Een nieuw volkslied tegen de derde wereldoorlog = A new folk song against the third world war (2), 1973 - 2000

Oosterhuis calls this a Folk Song, meaning a Song of the People as a protest song, about a war which needs to happen.. His text is about the Superpowers which, since living memory, have threatened world security, with the ability to annihilate one another. But it is equally about how much those same Superpowers have devastated whathas chauvinistically been called Third World countries. We have long-seen the raping of the earth's resources, the inevitable path to conflict and threat to the elusive nature of peace. Yet we are have become numb in our complacency, a complicity which fails to resist the ruthlessness taking place on a systematic scale, that we allow the rich one percent of the population to prosper at the expense of the remaining ninety nine percent.

This is the second setting Huijbers wrote about this piece The first was an unambiguous setting of the Dutch national anthem (JM 846). This second setting is based on the hymn, I will find comfort in Jesus' love, attributed to Johannes Brugman in 1539. For Huijbers, it was an intentional refutation of the head-in-the-sand syndrome, since Jesus' love could never countenance the obscenity of Rome's response to the struggling churches of Latin America, that you are poor because God wants you poor. This response provoked the reaction of an alternative, emerging theology in the mid-20th Century, an indigenous theology of liberation pertinent to Latin America. Such eminent proponents of this included church leaders such as the Protestant theeolgoan Aaron Sapsezian; Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife in northeaster Brazil (who initiated the movement of cooperatives to bypass the powers of corporate commodity rustlers); El Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero (who turned his back on a life of passive compliance to side unamboguously with the poor, earning him the sniper’s bullet) and many from all denominations, most visibly Methodist and Anglican. At grass-roots level, individuals such as the Catholic priest Camillo Torres, who left nis Church behind to take up the rifle, subsequently dying alongside the guerrillas. The Superpowers, aligned with the world's military might, defended the stability of their regimes to the hilt. And Rome sided with the Powers that be, accusing all who advocated economic and political revolt as being Marxist. This is an easy label when avoiding the reality of understanding the depths of the teachings of the Jesus of the Gospels. -- Tony Barr