The Workers’ Party of Belgium
Out of the student movement of the 1960s was born the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA), initially led by former Flemish nationalist Ludo Martens and organized around a publication named Alle macht aan de arbeiders (“All Power to the Workers”) during which it adhered to a crude form of “Mao-Stalinism”, supported the Khmer Rouge and the Angolan UNITA movement (which was supported by China, North Korea, apartheid South Africa and the United States during the Angolan Civil War against the MPLA supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba), and had an anti-union policy according to which it called on workers to leave unions and join autonomous red workers’ groups instead. This was only the start of a number of ideological zigzags the PTB-PVDA went through; after Mao’s death, it tried to transform into a more “mainstream” communist party and in 1979 it held its first congress where it adopted a program oriented towards Maoism, changed its name to The Workers’ Party of Belgium, adopted more flexible policies, especially towards unions, while denouncing the Soviet Union’s social imperialism and calling Cuba a “fifth column”. This changed when the PTB-PVDA threw its support behind Romania’s National-Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu and supported the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests, and later supported Radovan Karadzic. Martens, who was chairman of the PTB-PVDA from 1971 until he fell ill in 2008, and was ideologue of the party until his death in 2011, was a major Stalin apologist and wrote Another View of Stalin, meant to rehabilitate Stalin, and founded the International Communist Seminar (annually attended by the FRSO and occasionally by the WWP) in 1992 with the intention of uniting what he considered to be the four tendencies (pro-Soviet, pro-China, pro-Cuba, pro-Albania) of the Marxist-Leninist movement. In 1994 Martens met Kim Il-Sung, the PTB-PVDA back then bragging about Martens being the last foreigner to have met Kim il-Sung.
Another prominent member of the PTB-PVDA is Michel Collon, whose position on the War in Yugoslavia was not limited to mere opposition to NATO’s bombing but instead went to the extent of denying the crimes of Serbian nationalists in the Yugoslav War and working with the WWP to defend Milosevic [archive] (after which the WWP has regularly associated [archive] with Collon). Collon seems to have become a member of the red-brown network from then on, attending Thierry Meyssan’s Axis For Peace conference in 2005 [archive] while claiming to be a member of the Consultative Council of TeleSUR (a claim by him that cannot be independently verified). Collon’s own website, Investig’Action, claims to fight against disinformation by the mainstream media while in fact being a confusionnist and conspiracist outlet which counts on its List of Authors [archive] some left-wing personalities (including figures like Sara Flounders and the Workers World Party, and Bosnian Genocide denier Michael Parenti) as well as a large number of far-right and conspiracist authors such as 21st Century Wire (see below), Le Cercle de Volontaires, Gilad Atzmon[archive], Tony Cartalucci, Leonid Ivashov, Alison Weir, Michel Chossudovsky, Thierry Meyssan, Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, William Engdahl, Whitney Webb (a writer for Mint Press News who promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories), South Front, and James Petras, among others, and Collon himself promotes [archive] Le Cercle des Volontaires on Twitter.
In 2011, Collon’s website promoted pro-Gaddafi protests [archive] organized by[archive] the Entre le Marteau et l’Enclume organization run by Maria Poumier(a Holocaust denier and an associate of Dieudonné and of Israel Shamir[archive]), and La Pierre et l’Olivier, whose president is Ginnette Skandrani[archive] (a former member of the French Green Party from which she was expelled because of her proximity to Holocaust deniers and fascists — Skandrani is a close associate of Dieudonné). Collon’s website was at one point listed as a friendly site by Soral’s and Dieudonné’s Egalite et Réconciliation, and while Collon publicly maintains a certain distance from Soral, he has himself defended Soral’s associate Dieudonné [archive], was hosted by Croah.fr administrated by anti-Semitic cartoonist Joe Le Corbeau (who is also close to Dieudonné and Soral) and called for a debate with Soral after the latter verbally attacked Collon and his associate Jean Bricmont in 2011 [archive].
In February 2012, a conference at the Paris Labor Council where Michel Collon was scheduled to speak was cancelled after mobilization by local anti-fascists.
