The tumult over the recent inclusion of Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria’s coalition government has made discussion of certain issues timely. The move to isolate Austria is yet another example of a knee-jerk shallow response to a little understood domestic situation which threatens to backfire and produce unintended consequences. Overall, this is yet another example of the Holocaust issue being exploited and trivialized, and it is high time to discuss this in greater detail.
Haider exists in Austria and strikes a chord in Europe because the continent is tired of a domestic situation in which corrupt center-left parties have been milking the system for the benefit of political cronies, keeping out competition and generally overseeing an economic system that has failed to appreciate modern market forces. Haider represents a man of the people in a society which has become alienated from its government. For instance, an arrangement has existed in Austria where all civil service jobs were restricted to the two main political parties. His insurgency threatens the establishment in all of these countries and it is that which is causing governments across the continent, themselves enmeshed in political scandals, to be crying out in a holier than thou manner. Many of these European countries have former fascists and communists in their governments and there is a sense of the pot calling the kettle black. The more correct line of fire against Haider is his exploitation of an undercurrent of resentment against foreigners because of their contribution to crime and drain on government resources, but in Austria the economy is strong and there is no evidence that foreigners are displacing Austrians from their work; they are taking menial jobs that the Austrians don’t want. Haider is a successful provincial governor whose social policies would be considered somewhat liberal by American standards; the center in Europe is to the left of that in America. His programs involve redistribution of welfare, not the elimination of it. There is no comparison between Austria of today and Germany of 1933 and the fact that Hitler was also elected in 1933 has no relevance.
Haiders exist in the US and we don’t exactly put them away in the closet although we probably should; Buchanan, Perot and Farrakhan are examples. We are suspicious of these guys but they don’t come right and say evil things or keep “clarifying” when they do and therefore we don’t cut them off; make no mistake Buchanan and Farrakhan make money (and fuel for their operations) by shooting off at the mouth and getting press coverage and prominent positions on roundtable programs – all of which point to the value of ignoring them.
Haider is a bit frothy at the mouth but doesn’t come right out and say evil as much as impolitic things and it is true that most of the ammunition against him is based on things he said a decade or more ago, much of which has been twisted out of context. Assuming he did say these things a decade ago, a person should anyway be allowed space to evolve and grow but I sense he is not being given the opportunity. If I were to say that Hitler was a great speech maker and that one could learn a lot about crowd dynamics and speechmaking by watching and mimicking Hitler, I would expect in the current environment to read for the rest of my life that I was a Hitler-admirer but frankly it’s a true statement in its context and really nothing to be ashamed of. Simon Wiesenthal said last week that he has never heard Haider actually say anything anti-Jewish and did not agree with the current efforts to isolate Austria. I personally am offended at the self-righteous use of this kind of ammunition to blackball someone; it reminds me of the “PC” movement we saw on college campuses about 5-10 years ago when Leftists called anyone who didn’t agree with them Nazis, racists and pigs. It was a wonderful weapon until no one could be Leftist enough and they all started throwing these epithets at each other until there was no one holy left to debate; they then realized this was stupid and ceased fire.
In any event, all that has been accomplished is to make a no-name called Haider more popular who can now be expected to go on international lecture circuit and make millions. Go out and tell a generation of Austrians that they are irredeemably racist, anti-semitic xenophobes, and cut them and their democratically elected government off – and you will create a nation of people having nothing to lose who will be racist, anti-semitic and xenophobic. The polls show that if Haider were kept out of the government and, having already tried and failed to form a government new elections were held, Haider’s party would now probably gain enough seats to form a coalition on its own. So the only actual consequence of all this tumult has been to strengthen Haider and his party. The riots in the streets you see on television represent a small part of Austria; the majority want change, think that Haider represents a clean broom and a chance to settle a muddy political coalition situation that has been unsettled for some time.
