> I'm amazed they published that in the newspaper. (...) That was a freaking brave editorial decision.
As someone not from the US: what would the controversy here be? (i.e. what reason would someone opposed to publishing this name?)
The Netherlands has done pretty awful things in Indonesia after WW2, and while that is unfortunately hardly mentioned in high school, I can't imagine it being controversial for a Dutch newspaper to publish testimonials of it.
Imagine that a large number of people in the Netherlands thought that what the Netherlands did in Indonesia were right and justified, and that the Netherlands should still have colonies and Indonesians should be ruled from the Netherlands to this day. Imagine these people still fly flags celebrating Netherlands rule of Indonesia and name their schools after the officers responsible for committing those atrocities in Indonesia, which they deny actually happened.
How often do people actually approve of slavery, or deny that it happened? I mean, I know there are some - I've seen articles as well. But surely those are only the excesses of a fringe movement, not something the newspapers should actively take into account when deciding what to publish?
Racial supremacy is what people sympathize with, not slavery per se. For example, the assumption that a white person's word is inherently more valuable than a black person's word left some particularly nasty stains on America's history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
They deny the excesses of slavery, or excuse them, and argue that whites are inherently superior and should rule over other races as subjects. There are an awful lot of people in the south that at a minimum are sympathetic to those views.
As someone not from the US: what would the controversy here be? (i.e. what reason would someone opposed to publishing this name?)
The Netherlands has done pretty awful things in Indonesia after WW2, and while that is unfortunately hardly mentioned in high school, I can't imagine it being controversial for a Dutch newspaper to publish testimonials of it.