Translation of an interview with Ewoud Butter for the Dutch opinion website and monthly journal De Kanttekening, dated 12 March 2025 How did you get involved with racism? My childhood in the Dutch East Indies had a fundamental impact on my thinking about racism. I grew up in a colonial society in which white Dutch […]
Time to look at history from the point of view of the arms industry?
How did we end up in a situation where there is increasing talk of an emerging Third World War? A look back at a century in which the arms industry repeatedly found enemy images, along with the appropriate triggers, and in the meantime perfected its arsenal. Time to look at history from the point of […]
The Netherlands Waged a Bloody 4-Year War to keep Indonesia Colonized after 1945; Finally it is Apologizing
( Jacobin NL) On Monday 29 May 2023 I stood with my granddaughter and my son-in-law in front of the Proclamation Monument in Jakarta, with the two more than life-size bronze statues of the Indonesians Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, who on 17 August 1945 proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. In between them […]
When Politicians get involved in Science: The marble statue of Gregor Mendel
It is 2022, the bicentenary of the birth of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, and this is being celebrated in all kinds of ways. In 1955, as a biology student, I travelled with a group of young people to Brno (then part of Czechoslovakia), where he had done his experiments with […]
Two guises of racism, disdain as well as envy
Amsterdam (Special to Informed Comment) – Discussions still focus on who can and who cannot be called racist, while the question of what racism actually is, is posed much less and is often fobbed off with vague descriptions in the direction of ‘believing population groups to be inferior’. Looking down on people is of course […]
Cluster bombs once against Vietnamese people and still in use today
( Joop) – On 4 March 1971 our train pulled in to Paris’s Gare du Nord station. My then husband Ab van Kammen and I were going to spend a few days in the city. We had left our three daughters with various friends, packed our suitcases and caught the train. It would not just […]
An Atomic Bomb no bigger than a Pencil
By Anne-Ruth Wertheim[1] – It was 24 August 1945. I was ten years old, living with my mother, brother and sister in a Japanese internment camp on the Dutch East Indian island of Java. That evening we and all the other internees had been summoned to the large covered area by the main gate. The […]
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