By Andrej Sekulović
Robert Steuckers is a Belgian author, essayist, translator, activist, a former member of the New Right think tank GREECE, and the founder of the European Synergies think tank. We talked with him about geopolitics, philosophy, politics, the Conservative Revolution movement, and other interesting topics and current issues.
You have written several books and essays about the German interwar movement from the first half of the 20th century, known as the »Conservative Revolution«, which had a big impact on the Right ideological currents across Europe, but is deliberately ignored by today´s mainstream academics. Can you tell us a bit more about this movement?
Even if I were to give a “brief overview”, as you say, of the conservative revolution or the “folkish movement, I would need a good hundred pages. At least. That would be beyond the scope of our interview. But to make it short, I must nevertheless remind you that Theodor W. Adorno, one of the most emblematic figures of the Frankfurt School, which is rightly regarded as the absolute philosophical opposite of the “conservative revolution”, once admitted that incisive criticism, formulated by the best authors of this “conservative revolution” against the Wilhelminian and Weimaran political systems and against the implicit philosophies that underpinned them, were often more relevant, more profound, than the criticisms of the left, in whose orbit Adorno intended to inscribe his struggle. Adorno added that it was imperative to ask why these criticisms were more powerful than the whole para-Marxist paraphernalia of the left, whether or not sprinkled with psychoanalytical elucubrations or sexual speculation.
The “Conservative Revolution”, as a general rule, because one should not omit to think of the extreme heterogeneity of this impressive body of authors, is based on an acute sense of the decline of our civilization, which has become too materialistic, too procedural, too affected by routines that have become incapacitating over time: this idea is found in a sociologist/philosopher somewhat forgotten in the current neo-right-wing movement, Georg Simmel. He insisted on the inescapable ossification of the “procedures” and “processes” born in the wake of the generalized industrialization of Europe from the second half of the 19th century onwards. These procedures and processes had all had dazzling and promising beginnings, were the harbinger of happy and rational modernity in the making but had ended up getting bogged down in routines that prevented the emergence of new regenerative forces. The legal, institutional, and administrative productions of the progressive liberal ideology thus ended up producing deleterious incrustations, which blocked any progress, any decision, any resolution of accumulated problems and generated, volens nolens, a generalized regression, thus posing a serious problem of legitimacy (democratic or not).
You mentioned the Frankfurt School, which is considered the »birthplace« of the new left and could be considered as the complete opposite of the Conservative Revolution. How would you compare those two groups?
Societies, first the Wilhelminian or Austro-Hungarian before 1914, then the Weimar Republic after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, had come to live under a suffocating crust of rules and rigidities, of economic and deculturalizing conceptual heaviness, false political principles and falsely moralizing fads, a perfectly blocking crust, which prevented the terrible problems of the day from being solved, galloping inflation and the obligation to feed France with the enormous reparations demanded at Versailles. Simmel’s ideas on the blockages of the so-called “rational” society influenced the Frankfurt School precisely from its foundation in 1926 onwards. Strengthened by the black and tragic vision of Spengler, the thinker of the decline of Europe and the West as a whole, the “conservative revolutionaries” stopped believing in all ideologies of progress and stopped conceiving their actions (political or meta-political) as “kathekonic” (taking as a model the Kathekon of the Apocalypse, which fights incessantly to delay the final fall). The proponents of the Frankfurt School will, for their part, seek to save progress and to imagine alternative metapolitical and political forms of struggle, based on other revolutionary agents than the working masses. Their last emulators set in motion the process of decay at the end of the 1960s, a process which we see ending today with the festive and gendered follies which the Polish and Hungarian governments refuse to translate into obligatory social practices. Progressive modernity has thus had two historical chances which it has squandered: the first before 1914; the second in two stages, after 1945 and especially after the revolts of 1967-68, heralding the era of festivity, which was hoped to be a vector of unfailing and eternal happiness. We are disillusioned today, all the more so because this ideological nonsense was coupled with a socio-economic monstrosity, neo-liberalism, just as anti-political as the obsessions, sexual and otherwise, of a Cohn-Bendit. Today we see the catastrophic collision of this nonsense and monstrosity at work.
