Ignorance is Bliss

Booked our train tickets and hotel in London last night. We're taking the Eurostar from Brussels and we're going to stay at a hotel near the Lords cricket ground. Can't wait to be there. It's going to be my first time in the UK and there's so much to see. I'm worried a little about the currency, got a bit comfortable not having to check exchange rates and provide for cash in the Euro-zone. And I heard London is pretty expensive anyway, I wouldn't like to get fucked. Stupid, ain't it?

Otherwise, not much is happening. I held a presentation in German class this morning. I think I did pretty well. It's just so annoying, I'm now at the point where I understand most of what is being said but have terrible difficulty expressing myself.

I also saw two documentaries on TV last night. The first one was about the Belgian colonization of the Congo, about which I knew very little. It certainly wasn't the sort of glorious adventure in bringing civilization to the noble savages, as it's made out to be by the colonnial monuments in Brussels. The Congo and its people were exploited ruthlessly. They choped people's hands off, even killed them and/or their families if they didn't supply enough rubber to plantation owners, a practice also followed on the Belgian king's own estate. Entire villages were wiped out that way. All this went on systematically for decades, until British missionaries raised the issue (not that the Brits were any better on their own colonies). There was a big uproar about it in the 1900s, then it just got forgotten. One thing's for sure, I'm not buying any more hand-shaped chocolate in Antwerp.

The second one was about how stereotypes of people from the colonies developed over the years in France, and how that still affects the way people issued from immigration are viewed. It was interesting to see how this still manifests itself every day in the media and indeed, in our minds. The noble savage, who needs to be taught as if he were a child, or presented as a freak-show attraction, the Chinese immigrant communities refusing to integrate and being a hotbed of drug abuse, lazy and dangerous Arabs, and so on. Yeah, these images are still prevailing in our collective conscience. And what about the fat, lazy, ignorant, violent, prejudiced, xenophobic white Christian European? Things are not looking up in Babylon.

I guess it's just to complex to judge people on their individual merit. It's easier to take that everyone in Poland has a plumbing business and they steal cars and stab Belgian students for kicks when they're not out taking decent people's jobs away...