In this post, I tour respectively the Belgian morass, the Sarkozy attempt to pipolisate the Holocaust and the German embarrasment concerning racism and torture. 

Belgian Collapse? 

O my, how wrong I was, when I wrote last November, that the Belgian surrealist magicians were about to solve the national crisis! (Toto le Psycho: "Plan B s'exécute"). There is no plan. Government Ministers are on permanent strike [NL].

Today's Arte television digs into the stubborn Flemish idea of independence. Some marginal Flemish leftist tells them, that it is simply a Flemish employers' illusion. He says they think they will get more profit when the Walloons are out and the obedient catholic Flemish workforce would be alone to confront them. I hadn't thought at that scenario. It is somehow too fantastic, but I am not convinced that it is completely wrong, any more.

Those Flemish entrepreneurs, do they forget, that without Brussels, which is not Flemish, but not Walloon either, their economic power will be more and more illusionary? I cannot believe that. But how could we explain then, this course to a destruction of the Belgian state, which they do not oppose?

I am a Dutch-European Belgian, of Brussels conviction, to paraphrase a Flemish Brussels intellectual, interviewed by Arte, tonight. I cannot tell my new compatriots how to act. I risked a series of suggestions about my city, Brussels, who is to be the orphan of any possible compromise between Flemish and Walloon provincials. In line with my anti-autoritarian tradition, I proposed last week, that the Brussels people themselves create a full-fledged region-community (the last one multilingual) and leave the other two quarreling regions alone. (Et si les Bruxellois créaient leur communauté à eux?, Toto Le Psycho [FR]). The Dutch version is here. They earned some not unfavourable comment on Medium4You, the Brussels BloggersBlog.

But there is no new 1830 in view. The Brussels people are not (yet) in a mood to defy their two new egocentric rulers. I do not see, however, another way out.

Kosovo - a precedent?

I was against the US-NATO war against Serbia when it was fought, in March-May 1999. It is not that I am a friend of Milosevic, far from that. But restoration of the freedom the Kosovar Albanians had under Tito, could have been realised in many other ways. Launching a war of destruction against the Beograd youth who guarded the bridges over the Duna river, against the automobile workers of Kragujevac and bombing the civil airport of the Montenegrin capital, is certainly not my idea of humanitarian intervention. It was more the style of US interventions under the Monroe doctrine in Latin America.

Europe shouldn't have allowed it. Even if you do NOT condemn the way that war was fought, you cannot be happy with its results, from an European point of view. European states should not be dependent on ethnic homogeneity. it is impossible: Ethnicities are mixed among each other in a pattern that reflects centuries of history. A state is judged by its capacity to guarantee and to implement equality of all its citizens before the law and by how it supports cultural freedom for all groups of people who live within its borders.

That is how Europe deals with Hungarians in Slovakia and Rumenia. That is, what Europe demands from Turkey, when we speak of Kurds and Armenians. That is, what Spain allows the Catalans and what Britain allows the Irish in Northern Ireland. That is, why everybody with a sense of civility, opposes a divided Cyprus. And that is, why dividing Belgium into two states, is so disastrous.

After 1999, with the Serb sovereignty over Kosovo confirmed by the security Council of the UN, there were plenty of opportunities left for the EU, to impose a civil construction upon Kosovars as well as Serbs, that would have preserved a federal Serb state with internationally guaranteed minority rights. But the UN rulers of the occupied province, beginning with the maverick Kouchner (now French foreign secretary under Sarkozy), denied the Serbs and the Balkan nations in general, what was already then accepted European standard. In a not so far away future, Dayton (compromises about Bosnia, 1995) and the independence of Kosova (2008), will be seen as fatal errors that may have caused new wars and ethnic cleansings.

Sarkozy and his Holocaust Adoption Plan

I am brooding about a proposal to my French readers, to make 81-91 year old Frenchmen forcibly adopt a Jewish French child who was a victim of the 1941-44 holocaust. In my opinion, that would be much more to the point, than French president Sarkozy's idea to impose such a forced "adoption" non all French children at the age of 11. Our octagenarians were in their twenties and thirties, when they could have done something (more) against the deportation of more than 100.000 Jews from France to the Nazi extermination camps.

