[sacw] [ACT] NYT: Rushdie Op-Ed on events in Austria

[Harsh Kapoor]

=46YI
Harsh Kapoor
------------------------

New York Times
=46ebruary 2, 2000
Op-Ed

Austria's Uglier Voice

By SALMAN RUSHDIE

LONDON-Three years ago, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of
Austria's liberation from Nazism, an extraordinary rally took place on the
Heldenplatz in central Vienna. Beneath the balcony from which Adolf Hitler
had once harangued his roaring gang, Austrian artists, intellectuals and
politicians, as well as their friends and supporters from elsewhere,
united to celebrate Hitler's downfall, and by doing so to cleanse the old
square of its association with evil.

It was my privilege to be one of the speakers that night, and it was clear
to me that the event's more contemporary purpose was to give shape and
voice to the "good Austria," that passionate and substantial constituency
of which surprisingly little is heard outside Austria itself.

The supporters of J=F6rg Haider, head of Austria's Freedom Party, understoo=
d
this too, and the rally accordingly became the focus of much
ultra-rightist derision. Then, unfortunately, it began to rain.

This was neo-Nazi rain, incessant, absolutist, intolerant, determined to
have its way. The rally's organizers were worried. A poor turnout would be
celebrated by the Haiderites, and the event could backfire.

When I came out onto the stage, however, I saw an unforgettable sight. The
Heldenplatz was packed, as full as Times Square on Millennium Eve. The
crowd was soaked to the skin, joyous, cheering, youthful.

The people had come to make a statement they cared greatly about, and they
weren't going to let a little water get in the way.

That memory makes the news of J=F6rg Haider's surge toward power-eerily
reminiscent of the career of the Hitlerish central figure in Brecht's
"Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui"-all the more unpalatable. In Haider's
growing popularity we can see the defeat of those idealistic young people
standing shoulder to shoulder in the pouring rain.

But it won't do to see Haider's triumph simply as a victory of evil over
good. The success of extremist leaders is invariably linked to failures in
the system they seek to supplant or at least take control of. The tyranny
of the shah of Iran created the tyranny of the ayatollahs. The lazy
corruption of the old, secularist Algeria gave birth to the Armed Islamic
Group and the Islamic Salvation Front.

And the long-running Austrian "grand coalition," that backslapping,
jobs-for-the-boys establishment fix, has disillusioned the voters enough
to make them turn toward Haider.

The European papers are full of tales of fat-cat corruption these days,
and the revelations are a gift to a populist demagogue of the Haider type.
When the heirs of the late Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who was
convicted of corruption, shrug their shoulders and call the stories of
slush funds for Craxi, Germany's Helmut Kohl and France's Fran=E7ois
Mitterrand an irrelevance, they make things much worse. The more Europe
looks like a "grand coalition" of arrogant leaders for whom ends easily
justify means, the more ammunition the Haiders have.

Haider has said he will not himself enter the government-so much easier to
run things through proxies and stooges, so much less, well, exposed.

According to the political theorist Karl-Markus Gauss, Haider has pulled
off a more European trick. Like Jean-Marie Le Pen in France or Umberto
Bossi in Italy, he has won the support of the wealthy, successful
bourgeoisie. What these people hate about immigrants, Gauss believes, is
not their race but their poverty.

"This system is corrupt," say the placards of the German anti-Kohl
protesters. They're right, and the fight against that corruption and the
fight against J=F6rg Haider are one and the same. The European Union must
devote as much energy to rooting out the slush-fund artists in its own
ranks as to closing ranks against Haider and his Freedom Party.

At the end of Brecht's play, the actor playing Arturo Ui steps forward and
addresses the audience directly, warning them against complacency.
Ui/Hitler may have fallen, he reminds us, but "the bitch that bore him is
in heat again." The European Union must set its house in order quickly,
unless it wishes history to remember it as the latest incarnation of that
sleazy canine.

Salman Rushdie is the author of "The Satanic Verses and "The Ground
Beneath Her Feet."