Which history to look at?

I have just returned from my annual trip to the Netherlands, which for me has become more about the Hague than Amsterdam (for one thing the Hague’s hotels are cheaper). I have always found Holland to be a very civilised place—all those cycle lanes, politeness and ample culture for all tastes and not forgetting that nearly everybody speaks English. So how is it, I wondered whilst imbibing the culture has such a civilised, enlightened place turned to the political hard–right in recent years?
 
Anyone visiting the country’s museums and galleries will be confronted by things about their history they may not be all that keen on, chiefly the history of colonialisation and slavery. When everybody was imbued with the spirit of the Old Masters they probably weren’t thinking about slave masters and the brutal sequesters of others’ property. Now it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the ‘Golden Age’ was also an age of misery, albeit not for the rich merchants and bankers of Amsterdam whose fine canalside houses and Old Master portraits we now admire so much.
 
It may not be the case that the rightwing political trendsetters pay much attention to captions in galleries, but in a more general sense I think what is happening, not just in Holland, is a large scale reaction against a more honest cultural/historical appraisal of what it is that a nation is. Added to this awakening of course is the payback of migration. When once it was OK for colonial troops to traverse the world on a thieving and genocidal crusade, the descendants of the victims are now ‘invading’ us! Horror!
 
It makes for a disquieting experience. Visiting the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam I was particularly keen to step on board the Amsterdam, a large masted ship originally dating from the time of the Dutch East India Company. It turned out this wasn’t the original (which sank off the English coast) but a replica made in 1985, part funded by the city council as a job training project. Now hand-wringing captions everywhere on board ask whether it was right to spend a fortune on such a project, as if the history of the original ship was a long lost (or more appropriately) buried secret.
 
It’s like a long sleep has been rudely and irrevocably interrupted. Wouldn’t it be better to let sleeping dogs lie? What next—reparations? No chance of that. The West still wants the interest paid on the debt it has foisted on the developing world. And never mind addressing the social injustices arising from climate change. It’s all too much to handle so has an easy answer: Stuff the Others, Send Them Back Where They Came From! (and continue exploiting them)