Transatlanticism: Swinging to the right, swinging to the left

Tony Judt, possibly one of the best political historians of our time, likes to remind us that Austria never exorcized its Nazi past. As Hitler's first 'victim,' it never intoned the kind of national mea culpa that Germany, grudgingly and painfully, let out over time. But Austria was not only Adolf Hitler's birthplace; it provided a disproportionate amount of SS agents, concentration camp administrators, and Nazi sympathizers, on a higher per capita basis than Germany itself. In the absence of accountability and collective soul-searching, the echoes of Austria's post-war deafening silence reverberate today.

Austria's 2008 general elections have just yielded the strongest electoral result of the far-right in Europe since the end of World War II. Surpassing Jörg Haider in 1999 and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, the new poster boy of xenophobic, anti-Brussels Europe, Heinz-Christian Strache is the rising star in a country that embodies European civilization and is one of the highest contributors to the EU coffers. The young Strache and his former mentor, Haider, combined for one-third of the vote, holding a key to the success of any governing coalition emerging from the elections. A former dentist (am I the only one who finds that extremely appropriate?), Strache has been filmed in military fatigues training alongside known neo-nazis; wants to repeal a ban on swastikas and other Nazi symbols but prohibit the construction of minarets; enjoys calling headscarved women "female ninjas" and seems distressed that many Austrians prefer falafels, kebabs, and couscous over Wiener schnitzels and sausages; and his rhetoric and programs are unashamedly anti-gay rights, anti-immigration, anti-Islam and, perhaps most importantly, anti-EU. All of the above brings him close and tight with extreme right-wingers in France, Flanders, Bulgaria, Serbia, and elsewhere.

And it is not just Austria. A former fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, is part of Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition. Alessandra Mussolini, Benito's granddaughter, is growing more outspoken every day. While her cohorts harass Gypsies and immigrants, Berlusconi wants to make illegal immigration a punishable criminal offense and fingerprint the Roma minority. Similar anti-Islam and anti-immigration sentiment is growing in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Poland.

More mainstream conservatism is also on the rise. The Labour Party is crumbling in the United Kingdom, Sarkozy is winning his battle against the unions in France, and at least one of the Polish twins keeps quarrelling with Brussels over the death penalty. Not even Sweden is a social-democratic paradise anymore.

Meanwhile, the United States, a country whose political center is supposed to be markedly to the right from Europe, is in the midst of the biggest government intervention in its economy since the New Deal. American leaders are embracing words like 'bailout' and 'nationalization,' and railing against 'the unfettered free market' and 'deregulation' -although one could equally argue that "socialism for the rich," the only acceptable socialism in America according to John Kenneth Galbraith, has always been part of the conservative agenda. While stocks plunge in Wall Street, the political capital of atheism, universal health care, same-sex marriage, and taxes for the rich is steadily increasing. And unless something dramatic happens, Americans are about to elect a young, black, progressive man from the South Side of Chicago called Barack Hussein Obama to the highest office of the land.

It's almost as if a law of opposites informs the variable distance between the political centers of America and Europe, or as if the pendular swing of politics moves too fast to give all those books that came out at the beginning of the decade any respectable shelf life. Robert Kagan, who famously declared that Americans hail from Mars and Europeans hail from Venus, should look for new planets to explain the transatlantic gap. Jeremy Rifkin and others should wake up from their European Dream. Congressman Tom Tancredo, known for his hardline anti-immigration positions, is about to retire from his seat in the House of Representatives after failing to get Americans to embrace massive deportation. Well, maybe he should just move to Europe!

Austria Doesn’t Fear Bruno…Why It Should

Sacha Baron Cohen is on the verge of unleashing his third motion picture Frankenstein: the Nazi-fetishizing Austrian fashionista Bruno. While the Cambridge-educated comedian’s other creations—Ali G and Borat—enraged the black identity police and the Kazakh government respectively, Bruno does not even register on Vienna’s radar. When confronted with a question about Baron Cohen’s next movie project, an Austrian Foreign Ministry official responded, “Bruno who?”

Despite being the birthplace of Hitler, the Austrians seem to have moved on from worrying about historical stereotypes, especially in light of media attention surrounding the government’s recent imprisonment of the British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving. While Viennese diplomats may not be taking much notice of the faux reporter who argues that the fashion-illiterati should be "put on trains and shipped off tocamps," the same cannot be said for the country’s tourism industry. According to one report:

"Panic is now spreading among Austria’s tourism marketers, who fear that the gay fashionista, Bruno, will trigger images of a country brimful of Nazis instead of the advertised mountains, blue lakes and pretty girls in Dirndl folk costumes. If Borat’s success is indicative, they are justifiably terrified. Bruno’s air-headed adoration of Adolf Hitler could well remind prospective visitors that Austria still has a number of unresolved issues with its Nazi past, not to mention an active and rather successful rightist party."

Perhaps the tour marketers understand the mass-mediated global environment a bit better than Viennese policymakers. In today’s world of over-stimulated, under-educated, culturally-confused Western youth, your country is only as good its last pop-cult reference. Austrians wrongly assume that the average American 20-year old knows much more about their country than they know about Kazakhstan. I would be willing to bet that they would wrong at least half of the time. I am not saying that American youth are brimming with facts about Nauryz, kumiss, Kashagan field, the Nazarbayev clan, etc., but that they know very little about Austria. If you polled one on the street, I think you would be lucky to pry a single viable factoid from their brain. Given such unhappy realities, the country’s governmental image-makers would be wise not to ignore Baron Cohen.

Kazakhstan’s diplomatic legions made the best of a bad situation when Borat shoved their country into the spotlight. They worked hard to counter Baron Cohen because they knew that he had more power than they did among certain sections of the general public. Over time, they tamed their out-of-control national brand. The Austrians have a false sense of confidence about the resonance and content of their country’s image. This comes from being the descendent of one of Europe’s largest empires, Austria’s special role in the Cold War as a neutral meeting ground for East and West, and most recently from EU insulation. Austria is situated completely within Europe—mentally and physically. Of course Brits, Slovaks, and Swedes know something about Austria because the trains run through there. But what about the Americans?

It’s time to wake up and smell the Starbucks. If Vienna’s Scheißendummführeren do not counter Bruno, there will be a generation of American youths that think all Austrians are gay, fascistoid Schantineux.