7/4/2023 0 Comments In europe by geert makThe peasant co-operatives had long since been dismantled, the people gone to the cities, the land returned to private use. But in 1999 he found only two people left who had been there on that day. It was, he writes, "one huge rolling celebration". They were filmed on their way to take over the local estates in their tractors and decorated carts. Mak visited Couco, one of the many Portugese villages where peasants seized the land in 1975. Partly, of course, this was the result of what Abraham Lincoln called "the slow artillery of time". Let the stones speak! That was the plan, but the stones did not give up their tale so easily. Self-examination and awareness, on the one hand, the refusal to know or care, on the other - these turned out to be the dominating themes of his reporting and his book. The Netherlands had only a few years before been shocked into a degree of self-examination, and of awareness of the outside world, by the disaster of Srebrenica, where hapless Dutch troops could not prevent a massacre. And he was an intellectual from a country with wide international connections but rather parochial preoccupations. He was a journalist of a scholarly and even philosophical bent. He was the author of Amsterdam, a brilliant portrait of that city, and of Jorwerd, perhaps the best single book on the slow death of the European countryside. A "final inspection" was an ambitious aim, but Mak had unusual qualifications.
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