ENCHANTÉ – December 7 Then and Now
I was 5 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. At that time Nazi Germany had already occupied whole continental Europe, including Holland, for a year and a half. I didn’t hear about Pearl Harbor until US soldiers liberated us in 1945 and told us about it. I didn’t envisage the horror of Pearl Harbor and the national significance of December 7 until I saw the pictures in musea when I arrived in the US in 1974. The vivid memories of seeing bombs exploding on Schiphol airport in May 1940 when I was 4 1/2 were the ones that had primarily occupied my mind.
At liberation, we also heard the awful stories of the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942, when Allied ships, including several American, British, Australian and Dutch warships (which were berthed at the Marine base at Surabaja in the Dutch Indies) fought a Japanese invasion under the command of Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman. The Dutch Government in exile in London was one of the first to join the US after Pearl Harbor and declare war on Japan. Japan, short of natural resources, immediately set out to expand its realm in Asia by overpowering Singapore and Malaysia, and Borneo and Celebes of the Dutch Indies, to secure itself of abundant oil supplies. Next was the largest island, Java, of the Dutch Indies, which it approached from the island of Bali it had already occupied.
The allied fleet endeavored to stop the Japanese from invading Java, but the Japanese ships were much better armed with heavier cannons and super torpedos that had a reach of 25 miles. Its air force was superior. The more powerful Japanese fleet, which proved much better trained in sea battle at night, destroyed many of the allied ships. Two Dutch light cruisers, De Ruyter, Karel Doorman’s flagship, and the Java, were sunk and Karel Doorman perished with his ship. Several other Dutch warships sank, including the destroyers De Kortenaer and Witte de With. More than a 2300 sailors, including over 900 Dutch sailors, lost their lives.
Dutch Archive pictures
Thousands of Dutch families, who lived in the Dutch Indies, were imprisoned in Japanese concentration camps, where many were tortured and died. The Dutch never regained full control over the Dutch Indies, and the Japanese invasion meant the end of its colonial power. After the war, a bloody and cruel independence war erupted in the Dutch Indies, which ended in 1949 when Indonesia became independent. Thousands of Indonesians fled to Holland when the independence war started and were lodged with Dutch families to recover and find a new life. A father with three sons stayed with us.
Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Java Sea show some serious common lessons: In both cases, the enemy was much better prepared and armed. In Holland, this led to building a much stronger fleet after the war. Then, under cover of a powerful ally, the US, efforts to keep up a fierce military power slowed down, a pattern followed by many European countries. The lessons learned were soon forgotten.
Fast forward to 2016. While it is said that the American military is the best in the world, the political will to keep up its strength has repeatedly been undermined by several American administrations: Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama emphasized social programs over military strength. 9/11 constituted the second attack on American soil. More than 2400 sailors were killed at Pearl Harbor and close to 3000 people lost their lives during 9/11. The latter was a terrorist attack, but many say it could have been prevented had America been better prepared and kept its eyes open.
credit: ilsemundo.com
A new type of war was added to our human inclination to destroy each other. It took a long time to recognize that there is no real difference between “formal war” and “informal war”: both intend to destroy Western Civilization and its religious and philosophical democratic principles. The expansion of radical Islamic fascism signifies the same threat as German Nazism and Japanese Imperialism did, as do the threats of dictatorial regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.
Come 2017; the world is no better place. The Chinese military is spending trillions on military strength and expansion of its territory by building military islands in the China Sea, helped by the greed of the American market buying its goods and borrowing its money to cover its national debt. Russia invades the Crimea and controls eastern Ukraine, without a significant Western response. Iran undermines the Middle East through proxy wars and support of terrorism, causing tremendous civilian suffering in Syria.
Credit: Kansascity.com
The weeks after 9/11 with jets patrolling the skies aided by nearby refueling airplanes gave me that depressing feeling from WW II that we were at war again, and unfortunately we are. Osama’s escape from Afghanistan felt like Hitler’s escape from several coups against him. The indefatigable US Ops finally caught him, but when they did, the harm was already done: Sunni Radicalism had spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, and even the Far East.
Credit: Wikipedia.com
I sat on the fence about the US invasion of Iraq. I could understand it from a defensive point of view: Sadam used similar bluff as Hitler did, he had invaded Kuwait beforehand, he built nuclear facilities and was working on replacements after the Israelis bombed the first one. He continually launched scuds at Israel and did use poisonous gas on the Kurds. Sadam smartly removed everything concerning weapons of mass destruction to where it came from and used the gullible self-destructing US and world media to accuse the US. Although the US invasion was badly implemented, after the surge things began to shape up in Iraq. At the World Bank, we noticed a slow but steady increase in a willingness to restore a badly retarded administration to modern normalcy. Despite internal religious strife, administrators became more responsive to stable government. Northern Iraq regained calm and even became prosperous again. When the reconstruction effort ended, I had good hopes that it might take off (see my blogs “Iraq: A Hands-on Effort to Rational Thought,” (9/13/2014); “Iraq: From Western Dream to Fragile State”; (8/23/2014), and “Don’t Cry For Me, Iraq.” (8/11/2014).
