Majorityrights Central > Category: European Nationalism

Geert Wilders, having emerged fresh from his triumphs at last month’s Dutch general election, in which the people appear to have succeeded in replacing this mainstream politician:

... with this one:

... so, er yes, Geert is going global:

Controversial anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders has pledged to form an international ‘freedom alliance’ to spread his gospel of Muslim intolerance across western nations - including the UK.

Wilders, whose Freedom Party made big gains in the Netherlands general election in June, says Britain along with Canada, the U.S., France and Germany are the core states he wants to target.

The politician made a speech outlining his plans today in The Hague.

... He says he has chosen the five western nations to spread his message based on the fact that all have high levels of Muslim immigrants, liberal democratic processes and all face Islamic terror threats.

It is interesting that he chose Britain, USA and Canada to launch Brand Wilders.  None of them suffer from the same concentrations of Moslem immigration as his continental European neighbours.  But what can he say in Flanders, Denmark or Sweden that he can’t in France or Germany?

He is an attention-seeker.  But he is obviously very good at it.  He creates waves and I suppose he might be a nett positive for the nationalist movement on that basis alone.  What do you think?  (Apart from the fact that he doesn’t look like the other two gentlemen.)

From the Telegraph:

Separatists win Flanders region in Belgian elections
Belgium’s future as a unified federal state was in doubt last night after a national election landslide for Flemish separatists in the Dutch-speaking north of the country

Early results put the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) on an unprecedented 29 per cent of the vote in Flanders, catapulting separatists to the forefront of Belgian politics.

French speaking Socialists on the opposite end of the political spectrum to the right-wing N-VA, both on the question of Belgium and on economic policy, were the largest party, on 36 per cent, in Wallonia, which has a smaller number of voters than Flanders, as well as Brussels, the country’s only officially bilingual area.

Bart De Wever, the N-VA’s leader, may have won a historic number of votes, however he is unlikely to be asked by Belgium’s King Albert II to form a Federal government.
Instead, Elio Di Rupo, the Walloon Socialist leader, is expected to become the first French-speaking Prime Minister since 1974 at the head of an uneasy alliance of five federalist parties.

Following the election, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and francophone Walloon communities have never been more divided since they were welded together in an unhappy Belgian union in 1830.

The rise of mainstream Flemish nationalism, with the N-VA on course to become the country’s largest party, is unprecedented in Belgium’s 180 year history and will lead to a protracted political deadlock as the divided country tries to form a coalition government.

“It is a true earthquake,” said Mark Eyskens, a former Belgian Prime Minister and a Flemish Christian Democrat.

The N-VA vote will have more than doubled since the 2007 election.  Vlaams Belang, on the other hand, won 11.99% of the Flemish vote in 2007, a performance which dipped to 9.87% in the 2009 European Parliament election.  I cannot find their figure for today’s poll, but it must have been hit by the N-VA’s success.  If so, that would be clear evidence that where an electorate like the Flemish (or the Scots or the Welsh) defines itself through grievances against an ancient neighbour the racial issues which exercise ethno-nationalism cannot come to the fore.  That would beg the perennial question, of course, whether those issues can ever come to the fore.

Perhaps the best that ethno-nationalists in Flanders can hope for is that civicism will deliver separation and facilitate a redefining of the national conversation.  Out of that an opportunity to raise the larger questions may arise.

In any event, tonight the Belgian marriage looks more certain to end in divorce than ever.

The Telegraph reports on the outcome of yesterday’s Dutch general election:

With 88 per cent of the votes counted, published partial results showed the Liberals with 31 and Labour on 30.
But the real victory went to Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), which demands an end to immigration from Muslim countries and a ban on new mosques. The PVV took its number of seats from nine in the last parliament to 24, and could hope to enter a coalition government.

The far-right leader with his distinctive shock of fair hair called the result “magnificent”.

“The impossible has happened,” he told a televised party gathering. “We are the biggest winner today. The Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam.”