One of the philosophers that had quite an impact on the ideas of the Conservative Revolution was Oswald Spengler…
The Spenglerian idea of decline was accentuated by the German military defeat of 1918, by the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, and by the inability of successive governments of the Weimar Republic to ensure order in the streets, to protect the people against the effects of economic and financial crises, etc. Parallel to this, there was also the grim situation in German society generated by the idea of decline, which was becoming increasingly widespread, and the collapse of the currency, largely due to the obligation to pay reparations to France, Groups such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s acquired the idea that the defeat was not only the result of the actions of the Western Allied armies against the German imperial army but also of the inadequacy of the Wilhelminian institutions, an inadequacy which the liberal democrats of the Weimar Republic repeat, albeit in the name of other ideological nonsense. In his articles, Moeller van den Bruck popularises his ideas by using the categories of ‘young’ and ‘old´. Young is that which still has potential and creative fertility in itself in the political arena. Old” is that which remains passive under the crust of fixed institutions, of that which repeats infertile “ritornello”. Transposed today, this distinction, once used by Moeller van den Bruck in his polemics, would decree “old”, the liberal and the sixty-eight hodgepodge, which leads to deadlock and permanent crisis (as under the Weimar Republic), and “young”, everything that coagulates in a “pole of reactivity” hostile to this unbearable hodgepodge.
Another German who quite influenced that movement was Carl Schmitt…
Carl Schmitt, in the context of the Weimar Republic rather than in the more ideological and polemical context of the conservative revolution, forged two concepts to be retained: that of the “decision” (Entscheidung), of the capacity and will to decide the policy to be followed (and even the war to be waged); the “decision”, with the designation of the enemy, are therefore the very foundations of politics, of the essence of politics. Politics in Schmitt’s view is only constituted by the day-to-day management and debates without much relief of the more or less representative assemblies in normal times. When there is a “state of exception” or a “state of emergency”, when the city is threatened, decisions must be taken quickly, without debate, without wasting time. Then, after having been severely criticized by National Socialist authorities and having withdrawn from certain posts to which he had been appointed, Schmitt theorized his notion of the “Great Space” (Grossraum), in parallel with those formulated at the same time by the various schools of geopolitics active in Germany, including that of Karl Haushofer. Europe, around its German center, around the territory that was once the territory of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, had to unite, manage in concert its very large African colonial appendix and forbid access to any power outside this double Euro-African space. For Schmitt, this was the notion of “Interventionsverbot raumfremder Mächte”, aimed at prohibiting any intervention by powers outside the European space in the European space and in the adjacent spaces controlled by Europeans. The historical model of Carl Schmitt’s reasoning, a kind of a “contrario” model, was the proclamation in 1823 of the American President Monroe, who established as the axiom of North American foreign policy the systematic prohibition of any European intervention in the New World, following Spain’s expulsion from its Ibero-American empire. Only the Russians in Alaska and California (until 1842) and the British in Canada remained present in America. Schmitt’s grand-spatial Europeanism complemented the triadic vision (Germany + Soviet Union + China) of the German national-revolutionaries and national-Bolsheviks. In the main essay of the second volume, which I devoted to the “conservative revolution”, I stressed the importance of this national-revolutionary will to create a vast German-Soviet-Chinese synergy in the twenties of the last century, until 1933, the year in which the National Socialists established themselves in all the cogs of power. The main exponent of this triad, Eurasian before the letter and before the revival of this concept by Alexander Dugin in present-day Russia, was Richard Scheringer, whose facsimile Aufbruch magazine reveals interesting geopolitical and geostrategic options which, all things considered, have an impact on current events. The German national-revolutionaries intended to seize power in Germany as a result of the recurring crises in the Weimar Republic; for them, these crises heralded an inevitable and catastrophic end, generating temporary chaos which the former soldiers of the Great War were going to put an end to, either by sending the fake politicians back to their homes or … by settling their scores once and for all.
