Ghent, Belgium
Amidst the six months I spent in Belgium during my aborted PhD, I had many opportunities to speak to the locals and learn their lore. Aside from a handful of painters I fancy, the occasional Polandball meme, Austin Powers reference, and/or Brexit debate, I cannot say I knew much about homo dutchimin, or his rapid speciation into the many city states and colonial admixtures he is today. The Flemish folk always loved telling me about their proud origins, as they are a relatively new identity born in the 18th century with richly historied legacies of their plight against the French and Austrians. This post will take a deep dive into them. Alongside those fine people, quite a few were from the proper lowlands and while they told me they had a different accent to Flemings, I had not developed a particular sensitivity in my brief inhabitation. A few French and Germans lived in the area as part of the EU superstate, and loved to speak of their Ancien Régimes ruling the region. There was even a rather large Russian and Ukrainian population - left overs from when the Germans dumped Eastern Front POWs in the coal pits to mine. There were also a few Italians scattered about who joined them in the post-war era.
It ought not surprise you to hear that Belgium hosts a great number of populations from the EU, as it is the seat of the Throne Europa (Personally, I think Aachen would have been a better choice to Brussels, as living in the continuity of Charlemagne’s unification of the West would be particularly impressionable). But amongst all the colors of this white rainbow, there is a particularly curious population: the Afrikaners, summoned forth home by the great decolonization efforts of the past 50 years.
While I was there, one particular Afrikaner was a new arrival, and I cannot shake from my memory the shock on his face at the state of the churches in Europe. Dutch reform theology acted as something of an ark for the Afrikaners. While Europe’s Christians marched in lockstep with liberalization and democracy, they did not. They remained exactly where they were in the 19th century, wholly cut off from Europe’s progress. Indeed, none of these freckled Savannah Dutch expressed a sentiment of feeling at home in their ancestral lands of Belgium and the Netherlands, and why should they? They’ve been away from Europe for two centuries. Europa had taken its own course, and the Afrikaner had not. The Afrikaner had not gone on any course at all. Avoiding the slaughters of the world wars and the perversions of the post-war era, they seem to have preserved themselves near entirely. I’ve somewhat come to the realization the Afrikaner is a man to be pitied above most others, but also studied. For indeed he feels at home neither in his ancestral lands, nor his newfound lands. He is a homeless people…
…and so could you be one day.
AI generated image, the homeless antichrist hater.
To understand how these folk managed to preserve themselves, I set about investigating the origins of Dutch self-respect. How did such a people come to seek the preservation of their culture and language while sandwhiched between European superpowers? Certainly the main Dutch stock today do not display a desire to preserve their culture, but there are exceptions. The Flemings certainly have a greater desire to than the rest, and the Afrikaners continue to. As many Afrikaners hail from the Flemming stock, it seemed wise to investigate the origins of Flemish pride today, and why their Afrikaner progeny continue to show resistance to deracination, and continue to hold together through mankind’s atomization into consumers.
From an early time, the Flemish people do not seem to have believed an institution could serve them, as they were only but a local minority group. For both the eras of Napoleonic and Austrian rule, they knew very well they were subjects to foreign cultures that do not represent them. For this reason, the Flemings naturally began to adapt to their rulers in order to enter the institutions and get things for their needs themselves, rather than ask. Most upper class scholars, artists, and scientists spoke French to further these ends, but French is a hard language to master and easy to spot fakes. French has something of an immune system in this regard, and filters out non-natives with ease. So, even though the Flemings could speak French, their accent always gave them away.
Around the mid 18th century, amidst the Flemings there lived a man named Jan-Baptist Verlooy. He began to question why the Dutch ought to tolerate this state of affairs. For such a reason, he is considered one of the forefathers of the eventual Flemish Movement, and a founding father of the Brabant Revolution. Verlooy would go on to write pamphlets questioning the ever-increasing scope creep of French rule, going from passive pressure to active pressure against the Dutch. Readers of history may be familiar with Napolean’s attempts to route out regional customs, accents, and languages and unite French under a singular identity. The Dutch, especially the Flemings, were especially victims of this. Previously it was simply tradition to speak French in the upper eschalons of Dutch society. Now, The French had started to place severe restrictions on the Dutch in general. Their academic institutions were only to be in French, their theatre entirely French, all science published and reviewed would be in French, and more or less everything outside the household was required to be French. By and large, the language of anyone who wasn’t a boer was forced to become French.
