<nettime> New Dutch conspiracy to reinstate the Insula Batavorum

[Tjebbe van Tijen <tjebbe@imaginarymuseum.org>]

New Dutch conspiracy to reinstate the Insula Batavorum

July 29, 2010 by Tjebbe van Tijen

the illustrated & linked version can be seen & read at

http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/new-dutch-conspiracy-to-reinstate-the-insula-batavorum/

While most of the multi-cultural minded Dutch nation are happily on vacation a conspiracy is taking shape in all secrecy under the leadership of Batavian chieftain Beatrix Lubbers to join the cohorts of VVD, CDA and PVV into a force to reverse history and to isolate the Netherlands from the rest of the world by reinstating the mythical ‘ Insula Batavorum‘ *) of Roman times … “Down with the non Batavian Allochtoons” they shout when they cross their swords.


[image The Conspiration of the Bataves a painting of 1662 by Rembrandt van Rijn]


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*) Source Wikipedia: “In the 16th-century invention of a suitably antique origin myth for the Dutch people that would be expressive of their self-identification as separate from their neighbors in the national struggle with Spain of the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence, the Batavians came to be regarded as their eponymous ancestors.[6] The mix of fancy and fact in the Cronyke van Hollandt, Zeelandt ende Vriesland (called the Divisiekronike), first published in 1517, brought the spare remarks in Tacitus’ newly-rediscovered Germania to a popular public; it was being reprinted as late as 1802.[7] Contemporary Dutch virtues of independence, fortitude and industry were rendered fully recognizable among the Batavians in more scholarly history represented in Hugo Grotius’ Liber de Antiquitate Republicae Batavicorum (1610). The myth was perpetuated by Romeyn de Hooghe’s Spiegel van Staat der Vereenigden Nederlanden (“Mirror of the State of the United Netherlands”, 1706), which also ran to many editions, and it was revived in the atmosphere of Romantic nationalism in the late eighteenth-century reforms that saw a short-lived Batavian Republic and, in the colony of the Dutch East Indies, a capital (now Jakarta) that was named Batavia. Modern variants of the Batavian founding myth are made more credible by pointing out that the Batavians were only part of the ancestry of the Dutch people, together with the Frisians, Franks and Saxons, and by tracing patterns of DNA. Echoes of this supposed cultural continuity may still be found in popularisations of the history that follows.”


Tjebbe van Tijen
Imaginary Museum Projects
Dramatizing Historical Information
http://imaginarymuseum.org
web-blog: The Limping Messenger
http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/








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