Wis[s]e Words

Football

I'm not what you would call a proper football fan. I don't go to games, don't watch them on telly, don't turn to the sports section first when reading a newspaper. I'm not a football hater though; I quite understand why people like it, even if I usually don't bother with it.

There's one exception to my football agnosticism; which is when Holland is playing in an international tournament, like they are doing at the moment in Euro2004. There's something magical to a tournament like that, something that just isn't there for me in ordinary competitons. Maybe it's because there's both less and more at stake in these games. It's playing for the honour of your country and your team, rather than for your bank account and your club's shareholders.

And every time I actually watch a football game I'm surprised again by how addictive these can be. The game last night was a case in point: one of the best games I've seen Holland play, even if we still lost 3-2 from the Czech Republic, who were playing quite good themselves. Neither side gave up, with both sides attacking from the first to the last minute, having many more chances to score than there were goals. It was also an exercise in frustration, as the defeat of our team was at least partially to blame on the referee. First, he didn't award us a penalty we should've had, after Ruud van Nistelrooij was held in a bearhug by a Czech defender in the penalty area. And then he compounded his error, by awarding John Heitinga a second yellow card for a relatively minor foul, which left us with ten man and made it easy for the Czech to score their third goal. All the while, there were some brilliant chances for us, all of which just missed or were just saved by the Czech keeper or just hit the goal post... If not for that bloody referee, we could've won and we would be through to the next round by now. Thanks to him, we now have to beat Latvia AND trust the Czechs to beat Germany...

Anyway, I didn't just want to rant about last night's game. There's a larger point I'd like to make. If you know the Dutch, you will probably know that we aren't a very nationalistic or patriotic nation, except when it comes to sport and especially football, when entire neighbourhoods (including my own) are dressed in orange, the traditional colour of the Dutch team. Whenever there is any international sporting event in which there are Dutch competitors, it is not hard to spot their fans: just look for the people dressed in orange, banging drums and making noise.

But this isn't patriotism in the same way that English supporters, dressed up in red and white and flying English flags is. Orange is not a symbol of the country of the Netherlands; it's originally a symbol of the House of Oranje-Nassau, long since co-opted by the Dutch people. Which means there isn't the same kind of double edge to the patriotism that you have elsewhere: because it doesn't represent the country, it can't be appropriated by nationalists. Nor is it possible at this point for racists to co-opt it: just look at the team we are supporting in Euro2004...

The orange fans are just an extreme case of a larger trend in Europe: a redefinition of patriotism into something far more inclusive and multicultural. Take the English flag for example: for years this was a symbol for racists and other meatheads; this year it has been taken back from them to such an extent even Asian England supporters have no problems in flying it, as I've seen mentioned several times. I think this sort of relaxed, quiet pride in not so much your country as your fellow country folk is quite an improvement, don't you?

Posted by Martin Wisse at 2:34PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Ronald Reagan died

So Ronald Reagan finally died; the eulogising will start in five minutes. Having seen what happened when that other embarassement, Richard Nixon died, I have no doubt Reagan will be praised up the wazoo in the coming weeks. And of course, the loonies who want to name everything in the country, from the dimes to airports named after him will only be strenghtened in their efforts.

Now my first political memory is a feeling of disappointment after hearing Carter lost the 1980 presidential elections (I was six years old...), so I'm not entirely unbiased about the guy, but even so the truth is he was a disaster as a president. He wasn't a president, he acted being a president. He won the 1980 elections because he let his election staff do dodgy deals with Iran. He then oversaw the first major onslaught on workers right and the welfare system in the United States, started a massive and largely unnecessary builtup of the US military, halting Cold War detente even almost causing World War 3 when he forgot the mikes were on and joked that "the bombing will start in five minutes".

Meanwhile his war on Communism grinded a lot of innocent people up in El Salvador, Nigaracua, Honduras amongst others, while it also made it necessary to trade weapons with Iran illegaly, in order to be able to finance those noble freedom fighters, the Contras. While his wife financed well intentioned but crap comics against drugs, his own administration was making sure cocaine could flow into the country on a larger scale then ever.

And he thought it was a good idea to lay wreaths on the graves of Waffen SS members.

For all those reasons I can't care less that he died and I can't pretend its a great loss to humanity. Besides, he got to die peacefully; some people were less lucky, thanks to him.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 2:49PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

D-day

Tomorrow it is exactly 60 years ago that the invasion of Normandy started, June 6th 1944, D-Day. That day some 156,000 troops landed on the beaches of northern Normandy: the Americans on Utah and Omaha, the British and Canadians on Sword, Juno and Gold. Over 4,000 of them would die during the landings, with the US forces on Omaha having an especially hard time, thought he Canadians at Juno having not much of a cakewalk either...

