Flanders Light

Another time, these are different people, with lives we pass as our train slowly picks up speed. The Palais de Justice past Bruxelles Centraal, built on a hill top in the centre of the city to act as a physical reminder to the working class of the power of the state. The obligatory walls of glass, European institutions of bureaucracy and jurisdiction; at ground level, squawking late night graffiti.

Back in time to 1940, the occupation of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, an endless cycle of war and destruction. People stand nervously on the platforms. The Gestapo are looking for resistance fugitives and communists. The illusion of Stalinism, a disaster for the worker’s movement. The leaves are falling from the trackside trees, washed out yellow lime, autumn acorn seeds, the winter is coming. The world will freeze and then burn like hell.

Through the industrial suburb of Shaerbeek. One Sunday morning I was walking through the area. I noticed a church and thought I’d go in and have a look around the building. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be a service going on. The church was packed with people. I couldn’t bring myself to immediately leave so stood at the back of the crowd.

Three Black African priests conducted the ceremonies and rites, smartly dressed elderly white women, African women with elaborate hats and bright yellow and red print dresses, men in suits, a sprinkling of local toughs with half torn ears and noses moulded by bare knuckle street fighting.

Everyone said amen in chorus and sang the hymns with raw harmonies. As it concluded half a dozen people nearby come up to me and shook my hand and said, ‘Peace be with you’. It was a moving and uplifting experience. I like the idea of a shared humanity and I think that’s worth striving for through all the hate and division; a universal spirit.

But not the schisms, bureaucracy and hierarchies of organised religion. I have attended some services at All Saints church in Margaret Street in Fitzrovia. One was in the evening. A small number of local people, working class by the looks of them. I enjoyed the occasion. The second time was on a Sunday morning. There was a class tension in the air. People full of their own self-importance. A Tory atmosphere. I didn’t think much of that at all and felt uncomfortable. Perhaps it was deliberately set up to make me feel so.

The train is running alongside a motorway. The first signs for Rotterdam and Breda. The roads are busy; across Europe, central Asia, India and China. Production is in constant motion, a perpetual machine of the movement of raw materials and finished commodities.

All the elements of production are pushed to move quickly, even the growing of crops and fattening of animals and fowls. An acceleration of primitive accumulation, an acceleration of competition and capital accumulation. The one determinant that fails to keep up is a great stodgy layer of the left. Even worse, layers of the social-democrats in Europe and the Labour Party in Britain.

I am finding it hard not to lose my temper with it all. The people who really think the Labour Party will make much difference, the people who vote for the Tories and then complain about everything, the howling and shouting and lying, what feels like people practising a wilful ignorance, the foul mouth dictators, the government of Netanyahu; that sort of stuff.

The train passes through Antwerp and Rotterdam. I look through the dirty train windows for the port infrastructure, ships and water. I want someone to sit down next to me on the train and explain it all to me. Capitalism, capital, production, the distribution of commodities, the character of money.

And now we pass through the suburbs of Amsterdam and the offices of PWC and Deloitte and all the rest of them. Suck, suck, suck the money up and turn it into bits and bytes and send it through the ether using packet switching to bank accounts in the tax havens.

And then use a magic trumpet to tell the poor to blame themselves and blame each other when they lack health care, good quality low cost housing, enough food for the whole family. Keep turning the wheel on the head-fixing machine.

At the Museum of Dutch Resistance I was confronted for the first time with Anne Frank’s diary in Dutch. It made it seem more real, more recent, as if written a week or so ago, or maybe even yesterday.

The holocaust seems more recent, it is now coming more alive, in colour, because the same forces that led to the rise of the fascists in the 1920s and 1930s are with us now today.

Time is being compressed in different ways, short circuits between 1933 and 2023. Here is Anne Frank’s diary in my hands, almost too painful to hold, or read. As if written an hour ago, somewhere in Amsterdam or Gaza or Mariupol on this grey November morning. The lines of history are being re-drawn.

No place feels safe anymore.

Life trickles by us and sometimes we find ourselves involved in that stream itself. I enjoyed much of the trip to Amsterdam, and the sense of the city itself, glimpsed from trams and walks through the dark, gloomy rain, at night with the Christmas lights splashing colours on the wet pavements.

There wasn’t time to study the history of Social Democracy in the city, or the Communists or the potato riots or the unionisation of the dockers and the building of good quality working class housing. Nor did I manage to get to the Rijksmuseum again, but these things can wait. I was taken on a tour of the housing around Hoofdweg and that created some notes and images for further research.

The Amsterdam canal brought the sea and the world to the city.

And then it felt as if the train was turned around and back we went across the Low Countries and Flanders, passing Mechelen in a blur and sodden fields were so many wars have been fought, for so little, except the mass murder and smell of death.

The fields themselves are really benign. Fields and trees and rivers and hills and hedges don’t start wars but there always seem to be those who want to fight over them. And once the fighting is done, the leaders are shaking hands again, and even before the mounds of corpses are shifted into open pits by industrial made bulldozers, trade and commodity exchange and capital investment flows are starting up again.

I’ve only been back an hour or two and I’m tired of the Tory stench in England.

And already I miss the light of Flanders.