It is their shame, allowing for the positive exceptions, that French railwaymen rode without problem the trains of death to their destinations, it is their problem, that the "rafle" of the vélodrôme d'hiver could happen, it is they who should question themselves, how the Drancy concentration camp could function unhampered in the Paris suburbia. That problem is not solved yet. In stead of charging symbolically innocent children (35% of them from immigrant parents) with that guilt, they should do wise, to end their "refoulement", make peace with their conscience and then, yes, only THEN, talk with their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in order to demand them to oppose resolutely and without compromise, without subterfuge, and always, genocide and racial discrimination.

Isn't that a better idea than Sarkozy's? I appeal to Mr. Kouchner, for here we are in an evident situation of "devoir d'intervention". The Government, he is a member of, seems to be going to culpabilise French 11-year olds, for something, they are not reponsible for at all. And, in the case of the 35% immigrant children, even their fathers and grandfathers are completely innocent of. This is a form of state-brainwashing, that cannot stand his high humanitarian principles. I do not imply, that the holocaust history should not be taught to French children. Not at all. More attention than now should be given to it. But, please, do it in a historical context, that children of that age can understand!

And, thinking about contexts, why should the French Government limit itself to genocides that were perpetrated under foreign leadership? Why, for instance, not force French who are in their fifties and sixties, to adopt, each individually, an Algerian child, that has been a victim of French torture, rape and blind killing during the colonial war from 1954-1962 in that country? An estimated one MILLION Algerians met their death under French intervention. There are a sufficient number of victims in stock for that age-group. And I, for myself, I wouldn't exclude the Jewish victims of Muslim revenge in Oran or in other cities. Nor the poor pieds-noirs who were forced out of the country after the French defeat.

I do not forget the people in their seventies. For them, a Vietnamese child, victim of the French intervention after 1947, that ended so tragically in the defeat of Dien Bien Phu, is the one to adopt immediately.

Summing up: If the principle of Sarkozy's adoption plan is accepted, there is much work to do. Algerian victims and their torturers have to be identified. The same for the Vietnamese.

Then, after the French setting an European example, the British will adopt massively Indian, Burmese, Boer, Egyptian, Persian, Pakistanese, Sudanese, Chinese, and I do not know who else as adoptive children. I do not forget my Dutch and Belgian contemporaries: The former will adopt each an Indonesian child, victim of the so-called "Police-Actions" 1946-1949, while the latter will tend to a Congolese child, raped and mutilated in the wars, the Belgians helped to bring about in their former royal colony.

And why not the Spanish (republican -and non-republican- victim children from the thirties civil war), the Italians (Ethiopian children, victims of the Mussolini invasion) and the Portugese (from all former colonies under Salazar)?

And the Germans, what do we do with our dear Germans? The elder generations have mostly died. The younger ones are pro-Israelian and pro-American. They do not want a new holocaust, even the most right-wing among them. The Germans, they are against the Turks, or the Islam, generally. Allowing, again, for the notable exceptions.

Ulfkotte and his works 

Well, here we are in the land of Udo Ulfkotte. Mr. U.U., before the 11th of September 2001, was convinced, that terrorist actions were mostly due to covert actions of Israel (Gencode "J"). After that date, he changed dramatically his orientation. Europe is victim to an Islamist conspiracy, and left-leaning authorities are their objective or subjective accomplices. Ulfkotte inspires with his so-called "informations" on Islam a whole community of German nationalists and supremacists, who leave their ideas on the comment pages of "Politically Incorrect" and other Hetzblogs.

Although he is under suspicion in Belgium (Antwerp) and in Holland (Amsterdam) of distributing knowingly false informations about immigrants in those cities and the attitude of communal authorities, he continues to publish false information about those EU partners, and declines to correct them, even if evidence is sent to him.

Ulfkotte did not yet give an opinion on the torture issue. Under US pressure, some German authorities let it be known, that they are in  favour of, for instance, waterboarding, as a means to deal with presumed terrorists. We are waiting for Ulfkottes verdict. Can we return to Nazi times, and do with captured people everything we want, or is the German Constitution still upright? As soon as "Akte Islam" pubishes its opinion, we 'll keep you informed.