Just as in Europe, prominent people here are still busy striking moral
attitudes about Joerg Haider, the Austrian head of the Freedom Party now
being treated as the greatest menace to Austrian decorum since the Turks
besieged Vienna in 1683. Try this one from Paul Fireman, chairman and CEO of
Reebok International, handed down from Reebok headquarters in Stoughton,
Mass., on Feb 11, 2000.
"In 1994, I learned from an associate in London that Joerg Haider appeared
in an Austrian video wearing Reebok products. Upon learning of this, I
ordered an immediate investigation, and found that an employee in Austria,
acting on his own behalf, without any knowledge of Reebok International, had
provided product for this video. This individual's actions were a clear
violation of Reebok's code of conduct, and totally against what we stand
for. I asked for his immediate dismissal from our Austrian subsidiary.
Reebok responded quickly and responsibly to a deplorable situation. Reebok
has never supported Haider. His opinions are abhorrent to me personally, and
in direct conflict with the values of human rights that form the core values
of this company."
Reebok just closed a factory in Indonesia, firing 4,000 workers. When
Reebok's lawyer was asked about severance, he is reported to have replied,
"Over my dead body." So, here we have a company that makes its money off the
sweat of ill-paid Asians, many of them teenagers, and its boss strikes a
great moral posture about his "core values," firing the unfortunate fellow
who gave Haider a pair of Reeboks six years ago. If Bill Clinton or
Madeleine Albright appeared in Reeboks, what would Fireman do? After all,
Haider -- so far as I know -- hasn't actually killed people. Clinton and
Albright have had a hand in the deaths of millions, starting with kids in
Iraq finished off by sanctions.
People want a token Nazi to wave around, and I guess Haider fills the bill.
Reams get written about him, and actually existing, murderous Nazism marches
on undisturbed. Bill Clinton and Congress send a fresh billion to death
squads in Colombia, and the Brits nix tetanus vaccines for kids in Iraq.
Lou Reed protested Haider by canceling his concert in Austria, though he
had no equivalent compunction about singing in Germany, France and other
Euro-states with plenty of recent blood on their hands. So, why disappoint
the fans in Vienna, most of whom are doubtlessly utterly opposed to Haider?
As retailed in the press, Joerg Haider's crimes are thus far unimpressive,
particularly when compared with those of the leaders of the European Union,
who invoked sanctions against Austria for daring to abide by the
consequences of a democratic election. In the same week that Haider's
Freedom Party helped form a ruling coalition, these same E.U. leaders stood
accused by Human Rights Watch of presiding over war crimes against Serbia.
Now, for all I know, each weekend Haider dresses up in full Hitlerian rig
in the Carinthian castle his uncle seems to have acquired in the Second
World War at a forced knockdown price from its Jewish owner. But we must
stick to the known record, and in Haider's case, it's not meaty. He's said
that the Waffen SS were brave patriots. Reagan went all the way to that
cemetary in Bitburg in 1985 to make the same point. More recently, Germany's
Green Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, unleashed the Luftwaffe on Serbia's
civilians, so Haider seems to be securely inside the official moral margins
of the Western alliance. There are no doubt Waffen SS vets in Carinthia,
with uniforms nicely pressed in the bedroom closet, and pensions rolling
each month from Bonn, but Haider is mostly honoring the long-dead. They were
very much alive, with blood fresh on their hands, when the commander in the
U.S. zone of vanquished Germany, Gen. Lucius Clay, was forced by his own
government to reverse denazification, thus, engendering a Nazi renaissance
so pervasive that, by 1947, 40 percent of all higher civil servants and 30
percent of private industry owners in the Western zones were former Nazis.
By 1950, two-thirds of West Germany's teachers had more than trivial Nazi
pasts. The State Department's George Kennan advised against denazification
on the grounds that, first, the elimination of Nazi influence in Germany "is
impracticable," and second, "we would not find any other class of people
competent to assume the burdens (of leadership). ... Nine-tenths of what is
strong, able and respected in Germany has been poured from those very
categories which we have in mind, (i.e.) more than nominal members of the
Nazi party."
Haider's pledges to restrict immigration should scarcely make him a pariah
in Europe, where Haider's prime critics in Germany and France and the U.K.
have all discriminated viciously against immigrant workers. High on the bill
of indictment against Haider is his hearty commendation of Hitler's economic
policies, particularly regarding employment. Who is Haider supposed to
praise -- Herbert Hoover --THE deficit-hating FDR of 1932, before he started
applying policies borrowed in part from Mussolini? In 1933, when Hitler
became chancellor, unemployment stood at 40 percent, and savage deflation
was in progress. By 1936, German unemployment stood at 1 percent, a recovery
achieved -- contrary to persistent belief -- without the stimulative effects
of arms spending. Hitler launched a construction boom, in housing and
autobahns. He told the bankers to stop whining about deficits, and kept
interest rates low. So, he was a Keynesian. Haider most certainly isn't.
He's said he admires Margaret Thatcher and that epigone of Thatcherism, Tony
Blair.
To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other
columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com.
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