In questioning this state of affairs, Verlooy reveals himself as something of a host of contradictions: He favored the French Revolution’s religious reforms, its democratic shift, and its liberal values. Yet, he vocally opposed the francification of the Dutch. It is not clear if Verlooy was Catholic or Dutch Reformed, but with his Catholic name, and his Catholic co-conspirator Jan Frans Vonck, he clearly chose Catholic allies over French revolutionaries. Perhaps most curiously, even though Secret Societies were not allowed by Catholics, he founded one to fight Francification. (I lean more that he was simply a Dutch Reformed with Catholic friends for this reason.) Verlooy favored the preservation and standardization of the Dutch language as well, which by definition would erase many of the unique qualities of Flemish Dutch. Nonetheless, he subverted many French ideals with strong limits on who could vote to only the landed gentleman.
Somewhere in those tensions, he appears to have identified a rather insightful - perhaps inciteful - methodology on how a people can seek to preserve themselves while under foreign rule. I found many of his observations to be in line with my previous substack post about avoiding your enemy’s language, so for that reason I wanted to attempt to present his concepts here, in small part. I believe they constitute a theory of generational cultural exchange which perhaps can help prevent the Boomer-Millenial-Zoomer dichotomies from repeating, ironing out the generational schizophrenia we are plagued with in modern America.
I do not have many sources for this man’s works, as this is mostly orally transmitted to me from the locals. What texts I know of from him are all in Dutch: The Codex Brabanticus and the Verhandeling op d’onacht der moederlyke tael in de Nederlanden, which translates to “Treatise on the neglect of the motherly language”. This text in particular appears to have some rather pointed critiques on Dutch weakness in culture war politics while under occupation. His work is worthy of translation efforts, but such work is for a PhD, of which I no longer am one. From what little I have translated myself, I find a man who was aware that one must not use the language and culture of one’s conquerors if one desires not to become them. This is up to the reader to discern if the effort is to be total, partial, or none at all.
To pull up an example, this is from a section of his Treatise on Neglect which focuses on what culture and language does to the end-user if he be alien to the culture that created it:
Noble, good-matured patriots, you saw that our country was dishonored, and you saw that this came from borrowed cultural norms. Why did you not go and investigate a little more? Why did you not inquire after enjoying, where this mischief came? Had you done that, you had seen that a nation brought to the foot of foreign costumes, dresses, tales, plays, songs, will also draw in servitude to the foreigner. And thus you would have seen that your sorrows you daily complain about come at night from what your eyes see.
You praise [the French] and say that you are rich and abundant for doing so, but in so doing always scorn your Dutch as incomplete and impossible to compete - whom you never even began to write about without first ample shameless confession of your flaws. But did you not think that you frame yourself as the Romans who plagiarized the Greeks they hate, such as Macrobius did unto Gellius? Are you not like a lame who wishes to dance, or one off tune who wants to sing? Reasonable people will forgive one when he dances, and another when he sings, if they are compelled to do so: but no one will keep from laughing about it. But if I see the lame dance willingly and the voiceless sing willingly; then I have a right to laugh, mock and despise. And, in spite of what no one knows to be mischief in advance, what is this but playing the Buffoon?
Furthermore, because of this aversion to our own ways, we despise those sacred descendants of our ancestors, those constitutions of the state, those lofty alliances between the People and the Prince: the laws of currency, hunting, fishing, borrowing, encumbrances, inheritance by dead hands: those institutions, instructions and duties of the Councils and courts: that old piece of paper, which, as has been said, are the foundations of the present seafaring and military rights: which are all our original creation of we Dutch folk. We work, therefore, for those very costly laws, which have undergone the utmost test of sufficiency in the greatest forebears of the population, which also present us today everywhere in cities and in the countryside, and which provide us with discipline and regulation, which all men-at-arms know to be found no where else. To find otherwise; we work, I say, not to undermine those dear memories, nor to drown them in an eternal night.
It is quite a curious section, is it not dear reader? If you read my previous substack post against using the language of your conquerors, you may find Verlooy’s words quite familiar. He plainly identifies the problem of borrowing customs: To do so is to declare your own culture and language as insufficient and in need of receiving a conceptual graphing on of values. Once you do so, you surrender your virtues and ideologies, for you present yourself as inherently inferior to whatever you draw from. Your priests will inevitably adopt the buzz words of the greater, your films and plays will inevitably include the greater’s values, and your culture will inevitably be forced to preach the greater’s virtues and curse the greater’s sins, no matter how much you complain - especially so if you complain in the language and politics of the one persecuting you.