You mentioned the »triadic vision« of Germany, the Soviet Union, and China. Tell us a bit more about this…
The communists, whom they initially perceived as their allies, were in power in the USSR. The dominant party in China was the Kuo Min Tang of Chiang Kai Chek, aiming to establish modernist military power. The Kuo Min Tang received the support of German soldiers, including the famous General von Seeckt and the future military governor of occupied Belgium, von Falkenhausen. The residual Reichswehr trained in the USSR. Scheringer and also the brothers Jünger, Hielscher, and Niekisch wanted the constitution of this great Eurasian Triad, capable of drawing into its orbit Kemalist Turkey, the Iran of the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, and Indian nationalists in revolt against British colonialism. Today, the inferiority of Germany (and the rest of Europe) in the Americanosphere is a failure and can only lead to the bogging down of our continent and our civilization. The Merkel system is leading Germany to implosion and an economic backlash, in the face of which the Weimar crises will soon appear as small ripples. But Germany’s main customers, who keep it afloat today, are Putin’s Russia, which supplies the bulk of its energy, and Xi Jinping’s China, which is its main trading partner. Inevitably, the Triad, potential Eurasianism, is back. Scheringer was right.
How much did in your opinion the Conservative Revolution influenced the French and the European New Right?
The “new right”, especially in its Parisian expression, did not really engage in geopolitical issues. In fact, it’s one of those Parisian intellectual sects, with all that’s ridiculous and unpleasant about it. I can no longer identify with this type of cenacle. Guillaume Faye deplores this situation expressis verbis, in his book entitled L’archéofuturisme, which he was not forgiven: until his death, he was pursued by the hatred of his former fellow fighters, whose reflexes were more sectarian than metapolitical. Stefano Vaj, a friend of Faye’s, a Milanese jurist and thinker, theorist of a new dissident Italian right-wing, is of the same opinion: his caustic texts on sectarian reflexes and the art of waving his “sebile”, begging for money to feed the guru and satisfy his whims, are very tasty. Among the ranks of the Parisian neo-right-wing sect, very few understand a minimum of German to grasp the importance of the theories of the “conservative revolution” and above all to understand the eminently Germanic context in which they were born. The end result of this bizarre agitation is a cacophony in which everyone bawls out tirades from the translated works of “conservative-revolutionaries” without ever understanding the complicated context of Weimar Germany, where the political actors sometimes moved from one camp to the other, by justifying their choices with complex, very German arguments in the sense that behind them there was often a Hegelian philosophical heritage or original, unexportable political veins born in the second half of the 19th century.
Would you agree that the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche also played a big role within both Conservative Revolution and the New Right?
Finally, in the context of the new French Right, it will mainly be Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler who will be called upon, because they have been very early and abundantly translated into French. To this reception of Spengler and, above all, Jünger, we must add a very important impact of the French Nietzschean vein, born before the First World War, under the notable impulse of Charles Andler (1866-1933), a native of Strasbourg, author of three volumes on the reception of Nietzsche in France. Charles Andler was a socialist, a founding member of the Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Révolutionnaire, founded in 1889. He had corresponded with Engels, defining his position as “humanist and labourist” but, as the reference to Nietzsche before 1914 was more socialist than conservative, he went to Germany in 1904 to meet Nietzsche’s sister and to Switzerland, to Basel, in 1907, to take advice from the first great specialist in Nietzschean thought, Carl Albrecht Bernoulli (1868-1937), a pupil of Nietzsche’s friend, Franz Camille Overbeck (1837-1905). His threefold political position, socialist, Dreyfusard and Nietzschean, aroused the virulent hostility of the Action Française, the main mouthpiece of the nationalist right at the time. However, Andler was not a Germanophile Alsatian: during the First World War, he created various structures aimed at reintegrating Alsace into the French Republic.
Did his Socialist views affect Andler´s perceptions of Nietzsche? And how is Andlers viewed today by the modern Left and Right circles?
