The Sick Men of Europe

...Before the court had evaluated the evidence, Di Pietro suddenly became the left's candidate in a by-election for an empty Senate seat in Tuscany...

...And being rational politicians, they will seek to avoid that choice at almost any cost, because if they hide under autarchy, their country will decay...

...The French and Italian existentialists, and those angry young Englishmen were surrounded by intellectually fascinating and physically luscious girls, while we made do with dreams inspired by Grace Metalious and Harold Robbins...

...Running against him was a local Communist flying the Refoundation banner, and an eccentric journalist-editor-politician named Giuliano Ferrara, who had been Berlusconi's spokesman, and was noted as a fervent champion of lost causes who had devoted the pages of his newspaper, it Foglio, to a detailed description of all the allegations against Di Pietro...

...The greatest problem is corruption, and that is likely to get significantly worse after the Euro takes over, for the same reason the nation states have become so corrupt: the fatal embrace between government and business...

...42 April 1998 • The American Spectator The best short description of the state of mind of European politicians was given by Newt Gingrich in London early last December, in a speech to London University's Institute of United States Studies...

...Ever since, Berlusconi and his allies have been relentlessly persecuted by the judges...

...Before the campaign he had been widely believed to have conservative political instincts, but his candidacy in the Democratic Party of the Left added the disciplined organization of the former Communists to Di Pietro's own personal popularity...

...All this to reach the magic Maastricht parameter: the annual budget deficit must not exceed 3 percent of GDP...

...And Germans should worry about the crisis at Daimler Benz, where two successive models—the A Class sedan and the sporty "Swatch Car"—have failed road tests...

...t.14 47 The American Spectator • April r 998...

...His government collapsed, and with it the best hope for a real reform of the Italian state...

...Italy came up with the neat trick of selling gold from the Exchange office to the Central Bank and then paying itself taxes on top of it (a maneuver, like the Germans', that was summarily declared illegal by the courts), and blithely stopped paying a substantial number of obligations (in the first half of '97 the difference between accounts payable and accounts paid was more than $65 billion...

...I had hoped that the campaign would at least provide good theater, for both are big personalities (and Ferrara is a huge man...

...All this has produced considerable gloom in high quarters...

...When things get so bad that heads begin to roll, the new European Central Bank can be blamed...

...It's a long shot, but it would be a delicious irony if the Euro were delayed by a group of German judges, acting in the name of democratic accountability...

...On the other hand, Europeans are turning inward...

...They are the logical and seemingly inevitable consequence of European welfare states that promised to eliminate failure and suffering, and in the end dumbed down all standards, whether competitive or ethical...

...Once that Manichean division had been made, it was a short step to the big lie that the only effective resistance to Fascism had come from the Communists...

...The fall of the Soviet Empire unblocked this situation, and there was a great purge of leading Cold War politicians and businessmen in the late eighties and early nineties...

...Some German politicians are whispering that Kohl may be replaced as party leader for the September federal elections, but even his most outspoken critics within his Christian Democratic Union would delay their challenge until the Euro is approved in May...

...The deadly connubium between business and the state was in part a carryover from the fascist era, and in part reinforced by the political imperatives of the Cold War, when center-right and center-left parties were often kept in power beyond their normal life expectancy because of the fear that the parties of the left would work in favor of the Soviet Union...

...Actually, the Europeans think they can avoid this unattractive Hobson's Choice by jumping into the currency union...

...The sad truth is that there was precious little resistance to Fascism anywhere in Europe, and not a year goes by without the discovery of additional dirty little secrets, whether it be about Swiss bankers working for the Nazis or withholding information from Jewish survivors, or Swedish scientists and doctors performing genetic "experiments" on nonAryans...

...The Minister of Labor and Solidarity, Martine Aubry, until recently the Joan of Arc of the Socialist government led by Lionel Jospin, blamed the violence on (of all things) a Communist plot...

