Paul M.M. Doolan
In December 1949, the Netherlands was forced to hand over sovereignty of its colony, the Dutch East Indies, to the Republic of Indonesia. Their long domination of the Indonesian archipelago had come to a brutal end with the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949). Hundreds of thousands of Dutch who had called the former colony home repatriated to the metropole and 150,000 soldiers returned from a war that had proven futile. Their memories were not forgotten, though their compatriots did not care to hear their stories. During the decades that followed, the war faded from Dutch collective memory. Today it frequently makes the news.
The foundations for unremembering had already been constructed during the war, by means of official representations of the war. Carefully contrived representations, including visual representations, gave the impression that the Dutch military were involved in a great humanitarian exercise, not in a war. The Dutch military authorities contrived this false impression, but the press distributed and the public consumed this manipulated image, producing a fiction that would complicate the act of remembering in the future.
Continue reading “A Fictional War: Dutch propaganda and the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949)”
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