The article is a bit too long to fully post it in the comments, so I have picked out some highlights.
> He tells how in the early 1990s, after the far-right’s first major election victory in Flanders, he ‘had’ to go to an exhibition on Anne Frank with his classmates. ‘At the end, it was made clear to us that the Vlaams Blok was actually made up of Nazis (emphatically) People are getting con-ti-ned lies about us now. All the newspapers are against us.’
We will soon find out why people might think such a thing.
> Vandendriessche is a rising star within Vlaams Belang. He is not only the front man for Europe, but also the head of the study department. He is the man who put together the party’s election programme. He is increasingly sent out to the television studios. And he is especially influential on chairman Tom Van Grieken. When asked, party members call him ‘the mastermind’, ‘very powerful’ and sometimes even ‘the real boss’. Van Grieken himself wrote in 2020 in his book En nu is het aan ons (And now it’s up to us) that he and Vandendriessche are yin and yang. This is also how Filip Dewinter sees it. ‘Van Grieken is the doer,’ says the Antwerp native. ‘While Vandendriessche is the ideologue. The strategist.’
> Vandendriessche himself says he was drawn to the ‘rebellious side’ of the Vlaams Blok. On 23 December 1993, a year and a half after Dewinter proposed his controversial 70-point plan, he bought his first membership card of the party. He was barely 15 years old.
> He did not stop at nothing. In Bruges, he decided to revive the Nationaal JongStudentenVerbond (NJSV). That is the school division of the Nationalist Student Union (NSV). Those two clubs were intensely intertwined with the Vlaams Blok. The NJSV was founded in the late 1970s in Bruges by Dewinter and was always very extreme. In 1982, for example, the club organised an ‘anti-Marxist book fair’ where works by Nazi collaborators, such as Léon Degrelle, were offered. The NJSV’ers were also violent. The club had, during Vandendriesche’s adolescence, faded away somewhat, but he changed that.
> Ideologically, when he became praeses in the mid-1990s, he did not change tack. In Goedendag, the NSJV’s magazine, stickers were offered for sale: ‘Revisionism is not a crime’ (1 franc each). Anti-Semitic jokes also surfaced. ‘With eager beady eyes, ditto hands and crooked hook nose, I look forward again to the membership renewal,’ noted the quaestor at the end of 1995. There was writing about ‘n*****’, ‘Jews’ and ‘woolly sock carriers’. Vandendriessche in his comments (or ‘praeses dixit’) angered fellow nationalists ‘who are too lazy to stand upright in a disciplined manner during the national anthem or Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’.
> The NJSV’ers also constantly clashed with left-wing schoolchildren in Bruges. These protested because, after the relaunch of the scholastic club, they suddenly saw swastikas, far-right runic signs and SS graffiti popping up in their town. But it went beyond that. They were also, Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck told parliament in February 1997, ‘systematically’ visited in their pubs by NJSV members who wanted to ‘intimidate’ them. In the process, glasses were smashed and blows were struck. The NJSV members were not easily intimidated. One of them even blew up his own front door with a grenade so that he could then accuse his left-wing opponents of bombing him. The police unmasked him.
> Even then Vlaams Blok chairman Frank Vanhecke was forced to distance himself from the NJSV for a while. ‘Such provocateurs and troublemakers,’ he had it recorded in the local press, ‘we can miss them like a sore thumb.’ Vlaams Blok councillor Lucien Decoorne said in 1997 that the party was especially annoyed with ‘praeses Tom Vandendriessche, who acts rather dictatorially’.
Ten tijde van het VB van Filip Dewinter solliciteerde hij bij het VB, maar werd hij niet aangenomen omdat hij ‘te extreem’ bevonden werd.
Dat is heel tekenend. Het VB onder Van Grieken ziet er misschien wat netter uit, maar is dat dus helemaal niet.
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[deleted]
The article is a bit too long to fully post it in the comments, so I have picked out some highlights.
> He tells how in the early 1990s, after the far-right’s first major election victory in Flanders, he ‘had’ to go to an exhibition on Anne Frank with his classmates. ‘At the end, it was made clear to us that the Vlaams Blok was actually made up of Nazis (emphatically) People are getting con-ti-ned lies about us now. All the newspapers are against us.’
We will soon find out why people might think such a thing.
> Vandendriessche is a rising star within Vlaams Belang. He is not only the front man for Europe, but also the head of the study department. He is the man who put together the party’s election programme. He is increasingly sent out to the television studios. And he is especially influential on chairman Tom Van Grieken. When asked, party members call him ‘the mastermind’, ‘very powerful’ and sometimes even ‘the real boss’. Van Grieken himself wrote in 2020 in his book En nu is het aan ons (And now it’s up to us) that he and Vandendriessche are yin and yang. This is also how Filip Dewinter sees it. ‘Van Grieken is the doer,’ says the Antwerp native. ‘While Vandendriessche is the ideologue. The strategist.’
> Vandendriessche himself says he was drawn to the ‘rebellious side’ of the Vlaams Blok. On 23 December 1993, a year and a half after Dewinter proposed his controversial 70-point plan, he bought his first membership card of the party. He was barely 15 years old.
> He did not stop at nothing. In Bruges, he decided to revive the Nationaal JongStudentenVerbond (NJSV). That is the school division of the Nationalist Student Union (NSV). Those two clubs were intensely intertwined with the Vlaams Blok. The NJSV was founded in the late 1970s in Bruges by Dewinter and was always very extreme. In 1982, for example, the club organised an ‘anti-Marxist book fair’ where works by Nazi collaborators, such as Léon Degrelle, were offered. The NJSV’ers were also violent. The club had, during Vandendriesche’s adolescence, faded away somewhat, but he changed that.
> Ideologically, when he became praeses in the mid-1990s, he did not change tack. In Goedendag, the NSJV’s magazine, stickers were offered for sale: ‘Revisionism is not a crime’ (1 franc each). Anti-Semitic jokes also surfaced. ‘With eager beady eyes, ditto hands and crooked hook nose, I look forward again to the membership renewal,’ noted the quaestor at the end of 1995. There was writing about ‘n*****’, ‘Jews’ and ‘woolly sock carriers’. Vandendriessche in his comments (or ‘praeses dixit’) angered fellow nationalists ‘who are too lazy to stand upright in a disciplined manner during the national anthem or Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’.
> The NJSV’ers also constantly clashed with left-wing schoolchildren in Bruges. These protested because, after the relaunch of the scholastic club, they suddenly saw swastikas, far-right runic signs and SS graffiti popping up in their town. But it went beyond that. They were also, Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck told parliament in February 1997, ‘systematically’ visited in their pubs by NJSV members who wanted to ‘intimidate’ them. In the process, glasses were smashed and blows were struck. The NJSV members were not easily intimidated. One of them even blew up his own front door with a grenade so that he could then accuse his left-wing opponents of bombing him. The police unmasked him.
> Even then Vlaams Blok chairman Frank Vanhecke was forced to distance himself from the NJSV for a while. ‘Such provocateurs and troublemakers,’ he had it recorded in the local press, ‘we can miss them like a sore thumb.’ Vlaams Blok councillor Lucien Decoorne said in 1997 that the party was especially annoyed with ‘praeses Tom Vandendriessche, who acts rather dictatorially’.
Ten tijde van het VB van Filip Dewinter solliciteerde hij bij het VB, maar werd hij niet aangenomen omdat hij ‘te extreem’ bevonden werd.
Dat is heel tekenend. Het VB onder Van Grieken ziet er misschien wat netter uit, maar is dat dus helemaal niet.