MP3: Side 1 | Side 2

Rav­aged by the social depri­va­tion wrought by the Great Depres­sion, many des­per­ate peo­ple embraced fas­cism as a solu­tion to their prob­lems, a phe­nom­e­non which con­tributed greatly to the suc­cess of Hitler, Mus­solini and lesser-known fas­cist lead­ers and their par­ties. With the global econ­omy severely ail­ing, fas­cism is again prof­it­ing from the social dis­lo­ca­tion stem­ming from the finan­cial meltdown.

After not­ing that the finan­cial cri­sis appears to be dri­ving a surge toward the far right in Europe, the broad­cast notes the march of fas­cism on that con­ti­nent. Part of the orig­i­nal Third Reich, Aus­tria is home to a dra­matic fas­cist renais­sance. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is the role played by Waf­fen SS vet­eran Her­bert Schweiger, pic­tured at right. Schweiger is an impor­tant oper­a­tional link between the Hitler period and the present.

Schweiger is one of the founders of the Free­dom Party (FPO), until recently headed by the late Jorg Haider, pic­tured at left. Con­ceived as a vehi­cle for the rein­tro­duc­tion of Third Reich vet­er­ans into Aus­trian polit­i­cal life, the FPO has been dra­mat­i­cally gain­ing strength. Schweiger is in reg­u­lar con­tact with con­tem­po­rary Nazi ele­ments in Ger­many and Austria.

Also fuel­ing the Aus­trian fas­cist renais­sance are the Burschen­schaften, ultra-nationalist duel­ing soci­eties that work with the overtly Nazi and fas­cist polit­i­cal par­ties in Aus­tria. (They are pic­tured at right.) A notable vet­eran of the Burschen­schaften was SS colonel, Third Reich com­mando chief, Hitler favorite, ODESSA leader and CIA agent Otto (”Scar­face”) Sko­rzeny. Skorzeny’s received his name­sake scar in one of their duels, in which mem­bers fre­quently slash each other’s faces.

In Italy, the heirs to Mus­solini have moved alto­gether into the main­stream, once again. Gian­franco Fini’s National Alliance, the suc­ces­sor to the fas­cist party of Ben­ito Mus­solini, has been part of coali­tion government’s with Sil­vio Berlus­coni on two occa­sions. (Berlus­coni him­self is a for­mer mem­ber of the Licio Gelli’s P-2 Lodge, which com­prised a de-facto crypto-fascist gov­ern­ment that gov­erned Italy for decades. Fini is pic­tured left, Berlus­coni right.)

Against the back­ground of the ascent of Ital­ian fas­cism into an insti­tu­tion­al­ized and main­stream ele­ment, it is as impor­tant as it is fright­en­ing to note the re-appearance of para­mil­i­tary fascisti. A group called the Ital­ian National Guard revealed uni­forms rem­i­nis­cent of those from pre-World War II fas­cist mili­tias and also uses sym­bols linked with fas­cism, such as a black insignia and the Impe­r­ial eagle.

Turn­ing to the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many, we see more exploita­tion of the global eco­nomic col­lapse by Euro­pean neo-fascists, the broad­cast high­lights the Ger­man neo-Nazi NPD’s co-opting of the tra­di­tional May­day work­ers holiday.

Con­clud­ing with the man­i­fes­ta­tion of Third Reich for­eign pol­icy by the cur­rent Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many, the pro­gram sets forth the con­tin­ued sup­port by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment for the SS-linked ver­triebene groups. The ver­triebene groups aim to restore the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic rights of the Ger­man minori­ties in East­ern Europe–groups whose polit­i­cal agit­prop aided Hitler and were a major excuse for Nazi aggres­sion. Among the groups sup­ported by the ver­triebene groups (and the Ger­man gov­ern­ment) are the Sude­ten Ger­mans and the Witiko League (Witikobund).

Pro­gram High­lights Include: More infor­ma­tion about the Nazi and anti-Semitic sup­port given to the ascen­sion of Pope Bene­dict XVI (pic­tured at right as a young Ger­man priest); the surge in pop­u­lar­ity of Nazism among Euro­pean youth; review of the Allies’ re insti­tu­tion of fas­cist ele­ments in Ger­many and Italy after the war; review of the his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between fas­cism and the Vat­i­can; review of Opus Dei, a pow­er­ful fas­cist order influ­enc­ing the Vat­i­can; deceased Free­dom Party leader Jorg Haider’s friend­ship with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

1. The pro­gram begins by not­ing that the fail­ing global econ­omy is dri­ving a right wing and fas­cist surge in Euro­pean pol­i­tics. With the les­son of the Great Depres­sion and the impe­tus that gave to des­per­ate cit­i­zens to embrace fas­cist extrem­ism, it should not be sur­pris­ing to see this development.

Among its many other sins, the green­back is a press hog. The world’s reserve cur­rency, loved and loathed as it is, sim­ply gets most of the ink these days. In that light many a U.S.-based com­men­ta­tor, not least your cyn­i­cal Taipan Daily scribes, have repeat­edly waxed elo­quent on the long-run death of the dollar.

But in our zeal we some­times for­get that, in order for the dol­lar to die, it has to die rel­a­tive to other fiat cur­rency offer­ings... and some of those oth­ers are look­ing pretty sick too. (The main excep­tion, of course, being gold — the one and only “state­less cur­rency” not sub­ject to the whims of a print­ing press. As Grant’s Inter­est Rate Observer quips, “Show us a mon­e­tary asset whose value is not sub­ject to gov­ern­men­tal debase­ment and we will show you a Krugerrand.”)

In short, the dol­lar is not the only bas­ket case out there. Take the euro, for exam­ple. Now there’s a trou­bled cur­rency if ever one existed. As pollyanna stock mar­ket bulls are find­ing out the hard way, ris­ing inter­est rates (via falling bond prices) can have ugly con­se­quences. The same is true of a ris­ing cur­rency when cou­pled with a weak eco­nomic backdrop.

In this par­tic­u­lar case, the stronger the euro gets, the more it cuts into Euro­pean export sales. At a time when most all of Europe is sick, the eco­nomic pain of a too-strong cur­rency becomes intense above a cer­tain thresh­old. On top of that, var­i­ous bits of Europe are in the process of blow­ing up... or falling apart... or both. There is deep trou­ble brew­ing in mul­ti­ple cor­ners of the con­ti­nent. Let’s take a quick look on a country-by-country basis to see why Europe is being held together with duct tape.

We’ll start with Britain — not an adopter of the euro, but a mem­ber of the EU (Euro­pean Union) nonetheless.

Britain has been hurled into polit­i­cal chaos, thanks to an unholy combo of deep finan­cial cri­sis, explo­sive Labour Party scan­dals, and the hap­less lame-duck sta­tus of embat­tled Prime Min­is­ter Gor­don Brown. Cab­i­net Min­is­ters are resign­ing left and right in protest as Brown’s pop­u­lar­ity plum­mets, call­ing for the PM to step down. Elec­tion results tal­lied this week showed the Labour Party (Brown’s party) putting in its worst show­ing since 1918.

Philip Stevens, chief polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor for the Finan­cial Times, sees an omi­nous chain of events now set in motion. “Every­one thought the [elec­tion] results would be bad,” Stephens reports. “But these [results] are calami­tous... the Prime Min­is­ter was pre­pared, if you like, for very bad results. He’s now got to grap­ple with absolutely ter­ri­ble results.”

If the Brown gov­ern­ment fails, Britain will be left rud­der­less in the midst of the worst fis­cal storm in decades. In a worst-case sce­nario where bad events lead to worse deci­sions, opines Stephens, the domino chain could even lead to a British exit from the EU.

This out­break of chaos is awful and unset­tling for the British econ­omy — and by exten­sion awful and unset­tling for Europe. As of this writ­ing, it is not yet clear whether Prime Min­is­ter Brown can sur­vive a polit­i­cal coup... or even whether he would be bet­ter off resign­ing, Dick Nixon style, in the inter­est of spar­ing greater turmoil.

Else­where in Europe, Latvia, a tiny coun­try of 2.2 mil­lion, threat­ens to unleash havoc on the entire continent.

Latvia’s cur­rency, appro­pri­ately known as the lat, is offi­cially pegged to the euro. Latvia set up the cur­rency peg to speed up offi­cial entry into the EU. But now the fis­cal dis­ci­pline of main­tain­ing the peg is crush­ing the Lat­vian economy.

