A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [137]
The skinheads did not mix with the neo-Nazis. They mainly kept to themselves and drank. Later, when there was less debating and more fighting, the skinheads came into their own. Nazis and neo-Nazis could hammer out the arguments. Skinheads just wanted the action.
By late Saturday night, there was enough action to keep the skinheads happy. The northerners had to show the Mediterraneans their place, and the Flemish had to show all the foreigners their place. It is not easy to have an international gathering of violent xenophobes. A dark bar called the Flemish House was the center of the beer-drinking and Sieg-heiling. Everyone liked to Heil Hitler. But the Flemish House was also the neighborhood pub, and townspeople were still there too —housewives, families with children, and cuddling young couples—none of whom showed any sign of seeing anything disturbing this night. The Flemish sporadically gave straight-armed fascist salutes and shouted “Sieg Heil!” Tlley were particularly happy when they could get a chorus going—sixty or more Flemish nationalists rhythmically jutting their arms out and shouting “Sieg Heil” over and over. These volleys greatly excited the foreign visitors. German skinheads stood up and stuck out their muscular tatoos and joined the chant. A small contingent of Italians from the neofascist party MSI (Italian Socialist Movement) got excited and started countering with shouts of “II Duce!” This angered the German skinheads, which in turn reminded the Flemish nationals that the Germans were shouting in German, not in Flemish. “We can say it, but the Germans have no right to say it in Flanders,” said one Belgian Army sergeant stationed near Dortmund who had come in for the weekend festivities. The Flemish looked for opportunities to jump the German skinheads, but this was difficult to do because the Germans stuck together in a large group.
The British—an assortment of brown-shirted National Front members, Scottish nationalists, members of a fascist movement called League of Saint George, and skinheads—were easier to isolate and run out of the bar. Some of them were severely clubbed.
The British were upset by the quantity of pro-German literature. Most of it celebrated the exploits of Flemish volunteers who fought for the Third Reich against the British and Americans. A British National Front member said in a wounded tone of voice, “I feel sort of unwelcome here with my Union Jack.” This was particularly problematic since his Union Jack was tattooed on the top of his shaved head.
Only their hatred of Jews tied these groups together. They could always turn to this subject when they got bored with Dutchmen railing against Surinamers and Germans ranting about Turks. The Diksmuide meeting was, in fact, what monitors of anti-Semitism most feared—a meeting place for extremists from very separate segments of European society, people who did not often have occasion to encounter one another. With neo-Nazi groups growing in the 1970s, a new set of political opportunists was also emerging. As European unemployment figures steadily rose, they could exploit irrational anti-immigrant sentiments. In France the National Front was flourishing under Jean-Marie Le Pen, a veteran of the anti-Semitic Poujadeist movement that had briefly gotten into the National Assembly in the 1950s. The Dutch Centrum party won a legislative seat in the early 1980s on an anti-immigrant platform. In 1983 a former SS officer, Franz Schonhuber, founded the Republican