These are momentous times in Flanders.  My friend, Johan Van Vlaams, blogs below on the new beginning for pro-Flemish politics.

Meanwhile, I want to look backwards at the Vlaams Blok model.  Does it have a wider applicability?  What if any lessons does it hold for the benighted natives of my own country.  For the avoidance of doubt and in deference to my Scots friends I will restrict my observations in this respect to my own band of raiders south of the border.

The Blok took its character and drew its determination not from anything so nebulous as political ideals - or, God help us, values - but from the Flemish people themselves.  They are children of the North Sea coastal lands of Europe, cut from much the same cloth as the Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans who, with the Celts of the fringe, constitute the indigenous peoples of Great Britain.

But unlike us, the Flemish have, even under the multicultural onslaught and in the maw of the Belgian Establishment, retained sufficient self-knowledge and self-respect to found a liberation movement on national identity.

National identity in a European people, no less than any other, ought always to be contiguous with the nation state.  A discreetly related people is the heart and soul of nationhood.  But that nationhood is not merely diminished by the artificial conjunction of differing peoples with differing interests, it is permanently disfigured by the inevitable contest and still more inevitable one-sided outcome.

But there is an upside to this, too.  Ancient rivalries do speak to public feeling.  A people who suffer injustice are likely to be as mindful of their identity as any single-malt nation.  All too clearly, being gripped in the Belgian maw has served just such a purpose for the Flemish.  The Blok was all about that.

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It was a long time ago.  If I had to rely purely on memory I couldn’t even be sure of the year now.  But, you know, I was young and didn’t worry for the world as I do today.  I didn’t understand the need to hold fast to the remembrance of such dispiriting realities.  I didn’t understand why it would matter if, so many years later, they should slip out of the public mind, and mine.

So it was rather easy to forget.  Perhaps, too, forgetting went with the grain of the wood.  Seventies Britain was a different place with quite different expectations.  Life seemed more providential, and perhaps was.  We raced between the lights.  We were freer and more risk-taking or, perhaps, just more subject to the cheapening, egalitarian law of accident.  Now we are all wrapped up in cotton wool.  Death seems an intolerable affront.  But I don’t know that it was then in quite the same way. 

I should also say that we were also immeasurably more naïve then than now.  For one thing, the foul-minded, shit-hearted non-soldiers of the Provisional IRA had not begun leaving their murderous gifts in mainland pubs.  We saw terrorism on the nightly news.  But it was mostly on the island of Ireland, as the shit-hearts liked to put it.  Or it was even further away and involved Middle Easterners and Israelis.  This type of terrorism came to us through the most basic moral filter.  It was a filter through which only one side of the story ever got told.  We didn’t question it then.  We hadn’t learned to question everything.  But anyway it was a true filter.

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Digby Jones, Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, will tell his members at their annual conference today, “there will not be any work in Britain for unskilled people … within one scholastic generation.”  Outsourcing is the culprit, with the jobs going to India, China and, increasingly, the countries of eastern Europe.

Jones is scathing of the protectionist trends in American and French political life.  One would, of course, expect him to be.  The CBI has been a cheer-leader for goin’ global for years.  Its D-G has “formed the view that if ever there was a country made for globalisation it is Britain. It is in our DNA.”

Well, he might be over-heating somewhat there and probably meant to say that it is in our island culture.  Still, from that one can fairly construe that he is referring to the culture of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples of this island.  So, if globalisation will indeed pin our future prosperity to our native capacities, which seems to be the logical extension of Jones’ premise, why are we allowing in 150,000+ legal and illegal immigrants each year with not a moment’s consideration of theirs.

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So despite all rumours au contraire there is hope for France again.  Magnifique.

An article that may interest Majority Rights readers.  The Failure of the American Experiment published at Kuro5hin

I remember a Romanian telling me, just before the downfall of the Ceausescus, that it would take three generations at least to remove the taint of the communist system from the souls of Romanians; it will take at least as long to remove managerialism from the souls of the British, though it has been with us for so comparatively short a period.

— Theodore Dalrymple

The story is told well enough here.  My thanks to Fred and Paul for the link.

To add to that, readers who are interested in knowing a little more of van Gogh and why he died, please read the comment by Braveheart in the thread of my initial post on the killing.  You will find there a translation of van Gogh’s last press article.  My thanks to Braveheart for that.

As chance would have it I stumbled across AMERICA’S SECRET WAR: INSIDE THE HIDDEN WORLDWIDE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND ITS ENEMIES by George Friedman today. Highly recommended.

The “Norman Goldman” review on the Amazon site provides an accurate summary of the book.

Friedman runs STRATFOR, billed as the largest private intelligence company, not surprisingly, Friedman analyses the war from the point of view of a hard headed strategist. At one point in his concluding chapter, he discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the arrayed Jihadist and American forces that may shock some readers in it’s candour.

He points out that American forces are well armed and equipped and capable of enduring hardship. He points to the long history of foreign powers underestimating the fighting prowess of American troops (Valley Forge, Corregidor, Khe Sanh..) and the war fighting ‘stomach’ of the American people.

“The weakness of the U.S. is not our soldiers, or their numbers, but the vast distance that separates American leaders from those who fight. From government officials to media moguls… few members of the leadership class have children who are at war. To them, the soldiers are alien, people they have never met and don’t understand… A ruling class that sends the children of others to fight, but not their own, cannot sustain it’s power for very long.”

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