Own Pictures
Credit: Fox News
The change in American policy under Obama destroyed all that with one swipe. Al-Zarkawi, the Sunni anti-Shiite leader from Jordan, had begun a fierce fight against the American occupation. Although US Ops were able to exterminate him, his force remained active underground. If invading Iraq may be considered a mistake, leaving it abruptly meant compounding that mistake. When the US military left Iraq, Sunny radicals quickly regrouped and despite their internal differences, created ISIS. The rest is history.
As a WWII kid, I hate war with a vengeance, but also know there will always be enemies as there will always be bullies in school. We have to be prepared to be strong enough to scare them off and defeat them. If we don’t, they’ll take us to the cleaners. Administrations like the Obama-ones open us up to being overpowered like Nazi Germany and Japan’s then Imperialism did to the Western World.
I am sleeping a bit better after the recent national elections. There is much hope things will change.
Credit: Canada Journal – News of the World
In my opinion, the political left of the US has done enormous damage to the fighting spirit and courage of this country. America may be divided (God knows why. Such a great place to live!) but as a foreign guest in the US, I pray they never come back to power. I don’t complain about placing competent generals to head security and military positions. Their decisiveness will keep me from lying awake at night about the future of my American kids and grandkids. We have to stay vigilant to protect our way of life and that of others that share it. Signs in Europe indicate that things are changing there as well.
And if you don’t like my saying these changes are good changes, that’s too bad. Let the other side of the American divide have a chance to show their resolve to make America better and “Great Again.”
ENCHANTÉ – Mice and ICE
It was 10 PM when I sat at my kitchen table, just home from a delightful concert at the Kennedy Center, having a late night snack with a good glass of wine. Suddenly, I had company. A mouse trotted by, lifting its nose, saying “Hello” in its funny mouse way. Shoot! It’s this time of the year again. It’s getting cold outside, and the tricky migrants sneak in, through invisible holes, fissures and garage doors. Well, it’s only one I thought. I called him Max, thinking it was a “he.”
Next evening I sat down again at the kitchen table, watching the late-night news while sipping from a night cap, and this time, handsome Max came by with a friend I named Maxie. Same greeting. Even their tails wagged.
“Anything to eat?” was the clear meaning in their eyes. I always make sure the floor is bereft of crumbs, so I could understand their frustration. Feeling good, I shared two pieces of real Dutch cheese. For American mice, this must have been an exceptional treat, because they scurried away with it into a corner so fast I could hardly follow them. That made me curious. I noticed a tiny open space between a wall and a molding on the freshly installed parquet flooring.
I figured they had taken shelter in an adjacent storage room underneath the kitchen, which is my wife’s safe-space area I am not allowed to enter. Since I am a coward, I did not mention it to her.
It was a foggy Saturday. I lit the fireplace downstairs in the rec-room, put on Brahm’s piano concerto #2, and sat down with a warm cup of tea. Unwittingly, I glanced at the basket where I keep old newspapers (mostly The Washington Post I don’t read anymore for obvious reasons). To my surprise, I saw Max’s and Maxie’s whole family snugly ensconced in snips of paper, snoozing or fast asleep. They seemed to like the music.
This got me a little bit concerned. I admitted that I had a nice warm house and understood the plight of mice in the cold. But they seemed overly content, making babies by the dozens which had all to be fed. From what? I explored the basement, which is another area my wife designates as storage room and inspected the laundry space. I found chunks of wool which seemed to be pulled from a cushion. Low and behold, the remnants led me to a half-open cupboard where a bag of rice was torn with snippets all over the place. Max and Maxie had taken over this second storage room as well. A further inspection took me to the garage, which is full of carton boxes with wooly Christmas dolls. It turned out Maxie’s breeding house.
So I was obliged to inform the Missus of the mice invasion. “What!” And then a whole speech of why I didn’t tell her before, didn’t I have any sense of East West Home Best, all the diseases they bring in, the damage they do to the house, especially your antique heirloom furniture, etcetera, etcetera. I was ordered to call a pest removal service on the double. Well, that’s not easy on a Saturday. Going back to the fireplace to finish my tea, Max and Maxie and their children and relatives had gone into hiding because of the loud exchange of views. No wonder. Words about deportation from their newfound habitat had scared the hell out of them.
The Pest service rang the bell.
I looked at the guy and asked if they hadn’t forgotten to put the “M” in front of the “ICE” on his shirt.
“Huh?” was the answer.
I opened the garage and pointed to the temporary headquarters of Max and Maxie. “Where are you going to taken them?” I asked.
