We are, it seems, "associated" with the partial boycott of Austria by EU states if the Freedom Party under Herr Haider enters government. The reason for this unprecedented move? Because Herr Haider has praised Hitler's economic policies, and has declared that Waffen SS men were brave men and patriots. The 14 EU states - plus Government Buildings - should prepare to boycott this column: Herr Haider was right on both counts. Hitler's economic policies were, for a while anyway, a triumph; and the Waffen SS, loathe them as I do, were nonetheless perhaps the best soldiers the world has ever seen.
Economic policies first. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, Germany produced 118,000 cars. The British figure was 286,000, the French was nearly 190,000 and the American was short of two million. Five years later, the German motor industry had nearly trebled its output to 340,000 vehicles. The British had increased their output by a mere 60 per cent, the Americans likewise, the French by 25 per cent. Now, who is achieving the economic miracle here - the western democracies or the fascist state?
Extraordinary changes
Right across the economy, Hitler had wrought extraordinary changes - coal production almost doubled in five years, iron production increased five-fold, gross sales of motor vehicles also up fivefold. Unemployment, which stood at over six million in January 1933, was a mere 72,500 by September 1939. Is it any wonder that Hitler was adored by the German masses? And is it any wonder that today some fool should admire his economic miracle?
No doubt Hitler's command economics violated many basic economic tenets, and no doubt the only way he could sustain growth was by replacing market realities with a war economy: inasmuch as I am able to understand Richard Overy's War and Economy in the Third Reich (from which the above figures are taken), that might well indeed be the case. That is merely an argument: not a cut and dried case.
But if we subtract the numerous vile sides of Hitler - the pathological anti-Semitism, the pagan adoration of violence, the exaltation of a spurious but lethal tribalism, it is possible to see that his regime achieved a great deal, before it began to unleash its pent-up evil on its neighbours. The means by which unemployment was driven down - the abolition of free trade unions, and the actual reduction of wages - were in fact the tools used by communist regimes to achieve economic take-off. Do I approve?
Irrelevant; but I would not diplomatically boycott a country which had communists in government - such as Italy, say. And communism has been a far more recent foe of freedom, more persistent, and bloodier by far than fascism.
Dreadful atrocities
Now for the Waffen SS. Yes, its einsatzgruppen were the butchers of East European Jewry, and the Totenkopfverban de - Death's Head Band, who were largely despised by other sections of the SS - ran the concentration camps. But for the most part, the Waffen SS - waffen means "armed", as in "weapon" - was a corps d'elite unique in war. It remained aloof from and disdainful of the concentration camp thugs. Even when, under an order from Himmler in 1941, all the various arms of the SS were to be amalgamated, the einsatzgruppen remained separate from the main body of the fighting SS.
The SS were not gentleman, and some were responsible for dreadful atrocities. That doesn't mean they all were. Is this not the way of war? Does being a member of the IRA in 1922 necessarily implicate one in the pogrom of Protestants in Cork? Does membership of the Black and Tans mean one was responsible for the slaughter in Croke Park? And might each group of men not, by their own lights, be regarded as patriots?
So can one say that SS men were patriots? Of course one can: that they volunteered for the most dangerous duties in the service of their country defines them as such. Which merely raises another question altogether: what is patriotism and what is so patriotic about it?
But that is barely the point. Jorg Haider said that SS men were patriots; some no doubt were. Most, I dare say, did nothing to be ashamed of by their own peculiar standards of ruthless warriorship. They expected no mercy, and by God were seldom shown it: Allied soldiers invariably murdered those relatively few SS captives who were taken alive.
That is one historical kernel of the issue. Here is the other.
Supreme Court
Would the member states of the EU boycott a state which refused to extradite suspected terrorist murderers because those murders were done in pursuance of a supposed constitutional imperative of that state? We are not talking about Iran and its fatwas, but about the IRA and its fatwas. The Supreme Court of the Irish Republic ruled - to its enduring shame, and under now-extinct constitutional provisions - that a suspect may not be extradited from Ireland for a murder committed in pursuit of a united Ireland, provided that the murder was done with a hand-gun. With that dispensation supplied by the highest court in this State, terrorists then pistol-killed an army recruiting sergeant in England.
For all its delinquencies, Austrian democracy has never embraced a legal definition as barbarous, depraved and wicked as that one. On the issue of Herr Haider, frankly, we should shut up.