...Do not transform the nation into a sum of particular interests...

...Undeterred by the fear of Soviet exploitation of Western political weakness, the judges have pressed forward with devastating results...

...But, as the four professors bringing the case in January argue, not even Germany has reduced its national debt to 6o percent of GDP, and Italy's is over ioo percent...

...It's not an accident, it's a strategy...

...The Goldhagen thesis is vastly overstated (as leading Israeli historians told him when he visited a few months ago, modern racist anti-Semitism is a French, not a German invention, and guilt for the Final Solution is global, not merely national), and, like the policies it justifies, it diverts attention from the issues the Germans and their neighbors should be addressing...

...The delay would be a godsend for Europe, providing a chance for the peoples of the old continent to take a deep breath and ask themselves some basic questions...

...The lemming-like march towards the "Euro" has overwhelmed virtually all debate...

...But the pitiful reaction to it from the French establishment—Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin rejected any notion that anyone should be concerned about the presence of Communists in his government, saying that all this happened some time ago, and the French Communists had surely learned from the past—shows how powerful is the dogma that the left is progressive while the real threat to freedom always comes from the right...

...And they enjoyed lying about the budget so much that they lied about other statistics as well: the French admit to 3 million unemployed, but the real figure is probably more than 5 million, plus another 2 million "precarious" workers involved in temporary or part-time jobs...

...There is no Nazi gene, and Fascism is not a serious threat to modern Europe, even in France, where Le Pen's extreme right-wing National Front gets a hefty protest vote...

...Pretty pathetic, don't you think...

...Above all, the West had won the Cold War thanks to the exceptional leadership of Reagan and Thatcher, both of whom tirelessly reminded friend and foe that they were involved in an epochal struggle between freedom and tyranny...

...President Jacques Chirac's dreary year-end television broadcast reminded me of Jimmy Carter's pitiful monologue on the "national malaise" he believed had infected the American people: "We are living in uncertain, difficult times," Chirac intoned...

...Masoch and Count De Sade can truly understand and love, but their progeny seem to have taken over the German Republic...

...The Italian judiciary has distinctly left-wing leanings, a tribute to the farsightedness of the first post-World War II justice minister, Palmiro Togliatti, who also happened to be the head of the Communist Party...

...Craxi fled the country, and the banker went to jail...

...Similarly, the Italian intelligentsia has never held the Communists accountable for their slavish obedience to the Soviet Empire, and their lies about being independent and democratic...

...The Euro—and beyond—is driven by a primal scream of German self-hatred and shame, "save us before we kill again...

...As I traveled with Ferrara's campaign, it was obvious that while there were concerns about Di Pietro's honesty and about the growing power of the former Communists, the Tuscans' loyalty to the left and the traditional Italian tendency to jump on the latest bandwagon would smother Ferrara's brave crusade...

...To be sure, the Germans are not the only Europeans to seek a kind of political/military straitjacket from their neighbors (Spanish leaders were eager to get into NATO so that their military would have a European mission, 44 April 19 9 8 • The American Spectator thereby making a new civil war less likely), but they are the only ones who have managed to subject the entire continent to the consequences of their collective neurosis...

...Craxi has been sentenced to jail, but has found safe exile in Tunisia, while Andreotti seeks to clear himself of mafia accusations...

...Participation in the Euro has become the sole badge of legitimacy for European governments, and they're so desperate to get in that they've resorted to the most amazing bookkeeping tricks to sneak past the gatekeepers...

...The court will probably find a safety valve to let Kohl pursue his misguided dream...

...But nowadays, the French people are usually implored to stay on good behavior and not become overly depressed...

...This is a policy that only the psychiatric team of Dr...

...According to a recent in-depth study of Italian attitudes, there is a rejection of politics and a search for new values, for a new spirituality, for a new harmony between body and spirit, between man and nature...

...And the Germans want all this because they have accepted the anti-German stereotype of themselves as dangerous to world peace...

