14/01/2026
“one of ours, all of ours" for those who have forgotten
Netherlands: Just outside Utrecht, in the woods near Fort Rhijnauwen, a modest memorial marks the ex*****on of fifteen Dutch resistance prisoners shot by the SS in November 1942. There was no battlefield, no uprising in progress, no trial. The men were taken from Camp Amersfoort and killed as a warning. The logic was simple and brutal: if one resists, all will pay. Terror works best when it is impersonal and absolute.
The N**i occupation of Holland relied heavily on this principle. Reprisal killings were not about justice or even efficiency. They were about message discipline. The SS understood that collective punishment collapses moral complexity into fear. Individual guilt becomes irrelevant. Identity replaces action.
That logic echoes uncomfortably when modern states adopt language that blurs the line between individual behavior and collective responsibility. Recent statements from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem, invoking rhetoric summarized as “one of ours, all of ours,” were framed as solidarity with law enforcement. But the structure of the message matters as much as its intent. When institutions speak in absolutes, they flatten accountability and invite escalation.
The comparison is not one of scale or intent. Utrecht in 1942 was living under occupation by a genocidal regime. Contemporary America is not N**i-occupied Europe (yet). But history is not only about outcomes; it is about habits of thought. The memorial near Utrecht exists because a state once decided that collective identity justified collective punishment, and that the public needed to understand this as normal.
The stones in that quiet forest do not accuse. They warn. They remind us that when governments shift from individual responsibility to tribal language, from law to loyalty, the distance between rhetoric and violence can close faster than anyone expects.
That is why Utrecht remembers. Not because the past is repeating itself, but because it never entirely goes away.
