This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
A few months ago, I reported on how the Austrian parliament elected a vice-president, Martin Graf, who remains a life-long member of the extreme right Olympia fraternity (Burschenschaft).
On April 15, Graf launched a book by the extreme rightwing Member of the European Parliament Andreas Mölzer (FPÖ) in the Austrian parliament. At this presentation Walter Marinovic - a retired teacher - gave a lecture entitled “Arminius liberated in 09 Germania from the Romans - from whom do we liberate ourselves 2000 years later?”
Marinovic has maintained contacts with Austrian and German neo-Nazis. In its 2003 Annual Report, the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution observed that “Austrian revisionist Dr. Walter Marinovic” was the guest speaker at the “First Free Convention” put on by the Deutsche Stimme-Verlag publishing house - an imprint of the extreme right NPD - held near Leipzig on 30-31 May. The report also pointed out that Marinovic writes for the National-Zeitung/Deutsche Wochen-Zeitung.
During the launch of Mölzer’s book, the Green MP Harald Walser protested by wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “The name of your shame is Martin Graf” ( “Eure Schande heißt Martin Graf”.)
Antisemitism is a consistent feature of Zur Zeit, the weekly edited by Mölzer. In its issue of April 17, the ardent hunter and revisionist amateur historian Heinz Thomann - who, for years, has tried in vain to debunk what he calls “the historical lie of the exclusive responsibility of Germany” - attacked Ariel Muzicant, the president of the Austrian Jewish Community for his criticisms of the extreme right wing functionaries of the FPÖ. That the knee-jerk defense against criticism of antisemitic positions is itself antisemitic is underlined by his article “Muzicant and Antisemitism”.
Thoman alleges that Muzicant, an Austrian citizen, “interferes” in “Austrian domestic policy” and has a “one-sided worldview”.
The “Tel-Aviv immigrant” Muzicant (actually, he was born in Haifa in 1952 and has lived in Austria since he was four years old) tries “to push our country into the right wing corner and to defame it as a Nazi stronghold” because he draws attention to the rising antisemitism and the extreme right wing background of many members of the FPÖ. As is usual in this milieu, Thomann makes Jews responsible for fanatical anti-Jewish hatred. The reasons for this reside “in those crimes of which the Zionist state Israel has committed against the civilian population in the Gaza Strip”. Israel tries “to annihilate finally, in the sense of the Old Testament, the remains of this hopeless, repressed and succumbed Palestinian people in the open air concentration camp called the Gaza Strip.”
Thomann sees “extermination mania in the spirit of Talmud” working. In the face of this, “the Zionist Muzicant” remains silent.
Thomann also trades in the old antisemitic canard that Jews exercise too much economic power internationally. He states that he is an agreement with “the nearly 50 per cent of the population” who believe that the global economic crisis is the fault of the Jews.
Thomann’s article alleges that “large scale carpetbaggers and swindlers like Alan Greenspan, George Soros or Bernard Madoff are all Jews, and this certainly another reason for the rise in antisemitism worldwide.” All this in the paper for which Andreas Mölzer, who sits in the European Parliament, is responsible.
I can only congratulate Karl Pfeifer for his - as always - courageous and determined effort to show the true face of facsism and antisemitism. That those people care for truth and facts less no more than for a fly or a beetle, is well known but has to be pointed out again and again. Every honest person and of good will yowards his fellow human beings must be thankful to Karl Pfeifer for his article. Peter F.Michael Gewitsch
Karl’s article is spot on.
Here is another one on the hard Right’s threat to Europe:
“And Spain, in a move widely seen as capitulating to Islamists, responded to the March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid by voting for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist Party, which had vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq immediately. Zapatero narrowly won reelection last year. As libertarian columnist Antonio Golmar explains, the centrist consensus established after King Juan Carlos’s introduction of democracy in the seventies has been shattered by Zapatero’s hard-left initiatives. These include the Historical Memory Law—which portrays leftist mass murderers during the Spanish civil war as heroic freedom fighters, while stigmatizing many of their innocent victims as fascists—and the introduction in all schools of “citizenship” classes that teach scorn for capitalism and representative democracy.
In response, some Spaniards have lurched rightward toward the national-Catholic, proto-fascist ideology of Franco’s time and become increasingly vocal within the conservative Partido Popular. Consequently, says Golmar, “moderates in Spain are trapped between a far-left administration and their cronies and the revival of the extreme right disguised in conservative and even libertarian clothing.” While America struggles to move beyond the antagonisms of the 1960s, then, Spain has entered an ideological battlefield reminiscent of the years preceding its civil war of the late thirties. There seems little room for those who loathe both the neo-Marxists and the neoreactionaries.
The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.”
Read the whole long article here:
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_pim-fortuyn.html