...T he instrument of the purge, and theoretically the best hope for the future of freedom, was the judiciary, invariably in league with the press...

...Berlusconi backed down, and shortly thereafter was indicted himself...

...The German leaders see their national history just as Daniel Goldhagen does in his recent work on the Holocaust: a relentless march from Martin Luther to genocide, in which the vast majority of the German people enthusiastically participated...

...The Black Book simply recounts the tens of millions of murders carried out by the Communist regimes of the century, and concludes that these crimes were not the result of particular leaders or national character, but of the core of Communism itself...

...This was the short-lived government led by media and real estate tycoon Silvio Berlusconi in 1994...

...The avenging angel of the judicial purge is a small-town investigative magistrate named Antonio Di Pietro, who made a name for himself by using computer technology to track the movement of money through the elaborate networks of Italian finance...

...Until recently it might have been possible for a few naïve souls to believe that the Italian Communists had a certain degree of independence from the Soviet Union, but last year two distinguished historians published a book (Togliatti and Stalin, by Elena Aga Rossi and Victor Zaslaysky) based on documents from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, showing in painful detail that every significant decision was handed down directly from the Kremlin...

...The most dramatic case is Italy, where two major parties have vanished, thousands of politicians and businessmen have been thrown into prison (a few subsequently convicted, most of the rest cleared), and the two major figures in the old regime—the Socialist Bettino Craxi and the Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti—politically destroyed...

...Ferrara hoped to weaken Di Pietro's charisma, and with it the unchallenged power of the judges over Italian politics...

...Togliatti began the dual process of recruiting existing judges and training a new generation, so that, by the time of the purge forty years later, the Communists 45 The American Spectator April 1998 were the one group in Italy to escape effective retribution, even though the Communist Party was an integral part of the corrupt national system, and also received direct payments from Moscow...

...Germany revalued the gold supply of the Central Bank (provoking a brief outburst from Bundesbank President Hans Tietmayer, quickly silenced by Chancellor Helmut Kohl...

...France transformed debits into credits...

...The results exceeded Di Pietro's wildest dreams, and propelled him onto the national political stage as a major actor, thereby adding glamour to the left...

...Instead of worrying about their imaginary murderous instincts, Germans should worry more about the practices of men like Jurgen Sarrazin, until December the president of the giant Dresdner Bank, who for months was permitted to retain his job while colleagues and board members were resigning because investigations had revealed massive fraud...

...The struggle for freedom should have carried over into the postwar period, and should have been directed against the huge state created during the wars against Fascism and Communism, as well as against the remaining tyrannies...

...Europe offered pleasures of the flesh and of the mind, and, above all, Europeans incessantly pondered the meaning of it all...

...In early January, the Italian treasury minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, called for the creation of an "economic government for Europe," a political body that would effectively shape economic policy for all the countries involved in the single currency...

...It was intended to be a subsidy for investments in the East...

...Di Pietro became a national hero, and shortly thereafter resigned from the bench to enter politics...

...Doggedly, Ferrara went from town to town, challenging Di Pietro to debate (rejected), and asking the voters why, if Di Pietro was the symbol of honesty, he had repaid a substantial loan in cash, wrapped in newspaper, inside a cardboard box...

...No more...

...Indeed, when non-Communist judges opened investigations into the activities of Party officials, they were quickly blocked, and often subjected to criminal investigations themselves...

...Politburo documents published by Vladimir Bukovsky show that the relationship continued at least into the 1980's...

...Back in the mid-fifties, when I and my high-school pals dreaded ending up in grey flannel suits and living a boring existence in the suburbs, the Europeans gave us sexy women, sexy movies, even sexy philosophers...

...Those intellectuals, usually with guidance from the Party, decided who was a democrat and who wasn't, who would be published and who wouldn't, who would teach the European elite in the big cities, and who would scratch for a living in the provinces, and the magic words that divided good from evil were "Fascist" and "anti-Fascist...

