verslag van de racistische meeting in Lebbeke : Ovl IMC

On the 2nd of December, I took a train ride to Lebbeke to sit in on a meeting for a group called Euro-Rus. I had heard that the infamous David Duke was going to be speaking there, and was curious to see what the former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard would have to say at such a meeting. In recent years, a private Ukrainian university had awarded him two doctorates and allowed him to teach courses and lead conferences on Zionist conspiracy theories at the institution. Euro-Rus is advertised under the pretext of focusing on the improvement of relations between Europe and Russia, but its body would seem to be mainly composed of white nationalists from Belgium, France, Britain, the United States, Holland, and Russia.
Upon arriving to the appointed place, a local bar and fitness centre in Lebbeke, I was greeted by a big, British bulldog-type skinhead, who cordially escorted me upstairs to the meeting. The first speaker was just finishing up his talk to a small audience made up of fancily bearded suits, suede cowboys, young skinheads, and ordinary looking people. Shortly after being seated, David Duke took the podium. He spent the first part of his talk going over his bad reputation in the media for, as he now recounts, having been briefly involved in the KKK in his youth, when in fact he acted as Imperial Wizard of the organisation until relatively recently. In his own words, he gave up those “images” long ago – leaving one wondering how superficial the “images” of white hoods and burning crosses in fact are, compared to the underlying ideology of racial nationalism, which today attempts to assume for itself much more moderate and subtle “images” publicly.
Next, Duke spoke about nationalism and how he believed that it was the natural right of any people to want to preserve their national purity. European nationalism, according to him, should aim to preserve “what is European” about Europe, and unite all of the European cultures (including Eastern Europe and Russia) against their common enemies. The common enemies Duke has in mind are the Jews, though by extension these enemies include all people of “non-European” ancestry. The 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war were both, according to him, Zionist plots complied with by President Bush and his neo-conservative cabinet, which he crudely likens to “a Hebrew wedding in Tel-Aviv”. Duke even sympathises with the Palestinians for resisting domination by what he calls “the most racist nation in the world”. He attempts to position himself against neo-conservative ideology on the basis of the Zionist machinations which, according to him, brought it into being. More simply, Duke is upholding his own racist ideology by pitting it as the natural reaction to the “much worse” racist ideology which he believes is being dictated from Israel. After hearing the other two English speakers, Nick Griffin and Guillaume Faye, make less than subtle attacks against Muslims, I was a bit surprised how little Duke went in this direction himself. Meanwhile, Griffin and Faye had less to say about Jews than they did about Muslims.
Duke paints Russia as the last great reservoir of European ancestry, as though strengthening ties with Eastern Europe could result in the yet “untainted” European qualities of Russia rubbing off on to the West. Meanwhile, he blames all of Russia’s political corruption on the Jewish oligarchs whom President Putin is attempting to shut down. Russia is then painted as the enemy by the Jewish-controlled Western media. But while Flemish nationalists would seem to be on friendlier terms with the Jewish community in Belgium than with the Eastern European community, Duke’s position would seem somewhat unorthodox, to say the least. Who can know how well these strategic words of advice from the former Imperial Wizard went over with the Vlaams Belang members present at the meeting ?
The next English speaker was Nick Griffin, leader of the British Nationalist Party. In his talk, Griffin was more emotional than Duke, while similarly extolling the virtues of Russian national purity and what it has to offer to the rest of Europe. With his clairvoyant abilities, Griffin gives the rough date of the middle of the current century as the time when Europe will collapse under Islamic conquest. At one moment, he says bluntly, “while our boys are killing their boys over in Iraq, their boys are sleeping with our girls back home”. With this emotional statement, Griffin got a huge rise out of the audience – but what does it even mean ? With his paranoid fear-mongering, he appeals to the most common uncertainties of traditional Belgians who feel easily threatened by all varieties of foreigners, while at the same time attempting to paint the Russians among them as their friends and allies in preserving white Christian Europe.
The final speaker to address the audience in English was Guillaume Faye, who alternated with his native French in a maniacal and likely drunken attack on all varieties of non-European foreigners (especially Muslims), the unemployed, gays, etcetera. Faye, a well-known extreme-right ideologue from France, helped orchestrate the “ethnopluralist turn” of the Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) a little while ago. The innovative idea was to steer clear of the old-fashioned evolutionist approach, which was becoming too confrontational as contemporary science eroded the credibility of rank-based racial theories, in favour of a more seemingly moderate “ethnopluralism”, which would purvey racialist nationalism under the pretext of preserving European cultural diversity against non-European cultures, and in theory respecting their right to do the same. While Faye may be clever at toning down his words to convey an equally hateful message, he concluded the Euro-Rus meeting with perhaps the most crude and vulgar talk of the evening. At the very least, he is entertaining as a caricature, and it’s hard not to laugh a little bit when listening to his rant.
After some concluding words from the moderator, there was a brief question-and-answer period. The most telling remarks on the evening’s proceedings came from an ordinary man in a tracksuit, who voiced his skepticism about seeing Russia as an ally. He had read that in the Russian army, senior officers tortured junior officers, and he took this as a bad indicator of how civilised Russians in fact were. Duke replied that the story was overblown, and that the practice of “hazing” takes place in all armies. Still not satisfied, the man held up a copy of the Russian youth issue of VICE, the trendy and cynical fashion magazine which recently expanded into Belgium. The cover of the magazine features an unwashed Russian boy playing outside at night. “Does this look civilised ?” the man asked, and for a second I imagined a funny scenario in which a Vlaams Belang father finds VICE magazine in trendy nihilistic son’s room and brings it to the weekend neo-Nazi meeting. It just goes to show how the ideological game of “uniting the right” is little more than a rewriting of scripts, or an attempt to reconcile a deeply ingrained tribalist tendency with the global reality facing it, which it can only approach in terms that do not over-agitate the xenophobia trembling at its core.