The carriage -- known colloquially as "De Gouden Koets" -- has been at the center of fierce debate in recent years.
One of the panels on the Golden Coach, named "Tribute from the Colonies," depicts people of color from the colonies kneeling in subordination to a young white woman who represents the Netherlands, while presenting her with gifts, according to the Amsterdam Museum, where the coach is housed.
The Golden Coach was given to Queen Wilhelmina, the first female monarch of the Netherlands, in 1898. She celebrated her 18th birthday that year, and had her coronation soon after.
King Willem-Alexander added, "The Golden Coach will be able to be driven again when the Netherlands is ready. And that is now not the case.
"All citizens of this country should be able to feel that they are equal and get the same opportunities. Everyone should be able to feel part of what has been built in our country, and to the proud of that. Also those Dutch citizens with ancestors who were not free in the East or the West."
"As long as there are people who live in the Netherlands who feel the pain of discrimination on a daily basis, the pain of the past will cast its shadow on our time and it is not yet over."
discrimination? Does he really try to nullify slavery, slave trade, etc with "discrimination"
Huh. Well, the Dutch East India Trading Company, headquartered in Amsterdam, isn't mentioned, in the CNN article, and neither is the word "slavery" but in the early modern period, the Dutch were pioneering investors and capitalists who raised the commercial and industrial potential of underdeveloped or undeveloped lands whose resources they exploited, whether for better or worse.
The Dutch East India Company, officially Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie aka VOC
For example, the native economies of pre-VOC-era Taiwan and South Africa were largely rural. It was VOC employees who established and developed the first modern urban areas in the history of Taiwan (Tainan) and South Africa (Cape Town and Stellenbosch).
Originally a government-backed military-commercial enterprise, the VOC was the wartime brainchild of leading Dutch republican statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the States-General. From its inception in 1602, the company was not only a commercial enterprise but also effectively an instrument of war in the young Dutch Republic's revolutionary global war against the powerful Spanish Empire and Iberian Union (1579–1648).
Between 1652 and 1657, a number of unsuccessful attempts were made to obtain men from the Dutch East Indies and from Mauritius.
In 1658, however, the VOC landed two shiploads of slaves at the Cape, one containing more than 200 people brought from Dahomey (later Benin), the second with almost 200 people, most of them children, captured from a Portuguese slaver off the coast of Angola. Except for a few individuals, these were to be the only slaves ever brought to the Cape from West Africa.
From 1658 to the end of the company's rule, many more slaves were brought regularly to the Cape in various ways, chiefly by Company-sponsored slaving voyages and slaves brought to the Cape by its return fleets. From these sources and by natural growth, the slave population increased from zero in 1652 to about 1,000 by 1700. During the 18th century, the slave population increased dramatically to 16,839 by 1795. After the slave trade was initiated, all of the slaves imported into the Cape until the British stopped the trade in 1807 were from East Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, and South and Southeast Asia.
Large numbers were brought from Ceylon and the Indonesian archipelago. Prisoners from other countries in the VOC's empire were also enslaved. The slave population, which exceeded that of the European settlers until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was overwhelmingly male and was thus dependent on constant imports of new slaves to maintain and to augment its size. By the 1660s the Cape settlement was importing slaves from Ceylon, Malaya (Malaysia), and Madagascar to work on the farms.
So, slaves are painted on the royal gold carriage, as that is the history of the country, and now it's going to haunt them. Should it? Does the fact that the country was in the slave trade, possibly even creating it, matter in 2022?
Or should the people who are so vocal against slavery, not do anything useful, about the slavery that is actually still an every day life in the middle east, in Muslim countries? If slavery is the issue, why aren't any of the protesters doing a thing about it?
It's simple. It's easy to yell at scared old rich white people who will fold, than to take on angry young men who will fight back, viciously. This is why the anti-fur PETA fanatics throw paint on fashionista rick old women in fur coats, and never say boo to any biker with pounds of leather clothes, boots, belts, and bike seat.
Slavery currently imprisons 40 million people, more than ever were enslaved in the colonial times. Not one war has been waged by the outraged. Not one march, not even a liberal left wing pink hat protest. Slavery is ignored by the people who tear down the statues of slave owners.
In India, “the biggest democracy in the world” as the filmmaker Pankaj Johar points out in his “Selling Children” (2018; Dec. 26 at 10 p.m.), millions of kids are bought and sold. Preying on children in impoverished, lower-caste, often rural families, traffickers lure them to the city with promises of an education and good wages. Instead the victims find themselves forced to work for next to nothing and often subjected to sexual abuse.
Figure it out. Instead of combatting the problem, morons are yelling at royalty for parading about in a gold carriage.
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