Austria's joerg Haider: a Hitler throwback

By Joseph Petticrew

A protest rocked the capital city of Vienna, Austria the night of Feb. 5 and turned quickly to an unexpectedly violent confrontation between protesters and police, resulting in the injury of more than 50 people.

As protesters moved on the Freedom Party Headquarters on Kaertner Street, the police attempted to disperse them with tear gas and water cannons.

The cause of this civic violence is the composition of the new coalition government of Austria, which includes the far-right, fascist-like Freedom Party, headed by Nazi-apologist Joerg Haider.

Haider seems to fit perfectly the mold of a new type of conservative emerging in the politics and culture of Europe. The emergence has many from both left and right deeply concerned, especially as such men move from their private cloister of marginalized, eccentric opinions, to the center of national and international politics, bringing with them attitudes of revisionism and apology for a Nazi past.

And despite all Haider's denials, the fact that he holds such opinions is at the heart of the protests against him.

The left responds to his admiration of Austria's Nazi past, while the right rejects his ultra-nationalist stance as inimical to the development of the European Union and a consequent expansion of international capitalism.

Haider himself blames the protests on the left-wing forces arrayed against him and his party. He practically accuses those who stand against him as being nothing more than political opportunists and undemocratic.

"Why should I be responsible if the left does not accept democratic decisions," he said in a recent interview. In recent months Haider has done much to distance himself from his own past pronouncements on the Nazi legacy in Austria, and the fact that he has been for some time one of its strongest apologists.

Of course, Haider obscures the fact that he was once forced to resign his seat as governor of the province, Carinthia, for his pro-Nazi pronouncements.

In a recent television interview he attributed his "former views" to the very poor historical education Austrians of his generation had received in their early school years. He simply didn't understand, he said, the true nature of the Nazi regime. But we sense in Haider not a change of heart, but of tactics.

In an example of his tactical parries, Haider recently called for the compensation of all Nazi POWs who were held after the close of WW II, but tied this to a call for compensation of those forced into slavery by the Nazi government. It is in this semblance of "even-handedness" that Haider is attempting to show himself in the better light of the reasonable man.

On the subject of reparation for slave-laborers, his comments are perfunctory and he only says that such policies would be patterned "after those of other nations." But on the subject of compensating ex-Nazis, he was more expansive.

"It is also my wish that we start up talks and negotiations with other countries who kept Austrians as prisoners of war or forced laborers after the end of the war," he said in a recent interview cited in the Morning Star. He went on to say, "I really don't see why, on the one hand, we recognize that slave laborers should be compensated but, on the other hand, we should do nothing for the Austrians."

This ploy seems to have become part of his new approach to the compensation of ex-Nazis. The fact that he truly does not "see why" is the crux of the matter.

This sort of reasoning might read well for some of the Austrian ultra right and conservative nationalists, but itdoesn't read well among many other Austrians and the vast majority Europeans.

Haider's early life does much to explain the shape of his politics. His parents were both ardent members of Austrian variants of the Hitler Youth and he grew up with the full force of their apologetics.

His father was an early member of the Nazi Party, joining in 1929 as a Hitler Youth and later serving in the Nazi SA. He was an early associate of Adolf Eichmann and in 1933 served as a member of the Austrian legion of the Nazi party. So far from being "ordinary Austrians" thrown into the maelstrom of the times, his parents were both hard-core Nazis.

Because of their high standing within the party, Haider's relatives were able to purchase a large estate in Carinthia once owned by a Jewish timber merchant. The estate - upon which Haider presently lives with his family - was extorted from its former owners in a forced sale in 1939, in accordance with new Nazi laws which forbade the owning of property by "non-Aryans." The estate is reportedly valued at $15 million dollars.

Haider has been compared to the Louisiana Klansman David Dukes, and it is not surprising that he has garnered his largest support from groups similar to those that gave Dukes his political base here.

Haider has managed to whip up much fear among Austrians who have felt increasingly marginalized by a perceived threat of "foreigners" taking over their jobs and changing their way of life.

There should be no surprise here, for this has traditionally been the fascist path to political power and as hard as he tries to distance himself from the Nazis, the intent of his message is clear to anyone who listens.

As Haider tries to distance himself from his Nazi sympathies, so the Freedom Party has made some attempt to distance itself from the same tendencies, rather difficult considering the party's history

The Freedom Party is a direct extension of a faction that actively promoted pan-Germanism after WW I and was instrumental in effecting the Nazi Anschluss of 1938. The party has had in its ranks many former Nazis, including two leaders who were, respectively, a high-ranking member of the Nazi government in Austria and an ex-SS officer.

Moving away from its early post-war pro-European stance (a stance many consider a cover for the party's continued allegiance to Germany), the Freedom Party has increasingly taken positions that can be characterized as ultra-nationalist and anti-European, playing on the fears and economic insecurities of many Austrians by pitting the "real Austrian" against the "foreigner." And far from being an aberration in the Freedom Party, Haider has led the way in their version of the "politics of exclusion."

In 1999 poster slogans there appeared many inflammatory commentaries. "Stop the foreign infiltration" and "Stop the abuse of asylum" were two notable examples. Haider himself has proclaimed that "the Africans who come here are drug dealers ... we've got the Poles who concentrate on car theft ... the people from the former Yugoslavia who are burglary experts ... the Turks ... superbly organized in the heroin trade ... the Russians who are experts in blackmail and mugging" - castigations which are deliberately crafted to increase fear and mistrust of Austria's ethnic minorities. And in a gust of Nazi enthusiasm, Haider once rejected the comparison of his party to the Nazis by saying "The Freedom Party is not the descendant of the National Socialist Party. If it were, we would have an absolute majority."

In spite of any attempt on his part to rehabilitate his image, can there be any doubt where Joerg Haider's true heart is?