laurentius

Dear Brian Wolfe

A lovely blog, and except for the part of the overpaid sporters I completely agree with you. I personally do not have heroes, but in my country it is (or was, if the left has their way) common for every town and city to have a neighbourhood with streets named after the seaheroes (zeeheldenbuurten). Streets in these neighbourhoods are named after important figures in the Dutch navy, and since the Dutch have always had a navy we have quite an amount of seaheroes, names include De Ruyter, Tromp, Piet Heijn etc. But recently we have had a bit of a hiccup in the Netherlands, as people of colour together with leftists have opened a historical discussion (which I always love, don't get me wrong) about the darkside of these people. In their opinion it was true that they had fought for the Netherlands, but it was also important to point out that they had taken part in or invested in the slave-trade, which as we all know was common in the 17th and 18th century. They demanded that the statues were taken down and the streets renamed, there was even someone who suggested to tear down the historical city-centre of Leiden, because it had been built with profits of the slave-trade. One gentleman from the dutch party VVD (Volkspartij voor vrijheid en democratie) put this whole debate to rest with the historical words ''We kunnen de mensen van toen niet met de waardes van nu bekijken'' (We cannot judge the people from the past, with the standards/ideas of now). And in my opinion that sums it up, ideas change, opinions change and societies change but what they did, by the standards of their time, was what they thought to be the just thing to do. And perhaps the heroes of today will be despiced and hated in 300 years, or perhaps not, because people in the future will finally know what perspective means.

Kind regards, Laurentius