Posted on 05/16/2003 5:24:05 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
French-speaking enemies call him a "designer fascist", with his air of having just stepped off a plane from San Francisco.
Filip Dewinter, the strongman of the Vlaams Blok, the Right-wing anti-immigration party that is poised to do well in tomorrow's Belgian election, is a man who provokes that sort of angry reaction.
His Flemish front poses a mortal threat to the Belgian state and the welfare apparatus that keeps the French-speaking regions afloat.
Filip Dewinter
Each year, the Dutch-speaking majority in the north pay a bigger share of GDP to subsidise their former masters in Wallonia than the west Germans transfer to their cousins in the eastern Lander.
Mr Dewinter intends to put a stop to this by abolishing Belgium, which was created by Lord Palmerston in the early 1830s, against the wishes of both tribes. He wants to carve out an independent Flemish state which he says should be aligned with the "Anglo-Saxon world".
The Blok has risen so far, so fast, from its murky origins in Waffen SS nostalgia that it could become the biggest Flemish party in tomorrow's election, shattering the cosy coalitions that have run Belgium for half a century and slavishly followed Paris in European Union politics. The Blok already has 33 per cent of the vote in the Flemish bastion of Antwerp.
At a Blok "family day" in rural Limburg, 2,000 beer-drinkers - Antwerp dockers and Phillips workers from the factory in nearby Hasselt - gathered in the rain waving the party banner, "Eigen Volk Eerst"(Our People First). A speaker wound up the crowd with a stream of insults about Elio Di Rupo, the bow-tied, openly homosexual Walloon leader.
Mr Dewinter praised President George W Bush for dealing with Saddam Hussein and told me in good English: "The chief threat to the world now is radical Islam. They were taught a lesson by the Iraq war that they must take the West seriously. They thought we were very soft and tolerant but they now see we can hit back when necessary."
Like neighbouring Rotterdam, power base of the murdered Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn, Mr Dewinter's home town, Antwerp, has become a multicultural powder keg, a recruiting centre for al-Qa'eda.
Last year, a former Hizbollah fighter from Lebanon, Abou Jahjah, led race riots that charged through the shopping district, allegedly smashing the windows of those who failed to pay protection money.
Children of ultra-orthodox Jews are preyed upon by North African gangs on their way to school and now have to walk in groups.
"We are seeing the first pogroms in Belgium since World War Two," Mr Dewinter said.
"How can this be happening in a democratic country? We've got the most Left-wing citizenship laws in Europe that lets people have nationality after three years, even if they come illegally.
"What the Labour Party has been doing in England is to the point. We've got to stop non-European immigrants coming in from the Third World. Those who are already here should have to assimilate or go back."
For the Blok, mass immigration means more Algerians or Moroccans who speak French and gravitate into the "enemy" camp.
It is hard to separate the language war from the questions of race.
So where does the Blok fit on the Right-wing spectrum that runs from Germany's skinheads, to Jean-Marie Le Pen's anti-semitic Front National, to sleek "post-fascists" such as Italy's Alleanza Nazionale, to Fortuyn's gay, feminist, free-market, anti-Muslim mish-mash?
Most Flemish nationalists welcomed the Nazis as liberators in 1940, believing Hitler would create a Flemish state. Thousands volunteered for SS divisions to fight Bolshevism on the Eastern Front. The state later sentenced 2,940 to death for treachery, imprisoned 70,000 and charged 405,000 with collaboration, punishing five per cent of all Belgians. The Vlaams Blok, founded in 1978, is led by their children.
Perhaps a ruling elite that has still not put Marc Dutroux on trial - for fear of what he might reveal - seven years after he starved young girls to death in chains in his dungeons, should ask itself why the Vlaams Blok is running away with the votes.
There were some hard core Nazi's in Belgium who were Flemish. However, there were Nazi Walloons as well. The Waloonian (sp?) Leon Degrelle is one of the most famous non-German Nazis. He was temorarily the head of Nazi occupied Beligum for a the few weeks after the start of the Battle of The Bulge.
Yes, the Flemings were more welcoming to the Nazi's then the Walloons were overall, but there is a good reason for that. The Walloons had always oppressed the Flemish. The Walloos did not allow them to have Flemish schools, etc. During World War I, the Germans allowed the Flemish to have their owns schools, local governments, etc. Of course, when World War I was over, the Walloons went right back to oppressing the Flemish. So, it's no surprise that when the Germans came back in 1940 many Flemings weren't too upset about it.
But that's the extent of it. Otherwise, this is just the usual Nazi slur.
Cicero, your comments/posting speak for you. I don't know this guy, but knowing the Flemish (I work with a couple of colleagues, the wife grew up in Antwerp, and we spend time there when possible) I find the tone here offensive. What is different here?
I'd actually considered it. I like Antwerp. (I don't speak Vlaams, but that can be rectified.) But a (native) friend there advised against it. OTOH, should it become part of a Flemish state, *that* would be different.
Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and was occupied by Germany during World Wars I and II. It has prospered in the past half century as a modern, technologically advanced European state and member of NATO and the EU. Tensions between the Dutch-speaking Flemings of the north and the French-speaking Walloons of the south have led in recent years to constitutional amendments granting these regions formal recognition and autonomy. Fleming 58%, Walloon 31%, mixed or other 11%
Roman Catholic 75%, Protestant or other 25%
Dutch (official) 60%, French (official) 40%, German (official) less than 1%, legally bilingual (Dutch and French)
Translation: Someone found a picture of Dewinter at age 7, wearing an SS uniform on Halloween.
yitbos
Actually the Walloons are the French speaking minority in the south. The folks paying too much (more than west Germans pay to subsidize east Germans) are the Flemish.
My biggest problem with this is the smarmy insinuation that the Flemish Belgians welcomed the Nazi's. My wife's step mother was 16 when the Nazi's conquered her small town in north central Belgium (Flanders). She tells stories of risking being executed by saving her sugar rations to pour into the German's staff cars. They didn't welcome the Germans, they just had no choice because their masters (the Walloons) had followed the post World War 1 pacifist policies of most of Europe.
Belgium as a country is a joke. Every Belgian school child, French speaking Walloon or Flemish speaking Flander, learns both languages in school as a requirement of graduation. They each then refuse to acknowledge that they know the "other" language for the rest of their lives. That's why most business in Belgium, at least between Flemish and Walloons, is conducted in English.
An independent Flanders would be a feisty little addition to the mix in the EU. Their favorite symbols are the Manika Piss (little boy pissing, famous fountain in Brussells) and the Confederate battle flag.
I should have known the pedophocracy spoke French.
Belgium exists because the Spanish armies in the 16th century were able to control the southern provinces but not to subdue the northern provinces, which became the independent Netherlands. The southern provinces were the Spanish Netherlands until 1713, then handed over to Austria. They were conquered by the French during the Revolutionary period. After the defeat of Napoleon, Belgium was added to the Kingdom of the Netherlands (the idea being to strengthen the countries on France's borders) but the Belgians were dissatisfied and rebelled against Dutch rule in 1830. That led to the creation of an independent Belgium.
Winston Churchill was critical of the Belgian government during the months before the German attack in 1940--they refused to allow French and British armies to enter the country in anticipation of the German attack that they knew was coming: "the Belgian King and his Army staff merely waited, hoping that all would turn out well." Had the French and British troops been in Belgium, the German invasion would have been much more difficult to execute.
Belgium last had historic significance in the 1988 election, when Michael Dukakis made Belgian endive a campaign issue.
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