At one time, Latvia was an East­ern Euro­pean tiger, grow­ing by leaps and bounds. But, like many other coun­tries, Latvia found itself badly caught out by the finan­cial cri­sis. Just when credit lines were needed the most to shore up a cra­ter­ing home front, Latvia found it sud­denly impos­si­ble to bor­row. Credit was des­per­ately needed. An attempt to issue $100 mil­lion worth of lat-denominated bonds resulted in no takers.

Nor­mally, a small coun­try with an implod­ing econ­omy would sim­ply devalue the cur­rency to make exports more com­pet­i­tive. But if Latvia deval­ues now, all kinds of ugly fall­out will follow.

For one, the Swedish and Aus­trian banks that lent heav­ily to Latvia would take huge, desta­bi­liz­ing losses. Worse, other East­ern Euro­pean neigh­bors, like Lithua­nia and Esto­nia (and Bul­garia far­ther south), would see their own cur­rency pegs threatened.

And even worse still, a whole­sale lat deval­u­a­tion would crush many Lat­vian busi­nesses (due to loads of for­eign currency-denominated debt on the books) and kill Latvia’s shot at even­tual EU acceptance.

So, with the help of emer­gency financ­ing from the IMF and Euro­pean Union, Latvia has vowed to keep on keep­ing on. The cur­rency peg will not go unde­fended. But in order to main­tain that peg in the face of eco­nomic hard­ship, Latvia will need to cut wages and spend­ing to the bone. This, too, is dire med­i­cine for a small coun­try strug­gling under the weight of great debt.

Some believe Latvia will be forced to devalue, in spite of all the pain it would cause for both the tiny coun­try itself and many sur­round­ing neigh­bors. The pres­sure might just prove too great, as the pres­sure was too great in 1992 when Britain was forced to devalue the pound and drop out of the Euro­pean Exchange Rate Mech­a­nism (ERM).

In a way, Latvia is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. Some argue that the peg must be defended at all costs, lest the whole of East­ern Europe be lost. If Lithua­nia and Esto­nia are sucked into a cur­rency pain vor­tex, the EU could lose its polit­i­cal hold on the region — and Rus­sia could rush in to fill the torment-filled vacuum.

It would be so much eas­ier (and sim­pler) if the value of the euro were to fall from cur­rent high lev­els. This would ease Latvia’s pain, as well as a num­ber of other strug­gling coun­tries. But there is a huge and intractable obsta­cle there — Germany.

As the global finan­cial cri­sis has unfolded, Angela Merkel, the Chan­cel­lor of Ger­many, has been looked on with increas­ing amounts of admi­ra­tion and hor­ror, depend­ing on the observer’s van­tage point.

Those who admire Merkel do so because Ger­many has appeared to com­pletely go its own way in the midst of tur­moil. As other coun­tries have stim­u­lated and relaxed and eased to fight the fires of slow­down, Ger­many has said “Nein!” to any­thing that smacks of lax fis­cal policy.

In a speech last week, Chan­cel­lor Merkel even went out of her way to slam the Fed­eral Reserve and the Bank of Eng­land, stat­ing plainly that “I view with great skep­ti­cism the pow­ers of the Fed... and also how, within Europe, the Bank of Eng­land has carved out its own line.” Within the sub­tle con­text of diplo­macy and state­craft, those are amaz­ingly blunt words. Merkel has all but called the stim­u­la­tors a bunch of out-of-control fools.

Many admire Germany’s fis­cal back­bone. But oth­ers are hor­ri­fied, and ter­ri­fied, by Germany’s lack of will­ing­ness to show any type of bend or flex in mon­e­tary policy.

Remem­ber the Latvia prob­lem? Many other rapidly implod­ing Euro­pean economies, like those of Ire­land and Spain, are also strug­gling with the weight of a too-strong euro hurt­ing export prospects. But in its zeal for fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity, Ger­many will prob­a­bly remain stead­fast in its oppo­si­tion to any loos­en­ing of the purse strings.

The stance is cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal. Hav­ing lived through the hor­ror of hyper­in­fla­tion in the Weimar Repub­lic in the 1920s, Ger­many emerged from its bap­tism by fire as a zeal­ous hard-money advo­cate. Rigid fis­cal dis­ci­pline has been a polit­i­cal ral­ly­ing cry in Ger­many ever since. So when Chan­cel­lor Merkel takes an espe­cially hard line against the easy-money infla­tion­ists, she is doing so with an eye for pub­lic approval rat­ings at home.

The trou­ble is, even Ger­many can barely afford its own right­eous­ness. The Ger­man econ­omy still depends heav­ily on exports... and so an overly strong euro hurts Deutsch­land too.

Last but not least, a sur­pris­ing new trend has arisen from the EU-wide elec­tions held in the past few days.

“Con­ser­v­a­tives raced toward vic­tory in some of Europe’s largest economies Sun­day,” the Asso­ci­ated Press reports, “as ini­tial results and exit polls showed vot­ers pun­ish­ing left-leaning par­ties in Euro­pean par­lia­ment elec­tions in France, Ger­many and elsewhere.”

The rise includes not just the right, but the far right. In Britain, the British National Party — an openly racist party that only admits whites — gained a seat for the first time. In var­i­ous other coun­tries, openly nation­al­ist par­ties gained fresh power either for the first time also, or for the first time in quite a long while.

“It is not clear why a chunk of the blue-collar work­ing base has swung almost overnight from Left to Right,” says Ambrose Pritchard of the U.K. Tele­graph. “But clearly we are see­ing the delayed det­o­na­tion of two polit­i­cal time-bombs: ris­ing unem­ploy­ment and the growth of immi­grant enclaves that resist assimilation.”

There are still other prob­lems in Europe we haven’t really touched on, like the Span­ish real estate mar­kets headed for freefall, the dire state of the Irish econ­omy (joke du jour on the Emer­ald Isle: What’s the dif­fer­ence between Ire­land and Ice­land? The let­ter ‘C’) and the toxic lever­age still lurk­ing in Euro­pean banks.

Put all this together, and what you get is a truly poi­so­nous stew. Half of Europe is still com­mit­ted to fis­cal stim­u­lus and eco­nomic coor­di­na­tion... while the other half has swung inward and hard right, towards a nation­al­ist and iso­la­tion­ist stance, at a time when exports are weak and the whole con­ti­nent is in trouble.

If Pritchard is right in his gloomy assess­ments, we could be wit­ness­ing a sce­nario where steely fis­cal dis­ci­pline, though a virtue early on, becomes a ter­ri­ble vice this late in the game. “The irony is that those fret­ting loud­est about infla­tion may them­selves tip us into out­right defla­tion, with all the per­ils of a debt com­pound trap,” Pritchard opines. “It is Angela Merkel who plays with fire.”

By now the trad­ing take­away should be fairly obvi­ous. The dol­lar is not the only paper cur­rency with crash and burn poten­tial. The euro could make for one hell of a great short when the time is right. Whether that time comes sooner or later depends on how events unfold... and how quickly the threat of defla­tion­ary vice grip leads to infla­tion­ary panic (as ulti­mately occurs in all unsound paper regimes, when the des­per­ate hope of the print­ing press is embraced as last resort). Macro Trader will be watch­ing the charts with keen interest.

“Euro­pean Union Being Held Together with Duct Tape” by Justice_Litle; www.marketoracle.co.uk; 6/10/2009.

2a. Next, the pro­gram exam­ines the reemer­gence of fas­cism in Aus­tria. Home­land of Adolph Hitler, the “East­ern Reich” is revert­ing to old ways. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance here is the degree of con­ti­nu­ity between the fas­cism of the Hitler period and the con­tem­po­rary Aus­trian Nazi milieu. A founder of the Free­dom Party, headed until recently by the late Jurg Haider, Waf­fen SS vet­eran Her­bert Schweiger is very active in the Nazi scene. Con­ceived as a vehi­cle for the rein­tro­duc­tion of Third Reich vet­er­ans into Aus­trian polit­i­cal life, the FPO has been dra­mat­i­cally gain­ing strength. Schweiger is in reg­u­lar con­tact with con­tem­po­rary Nazi ele­ments in Ger­many and Austria.

