Monday, May 15, 2006

Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal is also under attack

In the previous post on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chuck says we need to start a list of worthy European refugees to be welcomed in America. Add Paul Belien, a critic of Hirsi Ali, to it; he is a writer I have always considered an honest speaker of truths to the multicultural and anti-national lies of the leftist elites who are running Europe into the ground, and banning the speech of some who speak against them. Belien reports:
Following last Thursday’s Antwerp massacre the Belgian authorities have announced zero tolerance for racism. Belgian journalists, lawyers and politicians (including Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt), say that I am responsible for creating the atmosphere of hatred that led to the massacre. Some people even demand that I be prosecuted.

Belgian television and the Brussels papers say that the Antwerp shoot-out is the result of my writings. Regular readers of The Brussels Journal know my view well enough: I have repeatedly defended the view that Muslim immigrants are not to blame for Europe's predicament. The latter is entirely of our own making. Europeans have foolishly replaced God by the State as the one on whom they rely to take care of all their needs from cradle to grave. The religious vacuum has led to a demographic vacuum, because those who lose faith in God lose faith in the future as well. A civilization that has created a religious and a demographic vacuum is bound to perish.

The lights are turning out for Europe. If America follows Europe’s example Christendom is lost.
What was this massacre? Again, in Belien's words:
Yesterday Hans Van Themsche, an 18 year old high-school student who had just been expelled from boarding school for smoking in the dormitories, went berserk and set out on a bloody rampage in Antwerp. In the morning he shaved his head down to the neck. He put on combat boots and a black leather outfit and went to a store of sporting and hunting gear to buy a rifle. Dressed as a “Goth” he walked through town and shot at three people who crossed his path: a veiled Turkish woman, a two year old Flemish toddler on a tricycle and her black nanny, killing the latter two and seriously wounding the first.

A policeman was able to neutralise the student by shooting him in the stomach. He is currently in hospital, recovering from the wound. According to the authorities he said he was a skinhead on a suicide mission who wanted to kill foreigners and intended the last bullet for himself. In a farewell note, which he left at his school, he mentioned “heaven, which does not exist” and wrote that his three brothers would feel better once he was gone. Luc Deprez, the schoolmaster, said that Hans Van Themsche, who turned 18 last February, was an intelligent and courteous boy. According to the judicial authorities, who questioned his parents, there are no indications that the murderer was raised “in a racist or violent environment.”

The murderer’s aunt, Frieda Van Themsche, confirmed that the boy has been raised in a family where he and his brothers were even forbidden to play with toy guns. Frieda Van Themsche, however, is a member of parliament for the Vlaams Belang party. This party, which is Antwerp’s and also Belgium’s largest single political party, aims for the independence of Flanders, is opposed to Muslim immigration and does not believe in a multicultural society.

Following Hans Van Themsche’s killing spree, however, his aunt is guilty by association, and so is the entire party. The Belgian government has strongly condemned the shootings, describing them as an extreme form of racism. Guilty, too, is this website because the writer of this article happens to be married to another VB member of parliament. Today a far-left organisation, the Progress Lawyers Network (PLN), attacked The Brussels Journal in a press release, and demanded that “Paul Belien be prosecuted for his recent publications.” Tomorrow the Belgian media will parrot the message. I am a prolific and outspoken writer, which in Belgium is not tolerated from a Conservative.
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See also here and here.

4 comments:

chuck said...

Hasn't Belgium already outlawed one party on the grounds of racism? The country sounds thoroughly screwed up what with three factions competing for power: Muslims, Flemings, and Walloons; all sorts of underhanded politics results. As to Hans Van Themsche going postal, it wouldn't surprise me if he had heard racist remarks at home, folks tell me that the amount of acceptable racism in such places as France, Germany, and Switzerland is shocking to an American. Then again, we may just be getting a fortaste of a developing European youth movement reacting to the breakdown of European culture. The Belgian government is probably mistaken if they think they are holding the reins of history.

truepeers said...

Chuck, yes, the current Vlaams Belang party is the reborn version of the party they banned.

I have no doubt there is a lot of racism in Belgium and elsewhere in Europe, much of which we would condemn. But the denial of race as part of a given human reality - especially the denial of the need for the cultural particularisms and political or social boundaries by which, among other things, a racial connotation has been ascribed to particular populations and to the national identities that are today condemned because they have had historically some such racial connotation, is equally dangerous. It is the road to the death of self-ruling peoples and towards a new era of elitist one-world imperialism.

While globalization is inevitable and necessary at the economic and, to a lesser extent, cultural levels, at the political and at certain cultural levels, we should be talking about integrating immigrants into renewed national "races", and not denying our differences, which only leads to confused nihilism. A young person can only model his life on models that are bounded, part of specific, historical traditions, and not on what is common to humanity as a whole. One might, without much evidence, speculate that the failure to provide such models was part of this Belgian school's failings. People who over-react to things like smoking (if this was truly the sole reason for his expulsion) tend to be people who would purify the world in other matters and leave little of the civilized haze in which us fallen creatures are able to recognize and make proper use of our differences, and choose our own boundaries with which to live.

chuck said...

on the political and certain cultural levels we should be talking about integrating immigrants into renewed national "races", and not denying our differences, which only leads to confused nihilism.

Oh, I agree. But when membership in a country depends only on blood and race then there is little hope for integration. Especially when the whole problem is denied. I think Europe has bitten off far more than it can digest; the problem is both in the number of immigrants and the traditional insularity of the European nations. The EU elites wave the magic wand of moral purity and good intentions, but the problem remains. Someone needed to make a more realistic evaluation of the European temperament.

truepeers said...

Multiculturalism is a tough ideology to peg down and I'm not sure I've done it in the comment above; on the one hand, we are told by the multiculturalists to celebrate differences, but on the other it's clear we are not to make too much of them, that they are not to be the basis for any form of preference or exclusion; the net impact of this contradiction is that order and rights, the definitions of truth and heresy, must be imposed from above, and people cannot rule themselves in local democracies.

And this fits the European temperament to some extent. It fits the patronizing elitism of those who identify with a cosmopolitan culture more than with their "provincial" nations. But the provinces also have their heros who sometimes get the political upper hand. What I guess I am saying is that the Euro temperament could take Europe in many directions; the one in which it should go is the one that promises the greatest degree of freedom for people. And it seems to me that a world order in which strong independent nations negotiate the terms and business proper to the world scene, and when that scene must give way to the business proper to national and local scenes, promises the greatest freedom. It is better to have scenes within scenes that to seek purification and just one world scene. Multiple scenes contain differences and conflicts. Trying to include everyone equally in one cosmopolitan scene is a recipe for chaos and unbounded, senseless conflict and violence.