Conjecture 9: Frozen facts

This battle is an entirely failed military expedition conducted by Dutch commander Maurice in the summer of 1600 against his will, but at the order of Parliament with the aim to conquer the Flemish coastal cities including Dunkirk, destroy the pirates and release by the Archduke besieged Ostend.* Flopped, but nonetheless Maurice built a reputation inside the Seven Provincies as well as in the rest of Europe.** “When Maurice arrived in front of the place on 1 July, he sent 2/3 of his force across the Yser River to blockade it from the West. That night, while he was making preparations for a regular siege, he received news that the Archduke was close at hand with a field army. He knew he was cut off from his base; so he ordered his cousin Ernst Casimir with a force to delay the advancing Spanish while he was bringing the best part of the army to cross again the Yser and rejoin the rest of the army to face the Archduke. He had no option left but to present battle or risk a potentially disastrous retreat by sea.”*** This retreat was then presented as a masterly strategic move. Four hundred years after the Battle, we can only rely on some relicts of facts. Some stories grow bigger, this one grew to the size of time, place and act, where most Europeans don’t remember (at all) what this was all about.

One could also say: good management of expectations, where just as generals, some football coaches are also good at. Rarely The Netherlands saw a team with such low expectations as the national team in the competition preceding the World Cup of 2014. Scepticisme is there from the onset. 2-0 against France, 1-1 against Ecuador, Ghana 1-0 and Wales 2-0: chances that the Orange team will survive the group games against Australia, Chili and Spain as adversaries look almost frighteningly low. However, the World Cup come, the shortcomings of the Dutch football team are very well camouflaged.**** One might add: and profiled in the communication. Bringing such a weak team to the finals, that was huge, that was management of expectations. The third place was celebrated in The Netherlands as if the boys won the World Cup itself.

“Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990 was the leader for whom the term ‘Iron Lady’ was coined. On 19 January 1976, Thatcher, having recently been elected Leader of the Conservative Party, gave a speech entitled “Britain Awake” at Kensington Town Hall in Chelsea, London. It included the claim that The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. On 24 January, the Soviet military newspaper Red Star published a response to Thatcher’s speech by military journalist Captain Yuri Gavrilov.  He supplied the headline “The ‘Iron Lady’ Sounds the Alarm” to the piece, intending an allusion to Otto von Bismarck, known as the “Iron Chancellor” of imperial Germany. According to Gavrilov’s article, Thatcher was at the time already known as “The Iron Lady” in Britain, supposedly on account of her “extreme conservatism”. Gavrilov’s article was noticed by the British Sunday Times newspaper the next weekend and subsequently given wide publicity. The nickname stuck firmly to Thatcher.”**** Battle of Nieuwpoort, ‘Iron Lady’, they are frozen words, carved in our cerebral cortex, where such rudiments are hard to wipe out. But if the frozen word fits like a glove on the organization, who then is in some way the ‘owner’ of the frozen word and its given association and framing, this possession has become extremely valuable.

Next time: On facts and meaning

*P. Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam, 1948:318-319.

**M. Vlyminck, Het beleg van Nieuwpoort, 1977.

***Wikipedia, Battle of Nieuwpoort

****Voetbal International, December 2014

****”Revealed: Red Army colonel who dubbed Maggie the Iron Lady … and changed history”, Will Stewart, Daily Mail, 24 February 2007

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