Text 20852, 234 rader
Skriven 2006-01-03 12:22:00 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
  Kommentar till text 20542 av Carol Shenkenberger (6:757/1)
Ärende: Adverse Times
=====================
Hello Carol,

MvdV>> Publishing snippets would not violate any copyrights, but I still woul
MvdV>> have to digitize the English version before I could cut and paste from
MvdV>> it. The Dutch text would not be of much use to you. Well, I could only
MvdV>> digitize the snippets, but I'd rather do the digitizing in one piece a
MvdV>> otherwise I might end up doing unneeded extra work. So have a bit of p
MvdV>> I think I will talk ny sister into giving permission eventually, but i
MvdV>> takes a bit of time...

 > Ok, if it happens at some point, let us know and i'll try and
 > order a copy.

There will be no "ordering a copy" if I get my way. They may have some copies
left at the airborne museum in Oosterbeek, but otherwise I would not know how
or where to get a copy of the printed version. There will be no repint, too
expensive.

No, I will put it on my web site.

But my sister is still stalling. Now she says she is unable to foresee the
implications. She is a computer illiterate and has heard scary stories about
virusses and so...

She even was a bit upset when she learned I had a disk with the Dutch version.
Well, my aunt left the rights of the book to my sister, but she appointed me
custodian of her estate. So when I cleaned out her house ten years ago and
found the disk, I simply pocketed it for storing it in a safe place.

But she said, she being the copyright holder I should have given it to her. So
I said "Ok, I'll give you a disk". She didn't notice I said /a/ disk, not /the/
disk. <grin> And yes, /of course/ I will keep a copy. It is not safe with my
sister, she was the one who lost the fifty or so copies that were left of the
book...

She should be glad I took god care of it all these years.

MvdV>> Tulip bulbs are very much like onions and yes they are edible. They do
MvdV>> taste very good but they do have nutritional value.

MvdV>> Something else they ate was sugar beet. And acorns.

 > Acorns would be natural to use over this side of the pond.
 > It's still used in lots of ways though seldom commercially
 > found outside of 'health food stores'.

I have never seen acorns used in food here. Maybe they are different than yours
or maybe it is because people do not want to be reminded of the winter of
starvation of 1944.

 > Sugar beet of course would be a normal thing though it's grown
 > more often to just render sugar from.

Over here sugar beet is only used as a raw material for sugar production. I
have never seen it in a shop, nor ever seen it on the menu in a restaurant.

MvdV>>> much like to talk about it.

 >> Yes, Dad was like that.

MvdV>> And unlike what Frank suggests, it has nothing to do with shame.

 > Correct.  No relation to it, or at least, not in the sense
 > he's been saying about it.  It's more like putting a bad time
 > behind you and moving forward.

I spoke to my mother - she will be 86 next month - about this last sunday. She
confirms what you say: people of her generation do not and did not talk much
about it because they wished to leave it behind and move on. She agrees with me
that we should not burden the next generation with it.

 >> In our early days, he used to still have problems with
 >> flashbacks.  2 weeks ago at our Xmas party (ship party,
 >> probably 500 people and kids there) he _had_ to leave.

MvdV>> That's bad. Must be hard on the both of you..

 > Not so hard.  Took me some time to get used to it but when you
 > love someone, you put up with all aspects of them, even the
 > awkward ones.

Of course. That does not mean it's easy...

 >> Berlin.  Some memory fragment about the Russians also using it
 >> so maybe the 'russian quarter' but I dont have an address or
 >> anything like that.

MvdV>> Should not be too hard to track. Ah, well what's the use, it's history

 > Possible, but I dont have much info to go on.  There's no one
 > left alive related to that long ago settlement.

You will have to go there, I am sure there will be information available
locally.

MvdV>> I think this "learn from history" is highly overrated. yes, there are
MvdV>> lessons to be learned from the mistakes of others, but only up to a po
MvdV>> After that comes the point that one has to learn from one's own mistak

 > True.  BTW I wish it was presidential election year, I dont
 > happen to favor the policy of the one I have now.

I have to say I am a bit surprised. Not for you not being happy with your
president, lots of Americans share your feelings, but for openly saying so. So
far you have kept your opinions to yourself. I would have thought that in your
profession openly critisising what is your supreme commander would be
discouraged.

Anyway, it seems you are stuck with him for another three years.