Andler, a socialist, however, portrays an image of Nietzsche that is by no means adulterated, complete, and synoptic. With his method, with an encyclopedic eye, he lists all the sources of Nietzsche’s thoughts and comments on them without ever jargon. He obviously explores the German sources of this aphoristic and non-systematic thought (contrary to the Hegelian fashion) but he does not omit to mention the French sources: Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Chamfort, or Stendhal. Many of Nietzsche’s ideas, which are still relevant today, are derived from his French readings: the desire to unmask social lies, the idea of a view that must necessarily be “perspectivist” on reality, moral naturalism, intellectual pessimism, criticism of the gregarious spirit, the glorification of the solitary that emanates from the crowd of ignorant people, the Stendhalian idea that civilization is measured by energy and that any decline in energy heralds a fall of civilization, the primacy of beauty, etc. But here we are in the presence of a hiatus in the history of ideas in France, as soon as the figure and work of Andler is evoked: the French and German leftists do not hold him back because they denied, at a certain point in their history, both in France and in Germany, his form of socialism, which was humanist, Labour and Nietzschean. There is a denunciation of the unmasking strategies advocated by Nietzsche, especially in La généalogie de la morale, on the left, especially at the present time. Quite simply because the left holds the upper hand in the “French intellectual landscape”, its intellectuals forming a new intolerant, hysterical “clericature”, arched over its slogans, which obviously fears the emergence of a cultural polish counter-power, annexing to its benefit the unmasking strategies advocated by Nietzsche in a significant part of his philosophical work. Secondly, our contemporary leftists reject any “perspectivist” approach, that is to say, any pluralist approach to the phenomena at work in history and on the political scenes, in the name of “political correctness”. Any criticism of the gregarious spirit or any reference to vital energy is assimilated to the “extreme right”, that is to say to absolute evil.
On the right, Andler is just as deliberately forgotten because his socialism assimilates him to the left, which is, in the end, a very short-sighted analysis, one that is content to donate labels, the one demanded of all of us by today’s political correctness and the intellectual laziness induced by the political-media system. Andler’s Dreyfusarde positions are not forgiven him on the right of the political spectrum. The hostility which the Action Française has devoted to him has been maintained in a way in the right-wing cenacles, which, like their left-wing opponents, make a fixed apologetic and do not proceed to the genealogy of ideas in general and of their own corpus in particular. As for the Germanophile and/or ethnic/regionalist fractions in the small world of the French right, they do not understand his commitment to reintegrating ethnically and/or linguistically German-speaking Alsace into the framework of a ‘Third Republic’, which is hated for its Masonic and bourgeois options.
We are therefore faced with some beautiful paradoxes: the “new right”, which claims to be “Nietzschean” out of hostility to Christianity in general and to Third World Catholicism in vogue since Vatican II in particular, does not take into account the original French (and German) Nietzscheanism which was situated on the left of the political spectrum of the Third Republic and the Wilhelminian Reich, whereas the positions taken by Andler in his time on Nietzsche’s work correspond almost exactly to those that the “new right” intends to defend today, because it has abandoned its initial anti-egalitarian and pro-Giscardine and Chirac right-wing options of the 1970s and 1980s.
When did you first become interested in these ideas, and how much were you influenced by them?
Regarding the extent to which the vast movement of the “conservative revolution” (German or otherwise) has influenced me or the French “new right”, I would say that my steps, and those of my fellow students when we were in high school, began long before I knew the Parisian “new right”. At home, it began with an early reading of two books by Nietzsche, The Antichrist and The Genealogy of Morality. That was in 1971. Then we, the bunch of little gherkins of Brussels schoolchildren, groped around for four years before discovering the magazine Nouvelle école, which did not yet speak of a “conservative revolution”, except for a review by Giorgio Locchi, an excellent Italian Germanist, of Armin Mohler’s book “Die Konservative Révolution in Deutschland 1918-1932”. We were well aware that the “mess” in place in our country (and elsewhere) had to be swept away, thrown into the garbage dump of history, just as one throws away old furniture that has been rotted by the insatiable voracity of wood-boring beetles. Even as teenagers, we knew that a cultural revolution was needed, based on classical knowledge (we were in the Latin classes), but also on what had been repressed following the two great fratricidal conflagrations that had ruined Europe between 1914 and 1945. For us, this repression was above all that which had evacuated Germanic culture, which had been decisive in Belgium before 1914, when everyone wanted to think differently from the unbearable patterns of the French Revolution and the “machin république”, whose ears are still ringing in our ears today, to the point of making us want to vomit when a henchman of this moth-eaten republic, whether he is of the right or the left, still dares to speak of “republican values”, when everything related to this republic has no value, constitutes even the worst of the “anti-values”.