Schweiger was also one of the prime movers in the South Tyrol inde­pen­dence move­ment, which embraced ter­ror­ism in the early 1960’s in an attempt to annex that part of North­ern Italy (claimed by Aus­tria). The South Tyrolean inde­pen­dence move­ment has col­lab­o­rated with the Tibetan inde­pen­dence move­ment, both seen as exam­ples of what the Ger­mans called “volksgruppenrechte”–the right of native peo­ples. The Nazi ori­gins of the South Tyrolean inde­pen­dence move­ment and its col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Tibetans is dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 615 and 616. The South Tyrolean cadre is closely asso­ci­ated with the ver­triebene groups, dis­cussed below.

Another note­wor­thy insti­tu­tion is the milieu of the Burschen­schaften, ultra-nationalist duel­ing soci­eties that work with the overtly Nazi and fas­cist polit­i­cal par­ties in Aus­tria. A notable vet­eran of the Burschen­schaften was SS colonel, Third Reich com­mando chief, Hitler favorite, ODESSA leader and CIA agent Otto (“Scar­face”) Sko­rzeny. Skorzeny’s received his name­sake scar in one of their duels, in which mem­bers fre­quently slash each other’s faces.

Beneath a leaden sky the solemn, black-clad crowd moves slowly towards a mod­est grey head­stone. At one end
of the grave, a flame casts light on the black let­ter­ing that is engraved on the mar­ble. At the other end, an elderly sol­dier bends down to place flow­ers before stand­ing to salute.

From all over Aus­tria, peo­ple are here to pay their respects to their fallen hero. But the solem­nity of the occa­sion is cut with ten­sion. Beyond the crowd of about 300, armed police are in atten­dance. They keep a respect­ful dis­tance but the rasp­ing bark of Alsa­tians hid­den in vans pro­vides an eerie sound­track as the crowd con­gre­gates in mist and light rain.

We’ve been warned that despite a heavy police pres­ence jour­nal­ists have often been attacked at these meet­ings. If trou­ble does come then the mob look ready to fight. There are bull-necked stew­ards and young men who swag­ger aggressively.

This is a neo-Nazi gath­er­ing and in the crowd are some of Austria’s most hard-faced fas­cists. Among them is Got­tfried Kus­sel, a noto­ri­ous thug who was the show­man of Austria’s far-right move­ment in the Eight­ies and Nineties until he was impris­oned for eight years for pro­mot­ing Nazi ideology.

Today he cuts a Don Cor­leone fig­ure as he stands defi­antly at the grave­side. His neo-Nazi acolytes make sure no one comes near him and our pho­tog­ra­pher is uncer­e­mo­ni­ously barged out of his way.

Ominous-looking men with scars across their faces whis­per to each other and shake hands. These are mem­bers of Austria’s Burschen­schaften, an arcane, secre­tive organ­i­sa­tion best known for its fas­ci­na­tion with fenc­ing, an ini­ti­a­tion cer­e­mony that includes a duel in which the oppo­nents cut each other’s faces, and for its strong links to the far right.

Incred­i­bly, stand­ing shoul­der to shoul­der with these hard-line Nazi sym­pa­this­ers are well known Aus­trian politi­cians. At the grave­side, a speech is made by Lutz Weinzinger, a lead­ing mem­ber of Austria’s Free­dom Party (FPO), who pays trib­ute to the fallen.

This is a gath­er­ing in mem­ory of an Austrian-born Nazi fighter pilot, who dur­ing WWII shot down 258 planes, 255 of them Russ­ian. Such was Major Wal­ter Nowotny’s stand­ing at the time of his death in 1944 that the Nazi Party awarded him a grave of hon­our in Vienna’s largest ceme­tery, close to the musi­cal leg­ends Mozart, Brahms and Strauss.

But in 2005 that hon­our was revoked and his body moved to lie in an area of pub­lic graves. The deci­sion infu­ri­ated the far right and made their annual pil­grim­age an even greater event.

Today, the anniver­sary of Nowotny’s death, also coin­cides with Kristall­nacht, the ‘night of bro­ken glass’ in 1938 when 92 peo­ple were mur­dered and thou­sands attacked across Ger­many as stormtroop­ers set upon Jews in an out­pour­ing of Nazi violence.

Some 70 years on from that infa­mous pogrom, the world faces a sim­i­lar finan­cial cri­sis to the one that pre­cip­i­tated the rise of Hitler and, in chill­ing echoes of Thir­ties Europe, sup­port for far-right groups is explod­ing. Hitler’s birth­place has become the focus for neo-Nazis across the world.

And so I have come to Aus­tria to inves­ti­gate how Fas­cism and extrem­ism are mov­ing, unchecked, into the fore­front of its society.

Last Sep­tem­ber, Austria’s far right gained mas­sive polit­i­cal influ­ence in an elec­tion that saw the FPO along with another far right party – Alliance For The Future (BZO) – gain 29 per cent of the vote, the same share as Austria’s main party, the Social Democ­rats. The elec­tion stirred up ter­ri­fy­ing mem­o­ries of the rise of the Nazi Party in the Thirties.

And just as the Nazis gained power on the back of extreme nation­al­ism and vir­u­lent anti-Semitism, the recent unprece­dented gains in Aus­tria were made on a plat­form of fear about immi­gra­tion and the per­ceived threat of Islam. FPO leader Heinz Chris­t­ian Stra­che, for exam­ple, described women in Islamic dress as ‘female ninjas’.

Embold­ened by the new power in par­lia­ment, neo-Nazi thugs have des­e­crated Mus­lim graves. Recently, in Hitler’s home town of Brau­nau, a swastika flag was pub­licly unveiled.

The FPO wants to legalise Nazi sym­bols, while its fire­brand leader has been accused of hav­ing links to far right extremists.

After the FPO’s elec­tion vic­tory, Nick Grif­fin, leader of the British Nation­al­ist Party (BNP), sent a per­sonal mes­sage to Strache.

‘We in Britain are impressed to see that you have been able to com­bine prin­ci­pled nation­al­ism with elec­toral suc­cess. We are sure that this gives you a good spring­board for the Euro­pean elec­tions and we hope very much that we will be able to join you in a suc­cess­ful nation­al­ist block in Brus­sels next year.’

The mes­sage fol­lowed on from a secret meet­ing last May in which a high-ranking FPO politi­cian paid a visit to Lon­don for a meet­ing with Griffin.

The rela­tion­ship between the FPO and the BNP becomes more wor­ry­ing as I learn of the strong links between Austria’s polit­i­cal party and hard-line Nazis.

Her­bert Schweiger makes no attempt to hide his Nazi views. At his home in the Aus­trian moun­tains, the for­mer SS offi­cer gazes out of a win­dow to a view of a misty alpine val­ley. Described to me as the ‘Pup­pet Mas­ter’ of the far right, Schweiger, 85, is a leg­endary fig­ure for neo-Nazis across the world.

‘Our time is com­ing again and soon we will have another leader like Hitler,’ he says.

Still remark­ably sharp-minded, Schweiger was a lieu­tenant in the infa­mous Waf­fen SS Panzer Divi­sion Leib­stan­darte Adolf Hitler, an elite unit orig­i­nally formed before WWII to act as the Führer’s per­sonal bodyguards.

This is his first inter­view for four years and the first he has ever given to a jour­nal­ist from out­side Aus­tria. It hap­pens a few weeks before he is due to appear in court charged with pro­mot­ing neo-Nazi ideology.

It will be the fifth time he has stood trial for break­ing a law, the Ver­bots­ge­setz, enacted in 1947 to halt the spread of fas­cist ide­ol­ogy. He has been found guilty twice and acquit­ted twice. It quickly becomes appar­ent that lit­tle has changed in Schweiger’s mind­set since his Third Reich days.

‘The Jew on Wall Street is respon­si­ble for the world’s cur­rent eco­nomic cri­sis. It is the same now as in 1929 when 90 per cent of money was in the hands of the Jew. Hitler had the right solu­tions then,’ he says, invok­ing the lan­guage of Goebbels.

The room is filled with memen­tos from his past and indi­ca­tors of his sick­en­ing beliefs. His book­shelf is a library of loathing. I spot a book by con­tro­ver­sial British Holo­caust denier David Irv­ing and one on the ‘myth of Auschwitz’. On a shelf hangs a pen­nant from the SS Death’s Head unit that ran Hitler’s con­cen­tra­tion camps. Such mem­o­ra­bilia is banned in Aus­tria but Schweiger defi­antly dis­plays his Nazi possessions.

