Reading list: December 6-11, 2015

Good reads

Here’s a list of articles, stories, news and other scraps of unique things happening in the world that I thought you might also enjoy. Please share any reactions or other interesting links that you’ve come across in the comments section. I’m always curious about what others are curious about!

Once you go black…

Saint Nicolas’s sooty little helper, Zwarte Piet (“Black Pete”), continues to cause controvery in Belgium: Flemish Minister Rejects Racism Accusations After Blacking Up

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Con-men, grifters, liars – call them what you want, we can all be duped by a scam. Find out why we were all Born To Be Conned

America: Made in China

There are Chinatowns across America. But did you know there’s an Americatown in China? Jackson Hole, China: A new frontier for the American West, in the Far East

Should I stay or should I go?

America might not seem very welcoming to foreigners right now, but new research suggests that For Immigrants, America Is Still More Welcoming Than Europe

Right at the museum

How one Dutch museum is looking at the language used in its collection to right wrongs from the past. Rijksmuseum Removing Racially Charged Terms From Artworks’ Titles and Descriptions

A labour of amore

If you’ve ever tried to learn another language, you’ll know it’s not easy. This is a beautiful essay about the process of change that anyone that takes on a difficult task and succeeds undergoes. Teach yourself Italian

Lastly…

Speaking of fake Italian, the American pizza chain, Papa John’s, announced this week that it’s planning to open stores in a number of European countries, including in Belgium.

Aren't we lucky? For those not yet acquainted with Papa John’s, here’s a little taste:

(If any of the links on this page don’t work, please let me know and I’ll try and correct it.  - Thanks)

The Guns of August: Chapter 17, The Flames of Louvain

Good reads

“We shall wipe it out, not one stone will stand upon another! Kein stein auf einander! – not one, I tell you. We will teach them to respect Germany. For generations people will come here to see what we have done.” 

- A German officer during the burning of Leuven, Belgium (August 28, 1914)

Leuven Town Hall today

I first set foot in Leuven in August 2001. It was a perfect day, the kind you dream of when you arrive in a new town that you’re about to call home. I walked out of the train station under a bright blue sky pulling a suitcase that carried all my things for the next four months – a few changes of cloths, a few books, soccer cleats – the essentials. Instinct led me aimlessly in the direction of the center, down a wide boulevard whose name I wouldn’t be able to pronounce until some time later: Bondgenotenlaan. “Bond-ge-no-ten-laan,” locals liked to say to me slowly when they knew I was just a beginner in Dutch. Then, seemingly for effect, they'd tack on the English translation: “Avenue of the Allies.”

Bondgenotenlaan. Avenue of the Allies. Bondgenotenlaan. Avenue of the Allies. It’s the main road through town so I must’ve said and heard this name hundreds of times in the four months I lived in Leuven. And probably thousands of times more after I moved back for four more years from 2002-2006. But despite, or maybe because of, it’s daily presence in my life, the meaning of the name Bondgenotenlaan – Avenue of the Allies – remained hidden in a background I never thought to fully explore.

Leuven's medieval university library was destroyed in 1914

I just assumed it had something to do with World War II. Leuven was occupied by the Germans at that time and the university library was turned into a Nazi war-room, which the Allies bombed and later rebuilt using donations from American universities.

But that's just part of the story. Indeed, the library was destroyed in WWII, but that wasn’t the original. The original library, dating from 1426 when the university was founded, didn’t survive the First World War. And the “Allies” in the name Avenue of the Allies

The library today

weren’t those of my grandfather’s generation. Rather, these were the men of 1914-18. 

So what happened in Leuven during the First World War that I so clearly failed to see during my five years there? 

To find out more I turned to The Guns of August, the 1963 Pulitzer Prize winning account of the first month of the Great War written by Barbara Tuchman. Chapter 17 is titled ‘The Flames of Louvain’ and it recounts what happened there just over one-hundred years ago:

“GERMANS SACK LOUVAIN; WOMEN AND CLERGY SHOT,” a headline in the New York Tribune read. In England, an editorial in the Daily Chronicle called what happened in Leuven “Treason to Civilization.” And a Dutch paper, the Rotterdam Courant, wrote that “the fact of destruction remains” – a fact “so terrible that the whole world must have received the news with horror.”