I owe the need for classical anchoring to the Latin professor, Abbot Simon Hauwaert, who was well aware that the Greco-Latin humanities, which he cherished as the apple of his eye, needed to be consolidated by mythological and archaeological knowledge of the Germanic and Celtic worlds. This is how I read the celtologist Jean Markale on Irish, Welsh and Breton materials. For the initiation of the schoolboy to the Germanic mythological world, I owe it to a small book that I always highly recommend, due to the pen of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borgès, “Essai sur les anciennes littératures germaniques”. This little initial knowledge, supplemented by a short school course on the origins of Dutch literature, posed us, in the 1970s, as unshakeable protesters against the official disorder that was taking hold by erasing all the legacies of our history and culture.
You have also written a lot about geopolitics, including an English book on this subject. What can you tell us about your activities in this area?
I never received this book that I wrote. I don’t know what it looks like. The theme of this book, geopolitics, has long been on my mind: I have always been interested in history and maps since I was a child. In the German version of his small didactic and programmatic work on the “European nation”, Jean Thiriart evoked geopolitics and inserted some suggestive maps in the pages of this small 192-page volume. Later, I discovered the work of Jordis von Lohausen, Mut Zur Macht (1978), which gave a real geopolitical impetus to my metapolitical work, not, at first sight, within the framework of any political or metapolitical organization, but within the framework of my studies as a translator-interpreter, where we had, for the last two years, a very important course on international relations. Similarly, the English and German courses included a “cultural/historical” component, involving the study of literature but also and above all the “political, economic, social and cultural structures” (SPESC) of the countries studied. This series of lectures gave me an understanding of the institutional history of Germany from William II to the Federal Republic based on the 1949 constitution. For the Anglo-Saxon countries, the courses were less concise and less coherent, as the United Kingdom and the United States, or even other English-speaking countries such as Canada or Australia, were to be dealt with in the same course, in the same number of periods. It is in the framework of this course that I discovered Colin McEvedy’s historical atlases, which approach European history from the protohistoric period and envisage it in a dynamic way, posing it as the permanent and/or recurrent clash of Indo-European civilizational matrices with the matrices of other ethnic groups, more or less homogenous at the beginning of their emergence on the Eurasian theatre (for McEvedy does not limit Europe or the area of expansion of Indo-European matrices to what is today agreed to be our continent; McEvedy includes both shores of the Mediterranean and a steppe area extending to the Pamir). The phases of expansion and retreat of Europeanness follow one another in the face of other matrices, in particular, the one that will form, in the course of history, the hostile trinomial grouping together the Hamitic/Asianic, Arab-Semitic and Turkish-Hungarian-Mongolian matrices, whose initial territories are the vast North African space, the Arabian peninsular space and the steppe space of Central Asia. The Hamitic/Asianic presence in Spain from 711 onwards, the Arab-Semitic expansion after Mohammed, under the first caliphates, the long occupation of the Balkans by the Turko-Ottoman Empire are all phases of retreat, which were compensated for by long-term reconquest; Europe’s backlash, its demographic collapse in the face of the other matrixes, which are not experiencing this involutive phenomenon of decline, constitute a new and worrying phase of retreat, accentuated by the fact that there is no longer really a clearly defined border, where Europeanness could stand against besieged Europe. The struggle for final domination took place within the very heart of the cities of Europe, as far as Scandinavia.
The book in English, and my trilogy entitled Europa, published in France by Bios Editions, deal at length and in-depth with these processes of space control. To this initial influence of Thiriart, von Lohausen and McEvedy will be added later discovery of the work of the German geopolitologist Karl Haushofer, thanks to multiple impulses, and of the notion of “Large Space” (Grossraum) in Carl Schmitt’s work, thanks in particular to debates with the Strasbourg lawyer Jean-Louis Feuerbach who had approached this aspect of Schmitt’s work in detail.
What do you believe is essential for Europe to survive?