If Schweiger was an old Nazi liv­ing out his final days in this remote spot, it might be pos­si­ble to shrug him off as a now harm­less man liv­ing in his past. But Schweiger has no inten­tion of keep­ing quiet.

‘My job is to edu­cate the fun­da­men­tals of Nazism. I travel reg­u­larly in Aus­tria and Ger­many speak­ing to young mem­bers of our dif­fer­ent groups,’ he says.

Schweiger’s lec­tures are full of hate and prej­u­dice. He refers to Jews as ‘intel­lec­tual nomads’ and says poor Africans should be allowed to starve.

‘The black man only thinks in the present and when his belly is full he does not think of the future,’ he says. ‘They repro­duce en masse even when they have no food, so sup­port­ing Africans is sui­cide for the white race.

‘It is not nation against nation now but race against race. It is a ques­tion of sur­vival that Europe unites against the rise of Asia. There is an unstop­pable war between the white and yel­low races. In Eng­land and Scot­land there is very strong racial potential.

‘Of course I am a racist, but I am a sci­en­tific racist,’ he adds, as if this is a justification.

Schweiger’s rai­son d’être is pol­i­tics. He was a found­ing mem­ber of three polit­i­cal par­ties in Aus­tria – the VDU, the banned NDP and the FPO. He has given his sup­port to the cur­rent leader of the FPO.

‘Stra­che is doing the right thing by fight­ing the for­eigner,’ says Schweiger.

He is now in close con­tact with the Kam­er­ad­schaften, under­ground cells of hard­core neo-Nazis across Aus­tria and Ger­many who, over the past three years, have started to infil­trate polit­i­cal par­ties such as the FPO.

His belief that the bul­let and the bal­lot box go hand in hand goes back to 1961, when he helped to train a ter­ror­ist move­ment fight­ing for the reuni­fi­ca­tion of Aus­tria and South Tyrol.

‘I was an explo­sives expert in the SS so I trained Burschen­schaften how to make bombs. We used the hotel my wife and I owned as a train­ing camp,’ he says. The hotel he refers to is 50 yards from his home.

Thirty peo­ple in Italy were mur­dered dur­ing the cam­paign. One of the men con­victed for the atroc­i­ties, Nor­bert Burger, later formed the now-banned neo-Nazi NDP party with Schweiger.

Schweiger’s involve­ment earned him his first spell in cus­tody in 1962 but he was acquitted.

At Vienna’s Doc­u­men­ta­tion Cen­tre of Aus­trian Resis­tance (DOW), I speak to Herib­ert Schiedel, who mon­i­tors neo-Nazi activ­ity. He tells me that the glue between peo­ple like Schweiger and the politi­cians are the Burschen­schaften fra­ter­ni­ties. Schiedel draws two cir­cles and explains.

‘In the cir­cle on the left you have legal par­ties such as the FPO. In the cir­cle on the right you have ille­gal groups. Two dis­tinct group­ings who pre­tend they are separate.’

He draws another cir­cle link­ing the two together. ‘This cir­cle links the legal and ille­gal. This sig­ni­fies the Burschen­schaften. They have long been asso­ci­ated with Fas­cism and have a his­tory of ter­ror­ism. Adolf Eich­mann, Rudolf Hess and Hein­rich Himm­ler were Burschen­schaften – as are promi­nent mem­bers of the FPO in parliament.’

There are Burschen­schaften groups all over Aus­tria and 18 in the cap­i­tal alone. Their activ­i­ties range from quaint to disturbing.

At the Uni­ver­sity of Vienna, mem­bers of the Burschen­schaften come to pay homage to a statue called the Siegfried­skopf (the Head of Siegfried, a war­rior from Ger­man mythol­ogy). Their rit­ual takes place every Wednes­day.
The uni­ver­sity author­i­ties wanted to remove the statue, but the gov­ern­ment insisted it should stay as it is a pro­tected mon­u­ment. Instead, the piece was relo­cated to the courtyard.

Today, the Burschen­schaften have been pre­vented from enter­ing the court­yard and at the main entrance police stand guard as they hand out leaflets. Dressed in tra­di­tional uni­forms, the Burschen­schaften resem­ble colour­ful bands­men and are a far cry from the shaven-headed thugs nor­mally asso­ci­ated with Fascism.

But the groups have a 200-year-old his­tory steeped in patri­o­tism and loy­alty to a Ger­man state. In 2005, Olympia, one of the most extreme Burschen­schaften fra­ter­ni­ties, invited David Irv­ing to Austria.

As other stu­dents gather, there is ten­sion in the air. One girl whis­pers that this group recently attacked stu­dents protest­ing out­side the Aus­trian Par­lia­ment against the FPO.

A young stu­dent with round glasses and a scar on his left cheek, wear­ing the pur­ple colours of Olympia, is hand­ing out leaflets. Roland denies being a neo-Nazi but he quickly starts relay­ing his fiercely nation­al­ist views.

‘The anti-fascists are the new fas­cists,’ he says. ‘We are not allowed to tell the truth about how for­eign­ers are a threat.’

The truth, accord­ing to Roland, is that Mus­lims, immi­grants and Amer­ica are destroy­ing his way of life.

‘We are German-Austrians. We want a com­mu­nity here based on Ger­man nation­al­ism,’ he adds. ‘We must fight to save our her­itage and culture.’

The Burschen­schaften hold reg­u­lar, secre­tive meet­ings in cel­lar bars around Vienna. Jour­nal­ists are not usu­ally admit­ted, but I man­age to per­suade a group of Burschen­schaften stu­dents to let me see their tra­di­tions. Once inside, I find myself in a bar filled with 200 men sit­ting at long tables drink­ing steins of Aus­trian beer.

The Burschen­schaften are resplen­dent in the colours of their fra­ter­ni­ties. Old and young, they sport sashes in the black, red and gold of the Ger­man flag, and as the beer flows in this neo-Gothic build­ing, chat­ter fills the room and cig­a­rette smoke rises in plumes up to chan­de­liers hung from a vaulted ceiling.

‘Prost!’ the man sit­ting to my right toasts loudly. His name is Chris­t­ian. He is no neo-Nazi thug, but instead a psy­chol­ogy stu­dent. His white peaked cap sig­ni­fies that he is a mem­ber of a Burschen­schaften group called Gothia.
Most of the men at this table are Gothia, includ­ing the man sit­ting oppo­site who ordered the beer. He glares at me again. He has long scars on both sides of his face that run from his cheek­bones down to the edges of his mouth, and when he sucks on his cig­a­rette he reminds me of the Joker from Bat­man. Chris­t­ian has a dozen wounds from fenc­ing, includ­ing five on his left cheek.

‘It is a badge of hon­our to duel,’ he says proudly, before explain­ing that this is an annual event and that one of tonight’s speeches will be on the ‘threat of Islam to Europe’.

Sud­denly, every­one at our table stands amazed as FPO leader Heinz Chris­t­ian Stra­che enters.

He is wear­ing a royal blue hat – sig­ni­fy­ing his mem­ber­ship of the Van­dalia Burschen­schaften – and after shak­ing hands with each of us he sits at the far end of the table. Shortly after­wards I’m asked to leave.

Although the Burschen­schaften claims to be polit­i­cally neu­tral, FPO fly­ers had been placed in front of each guest and it was clear this event was a polit­i­cal rally in sup­port of the FPO – an event that would cul­mi­nate with these Aus­tri­ans, includ­ing a lead­ing politi­cian, singing the Ger­man national anthem.

After my encounter with the leader of the FPO among the Burschen­schaften, I con­tact Strache’s press office to ques­tion his mem­ber­ship of an organ­i­sa­tion linked to far right extrem­ism, and ask why the FPO wishes to revoke the Ver­bots­ge­setz (the law ban­ning Nazi ideology).

In a response by email, Mr Stra­che replied that the FPO wants to revoke the Ver­bots­ge­setz because it believes in free­dom of speech. He denied hav­ing any links to neo-Nazi groups and says he is proud to be a mem­ber of the Burschenschaften.

‘The Burschen­schaften was founded dur­ing the wars against Napoleon Bona­parte in the begin­ning of the 19th cen­tury. These are the his­tor­i­cal ori­gins I am proud of,’ he wrote.

Back at Nowotny’s grave­side I think of the Pup­pet Mas­ter in his moun­tain home. How can a for­mer Nazi still hold so much polit­i­cal sway? The Burschen­schaften are here, too.

