WHO ARE THE RACISTS NOW?

Adam Zamoyski believes it is high time

the West stopped lecturing others about their racialist tendencies. We are, if anything, worse

A COUPLE of years ago I attended a con- ference on the subject of nationalism in Europe, organised by French television and the Quai d'Orsay. The great and the good were jetted in from all parts of Europe, and even President Mitterrand put in an appearance, lending gravitas to the occasion.

A French journalist opened the proceed- ings by announcing that the conference had been called as 'a response to the pop- ulist and tribal offensive' that was about to engulf the Continent. The world, he informed us, was 'astonished at the terrible silence on the part of the intellectuals in the face of the crisis'. A torrent of flatulent argument and self-serving pomposity poured forth from an assortment of west- ern pundits who relentlessly lectured the guests from Central Europe on civilisation and human rights.

Jacques Delors' side-kick, Robert Badin- ter, urged them to reject nationalism and agree to be 'drowned' in the greater entity of 'Europe'. The artistically dishevelled French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy declared that a frontier was a philosophi- cal concept anyway (try explaining that to someone who finds himself on the wrong side of the Bug), and assured writers and academics from Vilnius and Bratislava, recently released from jail, that national independence and sovereignty were much overrated. It was a bit like someone com- ing out of a restaurant and telling a starv- ing tramp in the street that the steak was overcooked and the sauce dull.

The intellectuals of the West had in fact been anything but silent. Since 1989 we have been stridently alerted to the immi- nent danger of a nationalist explosion in Central Europe. Alarm-bells were sounded on a regular basis in every broadsheet from the New York Times to the Indepen- dent. The pages of this publication were not immune to the general sense of fore- boding. In the spring of 1990 Ian Buruma set forth 'what we are in for'. Fanatics in Moscow had revived the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he warned, Hungarians were daubing Stars of David on election posters, nationalist Poles were taking to the streets in their thousands, and in Rumania there is talk of purging the sacred national soil of the polluting blood of Jews. and Magyars'.

Four years on, we are still waiting for the pogroms announced with such certain- ty. To be sure, there has been some fairly repulsive political rhetoric in Poland and Rumania. But there have been no acts of violence — unless you count the storming of the Carmelite convent outside the Auschwitz concentration camp by a gang of Jewish fundamentalists from New York.

Hungary has not invaded Transylvania, Rumania has not annexed Moldavia, and Poland and Lithuania have not come to blows over Vilnius. Slovakia's secession from the Czecho-Slovak state was carried out with remarkable decorum.

The only exception is the former Yugoslavia. But this is a special case in every way. It is a toxic stew, made up of disparate elements steeped for centuries in incompatible marinades, diced by men in frock coats at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, flavoured and browned by more men in frock coats at the Paris peace confer- ence of 1919, stirred by Hitler and the Allies between 1939 and 1945, and cooked hard by Stalin. The present sordid mess is largely the responsibility of yet more men in suits, backed up by the United Nations, the European Union and all the other fine organs of 'the international community'. With that kind of outside interference, one would not be surprised at a civil war in Surrey.

'Kids scrumping — I just clipped them round the ear.' In the past four years there have been more desecrations of Jewish cemeteries in Britain, France, Germany and even Swe- den than in Eastern Europe, and greater loss of Jewish life in racial incidents in the United States. Immigrants from the Maghreb are regularly beaten up in Saint Denis, Asians are murdered in Britain, and there have been organised attacks on aliens of one sort or another in such implausible places as Holland and Switzerland. More bombs have gone off and lives been lost for separatist causes in Britain, France and Spain than anywhere in Central Europe.

These actions may be restricted to a loutish jingoistic fringe, but the attitudes that underpin them are not. One only has to look at the recent eruption of hysteria in the most respectable organs of the British press over the alleged Catholic subversion of Britain.

It certainly had nothing to do with reli- gion. Why should a professed atheist like Richard Dawkins care a hoot about whether superstition is carried on by Catholics or Anglicans? But care he did, and passionately, judging by his rabid let- ters to The Spectator. He termed the Pope 'a dangerous, world-damaging dictator' (move over, Saddam), but his real concern was that Paul Johnson is guided by 'an elderly Pole' with `no qualifications other than election by a group of other old men, mostly Italians'. In this, he strangely echoed the man who had started the non- sense, Sir.Ferdinand Mount, who dismissed Lord Rees-Mogg as 'an American smart operator disguised as an English gentle- man'. Mount also detected an 'alien quali- ty' in those of the anti-Maastricht campaigners who happened to be Catholics, and warned us portentously that 'our institutions and our way of life' are being threatened by 'Rollie'.

'There can be little doubt that there is a powerful corps of left-wing Jewish journal- ists committed regularly to write corrosive articles,' is a line you would expect to find on a yellowing page of the Volkische Beobachter. If informed that it was written a few weeks ago, you might assume that it issued from Zhirinovsky's press office. In fact, it appeared — with 'right-wing Roman Catholic' rather than 'left-wing Jewish' — in our very own Times, written by the dean of an admittedly minor Oxford college. In the spirit that gave rise to theories of Judaeo-Masonic conspiracies, the worthy dean blathered on about 'a consistent onslaught' by 'an active campaigning group', which echoed our beleaguered baronet's alarums on 'the Pope's big guns'.

Nobody in Central Europe has seriously suggested, as Sir Ferdinand did in ques- tioning the wisdom of Catholic Emancipa- tion, that Jews, gypsies or members of some ethnic minority be prevented from attending university, acquiring property and standing for public office. Yet we hap- pily go on believing ourselves to be above the crude attitudes that we are so quick to anticipate and denounce in others, and we go on applying double standards on an outrageous scale.

