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Not unrelated is the news of the Conservative party's distancing from centre-right politics in Europe. What are they doing snuggling up with an avowedly homophobic Polish party and a Latvian party who, according to the Times, proudly commemorates its Waffen SS dead? The Conservative's success at forming this fringey caucus is underlined by some hand-wringing as well. For instance, the leader of the Conservative MEPs Timothy Kirkhope says the following:
We are satisfied that the position of the LNNK is nowhere near this – they get offended about being accused of this because, after all, they are a mainstream party of government in Latvia. [...] There was a commemoration of those who had served in the Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. The Labour Party has been churning this thing out over and over again. The truth of the matter is that attendance of the commemoration service for those who have died in wars is not just by members of LNNK it is by others attached to the EPP[the main centre right group] because the Baltic states were taken over and oppressed by the Russians and the situation was that the Germans conscripted a number of people to join the Waffen.
But how does this work? Either they did it or they didn't - commemorate, that is. And look at how our attention is being made to shift from the controversial matter at hand to an accusation that it all stems from party political dirty business anyway: 'The Labour Party has been churning this thing out over and over again.' I don't much care whether Latvians want to commemorate their Waffen SS dead, for the fact remains that the Waffen SS is connected to the Holocaust, and there is no place for hand-wringing amidst the historical facts.
Poland's oxymoronic Law and Justice Party also evades the irony radar of the Conservatives. In this instance we're being asked to swallow the fact that this party, by its very nature as indicated in the title, is committed to social justice and abhors discrimination. This is the same party whose leader recently made pope Benedict-like comments about homosexuality being the downfall of civilisation, and so on, whilst also claiming (once the Conservatives' back was turned) that for Europe to become stronger, it must become more Christian. To the exclusion of what, though?
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Here: a touch of surrealism, the gothic, and the downright strange from two of the creators of The League of Gentlemen: Psychoville.
1 comments:
Sorry, but WHAT THE FUCK is Timothy Kirkhope going on about, if I understand this extract properly? The equivocation in the Baltics regarding participation in the Waffen SS is one of the biggest disgraces in the EU today - far-right parties in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are using the 'Russia invaded us' line as a smokescreen for Holocaust participation. Okay, before I get too steamed up, here's an interesting piece on the topic:
http://markalmondoxford.blogspot.com/2008/08/in-shadow-of-bronze-soldier.html
It seems to me that a combination of EU/ NATO expansion and the War on Terror have created a political situation in which the US and Western European countries have repeatedly had to bend over backwards to accomodate the rabid nationalism and Russophobia which has filled the power vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 (I think of all the 'plucky Georgia' headlines 2008, which were based on nothing more than the presumption that the Russians HAD to be the bad guys because, well, they're the Russians.) That the Conservatives are getting into bed with these bampots - some of whom, ironically, have begun to advocate quasi-communist economic policies since it became clear to them that the ECB and the IMF isn't a bottomless slush-fund for irredentists and isolationists like Law and Justice, or Hungary's idiotic Jobbik - speaks volumes about how well-informed their foreign policy is.
The current renarrativisation of 1939 - 1945 in 'new Europe' is genuinely frightening. I find it difficult to nod my head and stay unemotional when I hear otherwise sensible people attempting to put the 'tragedy' of the 1956 Uprising on an even keel with the Holocaust - there's a current (I don't know whether you can use the word 'minority' here) in Hungary who definitely see the joint Arrow Cross/ Wehrmacht 'defense' of Budapest against the Soviets as a brave battle to protect Hungarian territorial identity. At this point, it's difficult not to become vaguely nationalistic oneself, and start giving out about what OUR country gave up to defeat Nazism in Europe. I understand why the Hungarians give such primacy to the events of '56, and the subsequent clampdown, but I don't know why they can't see it as a matter entirely distinct from what happened in WWII.
I'm looking to post on this soon, but right now I'm - genuinely - too angry to be coherent...
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