This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders:
As if the devil plays tricks: exactly one year after Sinéad O’Connor’s suicide (which must still be called a ‘natural death’ but must be accompanied by the standard suicide warning – who can still follow this? Why first conceal it’s a suicide and then tag on the warning?). Well, exactly a year after I also had to search for her book like a needle in a haystack in a Dublin bookstore instead of it being openly displayed – and now the National Wax Museum Dublin comes up with this Thunderbird:
Director Paddy Dunning apologized today. “The statue has been removed. We’re redoing it; this needs to be better.” He vehemently denied it was intended as a publicity stunt.
Dunning admitted to broadcaster RTÉ that he hadn’t seen the statue before its presentation. “The statue was delivered the night before. We hadn’t seen it in advance.” Dunning did not address why he hadn’t inspected the work.
We need to discuss Avvakum Petrov again – the devout Christian who was burned at the stake by fellow Christians after being tortured in Siberia for fifteen years because he refused to concede that a two-hour polyphonic liturgy was more Christian than the traditional six-hour one.
What kind of mentality does it take to burn someone alive who you’ve already tortured for fifteen years, including imprisoning them in an underground pit? All this over a disagreement about the length of a religious service?
A very, very vile mentality, we can agree on that. And this vile mentality disguises itself in this case as ‘modern convenience,’ ‘innovation,’ essentially ‘the automation’ of the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, much like Stalin later automated and made the Gulag more effective.
Apparently, there’s no problem being a Christian and treating a fellow believer this way. That’s not good news for the non-believers among us. Consider also the mentality of someone who rapes children or drops white phosphorus bombs on children, causing them to burn alive.
A very, very vile mentality. It’s no coincidence that Sinéad’s statue was such shoddy work. She dared to tear up the ‘representative of God on earth’ in prime time. They were still counting the countless child corpses in the monasteries when the maker of this mannequin got another chance to emphasize that the opponent always plays dirty.
This year it became known that our AIVD had been monitoring Jews returning from extermination camps for thirty years because they might have developed communist sympathies in those camps.
My initial thought when I read that was: good grief, if they did that to those poor Jews, what are they capable of doing to communist or anarchist writers?
They’ll obstruct them wherever they can, and more than just obstruct. I’m beginning to understand why, at 53, I have never been invited to a single major poetry festival, something that is statistically almost impossible. Why? Well, I was extensively photographed at the Shell blockade in Amsterdam when I was 17. So, I had a ‘red card’ in their ‘brilliant system’ early on. The students who cover their faces know this all too well: don’t cover your face, as I didn’t back then, and you can expect a lifetime of sour opposition. As Willem Oltmans said, ‘Anyone who gets a red card in the Netherlands will never get rid of it.’
A culture of fear, essentially a form of terror and brainwashing.
The fact that there’s still a very radical Christian in a very important position at the Dutch Foundation for Literature (a man who claims that Enlightenment was unnecessary and that this world would be a better place if everyone had continued to believe in Jesus) – that’s the true face of the woke movement, which is just a playacting facade by which the clergy try to retain power.
I have them, but more on that later. And that while everyone thinks I’m crazy for even daring to start a lawsuit. It’s distressing to see how little faith people still have in the rule of law. That’s not surprising considering the above: people who apparently lack any ethical sense are at the secret core of state power. That is as clear as day.
So yes, a David against a Goliath, that’s for sure. Yet I once thought I could have been a good lawyer; my mother thought I should have become a journalist because ‘the askers of difficult questions’ still belonged in the democratic dream. We’ll have to wait for the outcome; I’ve done my best. And I’m glad I was foresighted enough never to make any attempt at journalism. We’ll see if my court case is indeed a futile error. I don’t think so: but they won’t be making a wax figure of me in a museum, not even if I win this case.
Back to poetry. I turned a poem by Karel van de Woestijne into a song:
I also made the animated film myself, and I play a Rhodes Piano Bass on the track.
Creating works like these truly delights me. It’s my antidote against the thriving gloom nowadays. If I lose the case, you probably won’t ever know why – state secrets lurk. Thankfully, poetry also lurks, and they can never fully replace it with pseudo.
Martijn 27-07-2024