Other issues Verlooy brings up in the text is that Dutch men will declare there are no Dutch beauties, that only a French woman is worthy of his time - a familiar problem among men today fancying anime women to real ones. He also describes that if a man holds a Dutch Bible he is considered a commoner, but a French Bible means he must be a scholar. This, too, persists in contemporary America in terms of what words and beliefs you express from Holy Writ. He often draws from Juvenal’s Satura VI, here.
Of particular note is Verlooy’s observations that some Flemings would pretend to speak their native language poorly in order to appear more French. However, because they could not speak French that well either, they were disregarded as seemingly near-intelligible bumpkins. The Flemings were thus cast away from any means to forge high culture. Most academic, scientific, or cultural institutes would refuse to present works outside of the French language if they even could pass as a Frenchmen with a lisp. In order to save the Flemish from cultural extinction, something had to be done.
Past the warnings of how the Dutch were being culturally eroded, Verlooy proposed several methods to stop the erosion and start building. Verlooy did not believe politics could save the Flemish in this matter. The French were too strong, and their cultural eminence was too anchored down to compete with. Rather, the Flemish needed to forge their own institutions within which they could compete as Flemings and secure a transmission of identity across generations. Political rallies and theory books could not do this. Such gatherings were akin to two armies coming to the battlefield and clashing their spears on their shields to get a sense of their numbers. The Dutch would always be inferior to the French in these matters. Only if a space could be evacuated of French influence could there be any hope of building a high culture, then perhaps such spaces could promote the Flemming culture after. Verlooy sought to identify these points of contact where the French influence could be removed and a Flemish continuity could freely prosper. Everyone knows that today this is primarily done in classrooms and mass media. In Verlooy’s day, these points of contact were a bit different.
Verlooy took particular interest in the theatre, as he felt the Dutch language did in fact contain a lexicon that could operate drama and plot if it were allowed to. Verlooy went about investigating how Dutch could fill these needs without needing to rely on French loan words and phrases, such that the experiences could be entirely a pure Dutch one.
His secret society’s name, Pro Aris et Focis, roughly translates to “For Alter and Hearth”, which pertains to some of the contact spaces he seems to have found where French influence could be entirely removed in favor of the Dutch without upsetting the French directly. For Verlooy, these contact spaces where identity was transmuted person to person, across generations, were private and sacred spaces that had to be won if the Dutch had any hope to survive, as opposed to the very public debates and protests where supporters were rarely won. Verlooy identified these spaces in his own time as follows:
Hearth: The space of sacred intimacy where children receive their familial heritage.
Altar: The space of sacred intimacy where fathers receive their people’s heritage
Stage: The space of sacred intimacy where peoples receive their national heritage.
In ruling these three spaces, a people may secure their country in time, rather than in space. Their heritage and their future would endure. It is the place where foreign and domestic threats must be cleared out from, and all the rest will follow. forth from a right ordering there upon.
Verlooy’s longer slogan can be said to have been “From God and soil, For Alter and Hearth”. In plain English, he felt that upon the public stage, the hearth and altar promote the material and spiritual reality that constitute a people. Conquering empires tend to target these intimate spaces in order to subjugate a people and replace an existing culture with its own. Rather than a marketplace of ideas, or the general marketplace itself, Verlooy could be said to have proposed a marketplace within a biometric security apparatus. A kind of anti-bioleninism where value, profit, and loss occurs in the constrains of the sacred and intimate. Familia, Ethos, Polis.
Perhaps this image I made can explain his concepts.
Verlooy’s undertakings ultimately led him to conclude Dutch very much could be made to fill in the gaps thought to exist in the language and culture. In scientific and artistic expressions, Verlooy expanded the Dutch language utilizing its existing lexicon of subtle natural phenomenon to relay academic and theatric concepts that were in French. After all, the Lowlands were a realm where the sea had been moved to create new land. Surely they had words to describe such endeavors! He organized Dutch theatrics to promote the culture and history, and he helped forge a distinctly Dutch approach to faith and politics. Such foundational acts would, in time, give birth to whole new cultures and peoples from the Rhodesians to the Flemish of today, and the Dutch Reform thinkers would go on to establish many of the foundational philosophies that helped establish the United States itself, especially my beloved New Amsterdam.
