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A female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time.
So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site.
She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him for an interview
"Pardon me, sir, I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. What's your name?"
"Morris Fishbien," he replied.
"Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?"
"For about 60 years."
"60 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?"
"I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims. I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop. I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults, and to love their fellow man."
"How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?"
"Like I'm talking to a flippin' wall.

Bugler among somnambulists
Of all the law-enabled crimes that the ruling elites of the West have perpetrated on their subject populations in the last 40 years, none has been as grave as the demented stuffing of 55 million imported Muslims into Western Europe, another 5 million into the white Anglosphere countries, plus unknown millions of illegals in both. This has shattered the common cultural, moral and religious social capital of the Euro peoples, dissolves bonds of community and civil society, and led to strife, violence, terrorism and anti-West genocidal plots by Muslims – all of which, we shall argue, could have been avoided had the West remained the West and the East remained where it properly belongs, in the Crescent Moon East.
The Dutch MP Geert Wilders has spoken often of the dangers Europe faces from Muslim colonizers. He has described a parallel society out of bounds for indigenous Europeans, governed by deeply alien customs, oppression of women, tribal violence, and sharia justice according to a 7th century moral code. He has cited thousands of mosques across Europe, European cities that are already one-quarter Muslim, Muslim majorities in the under-18 bracket, and Muslims as 25% of Europe’s population by 2020.
Wilders evokes the self-imposed falsification of the European culture in order to accommodate Muslim sensibilities: the banishment of pigs from children’s literature and school menus, the avoidance of bedrock Western authors like Voltaire, Diderot and Darwin, and the burying of inconvenient history like the Holocaust. He has talked about the self-imposed avoidance of prosecuting Muslims for violent crimes against women, homosexuals, Jews, Muslim apostates, the police, bus drivers, even ambulance workers.
Muslims do not come to integrate in Europe, but to force Europe to integrate in Islam. And the traitor class that rules Europe is happy to oblige, says this European politician.
“Muslims demand what they call 'respect'. [snip] Our élites are willing to give in. To give up. Surrender. [The Netherlands has] gone from calls by one cabinet member to turn Muslim holidays into official state holidays, to statements by another cabinet member, that Islam is part of Dutch culture, to an affirmation by the Christian-Democratic attorney general that he is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. [snip] Politicians shy away from taking a stand against this creeping sharia. They believe in the equality of all cultures.”
Wilders has become the West’s bugler, calling Reveille morning, noon and midnight to Western peoples intent on deep torpor even when it’s time to rise and confront Islam’s menace. He has trained the public spotlight on the Koran’s incitement to hatred, murder, terrorism and submission of the infidel.
Wilders has pointed out that Muhammad, as a warlord, mass murderer and pedophile [ibid.] could have given rise only to a religion that doubles as a totalitarian system intent on world domination, holy war, cruel archaic law, slavery of women, and theocracy.
But perhaps the most important part of Geert Wilders’s wake-up call is in his reminding that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. To Muslims, every word in the Quran is Allah’s word and therefore not open to interpretation or amendment. It is binding for every Muslim for all times, even though it was written by a 7th century barbarian desert dweller.
Not content just to talk, Wilders has produced the film Fitna, to convey the essence of Islam in images. For this he has been sued by the Dutch Islamic Federation (NIF), with an Amsterdam appeals court ruling that Wilders should face charges of inciting hatred and discrimination. The judges characterized Fitna as a "one-sided, generalised phrasing characterized by a radical nature, constant repetition and increasing ferocity". The court further ruled that Wilders’s prosecution would not conflict with the right to freedom of expression.
Geert Wilders has been restrained in directing his censure not at Muslims but mainly at the religion of Islam, therefore evading the capital crime of overt “racism.” He has stated, “I have a problem with Islamic tradition, culture, ideology. Not with Muslim people.” Nevertheless, the white, cowardly dhimmis at the helm of Holland set out to destroy the bugler in their midst, lest he awaken too many of his compatriots. The rest of the Body Snatcher cabal, from the UN Secretary General to Great Britain’s horrid Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, to the usual suspects at Newsweek (taken apart here) have reacted as expected per the imbedded programming of their Pod chip.
Wilders does not shy from placing the blame where it belongs, “the sick and evil surrender ideology of cultural relativism.” He states further:
“Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals and Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.”
Wilders sees hope only in the people, abandoned though they are by their elites and opposed by the entire political, legal and media establishment. He adduces as proof the public opinion shift in the Netherlands relative to the mass immigration of Muslims, the growth of his own PVV party and of immigration restrictionist parties elsewhere in Europe. And he sees the establishment of an American-style Freedom of Speech and the abolition of “Hate Speech” laws as the way for “the voices of anti-Islamization [to] swell like a mighty chorus across Europe.“
Perhaps. But criticism of the unhinged behavior of the West’s Muslims may already be seen in the media, and it’s muddled, timid and obfuscatory. Eight years after 9/11, after Theo Van Gogh and the Muslim doctors’ plot in Glasgow, and the London Subway plot, and the Muslim pizza commandos in New Jersey, and the Pakistani-American Ph.D. in neuroscience and mother of three who worked for Al Qaeda, and numerous other cases of Muslim immigrant foes imbedded deeply in Western science and security institutions, and a Somali with a Canadian passport found dead in August 2008 with a pound of extremely toxic sodium cyanide in a Denver hotel room, and other American Somalis disappearing and resurfacing on the battlefields of Afghanistan, and British Muslims foaming at the mouth at British soldiers returning from Iraq, a Telegraph article about hostile Western Muslims, ends with the silly whimper, “If the West wants to prevent further terror attacks, we must first distinguish between those who are on our side, and those who are not.”
This is pitiful, and it’s 25 years too late. What about the 60+ million – soon to be 100 million-- legal 1st and 2nd generation Muslims already in the West? What about the possibility that it’s not Islam but Muslims that are the problem? After all, 1400 years of following an unchanged totalitarian dogma and marrying each other’s cousin, and 500 years of disdaining science and creativity, has at least as much to do with the character of a people as its religion does.
The strange dimensions of Bodysnatcherland (1) can be seen even in Finland. According to statistics quoted by a Finnish blog, Somalis, who constitute 0.2% of Finland’s population, commit 12% of reported robberies. The Somali community in Finland, of course, lives at the taxpayers’ expense just as is does in every Western country where it’s present.
To import Somalis to such a singularly unmixed white and monocultural nation as Finland is a symptom of a galloping psychopathology. Not only that; the Finnish legal establishment actively prosecutes ethnic Finns who publish politically incorrect statements about Islam or Muslims. A blogger named Seppo Lehto was sentenced to long imprisonment and a large fine for “incitement against an ethnic group” and “disturbing religious worship.” To do this, the Finnish Body Snatchers had to dig up a blasphemy law so old that the first attempt to overturn it was made in 1914. And now, a Helsinki councilman and blogger Jussi Halla-aho will be tried for blasphemy, for having written that Muhammad was a pedophile.
Predictably, True Finns is the fastest growing political party in Finland. But who knows how much of the true is left to be rescued.