All this implies that the survival of Europe as a particular civilization, different from that of the English, French, and American West, depends on the following necessities:
To think jointly about the imperial dynamics present on the European continent (i.e. the imperial dynamics of Spain (especially in the Mediterranean), of Germany and Austria, of Russia, with a view to restoring it to face any hostile environment, orchestrated mainly by the hegemon across the Atlantic. A multi-imperial coherence would quickly put a stop to any second-hand challenge, i.e. any Hamitic, Semitic, or Turco-Ottoman challenge. This implies that what was once defended and/or conquered by one of these empires, at least in the European orbit, must be maintained/consolidated and no attempt to change the situation can be tolerated, neither in the Canary Islands nor in Ceuta nor in Melilla nor in the Balkans nor in the Aegean nor in the Eastern Mediterranean nor in the Caucasus (where the Armenian government was wrong to move closer to NATO and the Azerbaijani government was wrong to ally itself with Turkey).
This “pluri-imperial” position must be extended to the Iranian space, India (as a civil state), China, and Japan, despite the hereditary hostilities that set these entities against each other, to the greater benefit of the hegemon of the New World.
What can you tell us about the general political situation in Belgium?
Talking about Belgium’s institutional problems implies elucidating terribly complicated mechanisms. Our foreign interlocutors drop out very quickly as soon as we sketch them out. Belgium has several levels of power: federal, regional, and community. The difference between the regional and community levels is confusing for our foreign partners. The region is a geographical, territorial concept. The community is based on a linguistic basis and deals with everything relating to the ‘person’ (education, work, etc.). The Flemish region and community have merged. Wallonia is a geographical region but includes the territory of the German-speaking community. This makes it a bilingual entity (French/German). The Wallonia-Brussels community is represented by elected representatives from the Walloon region and French-speaking elected representatives from the Brussels-Capital region. I am not going to go into any more detail, otherwise, your readers will have to swallow a whole tube of aspirin.
In the past, there were some separatist tendencies present in Flanders. Do these tendencies still exist and what are the main political differences between Flanders and Valonia?
The separatist tendencies in Flanders can be explained above all by the difference in electoral behavior in the two communities in the country. Flanders traditionally votes more to the right than Wallonia or Brussels. This is not to say that there is not well-profiled Flemish socialism, especially in the industrial areas around Ghent. In Wallonia, once a densely industrialized area since the industrial revolution of the 19th century, militant socialism has developed that retains a certain political resilience, despite the large-scale deindustrialization that has been in progress for almost half a century. But official socialism, that of the party that bears the name PS (Socialist Party), has changed profoundly since its foundation in 1885. At the beginning of its trajectory, this socialism had its raison d’être and, before 1914, was the bearer of an interesting cultural revolution, whose literary, artistic, or architectural productions still fascinate. After 1918 and up to the Belgian debacle of May 1940, a high-level intellectual figure gave Belgian socialism its letters of nobility in the person of Hendrik de Man, a theorist of personalistic socialism who considerably inspired French theorists and activists who are conveniently grouped together under the label of “non-conformists of the 1930s”. Some people make of these “non-conformists” the equivalents of the German “conservative revolutionaries”. After 1945, socialism, as everywhere in Western Europe, served as a Trojan horse for NATO strategies, with the Americans in the 1940s and 1950s preferring to bet on the Social Democrats rather than the Christian Democrats or the conservatives. Later, under the influence of the “new lefts” and the spirit of the 1968’s, socialism, as in France and elsewhere, preferred to bet on new social strata, posed as underprivileged or discredited, and adopted the modes that the late philosopher Philippe Muray called “festive”. It has abandoned the working class and, even more broadly, all families active in concrete social functions. With the LGBT craze (etc.), the concrete struggles for the working class were forgotten, provoking an electoral hemorrhage in favor of the jokers who call themselves ecologists and above all of a more virulent neo-communism, that of the PTB (“Workers’ Party of Belgium”), which intends, rightly, to defend the social achievements of the working classes, achievements which had been exemplary in the Belgium of yesteryear. In Flanders, the working class generally (but not completely) preferred right-wing nationalism to the more populist discourses.
How do these political differences affect the country as a whole?
