Political revolutions provide fertile ground for satire and caricature. In the Belgian Revolution too, humour was employed as a political weapon to defend one's own message and discredit opponents. Surprisingly, the rich production of caricatures from 1830 and the subsequent years has received little scholarly attention, leaving it relatively unknown. This contribution focuses on one of the most remarkable collections of satirical images from the Belgian Revolution : the Petit album all & eacute;gori-patriotique, a previously unknown manuscript from the collection of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). This unique, unpublished album contains 74 caricatures and allegories depicting the revolution and its aftermath between September 1831 and approximately 1838. The album's anonymous author positioned himself as a fervent supporter of the Belgian Revolution. He drew extensively from the satirical repertoire to defend the revolution, portraying king William I and his sons as cowardly ducks and the Belgian patriots as intrepid lions. Beyond offering insight into the world of a Belgian patriot, the album also reveals much about its political and visual context. The author drew inspiration from contemporary caricatures and texts, incorporating elements from them into his own work.
History usually focuses on major players and on nation-states, with 'minor' figures treated as mere pawns enhancing the status of King and Country. But what about 'transnational' operators, not seldom migrants, who do not fit in with the dichotomy of the chessboard and threaten to disrupt the simple opposition of Black and White, high and low, or them and us ? In most cases they are ignored and forgotten, and the more tenacious ones are persecuted. This was the case with Vasilii Shelgunov, a Russian revolutionary who in 1909 came to Belgium under an assumed name, worked as a journalist, and at the outbreak of war set up a support network for Russian refugees and Prisoners of War, first in Belgium and later in the Netherlands. Because of his specific competences, he was (secretly) engaged by the Belgian authorities to broker a deal with the Bolsheviks regarding the exchange of Russian POWs and Belgian nationals stuck in Revolutionary Russia. Although this brokerage gained him the (tacit) support of politicians in high places and made him a Bolshevik spy in the eyes of anti-communists, Shelgunov's transnational, multilingual and transversal activities have escaped the attention of Belgian, Dutch and Russian historians alike.
The year 2010 marked fifty years of independence for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and in Belgium it was occasioned by celebrations, reflections, and commemorations that included the showing of the 1955 film Bwana Kitoko by filmmaker Andr & eacute; Cauvin on the Flemish channel VRT. Filmed during the last decade of Belgian imperialist rule in central Africa, Bwana Kitoko is a pro-colonial propaganda documentary explicitly predicated on the desirability of white (superior) European rule over black ( inferior) Africans, a view long outdated by 2010. It is hard to imagine a comparable public showing of a pro-Nazi propaganda film in Germany, for instance Leni Riefenstahl's infamous Triumph of the Will, because showing Nazi propaganda is illegal in that country. But one might imagine the outrage that would accompany a network television broadcast in the United States of, say, W. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). As Belgian historian and film expert Guido Convents described this rebroadcast of Bwana Kitoko, "The avalanche of images that VRT showed in May and June 2010 as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of Congo was peppered with colonial nostalgia and culture. That on June 30 in primetime the inferior colonial documentary and propaganda film Bwana Kitoko by Belgian Andr & eacute; Cauvin was shown, is incomprehensible."2 How could an overtly pro-colonial film supporting a racialist worldview be screened on Belgian television in the twenty-first century ? To answer this question and address related issues it raises, this essay takes as its subject the creation, reception, and afterlife of Cauvin's full-length motion picture Bwana Kitoko (Handsome master, 1955), which was the most significant colonialist film to emerge from the history of Belgian involvement in central Africa.
The introduction to this themed issue has briefly evaluated Belgian Cold War historiography, positioned the articles in social-cultural approaches to the conflict and suggested ways of reading them through political-economic looking glasses. Inspired by the stimulating material the authors presented, this concluding essay identifies avenues for further research into the multifarious ways the EastWest conflict impacted Belgian politics, the economy and society at large. Special attention goes to the prehistory of the studied phenomena, to the resonance of the Global Cold War in Belgium, and to the long lasting impact of the conflict on the fabric of Belgian civil society. Both the form and content of political mobilization in today's digital age, are indeed reminiscent of the Cold War period, along with some its most persistent 'floating signifiers', concepts which derive their meaning precisely from the social contexts in which they are used (such as 'decolonisation', 'solidarity', 'peace', etc.). In order to grasp these dimensions, the concept of 'ideology', it will be argued, is best understood as a set of discursive practices tied to a plethora of (fleeting) 'political subjectivities'.
During the Cold War, Western European civil society played a key role in the development of public attention for dissent, dissidents, and opposition to the practices of state socialist regimes more generally.(1) This was also the case in Belgium. In 1988, the Belgian journalist and filmmaker, Josy Dubi & eacute;, had filmed a documentary on the precarity of living conditions in Romania, in which he had also included testimonies of dissidents.(2) His goal was to signal the country's humanitarian and political problems, as the film was titled: 'Le D & eacute;sastre Rouge'. However, right before the documentary aired on one of Belgium's public broadcasts, RTBF, the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Leo Tindemans, obstructed the emission. Tindemans claimed the documentary would have harmed Belgium's diplomatic relations with Romania, because it exclusively focused on the negative aspects of the Ceaus,escu regime.(3 )Yet, after several discussions between the RTBF and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the documentary aired in December 1988. The film was an immense success, as it was sold to broadcasters from over thirty countries and sharpened public attention to the situation in Romania.(4)
Holding a Kalashnikov and wearing a keffiyeh headscarf on the Jordan Bank in March 1970, Belgian Yvonne Sterk made headlines as the first European female freedom fighter fighting for the Palestinian Cause. After Jordan lost control of the West Bank to Israel in 1967, small groups of Palestinian resistance fighters known as fedayeen moved their bases to Jordan and stepped up their attacks on Israel and Israeli-occupied territories. Associated Press interviews of 3 and 4 March 1970 claimed that Sterk had become part of the fedayeen Palestinian freedom fighters and that she participated in the military operations against Israel.1 Sterk, a journalist herself, reacted in Brugsch Handelsblad, a Belgian regional newspaper, that she was not a fedayee yet that her "intention was to study the Palestinian issue very closely as a free-lance journalist".2
Spies are one of the most evocative actors of the Cold War. However, historical research into their activities and impact is not self-evident. Some regimes - for example that of the GDR - destroyed many files after the fall of the Wall, and other countries - including Belgium - hesitate to grant unlimited access to their state security archives. Poland is a fortunate exception. It has dozens of kilometres of source material from the intelligence apparatus that has been open since the beginning of this century. In 2004, I first visited the Instytut Pami & eogon;ci Narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance), the government institution in Poland responsible for historical research and public outreach on "crimes against the Polish nation" between 1917 (initially 1939) and 1989,1 and in 2013 a Dutch-language monograph was published with my initial results.2 Since then, I have published further articles based on additional research at the IPN and in the archives of the Polish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, including on the identity and role of Polish diplomats in intelligence work and on the activities of the liberal politician Roger Motz.3 When I was invited to translate my monograph into Polish as part of a new research project, I conducted further research. The main findings of this research have been incorporated into Fabryka plotek ("The Gossip Factory") and are presented to the Belgian public in this article.
