Bogus Outrage: Why Some Are Criticized over Nazism and Others Are Not
From the desk of John Laughland on Thu, 2008-09-11 09:43
The row over Alemanno’s remarks has been given added piquancy because the Minister of Defence, Ignazio La Russa, said at a ceremony to commemorate the Italians who fell fighting the Nazis after 1943 that those who remained loyal to the Axis also believed they were fighting for their own country. The remarks by these two politicians who belong to the Alleanza nazionale, the party which Gianfranco Fini created out of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (founded in 1948 on the ruins of the Mussolini regime), have caused the previous Mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, to resign his post on the Board of the Shoah Museum in the Italian capital, the chairman of which is Alemanno himself.
Such rows show, of course, how dominant left-wing thought remains in Italy. It is all right to be a post-communist – no one asks you questions about Stalin – but to be a post-fascist is to remain tainted for life. As it happens, I met Gianni Alemanno in July, when I interviewed him for The Spectator, and it became very clear during the interview not only that he was fed up with having to defend himself against these charges all the time, but also that he was far closer to neo-conservatism than to fascism. Alemanno has even created a group called Kadima World Italia, which he chairs, the purpose of which (as the name suggests) is to support the policies of the Israeli political party founded by Ariel Sharon. Alemanno said to me during our interview that “To defend Israel is to defend the West,” and it is obvious that, like many Italian right-wingers, he is deeply troubled by the rise of Islam and, as such, a naturally ally of Israel and of those Jews who feel that their main enemies in the world are the Muslims.
Alemanno may well have completely recanted his earlier support for post-fascism. (He headed the youth wing of the party before Fini democratized it, and indeed Fini was his predecessor as head of that youth wing.) His wife, Isabella Rauti, the daughter of the veteran right-winger, Pino Rauti, whose politics are indeed very far to the right, has also joined Fini’s National Alliance and abandoned her earlier allegiance to Fiamma tricolore, the party which grew out of the MSI. But what is most disgusting about this bogus outrage over Alemanno’s supposed links to fascism is that the same people who express it never make the same point about certain other European politicians, even when there are far stronger grounds for doing so than in his case.
I am referring to the prominent Estonian politician and former Prime Minister, Mart Laar. Laar is the toast of the town in Washington, where he is a frequent guest of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. He is credited with being the author of Estonia’s economic transformation, as he presents himself as a Friedmanite (even though he had read only one book on economics when he introduced “shock therapy” into Estonia, Friedman’s “Free to Choose”). But he is at the same time a strong supporter of those Estonian partisans who fought the Red Army, the Forest Brothers, and of the Waffen SS out of whose ranks they were formed.
As Mark Almond has documented in an extensive paper entitled “In the Shadow of the Bronze Soldier” (the title is a reference to the Soviet war memorial which the Estonian authorities recently removed from central Tallinn), Laar (who incidentally acts as an advisor to the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili) is the author of a noted and laudatory book about the anti-Soviet resistance movement in Estonia which was set up by the Waffen SS. Laar also attacked the decision taken in 2004 to remove a monument commemorating the SS from a village cemetery, and which bore an image of a Estonian soldier wearing German uniform.
Nor have there been any protests about the fact that the Lithuanian president, Valdas Adamkus – who like his Latvian and Estonian counterparts grew up a North American citizen – himself fought in the German army against the Red Army and boasts about the fact on his web site. Silence, too, was the reaction when the Latvian government arranged for the creation in the village of Lestene of a massive cemetery with thousands of graves commemorating the members of the SS Latvia Legion who fought the Soviets. Latvia and Estonia, indeed, have both indulged in what in Western Europe would be called “revisionism” by erecting in their capitals “museums of occupation” which propagate two serious untruths at the same time. First, they proclaim, by their very title, that the Baltic states were “occupied” by the Soviet Union when in fact they were annexed by it and incorporated into it – an extremely important difference – and, second, and as a consequence, they imply that their respective nations were subjugated by the Russian nation when, in truth, many ethnic Latvians and Estonians were enthusiastic Bolsheviks, as Communism was obviously a political creed supported by people of all nationalities and not just Russians. Many of them rose to wield power in the Soviet system. In addition, these museums pass over in silence what most people regard as the salient fact about Nazism, namely that it was a racist political ideology bent on genocide.
In spite of these provocations, you never hear people expressing concern at the inclusion of these states in the structures of the European Union and NATO. Could this be because the geopolitical imperatives of having them on board, and of tapping into any possible historical memory of anti-Russianism, however extreme – the purpose being to use them a forward point in NATO’s encirclement of Russia – is considered to be far more important than what would otherwise be the taboos of political correctness?
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