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To: haroldeveryman

It wasn’t just the Dutch “Gay” troops, the entire Dutch Army is soup-sandwich.


146 posted on 08/15/2012 4:17:57 PM PDT by Sarajevo (Don't think for a minute that this excuse for a President has America's best interest in mind.)
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To: Sarajevo
146 posted on Wed Aug 15 2012 18:17:57 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Sarajevo: “It wasn’t just the Dutch “Gay” troops, the entire Dutch Army is soup-sandwich.”

Unfortunately, this is very true.

The Dutch military, which despite almost totally indefensible topography managed to delay Hitler's assault by nearly a week helping the French and British get at least somewhat organized, has long since become virtually useless. A good case could be made that the last time the Dutch military did anything worthy of the name of an army was the unsuccessful Indonesia campaign to prevent colonial independence following World War II.

That was not always true of the Netherlands. This is a country which defied almost unimaginable odds to declare and defend its independence from Spain, then the most powerful nation in Europe, and over the next several hundred years, despite its small size, was able to create a navy capable of acquiring and maintaining major colonies. At the same time, it managed to maintain an army capable of deterring aggression from far larger neighbors who might have had good reason to try to acquire its wealthy mercantile cities and ports.

Not coincidentally, the Netherlands was also known up until the end of World War II as the "Bible Belt" of Europe. It was a nation that managed to retain a strong Christian character in direct defiance of trends throughout most of the rest of Europe. Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch minister and politician who founded a daily newspaper, a weekly church newspaper, a Christian university, and what became the nation's second-largest Protestant denomination, eventually became prime minister of the Netherlands as head of a pre-existing Christian political party.

All that is now long gone. Internationalism and Eurocentrism have done their damage. You can't have a strong military without a strong sense of nationhood and a belief there's something about your nation worth defending.

Let's not forget that lesson.

147 posted on 08/15/2012 5:16:52 PM PDT by darrellmaurina
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