The mistaken transposition
The Muslim apostate Dr. Tawfik Hamid wrote in “The Trouble With Islam”, “There is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom.”
Hamid, a former Islamic terrorist, states flatly that Islam teaches and promotes violence and that the Muslim majority refuses to condemn Islam’s barbaric aspects. He blames the Western ruling elites for their cultural cowardice and appeasement toward their restive Muslim communities, and admonishes:
“Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in [snip] the West.”
I admire the good doctor for his courage, and wonder whether he is imprudent enough to write under his real name. Theo van Gogh is already dead, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan live in hiding under armed protection, Bat Ye'or, Hugh Fitzgerald, Christoph Luxenberg (2), Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Fjordman and others who speak the truth about Islam hide their names or identity, on penalty of death. But Dr. Hamid’s and other such prescriptions stipulating that “progressives” need, should, must, have to -- awaken, realize, understand, undertake, change etc. amount to nothing but an exercise in polemics.
Body Snatchers will not wake. Legume pods, whose original biological programming was erased and replaced by an ideology from outer space, cannot awaken. They have only one pre-programmed command, forward, toward “progress.” They will continue to progress in the manner of the windup toy that waddles forth until it falls off the edge of the table.
The problem is that they have the rest of Western society in tow. And the proof of how close this society has been towed to the edge is that ethnoconservative parties like Geert Wilders’s PVV, the Flemish VB, the Swiss SVP and FPS, and civic associations like Pro-Köln and Cities Against Islamization have been waging a valiant and often-losing fight for every inch of ground for over 20 years now, and still suffer stones and brickbats from the very people they are trying to save. In addition, Western patriots have spent millions of uncompensated man-hours pro bono to enlighten their peoples about the folly of suicide-by-Muslim-immigration. They run webzines and conferences and write for blogs like Brussels Journal, Gates of Vienna, Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs, View from the Right, or burn midnight oil to write books. This can even take the form of desperate appeals like this. All to little effect, so far.
Why is all this necessary? How could massive Muslim colonization have happened on the continent where monumental battles –-Toulouse (721), Tours (732), 750 years of the Iberian Reconquista, Manzikert (1071), Kosovo (1389 and 1448), Lepanto (1571), Chocim (1621 and 1673) and Vienna (1683) – had been fought for 1000 years to halt Muslim colonization? How can this be when there have been hundreds of additional such battles, and heroes such as Marco Antonio Bragadin whose name once every European schoolboy knew?
A case of collective amnesia so profound that it would allow for the influx of tens of millions of Muslims and the rise of Islam on this continent, that would lead to planned political unions with Turkey and the Maghreb, is no trifling matter.
Jihad is not the cause. It’s a symptom. Aggressively separatist Muslim communities in the West are not the cause. They are a symptom.
The symptom, in the West, is as old as the Goths and the Huns. But the disease is as old as the end of the Roman Empire, and before that, the Babylonian one. Flowering followed by decadence, followed by a partial population replacement with imported barbarians, followed by chaos, internal war, and wilting.
Addressing the solipsistic degeneracy of the American Empire and the despairing self-asphyxiation of post-national Europe are a precondition for disposing of the symptom. Fighting the symptom as if it were disembodied cannot bring cure, since the body’s maimed autoimmune system recognizes Islam and Muslims as its own, and its own – the anti-Islamization dissident – as the invading disease.
It should be none of our business whether Muhammad was a pedophile, nor should we be digging for damning quotes in the Koran or making damning movies about Islam. That we do so is the normal and spontaneous reaction of the scant remains of Western society’s nearly atrophied autoimmune system. It’s the autoimmune rejection of a foreign and deeply incompatible substance, forcibly injected into the West’s body as though phenol into a vein by the West’s insane ruling shamans.
Islam is everything bad its critics say it is. But one who has visited extensively in Muslim countries – and I have – returns home from some of them wishing he’d been able to import some of their features. Consider this:
- Which Muslim country is sick enough to encourage immigration by Christians, let alone welfare-consuming Christians, subsidize Christian churches, cower before Christian dissidents who despise their host society and its religion?
- Which Muslim head of state or potentate is so gelded as to state that if enough of his state’s subjects want to institute Christian (or just Western) jurisprudence instead of the law of the land, he sees no reason to object?
- Which Muslim country is lunatic enough to adopt on a wide scale the prima facie madness of denying the most obvious truths about racial, gender and cultural differences – and spending trillions (in euros, dollars, anything) to build a sham palace of cards in public education, employment and immigration based on those mad presuppositions?
- Which Muslim society is stupid enough to fail to understand how profoundly it differs from the West and from the West’s “infidel?” Which is ravaged by the Western virus to such an extent it fails to understand that its identity, its soul, depends on a vigilant rejection of the West’s culture and values, while recognizing that its economic wellbeing depends on playing a game of cooperation?
- Find a single Muslim head of state who goes out of his way to explain that Christianity is the religion of peace, and that Crusader really means someone who likes to cruise.
- Show me a Muslim country crazy enough to place its foreign relations, security and military matters in the hands of women, or to put women in the combat units of its military.
- Take a walk on the beach in Qatar or Abu Dhabi at 2 AM, and observe how a crowd of families with little children picnics happily and safely under the open skies. Then go back to Marseille or Rotterdam, Coney Island or Santa Monica, bring your wife and kids and two sets of old parents for a 2 AM picnic on the beach, and see what happens.
This does not imply that Islam is the cure for the West’s ills. The West has its own nonpareil system of recognizing and acknowledging reality. It’s called empiricism. The West had its own immune mechanism, its own unequalled culture, its own historical laboratory where the tried turned true. And all these were better than what Islam offers.
But we have allowed our own ruling elites to destroy these mechanisms here, whereas the Muslims preserved theirs. Some measure of respect is called for, concomitant with recognizing how indispensable it is that the West shake off its entire Mad Legume top layer.
The bugler in the steeple
Europe has another bugler, on its eastern flank. And were the soul and brains of the Western peoples less contaminated by their own elites, this is all the discussion about Islam and all the self-defense from Islam that the West would need.
Every hour, on the hour, a bugler climbs to the steeple of the Church of St. Mary in Krakow, and plays the dirge. The dirge is cut off abruptly mid-note. This commemorates a mid-13th century bugler who saved Krakow from being overrun by Muslim Tatar hordes from the Asian steppes.
Standing high in the tower of the grand church, the bugler saw a large force of Tatar invaders approaching on horseback toward the royal city, and gave the alert to close the gates. In the middle, a Tatar arrow pierced his throat.
Once a day, at noon, this dirge, cut off as though by a Mohammedan’s arrow, is transmitted by Polish radio throughout the country. The radio transmission has been going on daily since 1927, but the dirge has been heard in Krakow daily since at least 1399, with only a half-century pause in the late 18th century. This is how a European people remembers the meaning of Islam.
G.K. Chesterton, who admired Poland as the staunch eastern bulwark of the Christian West, said that the “St. Mary’s dirge” was for him the call of a besieged civilization. And so it is.