Today, many have started to call themselves “Legacy Americans” or “Amerikaners” in order to differentiate their stock from the post-Civil War mass migration era. This cannot said to be racial alone, as Italians and Irish are just as white as Anglos. But these people consider themselves the remnant of America’s foundational stock - Anglos, Saxons, Swedes, Dutch, etc. Their shared experiences of ruling America to becoming just another minority group of a plurality sounds rather similar to the Napoleonic era of the Low Lands. To you, my friendly legacy Americans, I hope this works as something of a guide to secure your own progress-free institutions and spaces, where you can compete to find your greatest and allow them to ascend up and lead you. Verlooy’s work founded the Flemish Movement, perhaps it can help you forge an Americaner movement too before you, like the Afrikaner, find yourself uprooted and homeless.
Already, there exists a significant shift in education, This past month I was presented with two major graphs. The first was the rate of youth transsexual surgeries, the second the rate of homeschooling. How of curiosity, I scaled the numbers 1:1 and made a graph. To my shock, for every one child diagnosed as gender non-confirming, a whomping upwards of 45 students are taken out of public school for homeschooling. As the average classroom size in the US hovers somewhere in the vicinity of 30 students, we can safely say that an entire classroom of parents quit the system for every diagnosed underaged transsexual.
Regardless of our political differences, dear reader, this trend holds in embryo a certain forgone conclusion: The US education system is on an accelerated death spiral. Parents are more than willing to abandon the US education institution if they fear losing authority over their children. Already in my beloved New York, there are constant rumors and fears of this collapse, with hundreds of thousands of students departing for either private or home education. Mind you, least you think this is related to Covid, this data explicitly does not count school at home over zoom. This number represents people who have departed the public education system, not those receiving it from the comfort of their home.
While the main institutions of cultural contingency were the stage, altar, and hearth for Verlooy’s day, this will be different for other cultures and eras. For our own, the public education system is certainly one such place intimate space of cultural contingency. The translation of it from a publicly funded institute, to a privately managed affair spells the end of at least one of the major columns that support the modern American truth regime. I am not quite sure what the other ones would be, but feel free to leave a suggestion, below.
I find Verlooy’s pamphlets quite useful in evaluating my own era, albeit what I’ve heard by oral tradition and what little I’ve translated myself. I’ve known for a while now that American dissidents need to create parallel institutions and spaces of heritage in which they can remove the scent of progress and grow their own truth regime in private. I’ve also written previously on the need for Christians to purify their language of the progressive lexicon if they hope to change course from an ideology they are incompatible with - the same applies to most any religion. I hope Verlooy’s attempts to specify an approach can help your own efforts to stand tall amongst the ruins of the west, with others suspicious of this era’s claims of progress.
This is a threat common people face daily in many ways, not just at the alter, hearth, and theatrics of Progress™. Verlooy was himself a liberal and a democrat, and so understand that his own suspicions of the equally liberal and democratic French lend his bias to using the words of his conquerors no matter how much he warned against doing so. You may have heard this described as the Moses paradox: It took 40 days for Israel to get out of Egypt’s land, but it took 40 years in the desert for Egypt to get out of Israel’s heart. I hope his toolset to route the French from the revolution can likewise be reverse-engineered to route the revolution from us all.
For groups like the Afrikaners, making your own microcosms was forced as a product of prolonged isolation, abandonment, and desperation. They had to make those institutions and communities for themselves. In many ways, despite being homeless, they have successfully adapted and will survive. Will the Amerikaner be fated to the same desperate actions? Will he succeed or fail? Can he manage to learn from his cousinkin and keep their souls? Or is America just another soulless propositional nation that slowly grinds any people it absorbs into trustworthy consumers that will mutilate, humiliate, and dominate everyone in the way of Current Thing™ newest product or fad? Are such nations merely constitutional ships of Theseus that can give and take whole tribes depending on who is most profitable? Or are such institutions invariably bound to the unique histories of their founders - to such an extent that when the culture dies, so too does the institution, and in time the whole empire.
That future is still up for grabs. You, dear reader, - regardless of where you come from - can seek to preserve your friends and family apart from the dying truth regime, as a distinct group with history and unique qualities. Or, you can strip yourselves of all distinction and become just another deracinated and atomized consumer with an algorithm ready and willing to feed and clothe you, for a price.
What do you think? What would you place on the fire and stone, when you’re all alone? Was it given to you by an unbroken chain of lived experiences and ancestral wisdom? Or did you make it up because it looked cool in a movie or book? Are you sure it will endure? What would you consider your own Altar, Hearth, and Stage, and how do the things that happen upon them define you, your family, and your community and nation? What have you learned from those who met and developed you in those spaces? Any generational wisdom, songs, or riddles? Feel free to reply and share below.
The greatest one I was taught is: He who calls his fathers fools, proves his lineage.
Think about that one for a while.
Ghent, Belgium
Some texts to read if you’d like: