Personal observations in my childhood (part 1)

As my readers (all 3 of them) already know, so far I have written about some things as I personally experienced them during my life, and this time I will do the same ..

My Dad back then

For who don't know me  I am from the Netherlands and I am an Atheist, no big deal here, half of the people in this country are non church going..

I am the son of an engineer, not the theoretical but the practical kind.
As a young man who survived WW2 by being "underground" to avoid capture by the Nazis, after the war my father got back to the factory he used to work before the Germans invaded my country, to find that nothing was working anymore and all needed to be repaired and so he did. It was not like using two broken machines to make one working machine, it was using two broken machines to make TWO working machines, that is the kind of man my father was, he could repair everything and anything.

My father also was a union man and member of the Dutch Labor Party formally known as the SDAP (Social Democrat Labor Party of the Netherlands)
Western Europe was in ruins and so were the Netherlands and what true is, has to be told, the American Marshall plan saved our asses from being annexed by the Soviet Union.

 In that time the greatest men in Europe came together to design a new social structure and parliamentary system that would rebuild Europe and the new modern Social democratic political system was formed

Dr Willem Drees

One of the main architects was Dr Willem Drees a man of great integrity and vision, you could call him one of the founding fathers of the Post WW2 Netherlands

Dr Willem Drees stood at the birth of this system,  it was the best of both sides : great personal liberty and freedom paired with the freedom of enterprise of capitalism combined  with good wages for the workers who were the pillars of rebuilding  the economy and a revolutionary new system in social and medical security taken from socialism..

Call me what you want but I am a Social Democrat in heart and mind and soul ....
 well... as far as I have a soul..

yours truly age 2

When I came to this world in 1955, Europe was still rebuilding and the prosperity of the people grew every year, factories made excellent profits and did huge investments , unemployment was practically none existing..

In my teens I became politically aware and I walked in the protest marches against the war in Vietnam, the Arms race and war in general.
When I reached the age of 18 I voted for the first time , and like my father I voted for the Dutch Labor Party but that was about it..
I was way to busy being young, party and chase girls to bother about politics , this came later when the USA suggested that western Europe could be used to "host" a new weapon: the Tomahawk Cruise Missile capable of delivering nuclear payloads to Soviet Union targets flying at very low altitude and undetectable for radar.
We just had a new government headed by a Christian conservative party  CDA and a capitalist conservative party VVD and they basically said "sure why not" .  This decision created an outrage in the Netherlands, labor (more ales like the liberals in  the USA) and the Unions organized the largest protest manifestations in Dutch history, it was clear that the people did not agree with American nuclear weapons on our soil and so becoming a target for the Soviet Union, we did not want to have anything to do with this "silly quarrel" between the USA and the USSR  ..

Some day an American reporter said, the dutch protesters must be -suffering from Hollanditis- , and what was meant as an insult we took as a compliment , HOLLANDITIS , half of northwest Europe had it , literally millions of people took it to the streets 400,000 people protesting in Amsterdam 150,000 in The Hague thousands in manifestations all around the country, Hollanditis ruled!!
Finally the government could not do anything else take the will of the people in serious consideration and had to deny the American request to place American nuclear weapons within our borders , Hollanditis was victorious we were proud of our country, we had made a clear stand for PEACE and equality..

This lasted until it got in the papers that our DIRTY RAT prime minister Dries Van

Agt, (he even had the face of a rat )in secret went to Brussels to sign the agreement of placing American nuclear weapons on Dutch soil..This was not only UN-constitutional, because he ignored the votes in the hous of representatives and the senate , it was HIGH TREASON , allowing foreign weapons on our soil ..
Technically this is the only (military) crime in which the death penalty by firing squad can be demanded in the Netherlands..
Of course this was covered up with misinformation and up till today, nothing is really clear about that had happened.
Only that Van Agt moved to obscurity as Dutch ambassador in Japan...
We were still proud of the ourself as a people but deeply ashamed about our government and it opened my eyes to how the following governments of the Netherlands changed from champions of peace , against the arms race in to an American ASS kissing bunch of cowards..

And it gets worse ....  in the next chapter