News from Belgium and the Belgian Congo
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VOL. IV, No. 27 JULY 8, 1944 NEWS FROM BELGIUM AND THE BELGIAN CONGO BELGIAN INFORMATION CENTER 6 3 0 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY. CIRCLE 6 2450 All material published In NEWS FROM BELGIUM may be reprinted without permission. Please send copies of material in which quotations are used to this offlce. THESE PERIODICAL BULLETINS MAY BE OBTAINED FIIEE ON JJEQUEST. Europe Will Never Die The dry soil of Mesopotamia kept, for keeps coming back all the time, and one day our modern curiosity, the tablets on whichit may be a real part of our common cul• the overlords of Babylon wrote their cunei•tural heritage. form orders to their officers and to the keep• It looks as if there are no lost cultures ers of their granaries, but it also preserved and that whenever man does something for us the many fragments of that oldest andworth his while it is bound some day to most pessimistic of great epics, the Gil-flourish, to embellish and enrich the world gamesh poem, which scarcely anybody readsand its inhabitants. We are told to weep over and which is one of the most moving booksfallen empires and lost civilizations. No• man has ever written. Little more is left ofbody should weep over an empire. It is a the powerful empires those people built. Itpolitical structure and therefore a thing is enough. An empire has gone, a civil• subject to changes and adaptable to circum• ization has crumbled, but we reaped the stances. There are no lost civilizations. If crumbs. they are of any significance, if they have In Central America the white man de• any message at all, they spread out, they ex• stroyed the ancient culture of the Mayas pand into less advanced territories; intel• and the Aztecs. The jungle and the forests lectual and cultural endosmosis is a constant covered its pyramids, its huge statues of man-and marvelous reality. eating idols, its sun terraces and the highly The smallest millinery shop in a Mid• colored pageant of Indian life, with its gri•western tank town will call itself The Bon macing, inhuman heroes and cruel gods. Ton, as an homage to the France of the sev• Little is left of the Mexican and Peruvian enteenth century, the culture of which dom• civilization, little of it lives in us, but it inated Europe. The politico will proclaim NEWS FEOM BELGIUM JULY 8, 1944 that he stands for the rights of "hoi polloi"a few bombs, the great cities are laid waste, and confess by those words our indebted•irreplaceable beauty goes up in smoke and ness to Greece for all our political concepts.ashes. That which made Europe so attrac• France does not rule the continent any more,tive to foreigners, its picturesque appeal, neither has Greece any great power, but theis rapidly disappearing. Tourists will not good they once did lives long after their come any more except to visit the ruins. moment of material supremacy is past. Europe is so prostrated that she will not re• For many decades prophets of gloom andcover, "Thus speaketh the fool in his ignor• doom have been busy predicting that Eu• ance." rope was going to die. All around us ive Certainly Europe is ugly looking; she is hear that the British Empire is tottering, no longer the luscious beauty the mythical and people who otherwise would not even bull Jupiter carried away. Her looks are not hurt a mosquito are indignant that it doesso good. A few months before the war an A- not fall right away. merican woman visited provincial England. If the British Empire has to fall, it will She came back and wrote a book {most of do so for the good reason that when some•them do, and some even do well) in which thing has outlived its usefulness it withers she said that she had studied the English away and decomposes, but a living body isyoung people in the village pubs. She an• able to adapt and transform itself, to survivenounced that they were physical wrecks and by evolution. Before prophesying on that that they all had badly neglected teeth. She concluded that the English people would point one should be able to estimate to what go under at the first attack. extent that Empire lives in the heart of the members of the Commonwealth. Her appraisal of the situation is typical of that specific Greek trend of mind a great As for Europe, it has been solemnly number of Americans have come to consider casketed and buried by that scholarly Ger• as an ideal, — not to cultivate the excellence man gravedigger Oswald Spengler, but long of the mind or the perfection of the body before him by quite a number of Americansalone {except for women), but to require who wrote on the subject, and implicitly that man should have both and be as care• by all the immigrants from Europe who ful about conserving or improving his brains turned their backs on that Asiatic peninsulaas his looks. If Socrates had been hand• and renounced her once and for all. For all somer, he might not have been condemned of them Europe had died; they even re• to death. The good looking man on this fused to look back at her sickbed, but rush•continent is instantly 50 per cent right. ed to the wide-open arms of that wonderfulEurope is not good looking any more, nor stout lady in the nightgown who in Newwere the teeth of the young Englishmen, York's harbor proclaims, but the history of these last few years "Give me your tired, your poor. proves that both still can bite. Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Europe will never die, for Europe is a and whose name is Liberty. powerhouse and a melting pot of spiritual Now more than ever men think and say values the like of which exists nowhere else. that Europe is done for, Europe is dying. You can bring here the best of each country, Civil war has ravaged Spain, the greatest ofand it is fortunate that you do, but for one all wars sweeps over the whole Europeangeneration at least it will be eccentric, for• continent, leaving only three steppingstoneseign and accidental. Because a culture's over that torrent of blood and horrors, Por•greatness grows out of the apparent waste tugal, Switzerland, and Sweden. The love•which accompanies it, because for every liest monuments are demolished by only great painter it produces there have been [214] NEWS FEOM BELGIUM JULY 8, 1944 hundreds of mediocre painters and thou• be said. Europe alone has pondered over sands of week-end artists. For every greatthem for centuries end ever so often, in author there have been millions of passable,some obscure corner of that continent, some• insignificant or silly books. For every cathe•body stands up, using perhaps a little known dral built there have been erected thousandslanguage, and utters the same old truths of annoying ogival monstrosities. You canwith a new voice. It echoes all over the derive great enjoyment from the isolatedworld. masterpiece, but to appreciate it to the full Millions of people have died in Europe; one must still hear in the background the millions have been slaughtered. Those who rumbling echo of all the attempts that failed,escaped from that hell and witnessed the of all the partial successes, of all the approx•sufferings and crimes must have a message imations and near-masterpieces. for the rest of the universe. It would be In Europe alone do people have time to unbearable to think that the shouts of an• devote to all this. In Europe alone people guish and terror of the fourteen hundred do not believe that they have the right to beJews who were pushed into a synagogue in happy. They are sad with experience and Lodz and burned alive there would not therefore humble when confronted with realhave an echo in the spiritual life of the happiness. Their art, their culture, express•world. It would be unbearable to think that es their amazement that anybody on this out of the monstrous crimes committed by earth could be happy for more than a fewthe Nazi there would be no flowering of hours at a time. They are the professional mercy. The Spanish civil war gave us the pessimists in this world of ours, as Ameri•fantastic story of the Toledo Alcazar: cans are the persistent optimists. seldom have human greatness and human They may be reduced to a second-rate cruelty been demonstrated more vividly by position, economically and politically; they both sides engaged in the fight. The history never will be morally or spiritually, for of Europe, old and new, is full of these every country in Europe has its word to say, incidents which tell us clearly to what in its own way. The statesmen of the earlydepths we can descend, what heights we nineteenth century spoke of "the concert can reach. of nations," of "le concert europeen." They Europe has been destroyed and maltreat• were right: the sound Europe makes is ed a dozen times at least. It has always sur• the sound of a concert, with its basses, itsvived : it has even given birth to a new world cellos, its flutes and its triangles. You needwhich is now guiding and leading the peo• every one of them; none of them is useless.ples. It is diversified and rich; it is full of Europe's cultural history is much like surprises and potentialities. It will not and Ravel's Bolero: the melody is always the cannot any more dominate the universe same, but each time it is repeated anothermaterially, but everywhere in the world instrument comes to the fore and interprets people who want to "understand the reason in its own way the basic motive.