Poland is nowadays quite relaxed about Islam. But there are only 25,000 Muslims living among a population of 38.5 million. Of those, about 5,000 are descendants of some 13th century Tatars who tired of the nomadic Mongol existence and asked for permission to settle. They were useful as a superb light cavalry, so successive Polish kings granted them citizenship privileges. The Tatars in turn fought in many wars for the Christian country that had given them shelter.
It’s all a question of scale and common sense. If 600,000+ instead of 60+ million Muslims were living in the West, there would have been no renascence of jihad. In turn, there would have been no Muhammad cartoons or Christian “blasphemers” of the Koran either.
There is no harm in accepting a small number of useful foreign exotics, even as different as the Tatars. The madness begins when a mental virus erases the distinction between a Mongol Muslim nomad and a European Christian pipefitter. The European West has succumbed to this madness. The European East has not.
It’s in the East where one can find proof that Europe used to be sane relative to Islam. In Kamieniec Podolski, once part of Poland and now Ukraine stands the Polish Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul. In 1672, a large Turkish army under Sultan Mehmet IV invaded the area and conquered the Kamieniec Podolski fortress (3). The Turks then converted the Catholic cathedral into a mosque and appended a minaret to it. But 27 years later, following a defeat of the Turks and their allies in that area at the hands of Jan Sobieski, plus more of the same in 1683 Vienna, in 1699 the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Karlowitz. As part of the treaty, the land of Podolia, and with it Kamieniec Podolski, returned to Poland.
And the Turkish mosque returned to Christians. They respected their foes and left the minaret intact. But they topped it with a 4.5m gilded statue of St. Mary. It stands like this to this day, while in Western Europe churches are turned into shelters and community centers for Muslim colonizers.

Separationism
Because of that bugler from Krakow, and the childhood tales of my countrymen’s 450 years of nearly incessant fighting against the armies of jihad, I don’t need to read books about the nefariousness of Islam. I don’t need to see Fitna. I knew all I needed to know at the age of seven, as do many boys in Eastern Europe to this day, because they are taught their history. And what I have known since childhood is that separation and robust deterrence are the only answer.
Not hate, not disrespect, not tilting at delusional windmills that Muslims should, want to, or can be like the West. Just separation.
The doctrine of separation from Islam has several champions now, who differ in some details but all agree on what that Polish bugler expressed in 1241: close the city gates. Lawrence Auster defined Separationism as per these points:
Islam is a mortal threat to our civilization.
We cannot destroy Islam.
We cannot democratize Islam.
We cannot assimilate Islam.
Therefore the only way to make ourselves safe from Islam is to separate ourselves from Islam.
What this separation entails is a subject that Islam experts like Hugh Fitzgerald, and truthful thinkers about the condition of the West like Fjordman, Lawrence Auster and Srdja Trifkovic have written much about. Other worthy commentators like Steve Sailer and Diana West have also put forth worthy ideas.
What emerges from these is the uniform perception of Islam’s menace, the epochal mistake of opening the West to Muslim immigration, and the plan to reverse the tide. In the aggregate, the main points are:
1. Complete stop to all immigration from Muslim countries.
2. Offering financial inducements to legal Muslim residents to return to their ancestral countries.
3. Deportation of all criminal immigrants even if citizens.
4. Deportation of all illegal immigrants.
5. Closing of Wahhabi mosques and Salafi-linked institutions.
6. Ethnic profiling of Muslims and surveillance of mosques and of Muslim employees in sensitive positions.
7. More severe penalties for terrorist and seditious activities, with ostensibly “religious” activities like advocating for sharia, preaching jihad or even the soft jihad of “conquering the West with the power of the womb” defined as sedition.
8. Much tighter border controls.
9. Cessation of all welfare payments to immigrants.
10. Cessation of involvement in the internal affairs of Muslim countries.
11. Cessation of foreign aid and all “help” to Muslim countries.
12. Military disengagement from Muslim countries, while erecting forward military posts on the perimeters of the Muslim world.
13. Punitive military strikes against regimes that harbor and abet terrorists, but without the deluded occupation and "nation building" that followed such strikes against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Needless to say, there isn’t any chance this agenda can be implemented, except after the criminal lunacy of the ruling Pods has led to more terrorist attacks by jihadis, civil wars and perhaps worse. And so, while all these ideas are wise, proper and warranted, at a certain level Separationism is a theoretical exercise, based again on the premise of “ought,” “should,” “have to” and “must” relative to both the rulers and the majority of the Western population that not only haven’t the slightest intention of following such imperatives but regard their issuers as evil.
Geert Wilders, a politician whose job is to win elections, has tried to offer some anti-Islamization measures mild (and ineffective) enough to be acceptable to the electorate in his super-liberal country. Yet, his Klare Wijn platform in 2005 that included these milquetoast measures was deemed “implausible” by a margin of 53% in public polls.
Upon receiving the Kluge Prize in 2003 in the U.S. Library of Congress, the distinguished Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, gave a speech entitled What the Past Is For in which he said:
“We must absorb history as our own, with all its horrors and monstrosities, as well as its beauty and splendor, its cruelties and persecutions as well as all the magnificent works of the human mind and hand; we must do this if we are to know our proper place in the universe, to know who we are and how we should act. [snip] If we forget [snip], we will be condemning our culture, that is to say ourselves, to ultimate and irrevocable ruin.”
But we have undergone a massive population replacement, not only through an infusion of some 100 million+ Muslim and other Third World aliens, but also through the replacement of at least 300 million of our own people’s brains with synthetic legume pods manufactured in true global-economy fashion by the firm Gramsci, Adorno & Said (4), whose local franchises have been operating for decades in every school and university in every Western country. How are we to absorb our history if there is no we? How are we to know how to act if we don’t know who we are?
Hugh Fitzgerald in particular is a great and prolific educator about the totalitarian and West-unfriendly nature of Islam. And chipping away like this at the public’s ignorance and apathy is important, and should continue. But it cannot possibly bring public sanity in time to prevent further calamities of the West’s self-dhimmization. For this reason, the road to “Atlantis” we’ll be charting leads there via a wide detour.
It’s only when Antipods have established a strong base at that detour, that talk of Separationism will be more than an exercise of the imagination. Nevertheless, there are two points that I’d like to add on top of the thirteen.
Be nice. Separation from Islam and from Muslims, unless the latter commit much further transgressions, should not to be carried out in a spirit of anger. This is normal self preservation, as mundane as keeping the bull and the bear in separate spaces. We discarded this common sense due to our own foolishness. Muslim countries have not.
Muslim citizens of the West who behave lawfully, contribute economically and choose to ignore or battle against the incendiary aspects of their faith, cannot be penalized for the idiocy of their host countries in having allowed them to settle there. However inconvenient, however costly their continuing residence in the West, the West has no moral right to kick them out, though it has the right to cordon them off from jihadi influence.
The same applies to relationship with Muslim countries. None of the separationist measures implies, ipso facto, hostility. Good fences make good neighbors. What doesn’t make good neighbors is if one is aggressively tribal and devious by nature, and the other one is a naïve “progressive” floating on fumes of Hope and Change. It’s in wresting the keys to its house from the Hope and Change boyz that the West’s security lies, and not in demonizing the swarthy, ululating neighbor.
Beyond that, it is necessary to recognize that the issue is wider than just Islam. The issue is the incompatibility and unassimilability of well over 100 million Third-Worlders imported into the West by its Body Snatcher regime, and the lack of any justifiable reason for this population replacement. The issue is the ethnocide of the Euro peoples by the demented legume pods bobbing on top of the social pool like a red tide of algae choking off the supply of oxygen to the creatures below. In water ecoscience it’s called eutrophication. In political science, maybe a new term is in order, europhication.
Consider this: In Sydney, the Muslim Brotherhood Movement, a gang of 600 Arabs probably all Australia-born, has been terrorizing the city. Vying for the title of the toughest street fighting force is another Middle Eastern gang, the Asesinoz. Then there is the BFL gang and the Notorious gang, the latter distinguished in adding a Pacific Islander component to its Middle Eastern one.
Crime reports from Sydney read like this: “A man wanted for questioning over the murder of alleged crime boss Abdul Darwiche is the younger brother of Ahmad Fahda, a Razzak family associate murdered in 2003.”
This is not Islam at work. Like the “youths” (les jeunes) in France, these are simply thugs of Middle Eastern Muslim ethnicity. The issue here is not Islam but why are there Middle Eastern/ Maghrebi Muslim Arabs (or Pacific Islanders) in Australia. While Muslim immigration is by far the most dangerous, America, for instance, is undergoing a process of self-asphyxiation-by-immigration similar to Europe’s, but with Catholic mestizo colonizers as the chief reason.
Leaving aside frothing supremacist wannabe Nazis, in the entire West there are at most five names of public resonance who speak up for the right and duty of the countries of the white peoples, with their own gene pool and a great and distinct history and culture anchored in Jerusalem–Athens-Rome, to remain as a cradle of that gene pool and culture. This is “racist” territory, far more dangerous to those who tread there than mere “Islamophobia.”
And yet, doom is inevitable unless Western political leaders arise who are reasonable, humane, respectful to other races and cultures, but have the courage to state that if the 60+ million Muslim colonizers of the West were Hindus from Karnataka or (hypothetical) Ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jews, or Africans, their admission into the West still would have been a disastrous mistake and a demographic crime.
As the Sci-Fi writer Philip Dick quipped, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Either we shall learn to deal with Reality, or we will be gone away. Reality will remain.
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(1) The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods that replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. From the Pods develop the new Body Snatchers who cultivate further Pods etc. I use these terms interchangeably, usually preferring Pods as a catchall term, and Antipod as the antithesis of Pod.
(2) Known only under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg, this is a German scholar of Semitic languages whose research shows that the Koran is a pastiche including contemporaneous Christian Syriac passages that ought to be interpreted according to their Aramaic meaning, not their Arabic one, e.g. raisins, not virgins.
(3) The defense and fall of this fortress is described in one of the great epics of Polish literature (and an epic film), Pan Wolodyjowski.
(4) Ibn Warraq’s “Debunking Edward Said” is available as a PDF document at monokultur.dk/wp-content/apostats_ibn_warraq_100503.doc

If you are living in Germany, or anywhere else in the EU for that matter, and fancy to make your new homies a lekker Creme Soda or Fanta Grape float, (ja, when last did you have a ice cream and soda float? You know, a Coke or fants with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream floating on top that makes it bubble and foam like a frothy volcano...ja swaer...last time I had one could easily have been back in the days, like in the early 70's when there still existed such a thing called a 'Roadhouse')...Anyway, so..you fancy a float, but can't for the life of you find a can of acid green Sparletta Cream Soda or poison purple Fanta Grape, (with all the artificial colouring and harmful additives..just kidding).

nt for the order was in, and I can highly recommend the girls from SA Goodies for not only being friendly and giving good service, but also for having a great range of our favourite South African treats. I thought the prices were okay as far as prices of imported goods go, we used to pay our arses off for groceries from Germany when we were in South Africa, so I wasn't expecting to be snapping up bargains. It's just really nice to have the convenience of being able to order some of my favourite South African products, as I have to say there are some things that you just can't find similar local products as substitutes, like the Ina Paarman chocolate cake mix...there just is NO substitute!
women look wistful, but it is one of those desserts that everyone seems to like. It is absolutely not fancy, pretty, clever or remotely sophisticated. But I can guarantee you that every South African reading this has tasted it because it is one of those things that every South African mom has at some stage made when catering for masses of people... say, at a braai. Some people whom I invited but could not make it were upset not about missing the braai, but about missing the pudding! In fact, it has become so ingrained in the South African culinary psyche that I was amused to see on my visit home in June that it has become a chocolate flavour! Cadbury's Dairy Milk has brought out a range of "Local is lekker" chocolates in flavours like milk tart and... mint crisp fridge tart. Jawellnofine. So what is this ambrosial pudding? OK, don't wince when I tell you. Many moons ago, a South African company called Orley Foods developed a range of non-dairy cream substitute products. The flagship product was (and still is, apparently) Orley Whip which looks like single cream, whips up to three times its original volume and can be stored in the fridge for up to three months. My recipe for this pudding was copied down from a package insert in a pack of Orley Whip a long time ago, probably much like every other South African I know. The recipe combines Orley Whip with Caramel Treat (caramelised condensed milk) and Peppermint Crisp (a chocolate bar from Nestle that features a filling of tightly packed, long and very brittle tubes of BRIGHT green mint-flavoured candy - looks like Kryptonite and tastes madly minty), layered with Tennis biscuits (shortbread-ish coconut-flavoured cookies). It struck me that it is in some ways a South African take on tiramisu, minus the culinary history and the fashionability ;-). The final product is not overly sweet, thanks to the peppermint and the fairly neutral biscuit layers, but is rich enough to go a long way. And I distinctly remember seeing plates licked clean.
So clearly, local is lekker, even if you have never set foot in South Africa!"
Ingredients:250ml Orley Whip, whipped
2 packets of Tennis biscuits (although you will probably use less)
375g caramelised condensed milk
20ml caster sugar
3 Peppermint Crisp bars, crushed
3-4 drops of peppermint essence (more, if you like))
Method:
Whip the Orley Whip and then add the caramelised condensed milk castor sugar and peppermint essence. Beat until well mixed and then stir in 2/3 of the crushed Peppermint Crisp.
Place a layer of whole tennis biscuits in a buttered 29x19x5cm dish. Spoon 1/3 of the caramel mix over the biscuits and spread evenly. Continue in layers, finishing with a layer of filling on top.
Refrigerate for at least 4 hours. Decorate by sprinkling the remainder of crushed peppermint crisp on top. Cut into squares and serve.
SUBSTITUTIONS:
-You can substitute whipping cream for Orley Whip, but the outcome may be even richer than this pudding already is! I used Elmlea, a half-dairy cream available in the UK. Apparently the American Cool Whip is a near-identical product.
-For caramelised condensed milk, you can use dulce du leche or you can make your own by boiling a tin of normal sweetened condensed milk (warning: hazardous!!).