Over here in The Netherlands and most other western European countries a simple
vote of no confidence in parliament is enough to send the government packing.
In the US it is very difficult to make a president resign. And even if you
manage that, all that happens is that the vice president takes his place and
you are stuck with *him*. You still have to wait til the end of the four year
term until you can elect a new one.

Over here we do not wait til lthe end of the four year term, we hold an
election right away and a new four year term starts. many a government here
does not make it to the end of the four year term.

MvdV>> Frank was never in Europe during WWII.

 > Yes, now we can all see that.  He certainly was talking as if
 > he had been though!

Indeed. He mislead us.

 > It wasnt a 'second language issue'.  His
 > choice of words definately indicated until now that he was
 > 'talking first hand'.  Perhaps he was in the Pacific theater,
 > or perhaps he was stateside support

From his refusal to provide further details, I conclude
that he never left US soil.

 > (nothing wrong with that if he was stateside).

Indeed, nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong however with
pretending to "have been there" when one was not.

 >> If you havent run into Andersonville,

 > It's a very very bad memory.  I've been there (Mom liked to
 > take us on vacations to historical places and old homes and
 > the civil war was a favorite one to check out).  There are web
 > links to history of it with some of the pictures if you want
 > to see.

Yeah, I found some...

 > Basically it goes like this:  The south was starving already and
 > they didnt have much to spare, so they pretty much 'didnt' but
 > it wasnt as deliberate as some accounts made it out to be.

 > Now this may seem strange to you but my family (mom's side)
 > was very rich until the civil war.  Then, they were splintered
 > totally by it with some being 'North' and some 'South'.

Not strange at all. We have had similar things here in Europe. The splitting of
Belgium and The Netherlands in 1830 and the splitting of Germany after WWII.

 > Mom says a great uncle of her's died in Andersonville so she added
 > that to the vacation route one summer (once i was old enough
 > to understand such things).  Mom taught me lots of 'history'
 > but it's oriented to the parts she liked most, generally civil
 > war and earlier. She'd pull out real live letters written by
 > various ancestors, let us read them ourselves, then we'd go
 > visit some place related to that person or someplace they had
 > been.

Your family has a rich history...

MvdV>> There never was much attention for American History at school.
MvdV>> Not that I remember anyway. Well, history never was my favorite
MvdV>> and I have for most of it, so I am an unreliable wittnes.

 > Thats ok, no special reason for your school house days to make
 > much mention of it as other than a passing comment or so.  You
 > wouldnt for example get a year's worth of 'American History'.

You also have to keep in mind that The Netherlands has so much more history
than the US. The written history of the US didn't start until some 300 years
ago. Whereas Dutch history goes all the way back to the Romans and beyond. Over
2000 years of history. Naturally more is left out. Also the history as taught
in school in my time stopped around 1900. After that it was too recent to be
considered "history". I learned about that part later, long after I left
school.

MvdV>> Every country has its dark pages in the history books. Mine not exclud
MvdV>> I am not paricularly proud of the role of what may have been my ancest
MvdV>> in the slave transports a couple of centuries ago. But then, that was
MvdV>> even longer before I was born than WWII.

 > Yup.  Ancient stuff there.  It's too bad the USA ever got into
 > that stuff and we are still cleaning up the mess culturally
 > that it left us.  BTW, a misnomer is that many folks who know
 > only a little history of the USA have, is that the civil war
 > was over slavery.  It wasnt really.  It was more about
 > economics and things like that.

Isn't it always?


 > There have been very interesting speculations that had the war
 > broken out 30 years later, the south very well might have won
 > independance.

Ah, yes. Alternate history... ;-)

 > Very little is taught about how the American civil war
 > impacted those outside of itself but it actually did.  The
 > cotton trade stoppage caused major problems economically for
 > England which is just one of the things I can recall being
 > taught.  A British school therefore might teach a segment
 > about the American civil war because it had impacted them in
 > their own history,

I guess it didn't impact us here in The netherlands as it was not taught in
history as far as I recall.

 > like we teach about the great Potato blight
 > in Ireland because it brought us so many immigrants.

And that I only learned when I started frequenting Ireland after my parents
bough a cottage there in 1964.

It was sold two years ago.


Cheers, Michiel

---
 * Origin: http://www.vlist.org (2:280/5555)