...The Constitutional Court has already ruled that the Maastricht Treaty is only valid if the participating countries all meet the "convergence criteria...

...For the European intelligentsia, Fascism is the symbol of evil while Communism remains a good idea gone wrong...

...If they change their system they may be thrown out of office...

...The left mobilized students, journalists, trade unions, and the rest of its faithful, filled the piazzas with demonstrators, and demanded the judges be left free to pursue their victims...

...Meanwhile, the leftwing parties—the Italian and French Communist parties are the prime examples were paid off, both by being granted special banking and trading privileges with the Soviet bloc and by being given a cut of the payoffs for public works and big international contracts...

...Meanwhile, the European peoples, who know what's going on, are opting out...

...They never for a MICHAEL LEDEEN, foreign editor of TAS, holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute...

...In Italy, milk producers enraged by mountains of incredible red tape, falling subsidies, and mounting taxes blocked the streets of Rome and several major highways, and railroad employees in early February shut down most major stations just as delegates to a congress of the governing party were leaving Florence...

...Unemployed French have occupied government offices from Paris to Toulouse and Marseille, blocked the main railroad station in Paris, and stormed luxury hotels and restaurants...

...The Euro, and the accompanying European Central Bank, are the symbols of the triumph of the statist forces...

...Creative accounting" was the unannounced policy of virtually every major European government in 1997...

...There is no longer any effective political force in Europe standing in the way of the Euro, although the English and some of the Scandinavians are staying out of the first phase, while promising to come in later...

...After a brief interlude new elections brought the 46 April 19 9 8 • The American Spectator left to power...

...Only a masochist would voluntarily attend what now passes for an intellectual salon most anywhere from Paris to Rome, because such conversation is more an exercise in group therapy for the depressed than a spirited inquiry among people expecting to shape the world...

...In December I spoke to a leading European banker who stated categorically that the people who issued the economic data for his country should all be sent to jail for falsification of balance sheets...

...After a brief stint as Transportation Minister, he again resigned when a few independent newspapers and a handful of judges surfaced allegations that Di Pietro had taken some suspicious loans...

...His justice minister, recognizing the mortal threat of the judiciary, proposed to limit judges' ability to use preventive detention as a method to extort confessions...

...MICHAEL LEDEEN T hese are decidedly bad times for Europe, and for those of us who have long looked to Europe for inspiration...

...But the post-war leaders were not equal to the challenge...

...For months, governmental policies have been measured solely against the "Maastricht 43 The American Spectator • April 1998 parameters" — inflation levels, size of national debt, and the like—that are supposed to determine whether or not a country qualifies for entry into the monetary union...

...Tuscany is politically "red," and Di Pietro was running in a super-safe district...

...And perhaps even to find that they have some real ideas after all...

...This, as the late Francois Furet has so brilliantly written in his masterpiece on the "Communist Idea in the Twentieth Century," is not so much the result of muddled thinking as a great political and intellectual triumph by the Communists...

...On the one hand, tax evasion is mounting rapidly, even in places where it has long been considered a civic obligation...

...European-style Reaganism was mainly limited to the privatization of state-owned industries, which was fine so far as it went, but not nearly sufficient to get the state out of most people's business...

...With the destruction of the Socialist and Christian Democratic Parties, it appeared certain that the left (by then the old Communist Party had split, with the majority forming a post-Communist party called "Democratic Party of the Left" and the Stalinist rump creating the "Communist Refoundation") would win the national elections...

...The purge offered hope that Europeans might regain some of the freedoms they had lost during the twentieth century...

...The issue was not whether he would win—that was a foregone conclusion—but whether he would win by such a landslide that he could become a major political player...

...Maastricht also requires that national debt not exceed 6o percent of GDP...