On the 31st of March 2012, Collon participated [archive] in a conference on Syria organized by Le Collectif Pour la Syrie, the Afamia association (its president is Ayssar Midani), L’Appel Franco-Arabe and the French-Near East Association. The honorary chairman of Le Collectif Pour la Syrie, Michel Raimbaud, is a former French ambassador and has more recently spoken at a conference by LaRouche in July 2016 [archive], and one of its delegate administrators is Michel Lelong (see below). The conference was attended Ginnette Skandrani, by members of the Syrian shabiha, members of the Comité Valmy (see below), and members of Égalité et Réconciliation, and its participants included:
- Michel Collon
- Samir Amin (see below)
- Jean Bricmont, an associate of Collon and anti-imperialist leftist turned red-brown activist who participated in Meyssan’s Axis for Peace [archive], more recently defended Gilad Atzmon and wrote a preface for the French translation of his book [archive], was an initial endorser [archive] and signatory (together with a large number of fascists [archive]) of a petition in support of Holocaust denier Vincent Reynouard, and attended protests on the 30th of October 2012 in support for Assad together with Ginnette Skandrani, Edouard Klein of the GUD, Yahia Gouasmi and members of his “Antizionist” Party, and Frédéric Chatillon
- Bahar Kimyongür (see below)
- Michel Lelong, a Catholic priest who has expressed public support for Roger Garaudy, supports a reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Lefebvrist fundamentalists, participated in a protest in support of Bashar al-Assad by Civitas, has been hosted on Alain Soral’s Bistrot Flash [archive], and supports Maurice Papon, a Vichy regime official who was condemned for Crimes Against Humanity for his participation in the deportation of French Jews during the Nazi occupation of France
- Bruno Drweski, a former member of the French Communist Party who was expelled from the Recherches Internationales journal of which he was the editor for being a collaborator of [archive] Holocaust denier Claude Karnoouh[archive], and participated in Meyssan’s Axis for Peace. Drweski is also a member of the editorial team of sovereignist publication Ruptures [archive] of Pierre Lévy, ex-member of the French Communist Party, and whose staff includes Laurent Dauré of the right-wing Union Populaire Républicaine (see below)
- Komnen Becirovic, a friend of Collon, contributor to BI, formerly Balkans Info, a defunct far-right pro-Milosevic outlet ran by former Trotskyist militant Louis Delmas [archive])
- Ayssar Midani, who animated the conference and is collaborates with the Cercle des Volontaires [archive], submits regular reports to Eveil France TV[archive] (a conspiracist YouTube channel promoting Bilderberg conspiracy theories [archive]), has given interviews to [archive] and was hosted by Soral’s Egalite et Reconciliation [archive], and in February 2013 was presentat an “anti-imperialist” manifestation by fascist Serge Ayoub‘s Troisieme Voie and Jeunesse Nationaliste Révolutionnaire (which was banned in 2014 after its members were involved in the murder of an anti-fascist activist) notorious for its participants brandishing the portraits of Bashar al-Assad, Aleksand Lukashenko, Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and Draga Mihailovič.
- As noted by anti-fascist media, one of the “surprise” participants of the conference was Julien Teil, a contributor to the Voltaire Network [archive], who was present in Libya in 2011 as member of the Voltaire Network’s team[archive], together with Mahdi Nazemroaya [archive] and Thierry Meyssan[archive], and later gave a conference with Nazemroaya [archive]. Teil once ran Mecanopolis, a now defunct far-right website, and he has unsurprisingly appeared on Global Research [archive], the Corbett Report [archive] and regularly [archive] on RT [archive]
Two weeks before, the Collectif Pour la Syrie and Afamia had organized another event in support of Bashar al-Assad [archive], where the main speaker was Julien Teil.
This proximity to red-brown networks by Collon reflects itself in his defense of RT [archive] and in how sympathetic to Bashar al-Assad the coverage of the war in Syria by the Workers’ Party of Belgium is, despite the PTB-PVDA’s attempt at rebranding as a less sectarian and more open party since 2008. And as result, in 2013 anti-fascists in the French city of Lille called to mobilizeagainst an event hosting Collon organized by the Communist Coordination, affiliated to the Stalinist Rassemblement des Cercles Communistes, and by the Left Front, the left-wing nationalist coalition headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