There are no ‘sieg heils’ and no swastikas for the cam­eras, but it’s clear that Fas­cism is back. These are not thugs merely intent on racial vio­lence, who are eas­ily locked up. These are intel­lec­tu­als and politi­cians whose move to the fore­front of soci­ety is far more insidious.

Through the polit­i­cal influ­ence of the FPO it is entirely pos­si­ble that the Ver­bots­ge­setz could be revoked – and if that hap­pens swastikas could once again be seen on Austria’s streets.

The ideas and racial hatred that I have heard over my two weeks in Aus­tria are just as threat­en­ing and just as sick­en­ing as any I have ever heard. And they are a lot more sin­is­ter because they are spo­ken with the veneer of respectability.

The open defi­ance of these men hon­our­ing their Nazi ‘war hero’, and the sup­port they are gain­ing in these trou­bled eco­nomic times, should be set­ting off alarm bells in Europe and the rest of the world.

“The Far Right Is on the March Again: The Rise of Fas­cism in Aus­tria” by Billy Briggs; MailOn­line; 3/18/2009.

2c. An arti­cle pub­lished since the record­ing of this pro­gram high­lights the change in atti­tude expe­ri­enced by young “Euro-Nazis” toward their polit­i­cal belief sys­tem. Viewed as losers a few years ago, they are now gain­ing accep­tance by their peers. Suc­cess­fully using Nazi rock out­lets, the inter­net and other “new media,” the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of Nazi youth are suc­cess­fully mar­ket­ing their ide­ol­ogy to con­tem­po­raries in the cur­rent socio-economic climate.

They sell CDs of lit­tle girls who sing softly about white pride to a pub­lic of pre-adolescents, video games where it is essen­tial to shoot all those who are dark-skinned, and t-shirts with cryp­tic slo­gans. They are British, Roma­ni­ans, French and Swedes. They mis­trust the var­i­ous media and, instead, cre­ate their own press agen­cies to pro­duce and broad­cast their infor­ma­tion. Gabriele Adi­nolfi, the co-founder of terza posizione (‘third posi­tion’, Italy) con­firms that: ‘Today, the only way of being fas­cist is by being pragmatic.’

The ‘right to cen­tre right’ par­ties are in the process of change hav­ing been unre­spectable for a long time. The EU has been look­ing to fight against acts of racism and xeno­phobes, and to bring leg­is­la­tion into line in mem­ber states on the mat­ter of strength­en­ing police co-operation. The extreme right has had a resur­gence over the years in France, Aus­tria and Italy and has had to face up to reac­tions from pub­lic opin­ion. The extreme right has there­fore moved with the times.

They are now made up of a myr­iad of small groups, and when the dots are all joined up they form a ‘show­case’ polit­i­cal party. The extreme right have placed them­selves into the mass media (via music, cloth­ing and mer­chan­dis­ing), and are now impos­ing them­selves on the media-related net­works across the EU. This strat­egy is pay­ing off; the extreme right is the lead­ing polit­i­cal party amongst 15–30 year olds in Hol­land, Aus­tria and Czech Repub­lic. Their influ­ence is grow­ing everywhere.

His strat­egy is called ‘metapol­i­tics’; it’s the art of doing pol­i­tics with­out it hav­ing the look of pol­i­tics. In line with those who think like Guil­laume Faye (nou­velle droite or ‘new right’ party in France), the extreme right is ‘surf­ing’ on being anti-politically cor­rect, the loss of impe­tus by gov­ern­ment par­ties in putting for­ward new venues on the out­side of offi­cial cir­cuits. Métapé­dia was cre­ated in 2007 by young Swedes based on the model of a well-known mass ency­clopae­dia; the Wikipedia mod­er­a­tors then gath­ered up the pages and excluded them.

The extreme right is now in nine coun­tries in the EU and their ambi­tion is to ‘have an influ­ence on polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal debates and they way in which art and cul­ture are pre­sented’. Alter­me­dia offers a plat­form for 17 dif­fer­ent EU coun­tries to dif­fer­ent cir­cles of influ­ence with a right wing iden­tity (from rad­i­cal chris­tians to anti-capitalist pagans), who want to chal­lenge the chal­lenge the tra­di­tional left wing supremacy in the domains of ideas and cul­ture. It’s Denis Diderot who wel­comes the vis­i­tor to Meta­pe­dia France, and the author and poet Mihai Emi­nescu who wrote Emperor and Pro­le­tar­ian, on Meta­pe­dia Roma­nia.

Jacques Vassieux is the Rhône-Alpes regional advi­sor to the French FN Party (‘national front’). He has taken charge of the national asso­ci­a­tion obser­va­toire et riposte inter­net (‘inter­net obser­va­tory and riposte’) from French far-right politi­cian Jean Marie Le Pen, and cre­ated Nations Presse in 2008. The site gets 350, 000 hits a month and has 25 con­trib­u­tors; two of which are pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists. ‘It is more than evi­dent that we are treated badly on the inter­net, and on a daily basis too,‘explains Vassieux. ‘This is one of the rea­sons, essen­tially, why pro­ceeded to cre­ate our site and this asso­ci­a­tion. We can admin­is­ter the anti­dote on a daily basis too.’

Clau­dio Laz­zaro is the author of the doc­u­men­tary Nazirock. ‘The extreme right has made itself more straight­for­ward,’ he says. ‘It takes what it needs and changes it in order to com­mu­ni­cate with­out mak­ing it sub­tle.’ Laz­zaro advo­cates dia­logue with the extreme right as long as this dia­logue ‘does not seek to jus­tify their fas­cist ideas.’ He also finds it alarm­ing that ‘fas­cism and neo-fascism are devel­op­ing in par­al­lel on two fronts, as if it’s about choos­ing ‘a pri­ori’ (with­out prior knowl­edge) more than ratio­nal thought and reflection.’

Noua Dreapta (‘new right’) is spear­head­ing the Roman­ian extreme right; they’re not reg­is­tered as a party but present them­selves as a ‘move­ment’, hav­ing been in exis­tence since 2000. It’s a way of declin­ing elec­toral con­fronta­tion in order to bet­ter place their sym­pa­this­ers into the train­ing which is being read­ied for them. The British national party (BNP) have swapped their Doc Martens for suits and ties, they dis­trib­ute guides amongst their fol­low­ers on how to speak prop­erly, made space for women (in the party) in order tone down their image and have estab­lished the birth rate as one of their ‘call to arms’.

This new gen­er­a­tion of young edu­cated lead­ers have a per­fect com­mand of 21st cen­tury com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and know their pub­lic well. Rock con­certs have replaced grand­dad meets. Project School­yard is a series of com­pi­la­tions pro­duced by the neo-nazi music label Panz­er­faust Records; their elo­quent slo­gan is ‘we don’t just enter­tain racist kids, we cre­ate them’.

The EU is strug­gling to keep up with the dec­la­ra­tions of ‘good inten­tions’ and a real lack of involve­ment from the mem­ber states; the major­ity are ‘con­tin­u­ing to escape from con­trol of their indi­vid­ual poli­cies and prac­tises at EU level’. The 2009 report on the sit­u­a­tion of fun­da­men­tal rights in the EU was panned. It has to be said that the extreme right’s elec­toral plat­form greatly inter­ests the right wing of the gov­ern­ment. When the right fail to vis­i­bly woo their vot­ers, they don’t hes­i­tate in tak­ing the extreme right’s cam­paign themes. A few ‘iden­tity’ rock con­certs have closed national front and casa delle lib­ertà (CDl, ‘house of freee­dom’) cam­paign meet­ings. As for the left, they seem hin­dered by their own con­tra­dic­tions. From now on they cham­pion the upper and mid­dle classes but haven’t been known to lis­ten to their tra­di­tional vot­ers when grap­pling eco­nomic dif­fi­cul­ties, and the ten­sions stir­ring up amongst com­mu­ni­ties in work­ing class areas.

The epi­cen­tre of this ‘renewal of nation­al­ity’ is now cen­tral and east­ern Europe. ‘Ten years ago we were ‘losers’ to be nazis, now it’s ok to be a nazi. Who knows where we’ll be in ten years time?’ con­cludes Peter, a cam­paigner for the national demo­c­ra­tic party (NPD) in Bavaria, Germany.

“Europe’s Far-Right Youth: ’10 Years Ago, We Were ‘Nazi Losers.’ Now It’s OK to be a Nazi.’” by Cleo Schweyer; cafebabel.com; 7/15/2009.

