and their nation. And in the mean time nobody worries about all the lies which are told by parents and politicians.

 

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This video, by the Daily Telegraph in England, recorded in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, says about itself:

17 November 2013

Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Father Christmas and his blacked-up helpers Zwarte Pieten, or Black Peters, arrive in Amsterdam amid protests claiming the tradition is racist.

Sinterklaas is not really ‘the Dutch version of Father Christmas’. The festival is on 6 December (and mainly on 5 December, the evening before 5 December), remembering the Christian Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop in what is today Turkey. Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, was derived from Sinterklaas later in the USA, and connected to Christmas, not 5 or 6 December.

Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands today:

The PVV

Geert Wilders‘ xenophobic party in the Netherlands

wil propose a bill which will protect Zwarte Piet.

Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) is a blackface character in the Dutch…

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