“Huh?” the agent said.
“I mean, what are you going to do with them?”
“You don’t want them in your house, do you?” he said, looking at me as if I were the dumbest idiot he’d ever met. I probably was.
“No, but…”
“No worry. We’ll take them across the street where they came from. Over there,” he said, pointing to the row of houses. “There, they gave them poisonous food. You, I understand, gave them Dutch cheese, that’s what your missus said. Blows my mind.”
“Well, there’s this thing of compassion, you know.” I knew the argument wouldn’t stick.
“Compassion?” he scowled. “Do you think they’ll feel compassion for you once they’ve taken over your place?”
“So what do I do if they try to come back again?” I got really upset with the idea of having to sleep with mice crawling through my house and occupying the bathrooms when I needed to go.
“Build a barbed wired wall around your house, okay? We can do that for you!”
I retreated from the garage and let the MICE PATROL do their work. Max and Maxie left with their siblings and offspring under loud protest.
I wasn’t around to hear it. We built the wall and lived happily ever after.
SOME WOMEN I HAVE KNOWN – Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets
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ENCHANTING THE SWAN : Grad students and musicians Paul and Fiona fall in love when they perform The Swan and agree to marry but paternal evil blocks their love until Christmas shows their blessing. A moving story of troubled love and inspiring music you want to read.
ENCHANTÉ – The Journalist
When I was eighteen, fresh from boarding school, I wanted to be a journalist. I had run the School Paper and loved to write stories I had uncovered in the catacombs of a Jesuit Valhalla. Of course, within limits: we were heavily “censored” by the powers that were.
Nonetheless, my ambition stood firm. I had interviewed with editors of the local papers to find out if this was my calling. I returned ever so convinced, although they told me that it would be a life of poverty and shame: I would always be “criticized” for whatever I wrote.
When I visited a distant Aunt, with whose son I had played in my earlier years during World War II, she said – in a somewhat denigrating manner – “You would be the first journalist in the family.”
But first I had to do my “military service.”
During my army experience, I knew I was not made of general’s material, despite some illustrious uncles and forefathers. Proceeding on my dreams of becoming a journalist, I elected to study political science. I soon discovered that there was no “science” in that faculty and added economics, ending up with two degrees. Economics is said not to be a “science” either because it cannot be “exact” like chemistry (too much “on the one hand and the other”). But at least you learn to count that one plus one is two and not three. At that stage, light shone on my young head, and it became clear I could never be a journalist, living on a dime and having to defer to a newspaper’s “political views.” Apparently, the journalists’ bosses wanted you to follow their “train of thought,” which was not necessarily “objective reporting.”
Meanwhile, I kept in touch with my journalist friends who had elected to follow my original dream. It was amazing how their views differed depending on the papers they worked for. Objectivity had become a virtue embedded in the eye of the beholder. I made a speech somewhere, and the next day each paper wrote a different account of what they had heard. There was “De Volkskrant” (People’s Paper) which was “labor-working class,” “De Tijd” (The Times) which catered to the Christian center, “De Telegraaf” (The Telegraph) which my mother read because it had good gossip stories, and none of them really reported what I had said.
To my utter surprise, each one said that they had done just that. When I argued the contrary, what did they say? Their editors had changed it in line with the newspaper’s point of view. Period. Some of them were told that if they did not write to the newspaper’s “conclusion” they might as well go fishing in the Amsterdam canals.
And so, at a very young age at the beginning of a career shaped in student idealism of bettering the world, I learned never to trust whatever a newspaper reported. Except the “headlines,” there was nothing to learn anything “true” from what followed. Even headlines were skewed. So how do papers make money that way? Because of advertising. Thanks to that flow of regular money, “journalists” can write whatever they chose, as long as they write what they are told to write if they want their paycheck to continue. Only when newspapers overdo it and lose too many readers, they stop operating or get swallowed up in a merger. But that does not make them any better. Throughout my international career, I noticed that this journalist mantra of having to report from the left existed everywhere in the Western world.
I often wondered where these journalists came from and why so many newspapers represent the “political left.” Left and right have existed as long as people learned to write. “Athens and Spartacus,” the Roman Empire, the opposition to Galilei, the French Revolution, the Civil War, all had their protagonists on both sides. But why are the major US newspapers so blatantly proffering the leftist political view? Even if they continue to lose readership, like The NY Times? Since a long time, I don’t read newspapers anymore. And when I did, I used them mainly for starting my fireplace or find some sales. The same question goes for the “mainstream” media on TV. Why do they so overtly support “the left?” What’s so “mainstream” about that?
