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To: goldsnow who wrote (15940)	2/6/2000 4:22:00 PM
From: John Lacelle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

goldsnow, I was in Austria once. There is nothing to fear from those people. They only want to protect their culture from invasions of eastern immigrants. That makes them politically "incorrect". It would not surprise me if all these lawsuits start hitting them for their actions during WWII. Did you know that there are now legal actions being taken against the Vatican Bank because it recieved hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen loot from Croatia when they were gassing Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs in their concentration camps? This stuff is getting too strange... -John

To: goldsnow who wrote (15940)	2/7/2000 6:17:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 17770

Re: ``Austria is not triggering a crisis in Europe. Do 360 million people in 14 big and powerful states really have to fear tiny Austria with eight million people? It is ridiculous,' Schuessel said. I told you: nobody in Europe is fearing anything about Austria --if anything, it's all crocodile Fears!! Problem is you ain't seen nothing yet: Austria is merely the tip of Europe's neofascistic iceberg.... The political recipe that proved so workable in forming the conservative/far-right coalition in Vienna could just as well be replicated everywhere else in Europe: in Belgium's Flanders, in France (think of UDF Charles Millon joining forces with the Front National to gain control over the Provence-Alpes-C“te-d'Azur region), in Italy, etc. --not to speak of would-be-EU-member countries in Eastern Europe.... Long-term, you may just want to extend the Austrian scenario to the whole of Europe. Obviously, as I put it earlier, the final outcome will not look like some Nazi extravaganza that would show up Europewide.... Times have changed, there's no room any more for the pomp and circumstance of a revamped IVth Reich! The process will be more insiduous: far-right parties can't claim more than 30% of the votes, but several of their values/agendas are shared commonly with conservative parties, that is the very parties which were involved all along the Cold War in most European executives and which were so badly shaken by the (ideological) end of the Cold War. All in all, we can assume the following poll-formula to be true in every European country: 30+20=50. That is a 30%-strong neofascistic party plus a 20%-strong conservative (Christian-Democrat) party makes a 50%-strong ruling coalition. Yet, the political action of such a right-biased executive will certainly rest on demagoguery. The far-right doesn't need to get 50% of a government's portfolios: it just needs to lay its hands on a few highly sensitive ones: the Interior Ministry, the Social Affairs Ministry, Defence, and Justice. Far-right parties usually couldn't care less about Finance, Agriculture, or Industry. Besides, since the European electorate is much more class-conscious than the American, it's often impossible for a right-wing executive to carry through some of its "anti-social" measures. However, the same range of allegedly unpopular measures can smoothly be pulled off by a left-wing government --with no social unrest, strikes, whatsoever.... The same rule might hold true for Austria: discriminative and protofascistic measures, once intolerable when uttered by Haider and his hacks, will look quite innocuous when sugared by allegedly mild-mannered conservatives.... Gus.