We have been making the same mistake for years. World outrage over Waldheim was instrumental in getting him elected. Let a little neo-Nazi who doesn’t have a pot to piss in say he will march on Main Street on Saturday afternoon and all of a sudden he’s headlines for a week, everyone is involved and ultimately 3 people show up to march along with 100 policemen and 300 counter-demonstrators, 100 of whom interrupted their sabbaths to show up. Two of the 3 marchers probably found out about the march via the publicity. Meanwhile, the city’s taxpayers paid the bill for all the police.
Now let’s evaluate Haider’s comments in context. Among the things Haider basically has said over time were that most Austrians who served in the Nazi-run armed forces were decent people and that Hitler’s employment policies were orderly. Basically, without any desire to apologize for this man I don’t know or have any reason to like, these are reasonable statements. The reason the Holocaust is so infamous and puzzling (for it is certainly not singular with all the genocides taking place this entire century) is that it involved so many people who would otherwise have been considered decent people who wound up doing very indecent things. A million brutal murders in places such as Bosnia, Rwanda and Indonesia just this past year doesn’t faze us because we don’t think of those people as decent but as savages. A third of the people that planned the Final Solution had Ph.D’s – ordinarily a vital part of a pedigree of the decent man.
Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan visited Bitburg a decade ago, a military cemetery in Germany where Nazi soldiers lay buried, among others. There was controversy then but I think the decision was correct. I think it needs to be recognized that not every person who served in the Nazi army was a willing Nazi and not every person who served in the Nazi army committed crimes against humanity. War breeds a strange occurrence where justice and humanity tend to be dictated by the victors. There were soldiers who followed orders because they could not bear not to and soldiers who followed orders with gusto. Not all Germans or Austrians acted against Jews; some helped them. Is it fair that East German border guards and officers are now being imprisoned by West Germany? They acted according to instructions by a dictatorship government that existed and was recognized by the world as legitimate for almost 50 years.
Old and dead people are presumed a certain amount of honor and grace because that is a societal value that is necessary particularly when people are not in a position to defend themselves. Do we really need to be directing resources toward chasing people like Pinochet and other assorted octogenarian Nazis and do-badders because we have now decided it is in fashion to do so? Remember that the main reason we are chasing these people now is that 50 years ago the countries that are chasing them gave them sanctuary in return for their assistance against the communists who were perceived as the greater threat. It’s not like we didn’t know. It was all a very dirty business with no angels on any side and we can argue about it but the world in 1945 was in a tentative and shifting stage that was scary at the time and that we cannot appreciate in 2000. In general, I have always started with the presumption that one shouldn’t judge another unless he has been in his shoes. Inhumane acts by Israeli soldiers are often defended by such comments as “You don’t understand their special situation; In war or in a battle zone, you have to follow orders or kill before you are killed.” I personally cannot swear that had I been a German citizen at the time of the Holocaust that I would have behaved any better or worse than my neighbor. I don’t know how the average American would behave in war time and I personally don’t expect to be pleasantly surprised should I ever have to find out, even with all our Internet and worldly understanding. I think humility in this area of judging one’s fellow man and defining “decency” deserves a higher place. This is not moral relativism – not everything is equal. The point is that sin is not neatly defined and its definition should not be fixed in perpetuity and redefined for earlier generations by those in later ones.
I as a Jew am sick and tired of reading about the Holocaust every week in the Jewish media; it is as if we have no new agenda except to obsess. I know this because I see 100 Holocaust and Tolerance museums that have become a self-perpetuating industry, but I don’t see leadership backing positive futuristic programs that don’t involve some kind of political or religious ideological brainwashing or any opinion pieces in the Jewish media written by anyone under age 40 that represent new thinking. Just as I am sick and tired of seeing Jesse Jackson butting in on every controversy including a black person so that he can get political (and financial) mileage out of it, I am tired of seeing the Holocaust invoked against every societal wrong alleged to exist and trivialized as a result. As inciteful and painful as it was to hear the Syrian press accuse Jews of cynically manipulating the Holocaust for financial and moral purposes, I have a sense that they are right and represent a lot of people who think that way for some good reasons. There is enough evidence for people to see of all these Jewish organizations and self-appointed leaders squabbling over the prosecution and division of Holocaust claims and assets, stacking the deck against the survivors themselves who have yet to get anything and who will soon be dead anyway, and evidence of Israeli banks who have behaved no better than the Swiss in concealing account information from their depositors, that we really should be looking at ourselves and wondering who are we to be the arbiters of political good taste.
