| PDF said: I understand the logic that it doesn't really feel like Belgium's history because as you said it happened on a different continent and it's now a different country. However, I think with that logic you could freely omit most foreign intervention from the history books. There was a ton of wealth generated in Belgium at the cost of the Congolese. This seems like a significant omission, especially for a country with only a couple hundred years of history. At least I understand if the UK or France were to examine colonization in school it would take forever because they practically colonized the whole world. Still, it does surprise me to hear some people from the colonial powers not to tackle colonization at all. Many problems in the world today are rooted in their colonial history. Once again the US is not innocent in this. While we have become better at recognizing the genocide of Native Americans when colonization first took place on the continent. We still ignore the terrible acts the US engaged in as we moved westward and claimed more land. |
Indeed, and it leads to an unhealthy disconnect in the people growing up in those countries, I was one of them.
I remember going on holiday to the states with my friends and we were kind of berating their portrayal of the treatment of the natives and the omissions of all massacres etc. Blissfully unaware that it were (also) the Dutch settlers that partook in the systematic removal of the natives from their land. New Amsterdam (NY) was of course all 'peacefully' established (allegedly the Dutch bought it from the natives for $24 worth of trinkets) until Charless II took it from the Dutch.
Now what I remember from school is that the Dutch at some point traded New Amsterdam for territory in the Caribbean. Which is true "In 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch re-conquered Manhattan with an invasion force of some 600 men. But they gave it up the following year as part of a peace treaty in which they retained Suriname in South America. “They thought that was going to be worth more,” Yet the war was left out, as well as anything about Suriname. Just a little factoid in history class that New Amsterdam was traded for a worthless colony in the Caribbean, no offense to Suriname, but that's what I remember from school. Dutch settled Manhatten, then foolishly traded it for territory in the Caribbean, that was it.
