It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Santa Claus is coming to town - Copyright ANP/AFP ROB ENGELAAR
Stéphanie HAMEL
Cherished Christmas tradition for some, profoundly insulting for others, the Dutch character “Black Pete”, a servant who helps Santa Claus distribute presents, has divided opinion in The Netherlands for decades.
Until recently, Santa’s arrival on the eve of Saint Nicolas Day (December 5) — a major Yuletide celebration for the Dutch — was marked by many people dressing up as Black Pete, complete with blacked-out faces and often afro wigs, creole earrings and make-up to plump out lips.
Stung by the caricature that harks back to Dutch colonial times, Jerry Afriyie founded the “Kick Out Black Pete” (KOZP) movement in 2010 to fight racism and is now wrapping up with the battle won.
“Around this time of the year, you would pass hundreds of Black Petes (Zwarte Piet in Dutch), hundreds of white people in blackface. Today, it is different,” he told AFP.
“Even small children are correcting me. When I say ‘Zwarte Piet’, they say ‘Piet,’ added the 44-year-old poet in an interview in Amsterdam.
In 2010, Afriyie’s foundation “Nederlands Wordt Beter” (“The Netherlands is improving”) set three objectives.
They wanted Dutch colonial history, heavily dependent on slavery, taught in schools, an annual commemoration for the victims and Black Pete to get the boot.
KOZP activists organised peaceful protests whenever Santa came to town with Black Petes in tow. Some were pelted with eggs or even fireworks by Black Pete backers.
The movement hit global headlines, tarnishing the country’s reputation for tolerance, and reached new heights amid the 2020 “Black Lives Matter” protests.
Then Prime Minister Mark Rutte — who had said for years that “Black Pete is just black” — urged the tradition to end.
– ‘This is not normal’ –
Afriyie explained that Black Pete was a figment of the imagination of Jan Schenkman, who popularised the story of Santa Claus in the Netherlands.
Black Pete is “actually a black servant. He (Schenkman) himself said it. It’s a black servant serving a white master,” said Afriyie.
“And I think that in 2025, it’s uncalled for.”
The movement’s goal was to “de-normalise” Black Pete and the blackface tradition, said Afriyie.
“It was as normal as Dutch pancakes. And we felt like, hey, this is not normal. It’s hurting people. A lot of children feel insecure,” he said.
KOZP has been so successful in persuading organisers — often municipal officials — to make the Santa arrival inclusive that it held no protests this year.
According to an Ipsos survey, the percentage of Dutch wanting to maintain the tradition has dropped to 38 percent, compared to 65 percent in 2016.
Sporting a “modern Pete” outfit of a long purple wig, spangles and a face lightly dusted with soot, Gipsy Peters told AFP: “It’s good to keep traditions alive but we can adjust them a little.”
“It should be about children and not about colour or something,” said the 35-year-old, who works in a school.
– ‘It’s not about racism’ –
However, not everyone agrees and maintaining the Black Pete tradition has become a rallying cry for far-right leader Geert Wilders among others.
Several activists in a recent anti-immigration rally in The Hague dressed in the “traditional” Black Pete outfit.
Away from official celebrations, many Dutch still apply blackface as part of the costume.
Jaimy Sanders, 30, who works in a plumbing firm, told AFP: “It’s not about racism. It’s about fun for the children.”
“And I really don’t care if they’re purple, green or whatever colour. As long as we can talk about the children and not the adults who make such a big deal of it.”
Afriyie said much progress had been made, although the war against racism was not won in the Netherlands, still wrestling with its colonial past.
“You have to understand, being a black person in the Netherlands, we have seen it all,” he said.
“I think that this country has made a huge step in fighting racism. But we are not there yet.”
“And it’s good to hold the country accountable for the remaining fight that needs to be fought instead of resting it on the shoulders of a few.”
Thursday, December 11, 2025
'On the road to Gilead': Alarm raised over conservative push to curtail women's rights
Comedian and podcaster Deborah Frances-White isn’t joking in her recent column for The iPaper, where she describes a growing movement of men who believe women’s right to vote should be taken away.
"The Guilty Feminist" host noted that she first assumed that it was rumblings coming from the "manosphere," an umbrella term for a loose network of online communities that promote ideologies of male supremacy and anti-feminism.
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"However, even the most fiercely anti-feminist forces haven’t openly questioned women having the vote in my lifetime, because no one can remember a time when it wasn’t normal," wrote Frances-White.
She recalled being cornered in the lobby of one of her comedy shows, by a woman who claimed that women are "too emotional" to have the right to vote.
"That was my first alarm bell," she confessed.
White women in the U.S. earned the right to vote in 1920. Frances-White noted that Native American women weren't even classified as citizens until 1924 and some Black women were blocked from voting until the 1960s — particularly in the South.
But in the last decade, Supreme Court rulings eliminated the Roe v. Wade standard, allowing the government to regulate reproductive health.
Frances-White pointed to the "Project 2025" handbook, a plan authored by those working with the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation amid President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.
The goals include not just replacing FBI staff with Trump loyalists, but the complete dismantling of the Department of Education, the mass deportation of immigrants and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
One section, however, focuses on enacting laws pushed by Christian nationalists, including laws that criminalize reproductive health.
"Much of this is being actioned now," she warned.
"Part of this new political climate includes the visibility of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which counts more than 160 congregations across North America, Europe, Asia and South America," she continued. "Their most recent outpost was strategically planted in Washington DC under the leadership of Pastor Doug Wilson. While they are not directly connected to Project 2025, many of their aims align neatly with it."
