LETTERS An Austrian Thatcher
From Professor Reginald von Zugbach Sir: Nigel Jones's assessment of Austria's Herr Haider ('Austria's new H****r!', 16 October) is utterly wrong. Haider is anything but a fascist. He and his party stand for fas- cism's very opposite. They seek to assert the rights of individuals as voters and consumers, long neglected by a corporatist political cul- ture even more unresponsive to its electorate than was our own pre-Thatcher Britain. They are true liberals.
Herr Haider has nothing in common with the crass, negative, skinhead Nazi legacy of Communism in East Germany. The Free- dom party is committed to building the modern liberal and democratic society that has been denied to Austria by successive anti-democratic interests — the Habsburgs, socialism, clerical fascism, Nazism, Cold War neutrality and, latterly, by the neo-fas- cist corporatism so well described by Nigel Jones. Herr Haider's Freedom party intends to bring the ordinary citizen voter out of the political cold.
And just because you do not want your country to become the dosshouse for every undesirable in Eastern Europe, that does not make you a fascist. Go to any Austrian city as a foreigner, as a Brit for example, and you will find yourself quickly integrated into life there, more so than in any other European country. Go to a dentist or a doc- tor and note how often you will be treated by a recent and welcome immigrant. But go to the quarter behind the railway station and you will soon find out about the prob- lem that Haider has 'dared' to articulate. In fact, do not go, because you will assuredly be mugged, and it will not be by a Slovene or Polish bricklayer, or indeed by a fascist thug, but by one of the hundreds of thou- sands of Eastern Europe's shiftless people, for whom Austria is the geographically nearest soft touch. Note also that this is exactly the problem that keeps utterly non- fascist Switzerland out of the EU.
Herr Haider's PR difficulty, outwith Aus- tria, is that he is of the first generation of modern politicians for whom the second world war is ancient history. If he admits that the Nazis had some good, ordinary administrative policies for roads, employ- ment or railways, which they had, this makes for good headline copy for journal- ists who have a fogey readership who can still remember the second world war. It cer- tainly does not make him a fascist. Many Brits of my generation, bombed as babies by the Luftwaffe, might say the same. If I had a vote in mainland Europe, I would welcome Herr Haider as a choice of Candidate because the assault that his party is making on the political culture of Austria badly needs to be brought to bear through- out the EU, not least of all in Germany. In short, Herr Haider is the Margaret Thatch- er the rest of Europe badly needs. Reggie von Zugbach 7 Dowanside Road, Dowanhill, Glasgow
Previous page
