A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [136]
By the 1970s, the Flemish, once the minority, made up more than half of the Belgian population, and within that population was a strong Flemish nationalist movement. At the same time a new crop of Europeans was emerging, and the IJzerbedevaart drew them with a magnetic force. Europe's second generation of Nazis, neo-Nazis, were coming into their own, and the Flemish pilgrimage gave them a place to meet—a place for British Nazis to meet Spanish Nazis, and more important, a place for the older ideological Nazis to connect with brutal young men who were looking for a reason to hit someone. A half-century after it started, Jews began to notice the IJzerbedevaart and the one-story village of Diksmuide where it took place.
Among some 30,000 Flemish nationalists, only a few hundred foreign fascists attended the weekend. The organizers claimed that the foreign extremists were unwelcome but did nothing to keep them out. They virtually took over the town for the weekend. The few main streets of this village, the cozy Belgian cafes and dark bars, were filled with men of varying ages in gray and black uniforms and jungle fatigues, sporting swastikas, SS insignia, and other fascist emblems, passing out books and brochures—many of them printed in the United States in a variety of languages—praising the Third Reich and berating immigrants, Jews, and Zionists.
While the pilgrimage was sponsored by groups with strongly antimilitary sentiment, uniformed young paramilitaries marched, legs high, through the little main street of Diksmuide. In Belgium, as in much of Europe, there are laws against “the open display of Nazi nostalgia,” which includes wearing Nazi insignia and uniforms and goose-stepping through town. But while the gendarmerie stayed vigilant and occasionally confiscated a club or knife, it did little to enforce the anti-Nazi laws. The city authorities were concerned only that the Flemings to whom they had given permission to march appeared to have had their ranks thoroughly infiltrated by West Germans.
Diksmuide is in the heart of militant Flanders, and the great majority of the Nazi nostalgists were Flemish nationalists. The town's mayor, Hendrik Laridon, was a member of the Flemish Christian Democratic party, a moderate center-right party that often dominated Belgian governments. He stood passively on the main street as hundreds goose-stepped by and, in a familiar refrain, asserted that the wise policy was to let the young people “blow off steam.”
After they marched, they blew off more steam in the taverns at one end of town, where they traded contraband Nazi memorabilia concealed in the innermost compartments of wallets, drank a great deal of beer, and expounded on their visions of Europe. The British, some in uniform, preached against Pakistanis. The Dutch denounced the Surinamese, the French lashed out at North Africans, and the Germans raged against the Turks. They also denounced each other. The northerners hated the Mediterraneans, although Spanish and Italian fascists were present. Scuffles with clubs and knives periodically erupted. As one neo-Nazi explained, they were, after all, nationalists. The one harmonious note in these beer-soggy interchanges was that they could all agree on their hatred of Jews. Most of them seemed to greatly enjoy explaining their own particular racist theories. These were young men with an inner anger because no one had ever wanted to listen to them. Neo-Nazis were usually instantly seduced by the proposition that someone thought they were significant. The appeal of being a neo-Nazi was that people paid attention to Nazis. Nazis had a history, and they frightened and worried people.
Not all of the neo-Nazis were young. The older ones did not seem to want attention and shied away from uniforms and fascist salutes, instead quietly talking to the younger ones. Toward the end of the 1970s an even newer crop of Nazis began to appear at Diksmuide—the skinheads.
The skinheads were different. They, of