-The Tennis biscuits may prove problematic, although I have seen forums in Australia advising the use of a typr of Arnott's coconut biscuits or Nice biscuits. Any other suggestions welcome. And as for the peppermint crisp... sadly, for that you will have to bite the bullet and buy it from a South African shop. Not sure if anything else like it exists. Maybe start campaiging for Nestle to produce it worldwide? ;-)

But for one woman, the name Adolf Hitler evokes a smile not a shudder.
She is Rosa Mitterer, who worked as a maid for the Fuhrer at his mountain retreat in Bavaria in the 1930s.
Rosa is 91 and until now has kept a vow of silence about her experiences. She has chosen to break it after realising she is the last survivor of the circle who served the tyrant in the years before he launched the Second World War.
91-year-old Rosa Mitterer (doesn't she look stunning for her age..!) is the sole survivor of those who served Adolf Hitler in the years before the Second World War
And her verdict on her former master: 'He was a charming man, someone who was only ever nice to me, a great boss to work for. You can say what you like, but he was a good man to us.'
Rosa's remembrances of life at the court of the tyrant make gripping reading. She saw leading Nazis come and go. Himmler, the evil party secretary; Bormann, whom she described as a 'dirty pig'; and the club-footed, sexually-obsessed propaganda minister Goebbels.
Rosa went into Hitler's service at the age of 15 in 1932 when she was Rosa Krautenbacher. Her sister Anni had worked as a cook at Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat since the late 1920s.
'She said he needed a housemaid and I would fit the bill,' Rosa recalled. 'I remember so clearly the first day I spoke to him in the kitchen. I said I was Anni's sister and that made him smile, because Anni was his favourite. I only ever knew Hitler as a kindly man who was good to me.'
A photo taken at Rosa's sister's wedding, which Hitler attended
His former housekeeper was Geli Raubal, with whom it was rumoured he had a love affair. 'She shot herself in September 1931 and I was told as soon as I went to work for him that he was not to be approached on the anniversary of that day,' said Rosa.
'My sister and I shared a room that was directly over Hitler's. We could hear him crying.'
For a long time she and Anni were the only servants in the home, known as Berghof.
Recalling her first direct request from her master, she said she was drying some porcelain cups when he came down the stairs.
'Hello,' he said softly. 'Sorry to trouble you, but could you make me some coffee and bring some gingerbread biscuits to my study?'
Coming into such close proximity to Hitler made her feel faint, she said, but she soon became accustomed to life at Berghof.
'I rose at 6am every day and put on a red-green dirndl with a white apron. My first task was to feed his dogs - he had three German shepherds at the beginning called Wolf, Muck and Blondi.
Charmer: Adolf Hitler, 'the perfect boss'
'In those days, Hitler slept in his study. In it was an iron bed, one wardrobe, one table, two chairs and a shoebox. It was very modestly furnished. Beside the bed hung a picture of his mother.'
She added: 'I didn't have to be a Nazi party member or anything. After a while I relaxed a bit. Apparently it was Hitler's orders that Anni and I be taken to church every Sunday because he thought this would be "good for us".
'Another time he came into the kitchen, saw me and said, "Ahh, I see our little one has grown a little plumper!".'
Part of her duties involved sorting out the fan letters and presents that were delivered in their thousands to the house.
'There were cigars, jars of jam, flowers, pictures,' she recalled. 'We gave most of them away to poorer peasant families nearby on Hitler's orders.'
Her time in service also allowed her to see at close quarters the woman Hitler kept secret from his people throughout his rule - Eva Braun. 'She was not so pretty close up,' Rosa recalled.
'Himmler was always there too, thinner than what he looked like in the photos, and Goebbels.
'And Bormann, I didn't like him at all. He was a dirty pig.' By the end of 1934, the house was surrounded by minefields and SS checkpoints. Rosa said. 'I felt like a prisoner instead of an employee.'
In 1935 she fell in love with local businessman Josef Amorts and handed in her notice. She was told she could leave immediately..
'I only met Hitler once more, on December 10, 1936, when Anni married Herbert Doehring, manager of the Berghof. He came to the wedding and was nice to me, saying he missed me.'
Rosa married in 1939 and had three daughters. She later remarried. A great-grandmother, she now lives in Munich. After the war she had to confront the reality of the man for whom she had worked so willingly. And in particular the reality of the Holocaust.
Just a few weeks before Americans voted in a black socialist as president, Austrians rocked the European political establishment by handing a stunning victory to nationalists who openly oppose non-European immigration and the loss of sovereignty to the European Union. It was a breakthrough unthinkable in any English-speaking country, and again confirms that the brightest political hopes for our people are in the nationalist parties of small European countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, and Austria.
The numbers were dramatic: In the September 28 parliamentary elections, Joerg Haider’s new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, increased its share of the vote from 6.59 percent to 10.4 percent, while his old party, the Austrian Freedom Party, went from 11.04 percent to 17.54 percent. If the two nationalist parties had been a single party, their combined total of 28 percent would have made them the number-two party in Austria. As it was, the Alliance and the Freedom Party achieved something nearly unprecedented: two nationalist parties dramatically increased their support in an election in which they competed against each other.
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| “Social security for our people. They are against HIM because HE is for YOU!” |
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On October 11, euphoria on the right was dampened when the charismatic Haider died in an automobile accident, but this did not change the assessment of the results by the pro-establishment Wiener Kurier: The general elections were “the biggest move to the right in the history of the post-war republic.” “This is madness, what this means is simply appalling,” wailed Erwin Wurm, one of the country’s best known sculptors. The Daily Telegraph in Britain fretted that “from the outside, it looks at best distasteful; at worst, downright sinister.”
How did post-war Austria, a cozy, Alpine country better known for Mozart and skiing than for politics, come to stand for the worst in “right-wing extremism”? Is this a success that can be repeated elsewhere?
| It was a breakthrough unthinkable in any English-speaking country. |
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The story goes back to 1986, when the Freedom Party transformed itself by choosing the young, ambitious Joerg Haider as its leader. The party, earlier known as the League of Independents, had started as a grab bag of social liberals, free marketers, pan-German nationalists, national socialists, and almost anyone who felt unrepresented in Austria’s political system long dominated by the mildly liberal Social Democratic Party and the mildly conservative People’s Party. The Freedom Party was thus little more than a movement of eccentric protest against a system that represented a career in politics and “jobs for the boys” rather than deep political conviction.
Haider quickly gave a sharp focus to this collection of gadflies. He was intensely skeptical of the European Union and hostile to non-European immigration. He argued that the two major parties’ ineffective and lackluster politics allowed outsiders so much control over Austrian policy that the country might eventually disappear as a sovereign state. He downplayed pan-Germanism, and gave the party a more specifically Austrian tone.
No doubt most important, Haider was charismatic, likeable, and knew how to exploit the growing feeling among voters that the two major parties took them for granted. He spoke frankly about problems the establishment parties ignored, such as the cultural threat posed by immigration, and the menace of non-white crime.