Tuchman’s account is harrowing:

On the first day of the occupation of Leuven “German soldiers behaved in exemplary fashion, bought postcards and souvenirs, paid for all their purchases, and stood in line with the regular customers for haircuts at the barbershop,” she writes.

Things started to heat up on the second day when a German soldier was shot in the leg, allegedly by snipers. The mayor and two other city officials were taken as hostages and “executions behind the railroad station became frequent.”

Then, on August 25, as German troops were marching west from Leuven they met the Belgian Army at Mechelen and were forced to return to Leuven.

“In the turmoil of retreat a riderless horse clattering through the gates after dark frightened another horse which tried to bolt, fell in harness, and overturned a wagon. Shots rang out.”

The Germans said the Belgians had started shooting. The Belgians claimed the Germans were shooting at one another in the dark. Either way, Leuven was about to go off like a box of matches. The burning of the city began later that day. It was the German's way of punishing the Belgians for their disobedience and sending a warning to other would-be enemies that anything less that full cooperation would not be tolerated.

For six days, street after street and home after home was reduced to ashes. News of the destruction quickly spread and

“On August 28 Hugh Gibson, First Secretary of the American Legation, accompanied by his Swedish and Mexican colleagues went to Louvain to see for themselves. Houses with blackened walls and smoldering timbers were still burning; pavements were hot; cinders were everywhere. Dead horses and dead people lay about. One old man, a civilian with a white beard, lay on his back in the sun. Many of the bodies were swollen, evidently dead for days. Wreckage, furniture, bottles, torn clothing, one wooden shoe were strewn among the ashes. German soldiers of the IXth Reserve Corps, some drunk, some nervous, unhappy, and bloodshot were routing inhabitants out of the remaining houses so that, as the soldiers told Gibson, the destruction of the city could be completed. They went from house to house, battering down doors, stuffing pockets with cigars, looting valuables, then plying the torch.”

When I read this, I was shocked. Not simply by the heinous and hateful crimes against humanity that took place in Leuven. But also by how little there is today to remind us of what happened. 

In 1914, however, the entire world was shocked at the news of Leuven’s fate and it marked a clear turning point in global public opinion about the war. As Tuchman tells us: 

“The gesture that was intended by the Germans to frighten the world – to induce submission – instead convinced large numbers of people that here was an enemy with whom there could be no settlement and no compromise. Belgium clarified issues, became to many the ‘supreme issue’ of the war. In America, said a historian of his times looking back, Belgium was the ‘precipitant’ of opinion and Louvain was the climax of Belgium.”

The use of terror was no accident either. It was a prescribed military tactic in the Kriegsbrauch: “War cannot be conducted merely against the combatants of an enemy state,” Tuchman quotes from the German war book, “but must seek to destroy the total material and intellectual (geistig) resources of the enemy.”

In other words, the Germans sought to strike at the very soul of a people. Not content to occupy another’s land, they set out to erase their culture. This is the only way to understand the decision to burn Leuven's famed library, which housed over 230,000 books, 750 medieval manuscripts, and a thousand incunabula (early printed books dating from the 15th century). It was a purely symbolic move in service of a warped strategy.

On August 30, the day after reports of the madness appeared in the foreign press, the campaign to destroy Leuven ceased. The beautifully ornate Gothic town hall was still standing, and so too was St. Peter’s Church. But the damage done to the rest of the city was irreversible. 

Or was it? 

When I think back to the first time I walked out of the train station there, and that first of many walks down the Bondgenotenlaan – the Avenue of the Allies – I can remember ambling very slowly, in absolute awe of my surroundings. My eyes didn’t know where to look first. At the buildings nestled together in long rows of grand façades and bustling shop fronts? At packs of bikers peddling past me carrying on conversations in a language I longed to understand? At the people parked at sidewalk cafés taking it easy with a noontime beer?

Before I knew anything else about Leuven, the spirit of the place had moved me. It lit a fire in my heart and I knew then that, whatever it was, I wanted to be a part of it.

