History

  • (Originally posted on December 28, 2018) For the size of the country it is astonishing how many football greats come from the Netherlands. Names like Johann Cruijff, Johan Neeskens, Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Arjen Robben to name but a few, but the name Sjaak Swart certainly belongs in that list. Sjaak (Sjakie) Swart…

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  • The title is a line from a song by Gary Moore and Phil Lynott, “Out in the Fields.” Although the song has nothing to do with the Holocaust, the particular line I used for this title was a reality for millions. Millions were murdered for no reason other than hate and a warped sense of…

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  • Following the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, the Soviet declaration of war and the Nagasaki bombing on August 9, the Emperor’s speech was broadcast at noon Japan Standard Time on August 15, 1945, and did reference the atomic bombs as a reason for the surrender. The broadcast was recorded a day earlier but was broadcast…

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  • You’re Beautiful

    On this day 21 years ago, I escorted my wife to the maternity hospital in Limerick. Our beautiful baby girl was born that day. Although I did not like James Blunt’s song “You’re Beautiful” prior to that moment, when it played on the radio in the maternity hospital room at the exact second she was…

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  • WWII- A Mickey Mouse war

    It was January 7,1942, just about a month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Fearing imminent chemical attack on American soil, the government issued thousands of gas mask to civilians. But the smallest citizens couldn’t fit into the regulation-sized masks. They were too heavy and too big. Plus, aren’t those things scary? The production of…

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  • The Thing-not the movie.

    The Thing, also known as The Great Seal Bug, was a passive covert listening device, developed in the Soviet Union and planted in the study of the US Ambassador in Moscow, hidden inside a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States. It is called a passive device as it does not have its own power source.…

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  • Walk a mile in your shoes.

    As the title might suggest I was trying to find some poetic sentences to describe this picture. But I couldn’t,because the more I looked at the picture the less sense it made. In fact it made no sense to me at all. What is the sense of keeping all these shoes? Were they meant as…

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  • Jan Ruschkewitz

    Jan Ruschkewitz, just a name of a young boy. A young bot born in the Hague in the Netherlands. 23 years after the international peace palace was established. A palace that was suppose to safeguard your peace. In the picture you are about 2 or 3, but your peace would soon be destroyed. Jan Ruschkewitz,…

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  • I have seen so many gruesome images of the Holocaust, but for some reason, the pictures of these smiling and playing children touched me more than any other. I know none of them survived, and the only crime they committed was being a child. On the morning of 6 April 1944, members of the Lyon…

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  • I know it is easy to call people like Rudolf Höss and others who worked in Auschwitz monsters, and to en extent I can understand that, I have done so in the past. However when you call them monsters you take the risk of given them an excuse for their acts, because we only expect…

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