Tensions between Dutch and French speakers paralyse the High Council of Justice

[Laly]

I wholeheartedly agree.

How suprising coming from a ...! As usual, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about...

[Dandelion]

How suprising coming from a ...! As usual, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about...

This ignorance is something I have stumbled upon several times. My last months in Belgium however I worked for a French-speaking leader who is anything but trouble. I only learned she was a Francophone years later.

[Laly]

I might have chosen my words poorly. I am against stirring up hatred between our peoples, no matter how narrow-minded people can be. The situation is dangerous in that people are kept dumb, because once they become aware they lack rationality. I am not the best communicator and it's because I have the vice of laziness. I don't like it when people are treated like children and I often feel this in Belgium.

Believe me, I cannot stand gratouitous hatred for Francophones as people. It's intellectually lazy. It's what I never understand in the Netherlands, when some Dutch think it's the solution for Belgium. I take no such advice of people who even think Francophone equals Walloon and who cannot even name one political party here. Reality isn't black and white as simple minds think.

I am sorry for what happened to you in Antwerp and I immediately believe you. Some people are rude as fuck. I myself even help French-speakers in French, even though I speak it poorly. Not out of submissiveness, mind you, but because they aren't Frenchifying me for just speaking a language. In Wallonia I sometimes get helped in Dutch too. People need to be less anal about it.

A Walloon who is nice to me can very well be a person who doesn't like Flanders, but who still sees the individual in me. This is how decent people treat each other.

Tchek also told me once. Many Walloons are just as ignorant as Flemings and delving into our national history is too much of a taboo because people think we cannot handle it. Francophones strike me as less of pushovers, is all. Many Francophones are annoyed when they are spoken to in terrible French when they try to speak Dutch out of compensation behaviour. When a Francophone speaks better Dutch than me, I speak Dutch. When a Francophone speaks English to me, I speak English. When one asks me if I speak French? I answer: "Oui un peu. Nous pouvons essayer. Comment puis-je t'aider ?"

I once helped a Francophone woman in French in getting the right train. She understood me and then asked a conductor because she was suspicious I told her the wrong info. I told her the truth. That hurt me a bit, but I understand her too.

I believe you are a wise person. We are actually very proud that our daughter is bilingual. We talk French at home and she goes to school in Dutch. She loves it, she loves her school. We also try to read books in Dutch with her at home. And she is actually a little bit upset because our Dutch is very poor. She would like us to speak Dutch like her. I am thinking about taking Dutch lessons.

[Laly]

Reason I didn't thumb him up is because of his quote above the video. I just disagree that Francophones suck. French Canadians get treated like shit by Anglophones more than vice versa in fact. Francophone Swiss might be seen as snobs, but Swiss people are proud to be Swiss.

In fact, I even worked under a Francophone lab coordinator once, in Antwerp. She's Flemish (not every Francophone is a Walloon!). She just from a family that spoke French to climb the social ladder. She hides her mother tongue very well and speaks Dutch with an Antwerpian accent. A hidden group of Francophones few people know about, living in Flanders.

There is a significant number of Fransquillons in Flanders. I am myself from a Fransquillon family originally from Limbourg. One of my friends, the count Xavier de Bergeyck, told me once that he was invited for dinner in a Fransquillon family in Antwerp and Bart De Wever was invited too. He gladly spoke French, like everyone else.

[Laly]

Also, Belgium isn't as artificial as people think. We are the Southern Netherlands. The Catholic Netherlands. The Belgian Revolution also happened because the Dutch didn't understand our sensitivities. It's not as simple as people assume. Sadly Belgium would become a Francophone state that emulated France too much and surpressed the Dutch language.

Trust me, I like the Netherlands and yes the Dutch did a lot to develop our land economically, but it's no fun being put under a Calvinist yoke when the people aren't used to it, while many Dutch Calvinists think their morality is universal. To this day, many Dutch fail to realise this. I even suffer from this in the Netherlands at times.

I totally concur! It may sound paradoxical, but I think that although there are obvious differences between the two ethnicities, which seem insurmountable, the Flemings and the Walloons have a lot in common and I think there is even a "Belgian spirit".

Genetically, they are quite the same I think, they share the same religion, Catholicism, which shaped and in a way unified their culture, for example in an artistic point of view. For ex., several "Flemish Primitives" came from the territory of Wallonia, several of the essential Flemish writers wrote in French and there is definitely a Belgian spirit, a certain "belgitude", with an off-the-wall gaze on things, a sense of surrealism that they enjoy cultivating.

[PaganPoet]

Flemish and Walloons are collectively more genetically related to eachother than anyone else. Only politicians can be blamed for friction.

[Tooting Carmen]

Flemish and Walloons are collectively more genetically related to eachother than anyone else. Only politicians can be blamed for friction.

So the respective publics have little or no animosity towards each other at all? And that is a silly argument: NI Catholics and Protestants are genetically almost if not totally identical, yet the Troubles lasted for four decades.

[PaganPoet]

So the respective publics have little or no animosity towards each other at all? And that is a silly argument: NI Catholics and Protestants are genetically almost if not totally identical, yet the Troubles lasted for four decades.

There is absolutely no such friction between Flemish and Walloon. Incomparable.

[Tooting Carmen]

There is absolutely no such friction between Flemish and Walloon. Incomparable.

Over the language issue there is to some extent, right?

[Ruggery]

Flemish and Walloons are collectively more genetically related to eachother than anyone else. Only politicians can be blamed for friction.

But it is clear that there are cultural-regional divisions, how many Walloons or Flemish people, instead of feeling Walloon or Flemish, feel Belgian?