After Facebook, bol.com is now also banning Zwarte Piet. Bol.com will no longer use the term ‘Zwarte Piet’ in titles and product descriptions. Instead, only the word ‘Pete’ will be used. That will undoubtedly cause huge misunderstandings. As far as I know, bol.com is the first and only webshop that does this and you can still go to Amazon for Zwarte Piet.
I don’t need Facebook. Maybe it’s time for everyone to question this medium instead of playing a slave. The book suffices The circle by Dave Eggers to know that Facebook not only cares about the fundamental human right to privacy, but is also simply a threat to democracy. Restricting freedom of speech is in line with predictions.
Bertelsmann On-Line
Let’s go back to bol.com. Bol.com was founded by Bertelsmann, one of the largest publishers and media companies in the world. Started in 1835 with Bibles and school books, but later known from RTL and last century also from the ECI book club. With the advent of the internet, a webshop was therefore an extension of those activities and Bertelsmann was indeed so visionary to set up Bertelsmann On Line (BOL) at approximately the same time as Amazon on the other side of the lake.
Unfortunately for them, they sold bol.com in 2002 as a result of a changed strategy. In 2012, bol.com was acquired by Ahold for 350 million euros. Ahold Delhaize owns all bol.com shares (since May 2012). Will Delhaize soon also cancel the term ‘Zwarte Piet’ in titles and product descriptions?
Many bol.com customers are angry and outraged. They wonder where bol.com gets the right to play as a moral knight as a web store. Because in the end bol.com is a shop. A store that interferes with the name of a product produced by a third party. Imagine that you walk into a grocer’s that has fallen and order a beer ‘Sint Bernardus Abt 12’, to which he says: ‘I don’t want you to describe that beer as’ Sint Bernardus Abt 12′, from now on we will call it number 12 because otherwise it comes across as hurtful to non-Catholics’.
Brown beer in our daily diet?
Are we now also going to censor all recipes with ‘brown beer’? At the VRT they are already reviewing all episodes of ‘Daily Cost’ with Jeroen Meus. How long will it take to order brown bread from the bakery?
Since when does a shop engage in politics, education, inciting hatred? A store is expected to honor the adage ‘the customer is king’. Not the other way around.
Thanks to all those underdeveloped, racist customers, bol.com has now been able to acquire a monopoly position. This can lead to abuse, especially in lockdown times. The next step is to keep increasing in cost efficiency and that is exactly what is happening here. They want no (or as few as possible) territorial product exceptions. That only costs money. They want the greatest common denominator. A local tradition is a disturbing factor. The whole thing about Zwarte Piet is convenient for bol.com because of pure economies of scale. In this way the company can simply carry out maximum extensions of products from the global world. Or once again showing BLM’s militants as useful idiots.
Here and there there will also be the marketing consideration that in this way they will please ‘social warrior’ clients or give the impression that they can tweak their revenue forecasts. The fact that they insult the customers who made them great does not bother them. After all, they form the tacit majority that does not break windows and does not initiate harmful switching actions.
It’s the Moors
They don’t care that the historical origins of the figure of ‘Zwarte Piet’ are being used. However, we have always heard that Sinterklaas comes from Spain. Spain has long been ruled by the Moors, the Muslims who inhabited the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Malta during the Middle Ages. So that lepe Sinterklaas has somehow succeeded in enslaving such a Moor.
The Byzantine historian Procopius described the Moors in the 6th century as black-skinned people who populated Numidia and Carthage. The Catholic Archbishop Isidorus van Sevilla (560-636) wrote that Maurus meant black. In Modern Greek means mavros also black. In the 9th century, the Muslim writer wrote Al-Djahiz that the Zengs, Ethiopians, Fezzans, Copts, Nubians, and Moors included among the black races.
It is therefore not so unlikely that Zwarte Piet was a real ‘differently pigmented’ and we do not need to insult him by saying that he would be dirty from the soot in the chimney.
How wrong can you put the cards?
By the way, that’s not the only fact that has some misunderstandings. For example, from now on at bol.com you will only be able to order the card game ‘Zwarte Piet’ as a game ‘Piet’. So watch out for Child Focus’s online pedophilia investigators.
However, the card game ‘Zwarte pieten’, of which we, by the way, pass on the expression ‘someone de zwartepiet’ (making someone a scapegoat or… ‘differently pigmented’ sheep) has nothing to do with Sinterklaas’ helper.
In the card game of the same name ‘Black Petes’, the Jack of Spades is the Black Pet and you as a player should not end up with that card. The person who is the last to have the jack of spades loses the game and is therefore the black pete. In the Black Pete game, both the holder of the card and the card itself have the Black Pet. Zwarte Piet is therefore used here as a term for accident and has probably existed as such for several hundred years.
Charles the Great
The symbols of spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds date from the Middle Ages. ‘Spades’ is a symbol for the landed gentry. Lord of hearts, incidentally, represents Emperor Charlemagne himself.
The term Zwarte Piet from the card game has therefore been around for much longer than the helpers of Sinterklaas are called Zwarte Pieten, so that the expression has also existed in the Dutch language for a long time.
So let us stop giving Zwarte Piet the ‘Zwarte Piet’ or we will end up with the ‘Zwarte Piet’ ourselves.
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