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Be On The Lookout For “Anti-Flemishism”

This idea, so quickly lost in discussions of Israel, is so easily grasped in other contexts. Those who oppose breaking up Belgium into separate Flemish and Walloon entities are not Flemish-hating racists, nor are those who advocate the breakup of the Belgian people animated by racist loathing of Walloons. ~Matt Yglesias Matt Yglesias is making […]

This idea, so quickly lost in discussions of Israel, is so easily grasped in other contexts. Those who oppose breaking up Belgium into separate Flemish and Walloon entities are not Flemish-hating racists, nor are those who advocate the breakup of the Belgian people animated by racist loathing of Walloons. ~Matt Yglesias

Matt Yglesias is making a lot of sense in this article, and I recommend it to you all, but I think he may have chosen a somewhat poor analogy with the example of Belgium, since it is unfortunately the case that the Belgian political class and their European cheerleaders do make the Flemish and Walloon independence movements (most especially the Flemish) out to be racist and dangerous movements.  This is because, yes, they are nationalist movements, but they also have the poor taste to object to unfettered immigration, which is their greater crime.  These claims are essentially self-serving propaganda from Brussels, which never has any trouble encouraging the self-determination of regions in other countries in Europe or elsewhere around the world, but which cannot stand the idea that Belgium, a country with scarcely more raison d’etre than Iraq ever had, might break up into its constituent regions on the basis of ethnic and linguistic differences.   

Of course, speaking of the overwhelming majority, the Wallonian nationalists (yes, they do exist) and the Flemish nationalists are not racists by any reasonable definition of the word, try as the Belgian government may to tar some of them as such as a way to revoke their public funding and disband them (as was done to the former Vlaams Blok, now called the Vlaams Belang)–this is incidentally one of the best arguments against the public financing of election campaigns.  (By the way, the great champions of freedom of speech and association who rallied to the defense of Jyllands-Posten and Denmark last year had nothing but congratulations or silence on hearing the news of the outlawing of the VB–that is what liberty amounts to in the heart of the EU.) 

As has long been the case, the charge of racism (or any other kind of terrible -ism of prejudice) is very frequently simply a weapon defined and used by those who reject the very idea of ethnic or racial identity as a basis for political organisation.  In the Belgian case, the drive for Flemish independence would deal a crippling blow to Belgium by taking away some of its most productive and wealthy areas, and the triumph of nationalist separatism in their own background would also be a significant embarrassment to the state that prides itself on its decided lack of nationalism and its role as the center of the transnational mental ward of European nations that is the EU.  Naturally, every state tries to preserve itself, and it usually has no compunctions about doing so through extremely dishonest and brutal means.  Flinging the extremely powerful charges of the West’s greatest contemporary thought crimes is a most effective weapon in effectively suppressing and intimidating dissidents or at least temporarily impeding the success of political movements that the state sees as inimical to its interests.  Interestingly, in the Israeli case it is not nearly so often the government in Israel that engages in these sorts of tactics, but rather it is usually its sympathisers abroad who lead the charge in trying to marginalise or discredit speech they regard as hostile to the integrity of the Israeli state.

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