Exploring the limits of satire.

last updated 8 January 2015

Belgium

Paul Martens

Belgians need to lighten up, said Paul Martens in Brussels’ La Libre Belgique. Last week, the French-language television station RTBF played a hoax on its viewers, and they are not amused. The station interrupted its broadcast with the news that Flanders, the Flemish-speaking part of the country, had declared independence. A shaken anchor said the king had fled. “Correspondents” stood outside Flemish government buildings interviewing grave-faced politicians. The show was convincing. French-speaking viewers wept by the thousands at the collapse of their country, and foreign embassies began phoning Brussels. The broadcast went on for many minutes before RTBF displayed a message confessing that the news was fake, a “dramatization” intended to provoke debate. The country erupted in fury. Parliament has opened an inquiry and threatened RTBF with everything from fines to outright closure. But this is an overreaction. What happened to the “famous Belgian sense of humor?” It’s our capacity to laugh at ourselves that allows us to confine our conflicts to speeches. Plenty of Irish, Basques, or former Yugoslavs “would envy us this capacity to keep ethnic politics in perspective.” And in fact, imagining how traumatic secession would be could help to ward it off. In retrospect, that scene “where the cop donned a bulletproof jacket before heading off to police the language boundary” was pretty funny.