Schild & Friends is an extreme right-wing and nationalist youth movement from Flanders. The movement propagates racist, anti-Semitic and sexist doctrines and aims to infiltrate various social organizations in order to spread its ideas. Although people portray themselves outwardly as pious and moderately conservative, closed online networks present a completely different picture. The Belgian program Pano was given exclusive access to the movement and its leader Dries van Langenhove. It painted a picture of this that shocked Belgium when it was broadcast in September 2018.
Shield & Friends
- What is Shield & Friends?
- Ideology
- Discredited by Pano reporting
What is Shield & Friends?
Schild & Friends (S&V) is a Flemish ultra-right, nationalist movement whose membership consists mainly of students. The movement was founded in 2017 by Dries Van Langenhove. Van Langenhove (1993) was at that time a student representative at the Catholic Flemish High Student Association (KVHV) and a member of the Board of Directors of Ghent University. The movement started with a Facebook group that mainly launched many memes mocking ‘left-wing Flanders’.
From 2017 onwards, the movement also started to manifest itself in public, for example by protesting at lectures by the Belgian State Secretary for Asylum & Migration The o Francken. In the summer of 2017, Schild & Friends also organized a ‘summer university’ in the Oude Klooster Maleizen, which also houses a controversial Catholic school and is associated with numerous reactionary Catholic organizations. In March 2018, Schild & Friends again came to the fore when it disrupted a demonstration for a more humane European asylum policy, including by pulling down flags. A month later, members of Schild & Friends broke into the headquarters of the social democratic union ABVV, where vandalism was committed. In September 2018, the movement was estimated to have around 900 members, of which around 190 can be seen as core members.
Ideology
Schild & Friends propagates an extreme right-wing and nationalist ideology. It does not shy away from racist, anti-Semitic and sexist messages, as evidenced by the messages on its own closed online groups to which the VRT, among others, has had access. Various reports also indicate that S&V has set itself the goal of infiltrating various social organizations and political life in general. Several members are already active within, among others, the Flemish nationalist party N-VA and the Flemish Youth Council, which acts as an advisory body for the Belgian government. They themselves formulate it in such a way that they want to ‘ensure a positive change in mentality among Flemish youth into physically and mentally resilient, social citizens’ and want to replace left-wing politically correct thinking with a right-wing vision.
Identitarian movement
The Belgian State Security Service includes Schild & Friends among the identitarian movements. This also includes Pegida, the French Nouvelle Droite Génération Identitaire and the Dutch Identitair Verzet. It also has in common with many other ‘new right-wing movements’ that it actively fights against ‘the great replacement’: the so-called displacement of the ‘original’ white population by immigrants.
Discredited by Pano reporting
On September 5, 2018, Schild & Vrienden was the subject of a report by Pano, a weekly journalistic interpretation program of the Belgian public channel Een. Journalist Tim Verheyden was given the opportunity to closely follow S&V founder Dries Van Langenhove for six months. He also gained access to the movement’s closed Facebook group, where he found very shocking sexist, racist, anti-Semitic and violence-glorifying posts. For example, there is a post with the caption ‘ how to pick up Jewish chicks ‘, with an image of someone scooping ash from an oven underneath. Another much-liked post claims that overweight young women place themselves outside society and that men can expect women to look good. Other posts include glorification of the Third Reich, such as an image of Hitler with the caption ‘you can’t be racist if there is only one race’. In total, Pano looked through approximately 65,000 messages. Despite strong evidence to the contrary, Van Langenhove denied having seen many of the posts himself and claimed that there was framing.
Following Pano’s broadcast, the rector of Ghent University ordered disciplinary proceedings and denied him access to university buildings and services. The East Flanders public prosecutor’s office has also launched an investigation to determine whether there are any criminal offenses. This included house searches.