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United States. True, the Haider Party in Austria suffered a disaster and
Chevenement in France, who tried to combine left-wing socialism and
pronounced nationalism, has not fared too well. Mollemann in Ger–
many, who tried to make Israel a major issue in the recent German elec–
tions, did fatal damage to himself and his party. But the whole political
spectrum has moved towards patriotism/nationalism.
It
takes moderate
as well as extreme forms. Martin Walser, the well-known German writer
who joined the German Communist Party in the 1970s, has now
become the most eloquent spokesman of the intellectual Right; his
recent demand to stop talking about Auschwitz was widely welcomed.
Walser is not alone; one could name in this context Botho Strauss and a
dozen others. Gunter Grass, whose fear of a resurgence of German
nationalism once went so far as to oppose German reunification, writes
in his last novel about the horrible suffering of German civilians during
the last year of the war. Other best-selling books deal with the same
theme; the authors are usually Maoists or New Leftists of 1968 vintage.
There is, of course, nothing wrong
in
dealing with the suffering of mil–
lions of Germans who had nothing to do with Hitler and Nazism. But
quite often it goes a little further and the question is raised whether
Churchill and Roosevelt were not war criminals.
But there are also the more rabid neo-Nazi ideologues like Horst
Mahler, once a leading terrorist among the Baader Meinhof gang, who
after years in prison has become a proponent of views that would have
fitted without difficulty into doctrinal parameters of the Third Reich.
He wants to liquidate the United States and Israel and claims that the
New Left movement of 1968, while basically anti-capitalist, was not
Marxist in inspiration but anti-Semitic and anti-American.
It
is, at best,
a gross exaggeration, but Mahler is by no means an isolated figure. He
has considerable support expressed in a somewhat more moderate way.
All over Europe militants of the extreme Right try to establish a com–
mon front with the far Left under the umbrella of antiglobalism and
anti-Americanism. They call it "third way" (or
terza posizione
or
troisieme voie)
and claim, not without some justice, that their opposi–
tion against globalism antedates that of the Left. For good measure they
want to bring Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden into this alliance,
even though they do not really qualify as pure Aryans; but then the
Japanese during World War II, despite their racial origin, became
acceptable allies for Hitler.
Some of the European patriotic wave is only natural and was to be
expected. There is no reason why Germans should not mourn the civil–
ian victims of the Allied bombings during the Second World War. The