2c. Another item not included in the orig­i­nal broad­cast con­cerns the late Free­dom Party leader Jorg Haider’s friend­ship with Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger. Numer­ous For The Record pro­grams high­light the prob­a­bil­ity that Schwarzeneg­ger is an oper­a­tive of the Under­ground Reich.

“. . .Haider was a friend of Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, and his own pub­lic image was relent­lessly cul­ti­vated to rein­force the per­cep­tion of a hand­some man of action: a per­ma­nently sun­tanned fit­ness fanatic who was a devil on the ski slopes, he also enjoyed go-karting, roller-blading, bungee-jumping and moun­taineer­ing, and com­pleted the New York marathon in three hours 52 minutes. . . .”

“Jorg Haider”; telegraph.co.uk; 10/12/2008.

3. In Italy, the heirs to Mus­solini have moved alto­gether into the main­stream, once again. Gian­franco Fini’s National Alliance, the suc­ces­sor to the fas­cist party of Ben­ito Mus­solini, has been part of coali­tion government’s with Sil­vio Berlus­coni on two occa­sions. (Berlus­coni him­self is a for­mer mem­ber of the Licio Gelli’s P-2 Lodge, which com­prised a de-facto crypto-fascist gov­ern­ment that gov­erned Italy for decades.)

Although decried by some of the more overt, venal fas­cist ele­ments in Italy, the for­mal syn­the­sis of Fini’s party with Berlusconi’s actu­ally con­sti­tutes a main­stream­ing of fas­cist val­ues, exem­pli­fied by the grad­ual polit­i­cal reha­bil­i­ta­tion of the Salo Repub­lic. Estab­lished under the aus­pices of the SS in North­ern Italy late in World War II, the Salo Repub­lic and its vet­er­ans con­tributed sig­nif­i­cantly to post­war Ital­ian fascism.

In addi­tion to many Salo vet­er­ans who became mem­bers of the MSI (Ital­ian Social Move­ment, pre­de­ces­sor of Fini’s party), noto­ri­ous fas­cist ter­ror­ist Pino Rauti had served Salo. Rauti, too, was part of Berlusconi’s coalition.

The flames are going out all over Italy. Tomor­row, the flame which for more than 60 years has been the sym­bol of neo-Fascist con­ti­nu­ity with Mus­solini, will dis­ap­pear from main­stream pol­i­tics. The National Alliance, the last impor­tant home of that inher­i­tance, is “fus­ing” with Sil­vio Berlusconi’s Peo­ple of Free­dom party to give the gov­ern­ing bloc a sin­gle iden­tity and a sin­gle unchal­lenged leader.

The change has been a long time com­ing – 15 years and more. Mr Berlus­coni broke the great taboo of Ital­ian post-war pol­i­tics after he won his first gen­eral elec­tion vic­tory in 1994 and incor­po­rat­ing four mem­bers of the National Alliance into his coalition.

Embrac­ing the Fas­cists and neo-Fascists was taboo for good rea­son. For one thing, their return after they had led the nation to ruin in the war was banned by the new Con­sti­tu­tion, whose Arti­cle 139 states, “the re-organisation, under what­ever form, of the dis­solved Fas­cist party, is forbidden.”

That veto had been hon­oured in the breach rather than the obser­vance since 1946, when Gior­gio Almi­rante, the leader of the Ital­ian Social Move­ment, picked up the baton of Mus­solini where he had left it at his death and led the new party into par­lia­ment. But the neo-Fascists remained in par­lia­men­tary limbo, far from power. Berlus­coni blew that inhi­bi­tion away.

Under the wily lead­er­ship of Gian­franco Fini the “post-Fascists” have been gain­ing ground since. Tall, bespec­ta­cled, but­toned up, the oppo­site of Berlus­coni in every way, the Alliance’s leader impressed the Euro­crats with his demo­c­ra­tic cre­den­tials when he was brought in to lend a hand at draft­ing the EU’s new Constitution.

He leaned over back­wards to break his party’s con­nec­tion to anti-Semitism, pay­ing repeated offi­cial vis­its to Israel where he was pho­tographed in a skull cap at the Wail­ing Wall. On one visit, in 2003, he went so far as to con­demn Mus­solini and the race laws passed in 1938 which barred Jews from school and resulted in thou­sands being deported to the death camps.

“I’ve cer­tainly changed my ideas about Mus­solini,” he said at the time. “And to con­demn [the race laws] means to take respon­si­bil­ity for them.” States­man­like: the word stuck to him like lint. Party hard­lin­ers such as Alessan­dra Mus­solini, the glam­orous grand­daugh­ter of Il Duce, were furi­ous and split away to form fas­cist micro-parties of their own. But Mr Fini’s strat­egy pre­vailed. Under Mr Berlusconi’s patron­age, he became for­eign min­is­ter then deputy prime min­is­ter and now speaker of the lower house, a more pres­ti­gious job than its British equiv­a­lent. As Berlusconi’s unques­tioned num­ber two in the new “fused” party, he is also his heir-apparent.

The puri e duri, the hard­core fas­cist ele­ments, have been grit­ting their teeth and scream­ing defi­ance. One group wanted to stage a cer­e­mony to mark the extin­guish­ing of the flame at the “Altar of the Nation”, the wed­ding cake-like sym­bol of Italy that tow­ers over Piazza Venezia in Rome. The city’s mayor, iron­i­cally him­self a life­long “post-Fascist”, banned it.

But the puri e duri will not give up. “The National Alliance dies, the Right lives!” declares a flyer scat­tered about by one of the hard-right par­ties, whose sym­bol sports an over­sized flame.

“Today, with the betrayal of our ideas, of our story and our iden­tity,” roars one of their lead­ers, Teodoro Buon­tempo, the national pres­i­dent of The Right party, “we have the duty to make clearer than ever that our party was born to assure the con­ti­nu­ity of our ideals ... [Join us] to scream your indig­na­tion against a rul­ing class of trim­mers and nobodies.”

Black Bands, an inves­tiga­tive book into the hard right by Paolo Berizzi pub­lished in Italy this week, claims “at least 150,000 young Ital­ians under 30 live within the cults of Fas­cism and neo-Fascism. And not all but many in the myth of Hitler.” Five tiny reg­is­tered par­ties account for 1.8 per cent of the national vote, between 450,000 and 480,000 vot­ers. These are sig­nif­i­cant num­bers, yet even com­bined they are not nearly enough to reach the 4 per cent thresh­old to break into parliament.

By this read­ing, the Fas­cist ele­ment in Italy is no more sig­nif­i­cant than the BNP in Britain: an embar­rass­ing irri­tant that can make noise and win insignif­i­cant vic­to­ries, but noth­ing more.

Despite the claims of the loony right to the con­trary, the going out of the Fas­cist flame does not mean Fas­cist ideas have dis­ap­peared from the Ital­ian polit­i­cal scene. Quite the reverse. Fif­teen years after Mr Berlus­coni brought the neo-Fascists in from the cold, their impact on pol­i­tics has never been more strik­ing, never more disturbing.

Accord­ing to Christo­pher Dug­gan, the British author of Force of Des­tiny, an acclaimed his­tory of mod­ern Italy, the fusion of the two par­ties does not mark the dis­ap­pear­ance of Fas­cist ideas and prac­tices but rather their tri­umphant insin­u­a­tion. “This is an alarm­ing sit­u­a­tion in many, many ways,” he says.

“The fusion of the par­ties sig­ni­fies the absorp­tion of the ideas of the post-Fascists into Berlusconi’s party ... the ten­dency to see no moral and ulti­mately no polit­i­cal dis­tinc­tion between those who sup­ported the Fas­cist regime and those who sup­ported the Resis­tance. So the fact that Fas­cism was bel­liger­ent, racist and illib­eral gets for­got­ten; there is a quiet cho­rus of pub­lic opin­ion say­ing that Fas­cism was not so bad.”

One exam­ple of the way things are chang­ing is the treat­ment of the vet­er­ans of the Repub­lic of Salo, the pup­pet Fas­cist state ruled by Mus­solini on the shores of Lake Garda in the last phase of the war. Under the thumb of Hitler and respon­si­ble for dis­patch­ing Jews to the death camps, Salo was seen by Ital­ians after the war as the dark­est chap­ter in the nation’s mod­ern history.

