The only video (so far) that I did not record in the Netherlands, I made in Germany near the border with Poland. It was about Bismarck, Russian soldiers and Soviet rule. Title: A military cemetery in Spremberg: “Sonst Nichts“.
‘Sonst Nichts’ was part of a slogan often used by the terrible Bismarck, who laid the foundation for the Third Reich.
The photo above is of a group of people campaigning against Freedom of Expression (for women, more specifically).
These are people who are loosely, but globally organized, under the banner of anti-fascism; they even call themselves ‘AntiFA’!
As illustrated in the image, they have no idea what the terms FAscism or Nazi stand for.
The woman literally tells the policemen: “This person is from the other side. From the Nazis anyway“.
But the photo above this post shows an even more painful reality: people who may know about the Second World War that the Russian people suffered relatively and absolutely the most and therefore (?) see the terrorist communist leadership of the Soviet Union as the obvious opposite of Nazism.
Who don’t know that the S in NSDAP stood for ‘socialist’.
Who do not know that Mussolini was a leader of the Italian Socialist party for ten years before he became leader of fascism.
Who have never heard of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, do not know when WWII started in Europe or that on that moment the war in East Asia had already been going on for a couple of years.
Orwell
I am a great admirer of George Orwell (and several other social democrats from long, long ago). Orwell wrote, among other things, two very famous novels: ‘1984‘ and ‘Animal Farm‘. My painted portrait (see below) of him is partly inspired by both those books. To me he really represents ‘What was good about the Left’.
I was also pleased that John Laughland -head of Forum for Democracy International– extensively praised Orwell in his contribution to a China-congress about a year ago.
The figures in the lower left and upper right of my painting are inspired by the last sentences from Animal Farm that Laughland quoted:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Before 1940, Orwell himself took part in the war against Nazism and fascism: in the Spanish Civil War.
There he became intimately acquainted with the communism of Lenin and Stalin. In addition to fighting Franco’s troops and his Italian (fascist) and German (Nazi) supporters, their supporters also fought against Spanish groups that leaned against syndicalism, anarchism and even nihilism. Groups that were stronger in Spain than in any other country. Very emphatically also anti-church, in Spain therefore anti-Catholic.
So in a sense I associate Orwell with ‘the good side of the left‘. Like the May 1940 British Labor MP’s that voted unanimously for Churchill as the new Prime Minister (Here I wrote more about May 10 1940 in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom).
Although I have been very negative about anything that smacks of Antifa, libertarianism or nihilism for many years, in the run-up to that first meeting of the Dutch version of Let Women Speak, I still encountered a surprising new low.
One such person discovered my admiration for Orwell and saw this as confirmation that I was definitely “from the other side, from the Nazis“.
After all, I rejected communism…
The terraced house resident
Since 2023 Dutch social democrats have been incorporated into the Green Left: a group in which the Dutch Communist Party (CPN) -and even Maoists such as Paul Rosenmöller- have an important role to play. Frans Timmermans heads the list of candidates for this new party in the national elections at the end of November. He openly speaks about the importance of the collective over the individual…
Most people in my country immediately know why I address this Timmermans that way. He is one of the most lying politicians in the world. He is the son of a high-ranking civil servant, became a civil servant after his studies and military service and then worked exclusively in politics. That made him a wealthy man. He worked in Brussels for the last fourteen years, the last five of those as Vice-President of the European Commission. He lives in a castle-like villa, but when his wealth was pointed out to him, he flatly claimed that his terraced house costs him a lot…
Former explicitly Communist MP Brouwer even tried for renewed parliamentary membership for this party, but did not make it.
On the list of candidates Timmermans is surrounded by a large number of immigrants. On the group phóto he is even sandwiched between the only two ladies with a (constricting) headscarf…
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