Scuffles in Brussels

The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal So, I was in Rome recently chasing down information for a book and noticed that, at the time I'd be heading back home, a National Conservatism Conference was being held in Brussels. I decided to stop in to see how NatCon would fare in the "capital" of the European Union. As has been widely reported, under pressure from "antifa" forces, Brussels' mayor foolishly forced Concert Noble, the initial venue, to cancel. And again, with the Sofitel. Ultimately, we gathered at the Claridge, where the Tunisian Muslim owner was (unsuccessfully) pressured by the mayor, his wife threatened, and warned that his business would be destroyed (kudos to him for standing up for free speech). Then, during the first day, the Brussels police, under mayor's orders, arrived to shut the whole thing down. The conference was allegedly advancing "exclusion" (i.e., controlling illegal immigration) and Euroscepticism (the horror!), harboring elements of "fascism" and "homophobia." Which, translated from the Globalese into the vernacular, means it was mostly advocating the kind of normalcy that existed since the beginning of time, until just a few years ago. All right-thinking persons are now supposed to classify mere sanity as "far-right," "dangerous populism," and a threat to "democracy," even when democratic majorities (the populus) vote - as they are likely to do in European elections this June and America later in the year - for just such normality. I was sick with what turned into something like the flu and left the conference at noon the first day in search of something hot to clear a stuffy head, just as the police were arriving. They told the organizers that they had fifteen minutes to clear the room. But then looked around and perhaps thought the optics were not great of rounding up a tranquil slate of academics and democratically elected officials, and an audience of political junkies, almost all in suits and dresses - and in their twenties. As a compromise, for the rest of the day, no one else was to be admitted. People could leave, but not get back in - because of "security concerns." A former candidate for the French presidency arrived late and was denied entry. Cardinal Mueller was smuggled in by a side door. The event carried on bravely, but with a cordon of police outside. (When I first arrived, the venue itself had set up a security perimeter - a big truck was parked in front of the entrance, and a heavy barred gate was raised and lowered as participants were checked through.) That such a thing can happen in a Western country - the center of Europe - beggars belief. It tells us something about what our public life has become, however, not only that it happened (though the restrictions were reversed by a Belgian judge for the following day), but that news outlets like the New York Times tried to spin the whole fiasco as something welcomed by conservative extremists as a way to play the victim. You have to be very deep into the victim/oppressor framework of much current public discourse to see - let along report - it that way. I don't entirely know what to think about National Conservatism, though I am an admirer of Yoram Hazony, the Jewish founder who has written several interesting books, and of John O'Sullivan, a longtime friend and past counselor to Margaret Thatcher. In my view, NatCon doesn't entirely know what it thinks about itself, which is all to the good, and why it hosts a variety of reasonable positions, long central to our western nations - and well within the proper democratic spectrum: religious beliefs, traditional social mores, national sovereignty, without excluding international co-operation - where appropriate. This is hardly political bomb-throwing, except to a fragile segment of our deeply disturbed elites. Brussels is at Level-3-Alert about Islamic terrorism, but makes a large public move against a few hundred conservative thinkers? The mayor had earlier warned about the threat of growing "Catholic fu...