But steadily and qui­etly it has been reha­bil­i­tated in the Ital­ian mem­ory. The lat­est step, before par­lia­ment, is the cre­ation of a new mil­i­tary order, the Cav­a­liere di Tri­col­ore, which can be awarded to peo­ple who fought for at least six months dur­ing the war – either with the Par­ti­sans against the “Nazi-Fascists”, with the forces of the Repub­lic of Salo on behalf of the Nazis and against the Par­ti­sans, or with the forces in the south under Gen­eral Badoglio.

In this way, says Dug­gan, the idea of moral inter­change­abil­ity is smug­gled into the national dis­course, treat­ing the sol­diers fight­ing for the pup­pet Nazi statelet “on an equal foot­ing morally and polit­i­cally with the Partisans”.

Dug­gan con­trasts the post-war process in Italy with that in Ger­many, where the Nurem­berg tri­als and the purge of pub­lic life super­vised by the Allies pro­duced a new polit­i­cal land­scape. Noth­ing of the sort hap­pened in Italy.

“There was never a clear pub­lic water­shed between the expe­ri­ence of Fas­cism and what hap­pened after­wards. It’s partly the fault of the Allies, who after the war were much more con­cerned with pre­vent­ing the Com­mu­nists from com­ing to power.

“As a result very senior fig­ures in the army, the police and the judi­ciary remained unpurged. Take the fig­ure of Gae­tano Azzariti, one of the first pres­i­dents, post-war, of Italy’s Con­sti­tu­tional Court, yet under Mus­solini he had been the pres­i­dent of the court which had the job of enforc­ing the the race laws. The fail­ure of the Allies to put pres­sure on Italy also reflects a per­cep­tion that still exists: that the Fas­cist revival is not to be taken seri­ously because Italy is ‘light­weight’. Whereas if the same thing hap­pened in Ger­many or Aus­tria, you’d get really worried.”

The wide­spread defi­ance of the anti-Fascist Con­sti­tu­tion can be seen in the pro­fu­sion of par­ties deriv­ing inspi­ra­tion from Mus­solini; in the thou­sands who pour into Preda­pio, Mussolini’s birth­place, to cel­e­brate his march on Rome on 20 Octo­ber every year; in shops and on mar­ket stalls doing a lively trade in busts of Il Duce and other Fas­cist memen­toes of every sort.

Far more alarm­ing, Dug­gan says, is what is hap­pen­ing out of the spot­light to the national tem­per, where the steady ero­sion and dis­cred­it­ing of state insti­tu­tions is play­ing into the hands of a dic­ta­to­r­ial elite, just as it did in the 1920s.

“What is so dis­turb­ing is not just the sys­tem­atic reha­bil­i­ta­tion of Fas­cism but the ero­sion of every aspect of the state, for exam­ple jus­tice, with the result that peo­ple have the urge to throw them­selves into the arms of the one man who they believe can sort things out.

“You cre­ate very per­son­alised rela­tions with the leader, so that in Mussolini’s case, he received 2,000 let­ters a day from peo­ple plead­ing with him to help. If the state doesn’t work, you trust in one man to pick up the phone and sort things out. This is how lib­er­al­ism dis­ap­peared in the 1920s, with the steady dis­cred­it­ing of par­lia­ment so that in the end there was no need for Mus­solini to abol­ish it, he merely ignored it. Some­thing very sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing in Italy today.”

“The March of Mus­solini into Italy’s Main­stream” by Peter Popham; The Inde­pen­dent; 3/20/2009.

4. Against the back­ground of the ascent of Ital­ian fas­cism into an insti­tu­tion­al­ized and main­stream ele­ment, it is as impor­tant as it is fright­en­ing to note the re-appearance of para­mil­i­tary fascisti.

The cre­ation of an extreme right-wing paramilitary-style vig­i­lante group has trig­gered an uproar in Italy. A group called the Ital­ian National Guard over the week­end revealed uni­forms rem­i­nis­cent of those from pre-World War II fas­cist mili­tias and also uses sym­bols linked with fas­cism, such as a black insignia and the Impe­r­ial eagle.

The Guard — dubbed “the black patrols” by crit­ics and the media — was formed with the sup­port of a neo-fascist polit­i­cal move­ment that mod­els itself on Britain’s National Front. With its uni­forms, the Guard is rem­i­nis­cent of the so-called Hun­gar­ian Guard formed by Hungary’s far-right Job­bik party.

Pros­e­cu­tors in Milan and Turin have opened inves­ti­ga­tions on sus­pi­cion that the Guard vio­lates a law that bans the re-establishment of the Fas­cist Party. Main­stream right-wing politi­cians joined left­ists in con­demn­ing the group.

“Para­mil­i­tary Guard Alarms Ital­ians” [Jew­ish Tele­graphic Agency]; JTA; 6/15/2009.

5. Not­ing more exploita­tion of the global eco­nomic col­lapse by Euro­pean neo-fascists, the broad­cast high­lights the Ger­man NPD’s co-opting of the tra­di­tional May­day work­ers holiday.

“. . . Just in time before today’s ‘Inter­na­tional Worker’s Day’ rally, the NPD has launched a new ‘Cam­paign on the Eco­nomic Cri­sis.’ The party is sys­tem­at­i­cally attempt­ing to exploit the eco­nomic col­lapse to broaden and sta­bi­lize its mem­ber­ship. ‘The months ahead will be marked by reduced hours, mass lay­offs and grow­ing social injus­tice,’ writes the NPD. ‘More and more Ger­mans are becom­ing aware that it can’t go on like this.‘[2] The party pro­vides ‘national responses to the eco­nomic cri­sis’ and wants ‘to show its col­ors in the van­guard.’ ‘Regard­less of if it is the shut­down of a plant, a demon­stra­tion in front of the unem­ploy­ment office or protest actions against the exploitive cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem’ the NPD is deter­mined ‘to bring the national and social alter­na­tive to the peo­ple.’ Already a few years ago, sim­i­lar cam­paigns in crisis-ridden areas (‘against Hartz IV’), brought the NPD regional elec­toral suc­cesses in Saar­land (4.0% in 2004), in Sax­ony (9.2% 2004) and in Meck­len­burg West Pomera­nia (7.4% 2006). . . .”

“National Responses”; German-Foreign-Policy.com; 5/1/2009.

6. Revis­it­ing the pro­found con­nec­tions between fas­cism and the Vat­i­can, the broad­cast high­lights the Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers and anti-Semites that backed the rise of Car­di­nal Ratzinger, now Pope Bene­dict XVI. Among Ratzinger’s sup­port­ers was Bishop Rudolph Graber, a sup­porter of Hitler and a doc­tri­naire anti-Semite. (Recall that the Pope him­self served in the Hitler Youth and the Wehrma­cht dur­ing World War II and has long-standing links to the fas­cist Opus Dei order.) The cur­rent Pope’s back­ground and polit­i­cal asso­ci­a­tions are dis­cussed at greater length in FTR #‘s 508 and 559.

“. . . With the renewed Catholic anti-Semitism in mind, crit­ics point to the ori­en­ta­tion of Ratzinger’s ear­lier milieu — for exam­ple the fact that today’s Pope ‘owes his career to sup­port­ers who were Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers.’ Of major sig­nif­i­cance was Bishop Rudolf Graber from Regens­burg, who, toward the end of the 1960s had ‘the planned Jew­ish stud­ies pro­fes­sor­ship trans­formed into a pro­fes­sor­ship for dogma.“[6] Graber was con­sid­ered a self-proclaimed anti-Semite. In a pam­phlet writ­ten in 1933 he asked ‘why should the scorned Israel rather than the Volk der Mitte (peo­ple of the mid­dle) rule the world.‘[7] He later opened ‘for Ratzinger, the doors to the Hab­s­burgs and Franz Josef Strauss,’ accord­ing to the Swiss press. . . .”

“The Pope and the Anti-Semites”; German-Foreign-Policy.com; 5/11/2009.

7. Con­clud­ing with dis­cus­sion of the man­i­fes­ta­tion of Third Reich for­eign pol­icy by the cur­rent Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many, the pro­gram sets forth the con­tin­ued sup­port by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment for the SS-linked ver­triebene groups. The ver­triebene groups aim to restore the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic rights of the Ger­man minori­ties in East­ern Europe–groups whose polit­i­cal agit­prop aided Hitler and were a major excuse for Nazi aggres­sion. Among the groups sup­ported by the ver­triebene groups (and the Ger­man gov­ern­ment) are the Sude­ten Ger­mans and the Witiko League (Witikobund).

