A pleasure in my travels is to see the street people of all the cities in the world, whether in Bruges or Busy Area Tokyo
One of the great poems, by Baudelaire, to remember when you are preposterous and forlorn
TO A WOMAN PASSING BY
The boom and yelping in the street had deafened me.
Majestic in her grief and widow’s weeds, so grand,
So slim, the woman passed, one ostentatious hand
Lifting festoon and hem to sway them casually,
Lightfooted, svelte, her ankle nonpareil.
Me? I was drinking up, preposterous, forlorn,
From her grey eyes, like clouds where hurricanes are born,
The sweetness that ensnares, the pleasure that can kill.
One flash… then night—O beauty, must you pass from me?
One look and I’m reborn; my life is changed forever;
Shall I see you again in all eternity?
Somewhere very far from here! too late! Or never!
You know not who I am; I know not where you go.
O you, I could have loved you. And I know you know.
But don’t forget why I love the sadhu on the street
It could be any of us
And if we all believed the high moral aims of poverty, devotion, purity, charity, and freedom… it would be all of us
A half-naked fakir, said Winston Churchill about Mahatma Gandhi
Gallipoli: Feb 1915–Jan 1916 overall; the land campaign began 25 Apr 1915 and ended 9 Jan 1916. Dead included Allied troops from Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Newfoundland, France, and Ottoman/Turkish forces. Roughly 8,000+ Australians, 2,700+ New Zealanders, many thousands of British/French/Indian troops, and huge Ottoman losses; total deaths were well over 100,000 across both sides. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty and became politically tainted by the disaster.
Bengal famine: 1943, in wartime British India. Usually estimated at about 3 million deaths from starvation and disease. Churchill’s defenders dispute sole blame; critics argue British wartime policy, shipping priorities, rice denial policies, inflation, and imperial indifference worsened it gravely.
UK retreat from France: the key event is Dunkirk / Operation Dynamo, 26 May–4 June 1940. About 338,000 Allied troops were evacuated, including about 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops. It was a rescue wrapped around a defeat.
Chronology knife-edge:
1915–16: Gallipoli catastrophe.
1940: Britain flees France at Dunkirk.
1943: Bengal famine.
1947: Britain leaves India.Dat is een harde reeks — “That is a harsh sequence.”
The Dutch there is not irrelevant.
Neutrality, the great language of the Swiss and… of Belgian cousins. We are small and weak, let us not take sides (we need money, we like living in London). One country is impossible mountains, never invaded. The other is flat sand. A highway to Holocaust. A philosophical imagination:
SOCRATES: Tell me, Leopoldes — what is neutrality?
LEOPOLDES: The right of a small nation to remain outside the quarrels of great powers.
SOCRATES: A legal definition. I asked for a real one.
LEOPOLDES: Then neutrality is survival.
SOCRATES: Ah. Survival without choosing.
LEOPOLDES: Small countries cannot afford grand moral gestures.
SOCRATES: Yet history forces gestures upon them anyway.
Let us begin with Belgium in the first war.
Germany demanded passage through Belgium to invade France.
Belgium refused.
Germany invaded anyway.
Belgian towns burned. Civilians were shot. Libraries destroyed. Refugees poured across Europe.
A small country became a martyr.
This much is true.
LEOPOLDES: Entirely true.
SOCRATES: And yet I wonder whether neutrality itself contained the seed of catastrophe.
Belgium trusted treaties the way a lamb trusts fences.
LEOPOLDES: Treaties are civilization.
SOCRATES: No. Treaties are civilization during peacetime.
War reveals what civilization actually is.
Belgium believed law could stop momentum. But when German generals looked westward, Belgian neutrality became not a sacred principle but merely a road.
LEOPOLDES: What alternative existed? We were small.
SOCRATES: Smallness is not innocence.
Nor is neutrality wisdom.
Belgium stood between Germany and France while insisting it was not part of their struggle. Yet geography itself contradicted this fantasy.
You sat in the doorway and declared yourself uninvolved in the fire.
The wind sharpens.
SOCRATES: Still — in the first war Belgium fought bravely once invaded. Liège resisted. The Yser held. Belgium became heroic precisely because it was overwhelmed.
But the second war is darker.
There, neutrality was no longer innocence.
It was repetition.
LEOPOLDES: Belgium remembered 1914.
SOCRATES: Trauma often disguises itself as prudence.
After the first war, Belgium drew the wrong conclusion. It decided not that Germany was dangerous, but that entanglement itself was dangerous.
So Belgium drifted back toward neutrality in the 1930s.
You weakened military coordination with France.
You hoped to avoid provoking Germany.