Accusations of ‘Nazism’
Haider, originally from the southern province of Carinthia, concentrated his political efforts there, and was elected governor in 1989. It was in a debate in the provincial parliament two years later that he famously observed that Hitler had had a “proper employment policy,” unlike that of his political opponents, the Social Democrats. Haider also raised hackles when he said that “the Waffen-SS was part of the German military and because of that it deserves every honor and recognition.” In the land that was Hitler’s birthplace, mild observations of this kind invariably prompt accusations of “neo-Nazism.”
Haider was therefore a controversial, internationally-known figure by the time of the 1999 general elections, in which the Freedom Party won an astonishing 26.9 percent of the vote, catapulting it into second place behind the Social Democrats and just ahead of the more conservative People’s Party. Like all “far right” movements, the Freedom Party had been in political quarantine, so it was out of the question that it should govern with the Social Democrats, but to the horror of much of the “civilized” world, the People’s Party finally agreed to a coalition. “Extremists” were finally in power in a European country.
| Mr. Strache steered even more to the right than Haider, and leftists saw the party’s slogans as thinly-disguised racialism. |
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Although as leader of the larger party in the coalition Haider should, by rights, have been chancellor, he stayed out of government entirely, and let the leader of the People’s Party, Wolfgang Schuessel, take the top job. Despite this important concession to “respectability,” the European Union put Austria into the deep freeze, as politicians made themselves ridiculous trying to see who could most insult the Austrians. At a February 2000 meeting in Lisbon of European Union ministers—the first to be attended by a Freedom Party representative—so many speakers rose to condemn the Austrians that Portuguese Labor Minister Eduardo Rodrigues had to tell them to stick to the agenda. The usual welcoming ceremony was scrapped to spare the anti-Austrians the discomfort of having to appear in a social setting with “racists.” “We will not accept anyone who attacks the basic principles of European civilization,” sniffed Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres.
At a February 28 ministerial meeting in Portugal, André Flahaut, the Belgian delegate, skipped lunch to protest the presence of Austrian Defense Minister Herbert Scheibner. “I don’t eat with fascists,” he explained. Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel went so far as to say that Europe “does not need Austria,” and other Belgian ministers complained that the rules for expulsion from the EU were too vague. Prince Charles of England and pop musician Lou Reed canceled trips to Austria. Italian fashion designer Guglielmo Mariotto exhibited a skirt emblazoned with a picture of Joerg Haider, a swastika, and the word “No” written in red.
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| Haider (right) with coalition partner Wolfgang Schuessel. |
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Chancellor Schuessel calmly stood his ground, and gradually the Europeans stopped behaving so childishly. Mr. Schuessel later claimed he had decided to involve the Freedom Party in the responsibilities and “demystification” process of government before it became any stronger, and that tactic seemed to be working. Haider, who believed he could control the Freedom party members in the cabinet from his stronghold in Carinthia, found the job of puppet-master harder than he had expected. Government at the national level, especially coalition government, required compromise and poise. The old hands in the People’s Party outmaneuvered the Freedom Party, which found itself racked by internal squabbles. In 2002, two Freedom Party cabinet members resigned, and the coalition broke up.
Chancellor Schuessel seized this opportunity to blame the Freedom Party for sabotaging the government, and called a snap election. It was, as he well knew, perfect timing for himself and his party, and the worst possible moment for the divided Freedom Party. Mr. Schuessel presented the People’s Party as serious, prudent statesmen and the Freedom Party as querulous, destructive, and disunited. Support for the Freedom Party collapsed from 26 percent of the vote to just over 10 percent, and Austria went back to another version of the stale old People’s Party/Social Democrat combination that had run the country for decades. Many Austrians believed that the right-wing bogey had been laid to rest for good. The Greens were advancing steadily, and at nearly 10 percent of the vote seemed poised to overtake the Freedom Party.
In the aftermath of this setback, in what could have been a mortal blow to Austrian nationalism, Haider and some of his top lieutenants decided to start a new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria. The reasons for the breakup were complex, but personality conflicts between Haider and a former protégé, Heinz-Christian Strache, appear to have been one reason. Mr. Strache, who soon took over the Freedom Party, is a remarkable man in his own right (see sidebar, page 5), and now that Haider is gone, he is the key figure in the Austrian nationalist movement.
In the next elections, in 2006, many people expected Haider’s Alliance, like so many splinter parties, to drop out of sight. Likewise, without its high-profile leader, the Freedom Party might have gone into decline as well, but instead of trimming his sails as any mainstream politician would have done, Mr. Strache steered even further to the right. He took an uncompromising stand against immigration, and many leftists saw the party’s slogans as thinly-disguised racialism. One was “Vienna must not become Istanbul,” a variant of the Haider-era slogan of “Vienna must not become Chicago.” The Strache version was aimed straight at Vienna’s Turkish minority, and evoked the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Another slogan aimed at Muslims was “Pummerin, not muezzin.” Pummerin is the name of the main bell of St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna, and is a symbol of Christianity.
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| Pummerin. |
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Other provocative slogans were “At home, not Islam,” and “Jobs, not immigration.” The slogan “German, not ‘I don’t understand’,” was a clear poke at people who live in Austria but cannot speak German. Haider marveled at these outspoken campaign themes, noting that the press would have roasted him if he had been so blunt.
The results were nothing like the death knell for nationalism the Left was hoping for. Even without Haider, the Freedom Party went from 10 to 11 percent of the vote, and Haider’s Alliance squeaked into parliament with just over the 4 percent required for representation. The combined vote total of the two nationalist parties, at 15 percent, represented a 50 percent increase in support over the disaster of 2002.
One important aspect of the 2006 elections was the role of the Green Party. It had been the fondest desire of the Left that any frustration with establishment parties be funneled into support for the pro-immigrant, internationalist Greens. This tactic has been a great success in Germany, where distaste for the traditional parties has been molded into a dangerously internationalist, multi-racialist and pro-EU movement. However, Austria has nothing like Germany’s strong, left-wing subculture or its leftist media domination. At the same time, close neighbors in German-speaking Switzerland have been shifting towards the Swiss Peoples Party, which is a virtual twin of the Freedom Party. The Greens pulled into third place behind the Social Democrats and People’s Party, but were outnumbered by the combined Freedom/Alliance vote.
Even hostile commentators felt compelled to acknowledge the appeal of the new Freedom Party leader. Shortly before the election, the Swiss establishment paper, the Neue Zuricher Zeitung, called Mr. Strache “a figure of hope … for the underprivileged, globalization losers and every incorrigibly nostalgic national socialist … people who were ready to suffer persecution and become martyrs for the sake of their leader.” The Freedom Party had clearly switched one charismatic young leader for another.
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| Joerg Haider (right) and Heinz-Christian Strache. |
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After this partial recovery in 2006, what led to the breakthrough in 2008? Partly, it was a matter of timing. The reason for the sudden election was a disastrous attempt by both members of the ruling coalition, the People’s Party and the Social Democrats, to steal the nationalists’ clothes and appeal to ordinary Austrians. That the old coalition dinosaurs thought they had to imitate Haider and Mr. Strache shows how much the wind was blowing in the nationalist direction. The trouble was that the establishment parties adopted two different—and, to them, conflicting—planks from the nationalist platform, and the collision brought down the coalition.
