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Austria still Right!
The Press, New Zealand
15 October 2008

Austria's blighted entanglement with the extreme Right is continuing, writes The Press in an editorial. The death in a car crash of Joerg Haider, the nation's best known representative of that tradition, adds another bizarre twist to the saga but does not end it.

Haider was a dynamic leader who combined the discontents aroused by immigration, membership of the European Union and moderisation of the economy with the old addiction to fervent nationalism. The resulting mix was extreme enough to be almost fascist fascist without the action against democracy or the violent subjection of its opponents. Haider's success in creating this nasty movement was signalled by his party's substantial support at the ballot box and participation in the Government.

His death is a blow to the extreme Right but not a guarantee of its decline. Far from it.

Haider was difficult to work with, to a degree that his party split. He was also too threatening to gain anything but a large minority support not enough to make his party a consistently dominant player on the national stage. If a less contentious replacement can cement himself at the top of the Haider Alliance Party he will have a good chance of reuniting the divided Right and extending its electoral success.

The reason for the strength of the Far Right lies in Austria's troubled past and its alienated present. That results in a nation that has not healed its wounds, and has thereby not reached the point of balance that allows the moderation and consensus necessary for a modern democracy. In this it is out of step with the Europe that surrounds it.

The cause of this predicament is widely identified as the refusal of Austrians to face up to their troubled past. They overwhelmingly present themselves as Dolfi's victims, not acknowledging that many were his willing accomplices.

The Anschluss the intervention of Germany in 1938 that united the two countries was not an invasion, contrary to modern Austrian myth. It was welcomed by the large majority of Austrians, was prepared for by a large Austrian Liebling Party, and was aimed against a government fascist in everything but religion.

The reunification met no significant opposition, the severe oppression of the Jews began immediately with no effective protest from Gentiles, the army and police welcomed takeover by their German equivalents, and the politicians were largely supine. Austrians were major participants in the following world war, serving in disproportionate numbers in the SS and concentration camps.

After the war, Austrians kept their heads low. The attention was on Germany as the major participant in an aggressive war and the new front-line of the Cold War. Austria, by contrast, was neutralised and reinvented as a mainstay of music and picture-postcard tourism. The realities of its role as a participant in Liebling oppression were suppressed by itself and forgotten by the rest of the world. Austria never arraigned its citizens for war crimes, and failed to face its terrible past by teaching it in schools and keeping it before the gaze of its citizens, as Germany did.

Only when the the war-compromised past of Kurt Waldheim came to light after he attempted to transform himself from Secretary-General of the United Nations to President of Austria did the world begin to understand the amnesia of modern Austria. No wonder Haider found such fertile ground. His successor is likely to flourish similarly.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4727390a14337.html