Hola Aloha, Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Erasmus Prize, sortof the Dutch Nobel Prize, and received it from the hands of the Dutch King Willem Alexander I in Amsterdam the day before yesterday. He gave a lecture, castigating the Western attitude towards the Earth and its inhabitants, mentioning in the process, and at the beginning of his lecture, the genocide perpetrated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) on the inhabitants of the Banda islands at the beginning of the seventeenth century, so as to seize their monopoly on the extremely profitable trade in mace and nutmeg. https://erasmusprijs.org/en/laureates/amitav-ghosh/ An English version of his lecture - not the original text (maybe Fred or Vivek can obtain it from the source ;-) is here, machine re-translated from its translation in Dutch in the (Dutch) daily Trouw (!) https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/erasmus-price-speech-amitav-ghosh-netherlands-26-nov-2024/273644394 The Dutch 'original': https://www.trouw.nl/trouw/erasmusprijs-winnaar-amitav-ghosh-over-het-einde-van-de-westerse-dominantie~b2a1bf41/ David van Reybrouck, Flemish (Belgian) author of a remarkable non-colonial history of Indonesia (aka Dutch East Indies) and of the Indonesian independence struggle ('Revolusi') has remarked that the Dutch population in general is remarkably ignorant of its violent, bloody and extremely opressive colonial history. I would add that it will also erupt in anger if and when reminded of it. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/445781/revolusi-by-reybrouck-david-van/9781847927040 Cheers from Melaka (ex Malacca, ex VOC ...) p+2D!