To the horror of the Social Democrats, the People’s Party adopted the Haider/Strache plank of immigration control and a hard line on crime. To just as much horror on the part of the People’s Party, the Social Democrats adopted the plank of sovereignty, demanding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which would substantially increase the powers of the European Union. New powers for Brussels are usually approved by governments over the heads of the people, but Austrians, who are among the most anti-EU people in Europe, were demanding a direct say.
The dissolution of the coalition that resulted from these conflicting policies brought elections at a moment that was as fortunate for Austrian nationalists as the elections of 2002 had been disastrous. Neither of the governing parties had adopted enough of a nationalist position to divert nationalist votes, and their squabbling seems to have discouraged their own supporters from voting. Voter turnout in 2008 was at a historic low, which helped the more-committed nationalists.
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| Anti-Haider protest in 2003. |
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Both Haider and Mr. Strache were in excellent form for the campaign. They were charming but serious, dynamic, and committed to a neutral and independent non-Islamic—that is to say white—Austria. Both men emphasized that they represented hard-working taxpayers against vested interests and large organizations determined to smother Austria’s sovereignty by expanding the reach of the EU and committed to bleeding Austrians to pay for immigrants and parasites. It is my own impression that Austrian voters are particularly unforgiving of politicians who strike poses or curry favor, and both leaders benefited from their unquestioned sincerity. The two-party coalition was seen more clearly than ever as power-sharing by elites who ignore the people.
By 2008, Haider and Mr. Strache disliked each other intensely but kept their rivalry well within the bounds of courtesy. In a pre-election debate they refrained from invective and were courteous in the extreme. Haider gently noted that Mr. Strache was offering ideas that Haider formulated long ago and continued to present in his own party, while Mr. Strache accused Haider—in the nicest possible way—of betraying his followers by walking out on the Freedom Party. The high demeanor of both men unquestionably helped their parties, which concentrated on promoting policies rather than attacking each another.
During the campaign, the establishment parties, Social Democrats and People’s Party alike, stumbled over just how nationalist they dared to be while the Greens went full tilt the other way. They called for an unconditional right for all immigrant children and adolescents to stay in Austria, no matter what their legal status, and pushed for automatic citizenship for any child born to a legal immigrant.
The Greens also promoted Turkish membership in the European Union, and the nationalists benefitted from opposing this idea. Given their strong anti-Islamic history, Austrians do not want their prosperous republic swamped by Turks looking for higher wages. Austrians are well known for their love of order, respect for the law, exactness, diligence, reliability, politeness and cleanliness—not the first characteristics associated with Turks.
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| Austria for Austrians! |
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The Freedom Party’s campaign slogans were not quite as frank as in 2006, but were still clearly nationalist: “Our land for our children,” “Asylum fraud means a flight back home,” “Representatives of the people instead of EU traitors.” Many posters portrayed a smiling Mr. Strache, with the slogan, “They are against HIM because HE is for YOU.”
Haider’s party portrayed its leader as a hands-on guy, sleeves rolled up, ready to tackle problems. One of his posters had a line that could not have been clearer: “Austria for Austrians—for your sake.”
When the results were in, both establishment parties had lost about 8 percent of their 2006 support, and the Greens were down 1 percent. The Social Democrats were still the largest party at 29 percent, and their current leader, Werner Faymann, was charged with forming a government. Mr. Strache has made it clear that he will not join a coalition unless there will be referenda on the Treaty of Lisbon and letting Turkey into the European Union, so this probably rules out a coalition with either of the establishment parties.
If the People’s Party, which already took the Freedom Party into coalition in 2000, were willing to work with the nationalists, the combined vote of the three parties would be 54.22 percent—enough for a coalition majority—but Austria may not yet be ready for a government so heavily tilted towards the right. As of this writing, the People’s Party and the Social Democrats were trying to cobble together a government, but this amounts to trying to piece back together the coalition that collapsed just a few months ago—and with far less popular support. The two parties will no doubt try to put enough new faces into the cabinet to make the government appear to be something other than business as usual, but no one will be fooled. If the coalition busts up again, the nationalists are poised for an even greater victory.
What are the prospects for reuniting the Alliance with the Freedom Party now that Haider’s sudden death has removed the personality conflict between the two groups? On October 6, just five days before his car wreck, Haider spoke out against a merger, arguing that the two parties had developed in different directions and could win more votes separately than they could together. There is some justification for this view, as the Freedom Party seems to have attracted frustrated Social Democrats, while the Alliance poached from the People’s Party. Activists on both sides favor a merger—partly because there is no one in the Alliance with the stature to take Haider’s place—but nothing is settled.
Austria and the European Right
Although it is has been widely claimed that the 2008 election represented a “shift to the right,” I interpret the results slightly differently. European voters are increasingly turning to parties that represent not so much their nation as their tribe or locality. They want politicians who “speak their language,” in what is not so much a right-wing or racialist impulse as a tribal and regional one. The reason people talk about a “right-wing surge” is that common voter complaints embrace typical right-wing themes. However, right-wingers who stick to the language of centralized nationalism rather than regionalism do not get good results.
Britain’s BNP (British National Party), for example, has yet to achieve anything like the Freedom Party’s successes. Even in its best years, “British” nationalism never made an impression on the “Celtic fringe.” It is the liberal-left Scottish National Party that is set to become Scotland’s leading party.
In France we find similar failure. The National Front, another centrist and anti-regional party, which flies the flag of the fanatical Jacobins of the French revolution, has been unable to break out of a nostalgic nationalist ghetto. In Italy, by contrast, the Northern League, which calls for greater autonomy for the North and has no brief for Italian unity and little love for the Italian flag, is stronger than ever.
Others have noted that if Germany had been divided between North and South rather than East and West, there would have been no need for a wall, since the real divide is between the Catholic conservative South of Austria and Bavaria and protestant liberal Germany to the North. In Germany, nationalist parties have always been extremely centrist. This is not the only reason for their near-total failure, but it is surely not a coincidence that success in Germany—such as it is—is nearly always regional.
This was clear in local German elections held at the same time as the Austrian vote but that attracted little interest outside the country. For the first time in half a century, the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, failed to win more than 50 percent of the vote. The votes it lost did not go to other establishment parties but to a newly-formed association of what is known as free voters. Its demands echoed, albeit in more moderate form, the demands of the nationalists across the border in Austria, namely, stricter immigration control, more financial accountability, and skepticism about central government, whether in Berlin or Brussels. These local efforts are, I believe, the type likely to succeed in the years to come.
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| All that was left of Haider’s Volkswagon. |
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Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty earlier this year can be seen in the same light. Unlike every other European nation, whose legislatures approved the treaty without consulting the people, Ireland had a chance to speak for itself. In June of this year, to the consternation of almost the entire political class, the Irish rejected the treaty, 53 to 46. There is a good chance other electorates would have done the same thing—the Austrians almost certainly will if they get the chance—and the Irish vote was welcomed across Europe by nationalists who were delighted that at least one country had been able to foil the elites who flout the people’s wishes. Just one rejection by a member state is supposed to kill the treaty, but European bureaucrats have been busy extending deadlines, and are studying plans to browbeat the Irish into “correcting” their lamentable mistake.