Wilder’s party has been a beneficiary of the Dutch committment to proportionality (for the delivery of which the list system is employed).  We are about to see whether the resultant coalition-driven politics are kind or unkind to Wilders.  That there is any possibility of kindness at all is testimony to Wilders’ ability to avoid at least some of the wages of dissidence.  But there is a challenge to conventional nationalism contained in that.  Wilder’s Judeophilia, whether it is sincere or simply a stratagem, has worked to his advantage thusfar.  The same can be said for his Islamophobia, which shifts the focus to cultural rather than racial preservation.  It’s about “the Judeo-Christian heritage” and “Western civilisation”.  The focus has shifted from a revolutionary nationalism that sees the challenging of the system in toto, and the deliverance of European Man into his own hands, as the ultimate political good to a civicism that is customised to an electorally proportional representative system and that sees electoral progress as the ultimate good.

Whether anything of actual value can be achieved by this means we may now learn.

Today, Tom Sunic circulated the following article about a conference that took place on Tuesday in Zagreb.  The article appeared at Javno.com, which describes itself as a multi-media news portal.  The day on-line news media in the English-speaking world print material like this the revolution will have been won, and the former media-owners will be kicking their heels in a condo in Eilat.

The conference nods toward the same neo-Gramscian path that de Benoist’s GRECE promulgated during its vigorous, early phase.  It is taken for granted by all three speakers that the problem of intellectual radicalism on the European revolutionary right remains one of numbers rather than talent, and organisation rather than output.  That’s not at all how it is in the Anglo-American world, though.

GW

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“POLITICAL HEGEMONY OR CULTURAL HEGEMONY?”
The Center of Cultural Information

Speakers:
Zlatko Hasanbegovic (author, publisher)
Jure Vujic (author, expert on geopolitics)
Tom Sunic (author, political theorist)

On Tuesday, October 27, 2009, at 7pm, in the packed hall of the Center of Cultural Information (KIC), Zagreb, Croatia, a conference was held with the title “Cultural Hegemony or Political Hegemony.”?

The three speakers were a writer and publisher Zlatko Hasanbegovic, a writer and expert on geopolitics Jure Vujic, and Dr. Tomislav Sunic, author of the book “The European New Right”  (Europska Nova Desnica), which has recently been published in the Croatian translation by the publishing house Hasanbegovic. The three speakers presented a synopsis of the phenomenon known as “cultural hegemony,” which originated and was developed by the former Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci.

Every political system, including the democratic one, is based on a given cultural hegemony, which presupposes the dominance of political ideas of some social elite, or elites, but also implying the consent of social groups at lower strata of the society. In order to win or maintain cultural hegemony, control of the media, education, and public communications, as well as use and abuse of various mechanisms of “soft power”- as is the case today with “fun-making society”-  must be constantly upheld and updated.  All of these conditions shape public opinion.

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One day last month I drove up to a Heathrow hotel to take Tom Sunic off the hands of two gentlemen from the National Front, the cinderella nationalists of British politics.  The previous day Tom had delivered a speech to the NF Party Conference in Bradford (you can find it here), and these gentlemen had driven Tom and another speaker all the way down from the Islamic Republic.

After the pair had taken their leave of us Tom made sure that I knew what good, solid people he had been among in Bradford.  I’ve not paid much attention to the NF for quite some time.  So I made a mental note to check out their website and see what they are up to.

My eye was caught by a statement written by veteran nationalist and poet Eddy Morrison.  It is titled The eight principles of White Nationalism – the foundation stones of NF ideology.  I wondered what you would make of it, and how you might compare it with the culturalist vision that Lee Barnes brought to MR a few days back.

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On its website Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom, the Movement for a Better Hungary, is displaying a ten-minute video of police violence against its apparently legal and peaceful demonstrations held in 2006.  The video was made for handing out as a DVD to members of the European Parliament at the debate on Iran in which one of Jobbik’s three MEPs, Dr Krisztina Morvai, was making her maiden speech.  It has appeared in various places across the nationalist internet.

We cannot know whether provocations have been edited out.  But based on the evidence of the video it is quite shocking to see what these repulsive creatures in police uniform are willing to do in broad daylight to fellow Hungarians.

The “better Hungary” the party is striving for is one in which government serves the interests of the mass of Hungarians, rather than the elites, foreign interests and ethnic minorities.  Economically, it offers an anti-elitist, anti-neoliberal vision.  The minorities issue seems to come down to the problem of the Roma.

