> It seems to me that this way of regarding "Attack"
> just as appropriate as if we were to think of
> Bulgaria as being France or Austria; it is as far
> from reality as Bulgarian political and social life
> are far from the standards of such advanced
> democratic societies. In those societies, it would
> not be possible for a group using such forms and
> degrees of expression of racism and xenophobia to
> achieve parliamentary representation, nor even to
> be present in the public sphere. It would be
> impossible for such an aggressive Holocaust denier
> as Volen Siderov to find any place for himself there,
> other than in the dock in a court of justice. In this
> sense, if we are determined to find a political
> equivalent for him, we should look towards Adolf
> Hitler and Radovan Karadzic, rather than the European
> far right.
I don't want to downplay the danger of the far right in Bulgaria, but this is a quaint way to think of Western European fascists, sort of like the way many of the British used to think of Oswald Moseley: he may be a bit daft, but ultimately "our" fascists are somehow less ferocious than the savage Oriental kind. It's bunk.
You have to be pretty naive to believe that Le Pen wouldn't cause the same kind of carnage that Karadzic did, given the chance. And it was as recently as a few decades ago that some politicians in the United States could be openly allied with the Klan; some of them (Trent Lott, Haley Barbour, John Ashcroft) are in fact still allied with the direct descendants of the White Citizens Council (the Council of Conservative Citizens), and those people would eagerly return to the days of the rope and the burning cross if they could get away with it.
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories