A new kind of historiography is in vogue. I don’t know whether this is also the case in books, but if you see how the national history is told on television, it seems that ‘we’ are now in the phase of humility and self-criticism. Certainly if pride was felt in the past at a historical period, it cannot be distanced from it loud and clear enough. It started with The story of the Netherlands, the popular series that was broadcast last year, was watched by an average of 1.7 million Dutch people. The black pages were not skipped. The VOC era, slave trade, exploitation, colonialism, collaboration with the enemy, it was all discussed and ‘we’ didn’t spare ourselves.
It may be too early to talk about a new trend, but it is striking that nowadays there is always an actor involved when it comes to history. A narrator who tells the story, and immediately says how ‘we’ should feel about that past. This is how Daan Schuurmans helped The story of the Netherlands comedian Diederik van Vleuten is the narrator for the three-part series about the last Dutch colony.
How a “small country” almost caused a third world war shortly after World War II begins High Game in the East: The Struggle for New Guinea. With beautiful historical footage, director Foeke de Koe brings to life the period in which the Netherlands’ days as a colonial power were numbered.
Its history begins on Dam Square in Amsterdam, at the state banquet of 1949. In attendance are Queen Juliana, Vice President Mohammed Hatta and numerous Dutch dignitaries. Then and there the end of the colony of the Dutch East Indies was heralded, and the beginning of the Republic of Indonesia announced. Was this the end of Dutch colonial history? No. Because, says Diederik van Vleuten: “We decided to keep a part for ourselves.” New Guinea ‘we’ did not give to Indonesia, but remained in ‘our’ possession. “It was a gift waiting to be unwrapped.” Dutch New Guinea had the largest gold mine in the world, possessed a wealth of copper reserves, the jungle offered wood, the ocean fish and then oil was also found. Oh, and people lived there. An ‘uncivilized and primitive people’, ‘we’ thought at the time. With a civilizing offensive, ‘we’ would encourage the Papuans to become civilized and self-reliant.
We, us, us. The ge-us and we-we is probably intended to suggest a collective past, but there is also something of shared guilt. It evokes shame, embarrassment about the ways of thinking and acting of previous generations, and therefore incomprehension. Diederik van Vleuten himself wrote a piece about the historical series in the VARA guide of this week. In it he speaks of “a drama of Dutch inability”, “another act in the great Dutch tragedy of missed opportunities”. Replacing patriotism with self-loathing, however understandable, may not be the best way to commit history.
Even without commentary, the images tell me about a time that is no longer ours. How crazy it was that boys of twenty were sent to New Guinea to become district head, judge, construction supervisor and nurse for an area that is 1,000 square kilometers larger than the provinces of Limburg, Brabant and Zeeland put together. Then, when Indonesia dropped paratroopers into the jungle to drive off the Dutch, eighteen-year-old conscripts were sent to New Guinea to hunt down the infiltrators. Boys who could only find the enemy if a Papuan showed them the way through the jungle. History can speak for itself.