But there were not just British, American and Canadian troops involved in D-Day. Also present were French, Chzech, Polish, Greek, Australian, New Zealand, Norwegian and Dutch troops. Even though the bulk of the invasion force was made up of Britsh, American and Canadian troops, it is important not to forget the contributions of other nations, some of which, like the Polish and Czech had been fighting from the start of World War II, first for their own countries, later for the Allied cause.

Therefore I would like to remember the Dutch contribution here. After the Netherlands were overrun by the Nazis in May 1940, quite a lot of people managed to escape to England. Much of the navy crossed the North Sea once it became clear the Netherlands would surrender, including some ships which were still being built in the great naval ship yards of Rotterdam and Vlissingen. The same held true for much of the Netherland's merchant navy, whose ships would serve with honour in the various convoys to Russia. The airforce had lost most of its planes during the invasion, but several pilots managed to escape anyway and served in the Dutch squadrons of the Royal Air Force during the rest of the war. Finally many soldiers and civilians alike fled to France and from there to England with the retreating French troops, which had reached the southern Netherlands at the time of the Dutch surrender [1].

At D-Day, Dutch B-25's bombarded targets in Normandy, including the headquarters of a German armoured division; eight of them were lost on operations in June 1944. The Dutch gunboats Hr. Ms. Soemba and Hr. Ms. Flores supported the invasion, targeting German positions on the landing beaches; they were valued so much by the British they gave them the nick name "The Terrible Twins". To counter the threat of German torpedo boats, the dreaded "Schnellbote", Dutch motor torpedo boats were active, while Dutch minesweepers were making the Normandy coast safe, one of which, the Hr.Ms. Marken was destroyed while doing so on 20th May 1944, sinking with only one survivor. A Dutch cruiser, the Hr. Ms. Sumatra was deliberately sank as a wave breaker for the two artificial harbours the Allies constructed at the Normandy coast. (Some of the caissons built for the construction of those harbours and not needed for them were later used to mend Dutch dykes damaged by Allied bombardement later in the year, as well as after the 1953 flood.) Finally, a large number of Navvy and merchant marine people and ships were of course used to transport Allied soldiers and supplies to the beaches.

The international remembrance of D-day is happening today, at which Dutch veterans will also be present. There will also be a Dutch remembrance tomorrow, at Scheveningen, at which Dutch, British and Canadian veterans will be present.

[1]: When the Netherlands surrender on May 15th 1940, this did not include the province of Zeeland, where French troops where still present and fighting the Germans. This led on May 17th to the bombardement of Middelburg, my hometown, whose historic centre was completely destroyed in it. Fortunately, much of it was restored after the war.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 4:25AM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Recently read

Stiff - Mary Roach
303 pages
published in 2003

What happens to your body after you die? Mary Roach explores the options when you donate your body to science. Nicely macaber and interesting without being too gross.

The Demon in the Freezer - Richard Preston
240 pages
published in 2002

Written shortly after the Anthrax attacks on Tom Daschle and other Democrats and several "liberal" media figures, this is about a far more frightening prospect: smallpox. Richard Preston traces the story of how smallpox got eradicated in nature, but still exists in storage in the US and Russia and unfortunately, probably also elsewhere.

Dark Life - Michael Ray Taylor
287 pages
published in 1999

Sort of a weird counterpart to The Demon in the Freezer, this is a book written by a caver/journalist who got involved in the search to socalled dark life; subterran life beyond the boundaries of known life. It largely revolves around the discovery of fossilised nanobacteria in a Martian meteorite and the discovery of terran equivalents

Posted by Martin Wisse at 11:01PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Couple 243

Last Monday, gay marriage became legal in the US state of Massachusetts, which immediately led to a run on marriage licences there, in towns like Cambridge. One couple who did so, couple 243, blogged their experience. It is a very emotional, happy piece:

We paid our $15 and walked up the stairs to the exit. People shook our hands on the way out, and as we walked out the front door at 4:15am we were greeted by a small cheering crowd.

"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" they yelled as we got to the bottom of the nearly-deserted steps. We kissed, posed for a picture and drove home through the nearly deserted streets.

(Brian)

[...]

I have a hard time gauging what my emotions were as we started running up the gauntlet -- the avenue that led from the sidewalk on Mass Ave. up to the front doors of City Hall -- to find that there were relatively few couples seeking licenses -- fewer than the thousand I might have expected -- but that there were about three thousand just *watching* -- a mass of people singing spontaneously, chanting, waving signs, all with their own little political agendas to defeat bush or proclaim love for gays or just be happy that we were getting what they had rights to -- a mass overfilling the lawn in front of City Hall, filling the sidewalk on both sides of Mass Ave, and stretching tendrils up and down several blocks, towards both Harvard and Central. As soon as Brian grabbed my hand and said let's give it a try, and started running, they all started cheering, clapping, screaming. I did not expect that.

