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Thread 4620

Thread ID: 4620 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-01-26

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Leveller [OP]

2003-01-26 12:31 | User Profile

In describing the moves to undermine the Vlaams Block, the Flanders secessionist party, the article sums up the European elites fundamental idea of democracy - top down rule by a permanent clique of supposedly opposed parties, with all the powers of state used to punish anyone who moves outside of a narrowly defined 'consensus'. Give me the Swiss version any day.

[url=http://www.flemishrepublic.org/current_issue.php?id=2&artikelsoort=2]http://www.flemishrepublic.org/current_iss...&artikelsoort=2[/url] (The article is hosted on the Vlaams block site)

CORRUPT BELGIAN REGIME ACTS TO OUTLAW ITS MAIN OPPONENT

The Vlaams Blok is poised to win the forthcoming elections. To prevent this, a government agency has brought the party to court in an attempt to ban it.

Since 1994, government agencies and NGOs supporting the Belgian regime have been harassing the Vlaams Blok with costly, time consuming court cases, hoping to obtain a judicial verdict outlawing the party or depriving it of its subsidies. As it is illegal for a Belgian party to receive private donations, all “democratic parties” are subsidised by the taxpayers in accordance with their electoral results. If, however, a court should rule that the Vlaams Blok is an “undemocratic” organisation, the government can defund the party and kill it.

So far, the Vlaams Blok has never been convicted. On 29 June 2001 a Brussels court refused to issue a verdict, arguing that it was for the electorate to decide whether a party was “undemocratic” or not. On 10 September new judicial proceedings against the party were started in Brussels. Because Belgian judges are political appointees, the Belgian regime of Louis Michel and Guy Verhofstadt hopes to succeed in its aim to designate the party as an illegal organisation, so that it can be prevented from participating in the next general elections, which are due at the latest in June 2003.

The stakes are very high. Indeed, if the party should become the biggest Flemish party, the “Belgian model” would collapse.

Corporatist Model

As its Prime Minister said in 1989: “Belgium is the prototype of Europe. The Federal Belgian State is a prefiguration of a Europe of Peoples, brought together in their organised diversity.” When the Kingdom of Belgium was established in 1831, the French diplomat Talleyrand described it as “an artificial construction, consisting of different peoples.”

“Have we not been called the laboratory of Europe,” the Belgian ideologue Léon Hennebicq wrote in 1904. “Indeed, we are a nation under construction. The problem of economic expansion is duplicated perfectly here by the problem of constructing a nationality.”

Belgium was transformed into a Corporatist state, where the so-called “Social Partners,” rather than Parliament, decide economic and social policies. These “Social Partners” are the Belgian Employers’ Federation and three trade unions (a Christian, a Socialist and a Liberal one) which are recognised by the State as the only official representatives of the employees. The Flemings and the Walloons were bound together within one single social welfare system, through the institutions of the Social Partners, spanning the linguistic divide. This situation still exists today.

In the 1930s, Henri De Man, the leader of the Belgian Socialist Party and one of the closest personal friends of King Leopold III, declared that the Belgian Corporatist construction had to be transplanted to a higher level; he wanted to replace it by a pan-European and eventually a global system.

European Vanguard

De Man and his deputy, Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, reckoned that if one had to live in an artificial state, it would be best to have one on as large a scale as possible.

In June 1940, De Man called the Nazi victory “far from a disaster, a deliverance. His friend, the anti-Semite Leopold III commented: “It is impossible to hesitate between German supremacy and English supremacy.” In a speech in 1941, De Man told his followers that it was necessary to “transform Belgium, not abandon it,” through “an Anschluss to Europe.” What was needed, he said, “was as much Federalism and as little Separatism as possible,” so that “Belgium, exactly because it is not based on a unique national sentiment, can become the vanguard of the European Revolution.”

In the 1990s, Belgium as an artificial state became the ideal of another group in addition to the Corporatists. In an Open Letter in 1998, a group of “Post-Modern” Belgian intellectuals wrote that they cherish the Belgian flag “because the latter does not represent anything,” and that Belgium, exactly because it lacks a national identity and is “post-national,” constitutes a supreme morality. The latter notion was also the opinion of King Baudouin, the son of Leopold III, who in 1993 stressed the importance of “the European construction,” which in following Belgium’s lead “can best help us to resist the temptation of egotism and narrow and disastrous nationalisms.”

A Royal Warning

His brother, King Albert II, reiterated the same warning last Summer, on 21 July, when he warned against “a repetition of the disastrous 1930s.” With these words, the King did not refer to his father’s anti-Semitism and Nazi-sympathies, but to the growing popularity of the Separatist Vlaams Blok.

This party is Belgium’s deadliest enemy. It is depicted by the Belgian establishment as the political heir of Fascism. Last May, Le Monde Diplomatique even wrote that the Vlaams Blok is inspired by Nazi collaborators such as Henri de Man! In reality, the party is a broad coalition with one common goal: the dissolution of Corporatist Belgium and the establishment of a democratic Flemish Republic. In 1985, the late Lode Claes, one of the two founders of the Vlaams Blok, wrote that Belgium is characterised by an “identity of non-identity.” This was repulsive to Claes, who argued that without identity there can be no morality. Without a sense of national identity, public morality inevitably withers away.

Dirty War

For two decades, the steady growth of the Vlaams Blok has been inspiring fear in the corrupt Belgian establishment, including the “Social Partners.” Although the Vlaams Blok, led by Frank Vanhecke MEP, is currently the third party in Flanders with over 15 percent of the votes, it figures prominently on the Belgian State Security’s official list of dangerous and subversive organisations. The Belgian police services are waging a dirty war against the party by infiltrating its chapters and intimidating the electorate. The Belgian trade unions exclude everyone who is known to be a Vlaams Blok member. However, in Corporatist Belgium the unions hand out the unemployment benefits (a task for which the government pays them), so the consequences of such exclusion can be severe. The party is also denied access to the government-owned networks. The Flemish Broadcasting Corporation (VRT) has adopted a charter stating that it does not provide a platform for “opinions that propagate exclusion.”

The dirty war, the lies, the legal prosecutions against the Vlaams Blok are all part of the strategy of a decadent Corporatist regime that hopes to survive by transforming itself into a Post-Modern, non-national, multi-cultural European Superstate – a construction which Karel Dillen MEP, the other founder of the Vlaams Blok, has aptly called “a Greater-Belgium.” It is in the interest of all Europeans to prevent this from happening.

na Gaeil is gile

2003-01-27 09:54 | User Profile

The old maxim "If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal" is chillingly born out in Europe these days.