Over the past 15 years or so, the electoral blocs have been very different in Flanders and Wallonia, making it difficult to form balanced (central) federal governments. The electoral mix is no longer possible as the practice of building a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Flemish nationalist formations remains. This ‘cordon sanitaire’ first applied to the most radical party (VB – Vlaams Belang) and, since the last federal elections in 2019, also to the more moderate NVA (Nieuwe Vlaamse Alliantie), even though this party, which was largely victorious in the elections, had been in power (federally) in the previous legislation (2014-2019). The practice of the double ‘cordon sanitaire’ means that between 45% and 50% of Flemish voters have no representation at the federal level. This implicit discrimination, harshly felt as such, of course, accentuates separatist tendencies, whereas its primary intention was to combat or at least contain them! This is, broadly speaking, what explains the separatist tendencies of the moderate and strong right-wing parties in Flanders. If the Christian Democrats had adopted a line similar to that of Orban in Hungary and the Liberals had opted for Haider-style populism in Austria, separatism would never have been so popular. It would have retained its cultural and meta-political resilience, but would not have had such a strong representation in the regional and federal assemblies.
You mentioned the »old« working class socialism and the »new« socialism that is more concerned with the LGBT groups and various minorities, which are supposedly »oppressed«. It is clear that on the modern left this new version of »socialism« is prevailing. Are there any metapolitical »counterweights« to this new left today in Belgium?
No metapolitical body correcting the dominant leftist-festive discourse exists in the French-speaking political landscape. Such a body could correct the deleterious tendencies adopted by a political staff generally composed of uncultured and deviant people, incapable, through gross ignorance, of grasping the issues at stake in the world and all busy tinkering with juicy schemes, which weave the well-established reputation of francophone corruption in the kingdom (where the beautiful city of Liège was nicknamed ‘Palermo-sur-Meuse’). The Flemish electorate no longer wants to be dependent on this ignorance and corruption, which does not exclude, of course, that ignorance and corruption also exist in the Flemish political landscape. As for those who are excluded from power by the cordon sanitaire, they have obviously not been able to spread their shortcomings like those that have been rooted in the mysteries of power for many decades. My pessimistic view is corroborated by the facts: the collapse of classical culture, the proliferation of bogus knowledge due to this collapse will prevent any new take-off in the short and medium-term, regardless of the labels that activists who stand for election to the electorate put on themselves. A clear and recent example: after very long months of negotiations, a federal government has been able to form a government worthy of the year 2020. The federal parliamentarians had to take the oath of office in two languages of their choice, French, Dutch or German. They had to utter this simple sentence: “I swear to observe the constitution”, “Ik zweer de grondwet na te leven”, “Ich schwöre die Verfassung zu befolgen”. In this collection of sad sires and sad wives, almost none of them were able to say these simple sentences (subject, verb, complement!) correctly, neither in their mother tongue nor in the other chosen language. The show on television and on “youtube” was hallucinating as well as distressing. This says a lot for the future!
Many Western European countries today are facing problems such as mass migrations, Islamization, and the rise of crime or terrorism. What is the situation in Belgium?
Belgium is facing these problems like all other Western European countries. The Islamisation of the everyday landscape can be seen especially in Brussels, in some neighborhoods while others are free of any trace of Islamisation. For me, personally, and for my wife, the most obvious sign of rampant Islamisation is the disappearance from the shops of certain traditional food products, such as sugar bread (the ‘cracker’) and raisin bread (the ‘cramique’), which are not a priori haram. To be sure to find all the ingredients of our traditional food, you have to shop outside the Brussels-Capital Region, in Flemish or Walloon territory. Otherwise, we are condemned to eat the same insipidities as our new fellow citizens who have come from everywhere and from nowhere, who now also revel in very fatty junk food sprinkled with this infamous brownish liquid called “Coca-Cola”: the “health” bill will be very heavy, already in the short term! For citizens who don’t have a car, the frustration is enormous and the resentment is growing day by day. The problem of immigration, and of the resulting diasporas, is above all the constitution of parallel economies and diasporic criminality, living on the trafficking of all kinds, especially drug trafficking. The official bodies of the EU and also of the UN have set up offices to combat these unpleasant phenomena; these offices have produced interesting literature that correctly takes stock of the situation. However, as with Frontex, these findings are not being followed up in any way! Words, debates, gossip, but no decision, no action. The mainstream press, including the kingdom’s leading newspaper, Het Laatste Nieuws, had accurately mapped the various mafia networks at work in Belgium, following the arrest of a political figure in the city of Mechelen who belonged to the Aramaic mafia (classified as ‘Turkish’). His neutralization had been followed by the dismantling of a network covering, among other things, the exploitation of the simple cafés of the capital (by money laundering), the trafficking of second-hand vehicles, and the alliance with Colombian drug traffickers thanks to an infiltrator in the docks of the port of Antwerp. The affair had demonstrated over and over again that each time, for each network in particular (whether Aramaic, Turkish, Moroccan, Albanian, Nigerian, or Italian), there was poli-criminality. However, nothing is being done to clean up the country. And nothing will be seen by the jojos who sit in our assemblies and who are unable even to pronounce the simple little sentences of their oath!
