Zedelgem, a quiet Flemish town in West Flanders, was occupied by the Nazis between May 1940 and September 1944. During World War I it had also been under German yoke for over four years.

Now, 74 years after the end of the the Second World War, former Latvian Waffen SS men, who wore the same barbarians’ uniform as the occupiers of Zedelgem during the occupation, who fought for the same ideals and were condemned by the same Nuremberg Trials of 1945/1946 as members of a criminal organization, now, more than seven decades  after Waffen SS men being freed from an Allied POW camp situated in Zedelgem, these former Latvian SS men and their current far-right, neo-Nazi and Hitler-sympathetic admirers have convinced Flemish officials — many report more than a little impetus to call them morons, plain and simple — in and in the region of modern Zedelgem to enable them to  erect a monument to “Liberty” in their memory. A monument to Liberty! The very Liberty they had denied the 100,000 Jews killed in their native country and the dozens of thousands of innocent Soviet citizens of an array of nationalities and religious they killed while fighting in the USSR, near Leningrad and at other fierce, lethal battles. They wore the same barbarians’ uniforms as the Nazi occupiers of Belgium and Zedelgem. They all fought for the Führer to whom they had sworn a common oath of loyalty. They too fought for the same ideals as the Führer.

The so-called “Beehive” monument now marring Zedelgem, and its host entities, Belgium and the European Union and NATO, is no monument to liberty. it is pure and crass nostalgia for the good old days when these Latvian Waffen SS men, wearing the same barbarians’ uniform as those men who kept all of Europe under Nazi yoke, felt that they were Übermenschen, free to kill anyone with the official sanction by decree of the Führer, free to destroy, to rape, to steal, never ever thinking that one day they might be accountable for their war crimes and crimes against mankind. Of course it goes far beyond that. It is a horrendous twenty-first century statement of European Union tolerance to the glorification of Nazism, and all that that implies for the common future of our European house.

Thanks to the Zedelgem municipality, Hitler’s Latvian elite executioners and warriors have now been rewarded with a worshipful monument dedicated to “Liberty” much in accordance with the language usage of top Nazi propagandists during the Third Reich. 

Are there leaders of Zedelgem, Belgium, the European Union, and NATO who are prepared, now, to speak out loudly and clearly on what needs to happen, now, to this carbuncle in the middle of the face of the new Europe?