Heil, Haider?

Television channels throughout Europe have been spin-doctoring for their governments by running clips of 1938 newsreel, showing Hitler and the Wehrmacht triumphantly entering Vienna. Newspaper reports and cartoons by the hundred also try to establish equivalence between Hitler and Haider. To compare the two is an insult to history, but it serves to illustrate the manipulation of mass emotion by the unscrupulous that George Orwell immortalized as the Two Minute Hate. A sarcastic joke is doing the rounds in Vienna: "When is NATO going to begin bombing our coffeehouses?"

Haider has indeed struck a nerve with the issue of immigration, but this is a troubling matter for the entire continent, not just Austria. Immigrants from all over the world are seeking legal and illegal entry everywhere in Europe. The result is tension and discrimination, race riots and murders here and there, and a hardening of public opinion to which all the European governments have responded. A variety of quotas and controls, subtle and not so subtle, are in place. Britain, to give an extreme example, seems set to require visitors from India and Pakistan to deposit 10,000 [pounds sterling] per person as a surety that they will leave. European countries together busily deport every year hundreds of thousands of unwanted immigrants, most of them from the Middle East and Africa. The human cost is immense and the dilemma seemingly insoluble, but to single out Austria for racism and xenophobia is outright hypocrisy.

Nor are complaints about Haider's alleged totalitarian mindset convincing when they come from the French government, which contains ministers proud to call themselves orthodox Communists, or from the Italian government, whose prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, remained a Communist and a Soviet supporter until 1991, and to this day boasts of it. The previous Berlusconi government contained no fewer than five neo-Fascist ministers. Rifondazione, the successor to the Italian Communist party, and the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the German Communist party, occupy seats in their respective parliaments, but nobody proposes boycott and ostracism on account of these openly anti-democratic elements. In the case of Ulster, Prime Minister Tony Blair has strained to install in government IRA terrorists for whom fascist is the most fitting description.

The Socialist International, the elite Left that rules Europe, appears to have gone berserk, but there is a logic to its behavior. The European Union now taking shape is evidently a centralized and corporatist project of the type that defines socialism. Stealthy measure by stealthy measure, each of the 15 nations involved is surrendering its sovereignty and historic identity to a supranational entity. The project is driven from above. European leaders, of course, know that if the masses were ever allowed to give their opinion freely and fairly, they would overwhelmingly reject the political future planned for them.