Let’s be honest and briefly visit some other stones we throw from our glass houses. If you compare how the Austrian and Israeli governments treat foreign workers, there is no comparison – the Israeli example is shameful but of course we ignore it. The private sector is exploiting foreigners and the government is treating the whole matter with benign neglect. It is a serious problem where people are deprived of pay, are physically hurt, threatened or killed and kept in unsanitary situations for extended periods, families are being arbitrarily split, deportations are without due process and there is a corruption factor overlaying the whole matter which has infested the police and judicial system. It would not surprise me at all were Israelis to support a Haider if they were instead in a situation such as Austria which bestows a full basket of social services upon foreigners residing in the country illegally, and it is not uncommon to read all sorts of stories in the Israeli press and to hear comments from politicians and ordinary citizens stereotyping even legal immigrant Russians, Ethiopians and Romanians as mafia, prostitutes, AIDS carriers, etc.
The self-righteous nationalistic attitude that exists today particularly in the religious community that actually mocks and opposes any kind of peace agreement – and offers no alternative except to stand up and say NO – is a perversion of religious principles. It has reached a point where a good many religionists value a state of war holding barren land and sticking a trailer and flag on it and surrounding and/or occupying strangers who do not wish to be occupied and who are not treated as decently as we romanticize or as we are religiously obliged – but they don’t care and will easily justify killing Ehud Barak or anyone else who stands in their way and it doesn’t terribly matter to many of the loudest voices that they neither pay taxes nor serve in the army. It has become irrational and at a frenzy’s pitch; peace is not at all a virtue to these people — it is a surrender of a war to be fought vicariously. Is this an ideology that deserves to say that Haider’s nationalism is any less moral than theirs? If an educated and religious Jew who thinks he is superior to most forms of humanity thinks that an Arab does not deserve human rights or possess any redeeming qualities and is presumed only to hate, be a religious fanatic and ignoramus and therefore be presumed to be subhuman, why should he tell an Austrian to think much of a foreigner or even a Jew?
If you want to throw a cheap argument at me, you’ll say I’m a self-hating Jew. Meanwhile, you’ll defend your positions by saying that the Arabs don’t want peace and that anything the Jews do to Arabs can’t compare with what the Nazis did to Jews. You’ll also say that Austrians need to be sensitive to our feelings due to their obligation to the memories of the victims of the Holocaust and their survivors. But these arguments miss the point. They don’t deal with the world or with Austria the way it really is, and create a moral demand upon a particular society that is unrealistic, not applied evenly and not met by those who propound it. Put simply, just because they’re wrong doesn’t mean we’re right.
It is high time to become more sophisticated about Austria’s domestic situation, our own behavior with regard to nationalism, the manner in which we treat foreigners and dehumanize our opponents, and the standards by which we define and allege decency and evil. Yes, the Holocaust did happen, it was evil, it should be remembered and it should not be forgotten or forgiven. Anti-Semitism should be called for what it is when it exists and should be beyond the pale of civilized behavior. Evil should be defined in an objective sense for this generation as universally as possible and opposed in all its forms, not just when it is expedient. What is needed is a better defined code of behavior that sets forth the boundaries of acceptable and nonacceptable behavior to provide a road map for public discourse, and for analysts and commentators to raise their level of commitment to looking at the context of the stories they follow. We benefit from public discourse that is not mealy-mouthed and that permits people to take risks and say things that matter and that represent the aspirations of their constituents, even if we don’t always like the substance or the style. Criticize the substance of what they say, not their right to say it. Moral authority is based to a large degree in its sparsity of invocation, a point Ezer Weizmann forgot as president of Israel. In plain English, we need to cut some slack to those who play the game so that they take the referee seriously when he throws the flag.