As for terrorism, it is above all a French family, that of the famous Abdeslam, co-author of the attacks in Paris. In the end, this Islamic terrorism is only a very small fragment of the tip of the iceberg that is the poli-criminality in place. This famous jihadist terrorism does not alarm me beyond measure: it is clear, given the obvious clemency of our courts, which are doing all they can to bring back to us the survivors of the Islamic state in Syria, their companions and their offspring, that these birds of ill omen have gone to make their dirty war, there in the Levant, because the special services of NATO, of the American army, Saudi or Qatari “petro-monarchy” networks recruited them to bring down the Syrian Baathist regime, which did not dance to the sound of their flutes or impose a Salafist, Wahhabi or Brotherhood-type regime on its population.
How do you view the 2020 U.S. elections? What will be the geopolitical consequences of the victory of Biden, and what do you think about the accusations regarding the stolen elections?
The main thing to take away from this election is that the media, driven by the fanatical riffraff of the system, want to make their wishes come true against the wishes of the bulk of the population. If the population rejects the dogmas and far-fetched ideas of the media scrap, it is considered as a despicable mass of “deplorable people” whose opinions and aspirations should not be taken into account. Here we have a relatively new phenomenon since 1945: the population had been flattered and spoiled in the name of “democracy”; this is no longer the case, which makes it possible to evoke a denial of democracy in the American sphere. Trump obviously says that the election was stolen from him: this accusation is plausible, given that the manipulations are much easier to perfect with electronic voting. That said, whether Trump stays in the White House or Biden goes there, the geopolitical and global agenda is determined in advance by Deep State or military officials, who govern beyond the democratic game. With Trump, and in spite of the Covid-19 crisis, the fronts opened by the Bush or Obama have remained in place even if they have been a little less “hot” than before. Others have opened up, notably in the Caucasus. Tensions with China increased in the Pacific. The de facto alliance between Morocco and Israel allows the United States to control the entire Atlantic coast of Africa, from Tangiers to the borders of Mauritania and Senegal. In December 2020, the combined forces of the US Navy published the “Advantage at Sea” memorandum, which repeats the main lines of US maritime and naval policy from the theses of Admiral Mahan and adds, surreptitiously, a new front in the Arctic, where Russia has solid assets to support the Russian and Chinese idea of an “Arctic Silk Road”. This area, which was once an ecumenical space and devoid of maritime communication routes, is becoming highly strategic. It will therefore become, on the northern/boreal flank of Europe, a zone of geopolitical turbulence. The Trump era has therefore not really calmed the confrontations underway in today’s world.
Thank you for giving us this interview. To conclude, tell us what do you think will happen to Europe in the near future?
There are currently two Europe: the one that is dominated by liberal ideologies (in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term) and the one, alas, a minority, which expresses contrary tendencies, castigated in Western Europe as “illiberal”. Liberal ideological nuisances are deadly and will plunge the countries that claim to be using them to shape their mode of governance into indescribable chaos, the premises of which we are already experiencing. The others have a chance to stay in the chaos and participate in positive geopolitical synergies. Needless to say, I live in a part of Europe that will experience dramatic collapse and abominable chaos.