The possibility that Austria could follow Ireland and reject the treaty is a nightmare for the European ruling class, which will stop at almost nothing to prevent Austrians from curbing the consolidation of European Union power or—even more horrible—from leaving the union altogether. The 2008 elections have actually put some of these unthinkable options on the table.
In an increasingly global world, more and more Europeans want to “come home” to a local identity. They want local politicians who truly represent them and speak their language. This, I believe, is what is behind the dramatic results in the Austrian elections.
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| A spontaneous memorial at the scene of the accident. |
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Reasons for success
There are many reasons for the 2008 surge for the nationalists, and here are a few that come to mind. First is the quality of the parties’ leaders. Both were remarkably adept in public and with the media, and seemed positively to enjoy themselves on television. They were constantly on the attack and never gave opponents a chance to pin them down. They are both so articulate and quick-witted that I have never seen them caught flat-footed. They never came across as cultish or eccentric, but as attractive, sensible, self-possessed men with the courage to say what other politicians may believe but dare not say. However much they disliked the “racists,” media producers knew Haider and Mr. Strache guaranteed big ratings.
They were also helped by circumstances. The Austrian media are somewhat fairer than in many countries—Germany, Britain, and the United States, for example—where the press invariably misrepresents the aims and intentions of anyone hostile to the system. At the same time, liberal smears against the entire nation of Austria since the time of Kurt Waldheim have backfired. In 2000, even people who had not voted for the Freedom Party were incensed at the high-handed way Europeans reacted to the coalition government. There is no better way of making apathetic individuals into racialists or patriots than to insult them on the grounds of race or nation.
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| Not the Austrians' favorite flag. |
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Another advantage for Austria is that it is a small country, homogeneous and compact. A politician does not have to appeal to so many contradictory interests, so any populist revolt, whether Left, Right, or Green, has more fertile soil. Moreover, Haider’s Alliance is deeply rooted in its home base of Carinthia and enjoys a quasi-tribal support that may have as much to do with Carinthian identity as with conservatism. Again, the revolt appears to be in the name of the tribe, not of nation or race.
Yet another advantage is that being Austrian is still largely a matter of ancient ethnicity. The non-white citizen population is low, so being a nationalist does not require a defense against the charge of “alienating large numbers of our fellow citizens,” as it does in France, Britain, or Germany. Austrians can define themselves as distinct from Germans or German-speaking Swiss, so nationalism does not immediately take on the racialist aroma that the mainstream parties and media find so frightening.
At the same time, all over Europe, support for large established parties is no longer assured. The same economic forces breaking up community identity are also destroying the social cohesion upon which the traditional parties rely. They can no longer take their constituencies for granted because voters are tired of the old way of doing business. (It is my impression that in America, political options are sharply limited by the Democrat/Republican duopoly and this creates similar frustrations. If America had a parliamentary system, there would certainly be Green, Libertarian, and nationalist congressmen, who would relieve the tedium of a profoundly conformist legislature.)
Another factor in the nationalists’ favor is that after years of campaigning, Haider and Mr. Strache had reached a threshold of power and prestige that once crossed makes progress much easier. Many people now respect the Freedom Party simply because it has succeeded. Authority behaves differently towards men with power than it does towards men on the fringe, and success brings more success.
Both the Freedom Party and the Alliance have robustly criticized other parties when they disagree, but have cooperated on specific issues whenever that was possible. They have thus avoided a “them against us” ghetto mentality and have managed not to be seen as complete outsiders.
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| The Austrian town of Hallstatt: a good place for Turks? |
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The Freedom Party’s strong support also makes it impossible for leftist enemies to sabotage its meetings by, for example, threatening hotels or meeting halls that host its gatherings. In contrast to Britain or Germany, the police are likely to be neutral if not sympathetic, and will not tolerate organized wrecking groups. Thus, Austrian nationalists can say in complete security and with relative respectability, exactly the same things that would get British or German nationalists tossed out of a meeting hall.
Economic uncertainty also played a role. When times are tough, people are less inclined to be generous to outsiders, especially if outsiders speak a foreign language and are thought to take more than they give.
Finally, Austrians are increasingly jealous of their sovereignty and are determined to preserve their official neutrality. They are not a member of NATO, and are deeply suspicious of its expansion into activities that go beyond pure defense. Austrians were also inspired by Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, and many asked themselves, “If Ireland can vote, why can’t Austria?”
Nationalists must now buckle down to the hard work of government. Whether the two parties reunite, they must be careful to avoid the backbiting that brought them low in the elections of 2002. With patience, hard work, and a little luck, Austria could once more have “right-wing extremists” in government, and maybe even in the chancellor’s office. Let us look forward to the day when Austria again becomes both anathema to liberals and an inspiration to all who love the West.Heinz-Christian Strache’s training was as a dental technician, but he became active in local Vienna politics when he was 22. Now, at age 39, he manages to combine a relatively radical political stance with a modern, almost overly polished style, and has been a more difficult target than Haider for those who would paint all Austrian nationalists as “Nazis.”
When a photo appeared of him in what looked like combat gear and a weapon, he explained it was taken of him playing paint ball when he was 18. Other pictures, said to show him in a bar doing a Nazi salute, he dismissed by saying he was simply ordering three beers.
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Long a loyal Haider supporter, he rose rapidly, served on the Vienna City Council, and in 2004 became head of the Freedom Party in Vienna. That same year, he became parliamentary leader of the Freedom Party, and proposed a bill to hold a referendum on whether Turkey should join the European Union. This was a direct challenge, not only to liberals but also to the pro-Western Right in Europe and the United States, which favors letting in Turkey as a bulwark against radical Islam.
Like Haider, Mr. Strache is very much a traditionalist. In 2004, a man accused him of making an inappropriately political speech at what should have been a social gathering at a student club. Mr. Strache challenged the man to a duel with blunt sabers, and the challenge was accepted. Student club dueling—with enough protective gear to avoid death or maiming—has a long tradition in Germany and Austria, and a few saber scars on the face were once the mark of a sportsman. “They won’t be trying to kill each other but they certainly won’t be just throwing tea bags at each other either,” explained a mutual acquaintance of the two fighters. By all accounts Mr. Strache took more knocks than his opponent, but this sort of thing charms a country that is keen on fitness and athletics. Haider’s bungee jumping and marathon running were equally popular.
One of the reasons Haider left the Freedom Party is said to be that Mr. Strache was going to challenge a Haider loyalist as the party’s national leader. With Haider gone, Mr. Strache was voted in as leader in April 2005. With his one-time mentor and rival now gone, much depends on how Mr. Strache manages his successes. A great deal is riding on the shoulders of this young Austrian patriot.
Rüdiger Halder is the pen-name of a distinguished European journalist.