You cannot enter the same river twice. The river will not wait. The one who enters again does not remain the same, either. Time matters. We all swim in the river of events, sometimes making waves, sometimes just staying afloat. We make history as history makes us. When we tell stories about the past, we pay homage to William Faulkner. “The past is never dead, it’s not even past”. Yet, history repeats itself with a twist. Either with a bang or with a whimper.
Here is the bang. When you occupy the main public square in a country ruled by the communist or the national socialist party, you risk a bang. When you demand more democracy for everyone, including the underpaid, the underrepresented, and the underrecognized, you face soldiers with real guns and real tanks.
When you replace class with gender and participate in the NGO Forum on Women in the same country, only a few years later, you risk a whimper. You have written “Liberte, egalite, homosexualite” on your banners. Instead of tanks and soldiers, you face the police agents clutching truncheons in one hand and folded white bedsheets in another. They have been warned that the lesbians might take off their clothes. So they stood by, ready to cover their bodies, to reduce the impact of nakedness in media reports. As it happened, nobody stripped, and the police did not move.
The river of events, usually defined as history, or as one damned thing after another, flowed for six years between these two events (1989-1995). Should we celebrate progress (less violence, more tolerance)? Can we conclude that the political manners of the communist politicians improved – at least in China, if not in Russia or North Korea?
Yes, we can. Perhaps.
Haarlem, May 19, 2026