Fire & Forget: Short stories from the long war

Good reads

Photo by Dan Eldon

In order to even begin to understand the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot you first have to forget. Forget Bush. Forget 9/11. Forget Obama. Forget Osama. Forget everything you thought you knew about why America went there – oil, Saddam, democracy, security – and just listen to the stories of those that were there. 

But soldiers’ stories are not always easy to come by. Most would just as soon forget, or at least move on, and understandably so. What good could come of talking about it, especially to a public still hanging on to the idea that everything’s okay?

Well, the silence has finally been shattered. And for those who are ready to listen, I highly recommend Fire and Forget, a collection of 15 short stories written by US combat soldiers (and one army spouse). This book is not a military history. There are no political theories espoused. Rather, every story in this book brings you closer to the chaos – and to the understanding.

It’s a stripped down, naked, and, most of all, extremely honest account of what goes on inside a soldier’s head during battle, in their down time, and after they return home. One minute you’re on the battlefield and the next you’re in the bedroom, expected to be able to kill and love at the same time. For many, the fighting never stops and we get an intimate look at the re-integration process. In one scene, a soldier returns home from war to find that his old dog, Vicar, is sick and dying. When it comes time to put the dog down, his wife, Cheryl, says:

"I’ll take him to the vet tomorrow." 

I said, "No." 

She shook her head. She said, "I’ll take care of it."  

I said, "You mean you’ll pay some asshole a hundred bucks to kill my dog."  

She didn’t say anything.   

I said, "That’s not how you do it. It’s on me."  

(from Redeployment, by Phil Klay)

While it’s clear that the adjustment isn’t going to be easy, there’s a strange sense in which the experience of war not only makes one more human, but can also make a person more humane. 

As civilians, the worst thing we can do is to forget about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, regardless of whether we agreed with them or not. That’s why it’s time to Read & Remember the stories of the men and women that were there. They have something to say.

Postscript 

Friends, again, I can’t recommend this book enough. There are some great insights into the human soul and the writing is fantastic. Here are two more excerpts, but believe me there were many to choose from: 

from Smile, There Are IEDs Everywhere, by Jacob Siegel 

"For us, there had been no fields of battle to frame the enemy. There was no chance to throw yourself against another man and fight for life. Our shocks of battle came on the road and it could always explode. There was no enemy: we had only each other to hate."

also from Redeployment, by Phil Klay 

"So here’s an experience. Your wife takes you shopping in Wilmington. Last time you walked down a city street, your Marine on point went down the side of the road, checking ahead and scanning the roofs across from him. The Marine behind him checks the windows on the top levels of the buildings, the Marine behind him gets the windows a little lower, and so on down until your guys have the street level covered, and the Marine in the back has the rear. In a city there’s a million places they can kill you from. It freaks you out at first. But you go through like you were trained and it works. 

In Wilmington, you don’t have a squad, you don’t have a battle buddy, you don’t even have a weapon. You startle ten times checking for it and it’s not there. You’re safe, so your alertness should be at white, but it’s not. 

Instead, you’re stuck in an American Eagle Outfitters. Your wife gives you some clothes to try on and you walk into the tiny dressing room. You close the door, and you don’t want to open it again. 

Outside, there’re people walking around by the windows like it’s no big deal. People who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died. People who’ve spent their whole lives at white.  

They’ll never get even close to orange. You can’t, until the first time you’re in a firefight, or the first time an IED goes off that you missed, and you realize that everybody’s life, everybody’s life, depends on you not fucking up. And you depend on them.  

Some guys go straight to red. They stay like that for a while and then they crash, go down past white, down to whatever is lower than “I don’t fucking care if I die.” Most everybody else stays orange, all the time.  

Here’s what orange is. You don’t see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block. It’s hard to even remember exactly what that felt like. I think you take in too much information to store so you just forget, free up brain space to take in everything about the next moment that might keep you alive. And then you forget that moment too, and focus on the next. And the next. And the next. For seven months.  

So that’s orange. And then you go shopping in Wilmington, unarmed, and you think you can get back down to white? It’ll be a long fucking time before you get back down to white."