My theory is that journalists usually come from elite households and love to write, but have little inclination to start a business or make real money which in my estimation requires more guts. They often emerge from good universities and are considered “highly intelligent.” Universities in the US seem overwhelmingly “liberal.” Perhaps because the “intelligent” Academia caters to the “young” who are mostly rebellious and anti-Mom and Dad. Well, intelligent they may be, but are they “smart?” A person who starts a business, and is able to become wealthy is to me a lot “smarter” than a journalist who makes it on television and gets paid ridiculous salaries for proffering the leftist views thanks to the advertising industry which has no “color.”
I have come to the conclusion that objective reporting, the essence of journalism, has gone out of the window, except for a few rare newspapers. Most commentators on TV report “from their point of view” directed by their bosses. Writers also write from a “point of view.” But they “make it up.” So to see, the “journalist’s point of view” is not any different. It is tendentious and pursuing a case, often misreporting as a result. The recent US elections are a clear case in point, amplified by what the “mainstream media” keeps spitting out afterwards. That’s why I don’t read or listen to them anymore. I rather read or write a book. I like to “make it up” the real way.
DON’T FORGET YOUR FALL READING!
SOME WOMEN I HAVE KNOWN – Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets
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ENCHANTING THE SWAN : Grad students and musicians Paul and Fiona fall in love when they perform The Swan and agree to marry but paternal evil blocks their love.
Stop The Whining
To all those who flood my e-mail and FB pages with hateful cries about Donald Trump’s victory election, shed your tears somewhere else. Elections have consequences (a quote from his Excellency Barack Obama). Now, let’s give The Donald a chance to prove that his way is better than Obama’s (1% growth, 98 million out of the workforce, skyrocketing Obamacare premiums, energy blockages, depleted military, 20 trillion national debt, black and white divided, immigration and a foreign policy in shambles). Stop whining and get over it. Take it from a very happy foreigner guest of your Great USA. Feeling safer again… and a lot more hopeful.
ENCHANTÉ – REPEAT: THE LADY AND THE TRUMP
Hi Everyone: This was written in July 2015!
Remember?
and the
Tramp
Is it not wonderful that everyone wants the Lady and the Trump now? Six years back every one fell for the hope and change-sweet smiling unknown pied piper. An untested senator who had mostly voted not present and sat in a pew listening to–but not hearing–a race baiter. The Senator even pushed that contagious congenital (William Safire of the NY Times in 1996), compulsory lying lady aside. Whatever happened to the Obamagirls? They must have gone hiding under the table. And now, they put that woman back on the table with her fornicating hubby in the background! With 17 opposing politicians-contenders crying “us and them.”
Remember when two dogs fight over a bone, the third runs away with it?
It happened before with that insufferable parrot (pronunciation ‘Perot’) and his crayon boards. We would never have heard of Hillary or even Monica had he just stayed quiet running his business. And now they want to claim that she, still lying off the cliff, is IT? What IQ do they rate us for? Can we endure still more lying than we had for the last six years? How stupid do they think we are?
Well, yes, to be fair, we are quite stupid. In 2012, we re-elected the current politician who should never have been re-elected. Only because the so-called smart electorate stayed home, mad that their candidate was a Mormon. And what did they get for their nonchalance? Four more years of tyranny and stalemate, stagnation and lies. Would we finally not want some good tyranny to throw all these bummers out? Get The Lady and the Trump to clean ship?
PLEASE LET US HAVE REAL HOPE AND HAPPY DAYS AGAIN!
Pundits and politicians, radio and TV commentators, whether socialists or conservatives, feed on each other. The Lady and the Trump are not in their camp. They slip through their fingers. They don’t quack, the pundits do. For pundits and politicians, getting something done is unproductive, because when it’s done you can’t quack about it anymore. And that’s the end of the TV or radio show. They can’t make money that way. They lose their platform. Don’t you see them poor slimy squatters squirm that the Trump is only a ten billion dollar windbag and the Lady a fired CEO? They say would you please let us talk politics instead of having non-politicians taking action? Executive power, you say? Sure, but only the left is allowed to do that. If the right does it, it’s racist, extremist or right-wing conspiracy. Good! Let’s have it the other way around for a change.
Black and White always fighting. All over the world. Even dogs do it. During the last six years it has only gotten worse in the US. And what does ‘H’ stand for other than for Hyena? Do you want a howling Hyena in the White House rather than a bulldog getting things done for America and us for a change?
What about us poor voters and hard workers, that is, those who still have a job? Is it not about time we get some relief from those slimy politicians, especially those who lead us to greater misery with their misguided philosophies that have been proven wrong time after time?
Us Poor Voters!
Well, 20 months later, us poor voters finally came out of the woodworks and SPOKE!
DON’T FORGET YOUR FALL READING!
SOME WOMEN I HAVE KNOWN – Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets
AMAZON.COM AND PAPERBACK
http://amzn.to/1QIL94B
ENCHANTING THE SWAN : Grad students and musicians Paul and Fiona fall in love when they perform The Swan and agree to marry but paternal evil blocks their love.