(Aaron

It's hard to imagine the impact this has in the US when you're living in a country where gay marriage has been legal for a number of years now. Where it was realised more as the logical end result of the emancipation process rather than as something people had to fight hard for. It must feel so good to finally be able to proclaim your love for each other the way you want to, knowing there are so many who would keep that from you; even if Bush pushes through a constitutional amedament tomorrow making it illegal again, the moment itself can never be taken from you anymore.

Good luck and congratulations to Brian and Aaron; may they and all those other couples who can finally marry have a long and happy marriage.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 5:32PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

What happened in Haiti

Another article from The New Left Review takes a look at what happened in Haiti earlier this year:

What began following the Lavalas election victory of 1990 was the deployment of a partially new strategy for disarming this revolution, at a moment when the Cold War no longer offered automatic justification for the repression of mass movements by the overwhelming use of force. Designed not simply to suppress the popular movement but to discredit and destroy it beyond repair, the key to this strategy was the implementation of economic measures intended to intensify already crippling levels of mass impoverishment, backed up by old-fashioned military repression and propaganda designed to portray resistance to elite interests as undemocratic and corrupt. The operation has been remarkably successful -- so successful that in 2004, with the enthusiastic backing of the media, the UN and the wider 'international community', it resulted in the removal of a constitutionally elected government whose leadership had always enjoyed the support of a large majority of the population.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 4:07PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Planet of Slums

Mike Davis, in The New Left Review writes about the urbanisation of the third world (as also touched upon in an earlier post):

Urbanists also speculate about the processes weaving together Third World cities into extraordinary new networks, corridors and hierarchies. For example, the Pearl River (Hong Kong-Guangzhou) and the Yangtze River (Shanghai) deltas, along with the Beijing-Tianjin corridor, are rapidly developing into urban-industrial megalopolises comparable to Tokyo-Osaka, the lower Rhine, or New York-Philadelphia. But this may only be the first stage in the emergence of an even larger structure: 'a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java.' [13] Shanghai, almost certainly, will then join Tokyo, New York and London as one of the 'world cities' controlling the global web of capital and information flows.

[...]

But slums, however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future. The countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world's poor, but that doubtful title will pass to urban slums by 2035. [49] At least half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be credited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum dwellers by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect, but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds the slums perse.

A very frightening article, reminiscent, as Ken MacLeod also noted of science fiction novels like John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 3:21PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

The Pentagon as slumlord

The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighbourhood militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite army rangers, forced US strategists to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as 'Mout: Militarised Operations on Urbanised Terrain'. Ultimately a National Defence Panel review in December 1997 castigated the army as unprepared for protracted combat in the impassable maze-like streets of poor cities. As a result, the four armed services launched crash programmes to master streetfighting under realistic Third World conditions. 'The future of warfare', the journal of the Army War College declared, 'lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world.'

Socialist Review, May 2004

The results of this are currently on display in Iraq...

Link via Genosse Tabu

Posted by Martin Wisse at 7:11AM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Recently Read

Newton's Wake - Ken Macleod
369 pages
published in 2004

I was a bit worried after finishing Engine City, as it wasn't up to Ken Macleod's usual standards; it read as if he had to force himself to finish it. Fortunately, Newton's Wake is much better, basically a space opera trilogy complete in one book.

Singularity Sky - Charlie Stross
313 pages
published in 2003

Singularity Sky is a clever book masquerading as broad farce. Charlie Stross' starting point seems to have been "what if 1905 Tsarist Russia had experienced a full Vingean Singularity". Don't expect the same density of ideas as in his short stories; this is an almost traditional space opera. Almost.

A Question of Blood - Ian Rankin
440 pages
published in 2003

Continuing the Scottish theme, this is the 14th Inspector Rebus series and one of the better efforts. Rebus is a hardbitten, hard luck cop in Edinburgh, who this time gets called in to investigate a school shooting. He's also in trouble again, to great surprise, this time for possibly being involved in the violent death of a small time crook who was harassing a friend.

Year's Best SF 7 - David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (editors)
498 pages
published in 2002

The best short science fiction stories of 2001, according to the editors. Some good stories, but their taste in science fiction is definately not mine. There's a lot of chaff amongst the wheat.

The Great Siege: Malta 1565 - Ernle Bradford
256 pages, including notes and index
published in 1961

History written as if it was an adventure story, this tells about the siege of Malta by the great Ottoman Emperor Soleyman. Ernle Bradford's sympathies clearly lie with the besieged, the Knights of St. John, but he still manages to be objective. Worth a look if you can find it.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 6:40AM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

The morality of the pro-war left

Does the fact that US soldiers have engaged in torture in Iraq demand of those on the left who supported the war to re-evaluate their position?

Wasn't the main reason given by those on the left who supported this war why they did so, the chance to remove a dictatorial regime, rather than any of the official reasons given by the Bush administration?

Than surely, the fact that the liberators themselve engage in torture and rape, must cause some soul searching? After all, what does liberation matter if torture still happens?

Posted by Martin Wisse at 3:19PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.