You attempted once again to stand beside history while history accelerated around you.
LEOPOLDES: We built defenses.
SOCRATES: Forts.
Concrete theology.
Europe worshipped fortifications between the wars because fortifications permit the illusion that war will remain orderly.
The Maginot Line.
Eben-Emael.
Lines on maps.
But tanks do not respect geometry any more than ambition respects treaties.
LEOPOLDES: Belgium could not defeat Germany alone.
SOCRATES: Then why pretend isolation increased safety?
That is what fascinates me most about neutrality: it is often fear disguised as dignity.
Belgium feared becoming a battlefield again.
So it delayed deep cooperation with France and Britain.
And what followed?
Germany invaded through Belgium again.
France rushed north according to the old plan.
German armor cut through the Ardennes.
France collapsed with astonishing speed.
Europe burned.
Neutrality did not prevent catastrophe. It merely postponed clarity.
LEOPOLDES: You make Belgium sound responsible for France’s fall.
SOCRATES: Not responsible. But contributory.
France committed its own suicide through arrogance, bureaucracy, exhausted demographics, and doctrinal rigidity.
Yet Belgium helped create the conditions for surprise by insisting on strategic ambiguity.
A nation cannot simultaneously occupy the hinge of Europe and claim to be merely decorative.
A silence follows.
Far away comes the sound of artillery that no longer exists.
SOCRATES: And now we approach the forbidden subject.
Sympathy.
Tell me, Leopoldes: were there Belgians who admired aspects of the Nazi order?
LEOPOLDES: In every occupied country there were collaborators.
SOCRATES: Do not dilute the question.
I ask because neutrality often produces a peculiar moral fog.
When a nation defines itself primarily by avoiding conflict, conviction weakens.
Some Belgians saw Germany not merely as invader but as future.
Authoritarian order.
Anti-communism.
Hierarchy.
Stability.
In Flanders especially, some nationalist movements collaborated enthusiastically.
The rhetoric was familiar across Europe:
Perhaps accommodation is wiser than resistance.
Perhaps Germany cannot be stopped.
Perhaps modernity itself belongs to the strong.LEOPOLDES: And many Belgians resisted heroically.
SOCRATES: Yes. Humans divide under pressure.
But neutrality before invasion creates strange habits after invasion.
A country trained not to choose often struggles to choose quickly when choice finally becomes unavoidable.
LEOPOLDES: You condemn small nations for trying to survive among giants.
SOCRATES: No.
I condemn illusions.
Belgium believed neutrality exempted it from history.
But there are locations on earth where neutrality becomes impossible because geography itself is political.
Belgium was one of those places.
Poland another.
Ukraine now, perhaps.
The plains of Europe are invitations.
The philosopher kneels and touches a poppy.
SOCRATES: England remembers the poppy as sacrifice.
And rightly so.
But sacrifice alone is a dangerous memory.
A nation that remembers only how it suffered begins to imagine itself morally pure.
Belgium remembers burned towns.
But does it remember the Congo?
LEOPOLDES: Again Congo.
SOCRATES: It must always return.
For while Belgium pleaded for the sanctity of treaties in Europe, it governed millions in Africa without consent.
Belgium demanded sovereignty abroad while denying it elsewhere.
This contradiction matters because it reveals something terrible about modern Europe:
Every empire believed brutality became immoral only when directed inward toward Europeans.
LEOPOLDES: You reduce all morality to hypocrisy.
SOCRATES: No.
To tension.
Belgium was both victim and perpetrator.
The British Empire fought Hitler while ruling colonies.
France defended liberty while suppressing Algerians.
Germany produced Beethoven and Auschwitz.
Civilization is not moral consistency.
It is merely complexity with architecture.
LEOPOLDES: Then what should a nation do?
If neutrality fails, empire corrupts, alliances entangle, and memory deceives — what remains?
SOCRATES: Honesty.
Not innocence.
Honesty.
A mature nation says:
We were brave.
We were frightened.
We resisted.
Some collaborated.
We suffered.
We exploited others.
We trusted treaties too much.
We prepared too little.
We hoped history would pass around us.
It did not.That is adulthood.
Most nations prefer mythology because mythology is emotionally ergonomic.
The sea grows dark.
SOCRATES: Tell me finally, Leopoldes:
What is neutrality?
LEOPOLDES: I no longer know.
SOCRATES: Then perhaps you are beginning to understand it.
Neutrality is not peace.
Neutrality is merely the hope that history chooses another route.
And Belgium learned twice that Europe often travels through the same doorway.
The wind scatters poppy petals across the stones like drops of blood.
Neither man speaks again.
An essay from Tokyo, dears. May 2026
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