But there is, for Dr Morvai, also a Jewish Question.  She is, as it happens, married to a Jew and has three daughters by him.  The marriage itself appears to be over, though the couple remain together for the children’s sakes. In any event, Morvai famously created a stir when she remarked on a conservative Hungarian internet discussion group:

“I would be glad if those who call themselves proud Hungarian Jews in their spare time would play with their tiny little circumcised tails instead of abusing me. Your kind expect that if you fart our kind stands at attention and caters to all your wishes. It’s time to learn: we no longer oblige! We hold our heads high and no longer tolerate the terror your kind imposes on us. We are taking our country back!”

What a woman!

The Observer reports on an obscure mayoral election in Hénin-Beaumont, and the anticipated resurgence of FN under Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen’s daughter scents victory for resurgent far right

With a cheery “OK, let’s go,” Marine Le Pen leads her troop of activists down the steps of their campaign headquarters, through the narrow streets and into Hénin-Beaumont’s weekend market. Bottle-blond hair, white stilettoes clicking on the pavement, white jeans a sharp contrast to the tracksuits around her, the 40-year-old former lawyer and far-right politician offers handshakes, leaflets, smiles and encouragement in her smoker’s rasp.

By her side is Steeve Briois, the local boy and Front National (FN) candidate who she hopes will be the mayor of this depressed former mining town in northern France when the final count from the second round of Hénin-Beaumont’s municipal election is known at around nine o’clock tonight .

... For the Front National and Le Pen herself, a victory in Hénin-Beaumont would be “the start of a new era”. The FN would be running a municipal authority again for the first time in several years and for the first time in the blighted post-industrial political landscape of northern France.

Also, a first critical step will have been taken to reverse the steady decline since the heady days of 2002 when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the former paratrooper who founded the FN in 1972, made it to the second round run-off in national presidential elections with a countrywide vote of 18%. And finally, Le Pen fille will be established as the unchallenged “leader in waiting” of the party once her father, now 80, retires as promised next year. Le Pen and her team are confident. In the first round of voting a week ago the FN scored well above 40%, twice as many as the nearest challenger.

... In Hénin-Beaumont, run by the Socialists since 1953, things could not be much worse. This weekend’s poll follows the imprisonment of the serving mayor on wide-ranging charges of systematic corruption and the resignation of virtually all his colleagues. The fraud is reported to have cost the town colossal sums, leading to local taxes rising steeply while schools’ grants are cut. To make up the losses, taxes will have to rise even further or deep cuts be made in the municipal budget or both. To make things even easier for Briois and the FN, the local Socialists have split.

... First, Roget said, came unemployment and the crisis of the welfare state. “The kids in France have got no jobs at all and we are all being asked to work longer and have our pensions and benefits cut.” Then came the politicians and the Paris elite who “don’t give a stuff about ordinary people” and simply spend money on “fast trains or big planes”. They never listened to any “ordinary people”.

Third, there was globalisation and, specifically, the Chinese. “We had jobs in Hénin,” Roget said. “But now everything is made in China. We can’t compete with them. They have factories where it is slave labour. What are we going to do? Work like slaves ourselves?

... The strategy of hunting for votes on the left as well as the right has split the FN and the debates have mirrored those in the British National party. Three years ago Marine Le Pen persuaded her father to ditch the hardline anti-immigration language and tone down the borderline racism and implicit antisemitism. Instead, she argued, the FN could break the barriers placed in its way by traditional parties by becoming “respectable” and gain support by adapting its key message. “We have put the economy, the preoccupations of ordinary people, in the foreground. I’m happy to see that my strategy has worked.” The extremism of her father, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail of history” and called the Nazi occupation of France “relatively humane”, was part of the past, she said.

“It’s true that we have sometimes given our opponents a stick to beat us with but ... as regards immigration ... my father was a visionary, far ahead of his time, and was attacked because of the truths he told. Immigration - economic, humanitarian, of relatives, because of global warming - is going to be the number one issue in the 21st century.

Whatever works, I guess.

UPDATE 06.07.09

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