Com­pris­ing major ele­ments of a Nazi fifth col­umn in Czecho­slo­va­kia, the Sude­ten Ger­mans were the pre­text for Nazi annex­a­tion of that coun­try in 1938. Forcibly expelled from the coun­try at war’s end for aid­ing Hitler’s aggres­sion, the Sude­ten Ger­mans con­tinue to enjoy the sup­port of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment in their attempts to force resti­tu­tion from the Czech and Slo­vak republics.

This week­end the “Sude­ten Ger­man Home­land Asso­ci­a­tion” is cel­e­brat­ing its six­ti­eth “Sude­ten Ger­man Day” with the active par­tic­i­pa­tion of promi­nent politi­cians and an extreme rightwing orga­ni­za­tion. As always, this mass meet­ing put on by the “Ver­triebe­nen” (“Expellees”) Asso­ci­a­tion in Augs­burg, Bavaria, is being billed as a protest against laws, with con­sti­tu­tional sta­tus, in two EU mem­ber states — the “Benes Decrees” of the Czech Repub­lic and Slo­va­kia. The event will be hon­ored with a mes­sage of greet­ings from the Ger­man Min­is­ter of the Inte­rior. Also present will be the “Witikobund,” which rep­re­sents the rad­i­cally eth­nic chau­vin­ist wing of the “Sude­ten Ger­man Home­land Asso­ci­a­tion” and main­tains con­tact to rightwing extrem­ists. A func­tionary of the NPD (the neo-Nazi National Demo­c­ra­tic Party of Ger­many) is a mem­ber of the pre­sid­ium of its youth orga­ni­za­tion. Notwith­stand­ing, gov­ern­ment sup­port for this weekend’s event is assured, because the Ger­man gov­ern­ment declares the post-war reset­tle­ment of Ger­mans an “injus­tice” and with the sup­port of the “expellee” asso­ci­a­tions seeks to add empha­sis to this opin­ion. For the same rea­son, the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sioner for Cul­ture and the Media just recently announced that the “Cen­ter against Expul­sions” (Foun­da­tion Flight, Expul­sion, Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion) has begun to func­tion. Berlin is keep­ing its east­ern neigh­bors under pres­sure with its legal opin­ion that Ger­man reset­tle­ment was an “injustice”.

With a press con­fer­ence and a wreath-laying com­mem­o­ra­tion cer­e­mony, the “Sude­ten Ger­man Home­land Asso­ci­a­tion” will open its six­ti­eth “Sude­ten Ger­man Day” today in Augs­burg, Bavaria. Approx­i­mately 15,000 are expected to par­tic­i­pate in this mass meet­ing, sched­uled to close fol­low­ing the Bavar­ian Prime Min­is­ter, Horst Seehofer’s (CDU), keynote address on Sun­day. As always, the event will be cen­tered on the protest against the Benes Decrees of Czecho­slo­va­kia, which still have con­sti­tu­tional sta­tus in the suc­ces­sor states, the Czech Repub­lic and Slo­va­kia. The Benes Decrees served the recon­struc­tion of the Czechoslo­vak state in the after­math of Ger­man occu­pa­tion, and laid the ground­work for the expul­sion of the “Sude­tendeutschen” (Sude­ten Ger­mans), which is the rea­son why the Home­land Asso­ci­a­tion is still cam­paign­ing for their annul­ment today. The Ger­man Min­is­ter of the Inte­rior is hon­or­ing this year’s “Sude­ten Ger­man Day” and its protest against the Benes Decrees, with a mes­sage of offi­cial greet­ings, while the pres­ence of high-ranking Bavar­ian politi­cians are insur­ing exten­sive media cov­er­age of the event.

As in the past, the “Witikobund” will also be par­tic­i­pat­ing in the “Sude­ten Ger­man Day” and has announced the orga­ni­za­tion of an event with speeches and an infor­ma­tion stand. The “Witikobund” was founded in 1948 by for­mer SS and NSDAP party mem­bers. It rep­re­sents the rad­i­cally eth­nic chau­vin­ist wing of the “Sude­ten Ger­mans” and main­tains con­tacts to the extreme right. A for­mer long-standing chair­man of the “Witikobund” was a “Repub­likaner”, back when the “Repub­likaner” Party, was the lead­ing party of the Ger­man extreme right. Today the links are to the NPD. Last year the chair­man of the Regens­burg county chap­ter of the NPD, Willi Wiener, was elected vice chair­man of the “Witiko” national youth orga­ni­za­tion “Junge Witiko­nen”. This led the Mayor of Regens­burg, Hans Schaidinger (CSU) to refuse, in March, to attend the “Sude­ten Ger­man Home­land Association’s” event. He demanded that they pub­licly renounce their ties to the “Witikobund,” and this not forth­com­ing, stayed away, in protest, from their event.[1]

It is not to be expected that for, this weekend’s event, sim­i­lar stands will be taken by Bavar­ian politi­cians or the Ger­man Min­is­ter of the Inte­rior. This is because of for­eign pol­icy inter­ests. Ger­many insists on its legal inter­pre­ta­tion, that the post-World War Ger­man reset­tle­ment con­sti­tutes an “injustice.“[2] There­fore, events, in sup­port of this con­tention, that draw exten­sive media cov­er­age, such as the “Sude­ten Ger­man Day,” are desir­able and will be sup­ported by the gov­ern­ment. For this same rea­son, Berlin has been push­ing for the estab­lish­ment of a “Cen­ter against Expul­sions” [3] over the past ten years. The Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sioner for Cul­ture and the Media announced on May 13 that the “Foun­da­tion Flight, Expul­sion, Reconciliation’s” board of direc­tors has now been con­sti­tuted. The “Cen­ter against Expul­sions,” which also declares that Ger­man post-war reset­tle­ment was an “injus­tice” will be cre­ated in Berlin under the same name. Remain­ing unclear, how­ever, is whether this alle­ga­tion, of Ger­man reset­tle­ment con­sti­tut­ing an “injus­tice,” opens the door to a law­suit for resti­tu­tion or com­pen­sa­tion for for­mer prop­erty of the reset­tled. The Ger­man gov­ern­ment is still try­ing to keep these claims on the table.[4] In any case, this issue places Germany’s east­ern neigh­bors under pres­sure to the advan­tage of Berlin’s for­eign pol­icy. A boy­cott of these “expellee” events, in protest of the far-right, appear there­fore unat­trac­tive to power-conscious politicians.

The event tak­ing place in Augs­burg this week­end will be fol­lowed by a sim­i­lar event in Hanover (Lower Sax­ony), planned for the last week­end in June (June 26 — 28) this year’s “Annual Meet­ing of Sile­sians”. Chris­t­ian Wulff (CDU), the Prime Min­is­ter of Lower Sax­ony is to present the keynote address; the Vatican’s Apos­tolic Nun­tius to Ger­many will hold mass.[5] The “Sile­sian Home­land Asso­ci­a­tion” came under pres­sure at last year’s “Sile­sian Annual Con­fer­ence”, because crit­ics had pointed to its links to the extreme right. These accu­sa­tions did not ham­per the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Prime Min­is­ter Wulff. Before Wulff had deliv­ered his speech, jour­nal­ists had dis­cov­ered such slo­gans on posters in the hall as “Sile­sia is not in Poland — the truth will set you free”.[6] Given such slo­gans, the extreme right’s par­tic­i­pa­tion can also be expected this year.

The chair­man of the “Sile­sian Home­land Asso­ci­a­tion”, who will give his speech at the Annual Con­fer­ence after Wulff, is also a lead­ing activist of the “Pruss­ian Trust” — an orga­ni­za­tion fil­ing numer­ous claims against Poland for the return of prop­erty that had belonged to expellees.[7] The “Sile­sian Youth”, the offi­cial youth orga­ni­za­tion of the “Home­land Asso­ci­a­tion” is a forum also for “extrem­ist forces”, who “par­tially put the Ger­man con­sti­tu­tion into ques­tion,” accord­ing to some of its for­mer members.[8] The “Sile­sian Youth” has also been invited to Hanover. The events in Augs­burg and Hanover show a sim­i­lar polit­i­cal con­stel­la­tion: offi­cials at the high­est state lev­els join with activists of the extreme right — in favor of an aggres­sive for­eign pol­icy against Germany’s east­ern neighbors.

“Days of Aggres­sion”; German-Foreign-Policy.com; 5/29/2009.