CREC spokespeople are outright arguing to overturn a woman's right to vote and put women "back to the household." Women's suffrage is "eroded family values" in their eyes. Women should only be voting, they believe, if she is the head of the household. That does not mean that men who are not the head of the household are not allowed to vote, however.
This reflects a broader argument within the Trump coalition. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has contended that if women are to be included in combat roles, they must meet the same physical standards as male soldiers.
In her closing remarks, Frances-White contends that what marks the beginning of the journey "on the road to Gilead" is not the overturning of a ruling like Roe, but rather when ideas questioning women's voting rights spread through conversations, social media, and videos without significant public opposition.
"It’s a quiet conversation in a church basement," she said. "It’s a campaign shared on social media. It’s ideas dropped in YouTube videos with millions of hits. It’s a moment when someone says, “maybe women shouldn’t vote,” and it doesn’t get laughed off. If you believe democracy means that each of us has a voice – the right to vote, choose, speak, dissent – now is the time to guard it." Read the full column here.
The Law Meets Its Limits: What ‘Nuremberg’ Reveals About Guilt, Evil and the Quest for Global Justice
View of the defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany. Photo: Raymond D’Addario. Public Domain.
The film “Nuremberg” depicts events surrounding the post-World War II International Military Tribunal – the first and best-known of the Nuremberg trials – which was created to carry out the “just and prompt trial and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis.”
Nazi party leaders Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg and Wilhelm Keitel were among the 24 people who ended up being indicted. Six organizations were also indicted, including the Gestapo and the SS. The tribunal, which took place in Nuremberg, Germany, and resulted in 19 convictions, attracted worldwide media attention.
The public’s understanding of these terms is due, in large part, to the success of the Nuremberg trials and the remarkable degree of international cooperation they required. But the shakiness of international justice today, along with the ongoing complexity of legal and moral conceptions of guilt, shows the limits of the law when it comes to holding the worst of the worst accountable.
Not the first attempt at international justice
These trials were not the first effort to prosecute war crimes in an international court.
U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was a key proponent of an international tribunal to hold Nazis to account. Library of Congress
Several years before the end of World War II, officials in the U.K., U.S. and USSR had already begun to discuss what mechanisms would be best for handling a defeated Germany. Some officials, such as U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, argued in favor of trials that adhered closely to American legal principles. Others, like British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, objected, specifically citing the failure of the Leipzig trials.
But several aspects were different this time around.
When the four chief prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal, representing the U.K., U.S., USSR and France, filed the indictment for the Nuremberg trials, most of the accused were already in custody. The prosecuting attorneys also had access to a trove of Nazi documents to build their cases.
There still needed to be a solid legal basis for the trials. Some defendants argued that their actions, at the time, had been legal under German law.
For these reasons, the charter that established the International Military Tribunal represented a significant development by outlining and defining the specific crimes that would fall under its jurisdiction: war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.
While the category of war crimes was based on existing international conventions, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity had not been previously codified.
The International Military Tribunal proceedings began on Nov. 20, 1945, and the hearings lasted until Sept. 1, 1946. Four judges – one from each of the countries convening the tribunal – presided over the case. Each of the four convening countries also appointed a chief prosecutor to lead the prosecution. Defendants were allowed to select their own legal counsel, subject to the court’s approval.
On Oct. 1, 1946, after a month of deliberation, the judges issued the final rulings. Of the 22 individual defendants, 19 were found guilty, 12 of whom were sentenced to death.
Atrocities committed by Allied forces, however, were not subject to the court’s scrutiny as possible war crimes, nor were actions taken by Allied governments domestically, including the incarceration of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government.
Even U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone expressed misgivings about the legal precedent he saw the trials setting. In a letter discussing International Military Tribunal chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson – who, at the time, was Stone’s colleague on the Supreme Court – Stone lamented, “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law.”
Questions about the complicity of everyday German citizens and those in Nazi-occupied territories were also left unresolved. To philosopher Hannah Arendt, the verdicts felt rather hollow.
“The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of law,” she wrote to her friend and fellow philosopher Karl Jaspers. “This guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems. … We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime.”
In “Nuremberg,” psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, played by Rami Malek, attempts to understand Hermann Göring’s personality and motivations in order to prevent future atrocities. Kelley assumes Göring will come off as an exemplar of evil. But he finds Göring to be largely ordinary, even likable, and not so different from many Americans.
While the Nuremberg trials left plenty of further work to do in developing a fair and functional framework for international justice, they represented a landmark development in international law, most directly in the adoption of the Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines regarding what constitutes a war crime.
After the International Military Tribunal issued its verdicts, Stimson remained a stalwart proponent of the trials he’d championed.
“It was not a trick of the law which brought them to the bar,” he wrote in 1947. It was the “massed angered forces of common humanity.”
In the 80 years since, the world has witnessed countless conflicts and atrocities unfold across the globe, yet only a relatively small number of the alleged perpetrators have been tried before international courts.
Beyond staunch disagreement over how to stop them, you’ll see debates over whether they even constitute crimes in the first place. The legitimacy of international courts is also disputed: In August 2025, the U.S. – which does not belong to the International Criminal Court – imposed sanctions on ICC officials after the court issued arrest warrants against top Israeli officials over alleged crimes in Gaza.
Watching “Nuremberg” in light of Stimson’s claim, you might wonder how to view this current moment vis-à-vis this earlier era.
Have political and social conditions shifted to such an extent that appealing to the “forces of common humanity” is no longer a viable political strategy? Or is the takeaway that there is always value in endeavoring to cultivate some form of consensus – no matter how small – over whether certain lines can never be crossed?
Even if consensus remains elusive, one thing is clear: The world’s knowledge of terms like “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” provides a universally understood way to push back against unfolding atrocities.