Zhirinovsky's not-so-surprising achieve- ment of winning 25 per cent of the vote in Russia sent western commentators into an orgy of scaremongering. The fact that Mussolini's grand daughter won 46 per cent of the vote in Naples on a fascist tick- et has been treated as a sort of Italian joke, as has the more recent victory of Berlusconi and his populist and neo-fascist allies. It is true that the mad Russian is a more sinister figure than the sultry lady or the slick crooner, but, given the respective circumstances, the Italian result is by far the more alarming.

In Eastern Europe, the communist regimes repressed legitimate national pride but shamelessly manipulated nation- alist myths and invented 'Zionist' threats. The subject populations were inevitably contaminated by these methods. When they achieved freedom, they not only delighted in proclaiming their past glories, real or otherwise, they also fell into the old ways of pinpointing 'creeping enemies' everywhere. As the American historian Tony Judt has recently pointed out, expressions of anti-Semitism in Central Europe are often more of 'a linguistic tic' than a statement of belief or intent.

A vote cast in a western democracy rep- resents something far more specific, yet we take no notice. Jean-Marie Le Pen's 11 per cent at the last elections is not spectacular enough to make him newsworthy outside France, but, while none of them has even approached his share of the poll, national- ist movements in Poland and Rumania get Plenty of coverage. And while we dismiss Edouard Balladur's edicts in defence of the French language as a quaint Gallic Oddity, I shudder to think of the horror that would convulse the western media if Hungary decreed that companies would be fined for allowing English or German words into their advertising. If Bratislava applied the language laws of Quebec to its Hungarian minority, Slovakia would be booed throughout the western world. Even a priest is suspected of fascist leanings for wearing black if he happens to be a Croat. The apex of this pyramid of double stan- dards is the way in which citizens of the former East Germany were automatically accepted as 'Europeans' in 1989, but when they started carrying out pogroms against 'guest workers' or refugees were suddenly turned into 'East European fascists'. While we are constantly being urged to play down German war crimes in the interests of reconciliation, we are not for a moment allowed to forget that some Lithuanians and Ukrainians were involved. In Schindler's List Nazis speak perfect English as they beat and shoot Jews, but sadistic kapos speak Polish. Western Europe likes to see itself as the heir to the finest traditions of Hellenic and Roman culture, Christendom and the Enlightenment. Whenever some nasty business like the Holocaust brings this into question, we subconsciously transfer as much of the responsibility as possible to the fringes of Europe. These, we like to believe, are inhabited by a kind of second- rank European, culturally and ideological- ly backward, who is not quite of our kin. In other words, we practise a curious vari- ety of racism, and we have been doing so for some time.

At the Paris peace conference in 1919, newly independent states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were forced to sign formal undertakings to guarantee full rights to and discriminate positively in favour of all their ethnic and religious minorities. Paderewski suggested that Britain, France and the United States sign similar undertakings with respect to Irish- men, Algerians, blacks and all their colo- nial subjects. Wilson, Lloyd-George and Clemenceau were not amused, and Gener- al Smuts of South Africa made some piquant remarks to the effect that the 'new nations' could not be trusted not to bully their minorities. (Germany, which was felt to be white enough to be trusted with her minorities, was not required to sign.) This principle of one law for us and one law for them helped the West to live with the crime of Yalta. It allowed western intellectuals to disregard everything that a Havel might say and stick to the Sartrean view that the Soviet system was good for the people who lived under it. It is time to remind ourselves that fas- cism was invented in Italy not Rumania, that Mosley's movement in this country was far larger than any comparable party in Poland before the war, that the Holo- caust was carried out by the Germans not the Lithuanians, and that it is in America that segregation was practised in the army in the Fifties and in schools till the Sixties, and that signs reading 'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Jews' were still widespread a couple of decades ago. And anyone with a funny name who tries to buy into a desir- able condo in New York will tell you what kind of racial pedigree-sniffing goes on even now.

It is also time we stopped seeing con- centration camps where there is only patri- otism. Since 1945, western societies have been understandably nervous of all forms of nationalism, to the point of pretending it does not exist. But we ignore it at our peril. For it is not a disease, but a natural instinct, and it only grows unhealthy if repressed.

Decades of fashionable taboo in this country have all but forbidden an English- man to be proud of his constitution, his imperial past and the Battle of Britain. He therefore either goes about beating his breast like Neal Ascherson and assorted bishops, or else he becomes a member of the British National Party and takes out his frustrated patriotism by knifing Asians in dark streets (or by spouting paranoid rub- bish in The Spectator).

In her admirable book Britons, Linda Colley demonstrates how the disparate peoples of these islands were brought together through a century of wars with France. 'Men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what they are not,' she explains. If national identities are stamped out, groups within what used to be a single nation begin to define themselves in opposition to each other, leading to infi- nite splintering and break-up of the com- munity. The result is more, not less, nationalism — the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, the movement for an Islamic 'parliament', the emergence of such phenomena as 'the gay community', and the Catholic-Anglican row are all symp- toms of the insecurity brought about by the undermining of the collective identity.

Instead of pointing accusing fingers at peoples which have for too long been 'drowned' in cruel megalithic supra-nation- al dictatorships and therefore know the value of national sovereignty, we ought to learn from them. In its benign form of patriotism, nationalism is no more than community spirit writ large, and it is a force for good. In places such as Poland, Hun- gary and the Czech Republic, it has helped societies which have been through unspeakable experiences to rebuild and move on in a remarkably positive way. This country could do worse than reach for a lit- tle healthy patriotism itself.

'We've got rhythm — who could ask for anything more?'