...And "group" is the operational word, because the Europeans are staggering towards monetary union, hoping that it will have some as-yet unknown magical properties that will resolve the grave problems the single nations are demonstrably unable to deal with...

...The crime is endemic...

...Between the power of the left-wing judges and the triumph of the Communist use of "anti-Fascism" as the political definition of goodness, the deck was heavily stacked against the one attempt to weaken the influence of the state...

...And yes, look also to Churchill and Montgomery, and to Charles de Gaulle...

...Chirac's appeal will no more rally the French people than Carter's plea rallied us...

...Countries which have half state, half private enterprise, highly subsidized corporations, labor markets that are protected," he pointedly observed, "will find out in a world of worldwide finance that they will...have to choose either to hide and live under autarchy or to change their system...

...The mediocre men and women who govern Europe know they are not up to the challenges and opportunities they face, and so they have deferred to the virtual leaders of an imaginary Europe that does not exist, and cannot be created by the heralded arrival of a single currency...

...But don't hold your breath...

...They do, however, reserve a soft spot in their hearts for the Red Army, conveniently forgetting that the Soviet alliance with Hitler was what got the Nazis' blitzkrieg going in the first place...

...Joie de vivre was theirs, not ours...

...They're burnt out, and they know it...

...Germany's Kohl promised to halve the number of unemployed, but the numbers are surging past 5 million in his country as well and the promise has been summarily dropped...

...In a confrontation worthy of Perry Mason, Di Pietro put Craxi and one of his bankers on the stand in Milano, and accused them of massive fraud on behalf of the Socialist Party...

...Meanwhile, explosive questions like the noncompetitiveness of European products, the erosion of educational standards (in Germany, some 30 percent of students leaving school are unemployable because of lack of reading, writing, and math skills), mounting levels of criminal violence, and the prospect of wave upon wave of desperate immigrants from the East and South—most recently the Kurds from Turkey— are either finessed or peremptorily "resolved" by ukases from on high...

...Most European politicians had been uncomfortable with the Reagan/Thatcher view of the world, both because they did not believe the Soviet Empire could be destroyed without a terrible war, and— a domestic variation on the Soviet theme—because they had a far more exalted view of the legitimacy of the state and were far less solicitous of the rights of individual citizens...

...Conversation was better in Europe because Europeans were more cultured and thought more about the big questions...

...But Di Pietro's refusal to debate deprived the public of serious drama...

...The court's rapporteur, Judge Paul Kirchof, is openly concerned that monetary union is being imposed without due consent of the peoples of Europe, and his nerve may be strengthened by a petition from over 15o economics professors to delay the decision...

...Nothing like this occurred in the previous postwar history of the firm...

...The postwar Europeans gave us great theater, great cinema, great novels...

...They should also worry about the behavior of men like Dieter Vogel, president of the industrial giant Thyssen, accused of having diverted some $30 million from the government...

...Vogel allegedly deposited it in Thyssen's accounts...

...If you're looking for effective resistance to Fascism, look to Dwight Eisenhower, Mark Clark, Walter Bedell Smith, Alfred Gruenther, and George Patton, who led the most effective resistance, and the greatest instrument of democracy in the twentieth century: the Armed Forces of the United States...

...They had great cuisine and fine wines, we had hot dogs, hamburgers, Coca-Cola, bourbon, and bad beer...

...That such a book would be published at all is a tribute to the spark of vigor within French culture...

...Only real leadership can do that, but there are no leaders worthy of the name...

...government by decree is the order of the day...

...Not even Germany meets it, but it is explained away by the special burdens of national reunification...

...But the Europeans do not look to the American Army as the ultimate resistance to Fascism...

...moment doubted that, while America might have superior power and wealth, they had superior wisdom and creativity...

...The Germans are desperate for the success of the Euro because they see it as the guarantor of a truly united Europe some years hence, in which national identities will be sublimated in favor of a new European consciousness...

...When the state steals, it turns its citizens into thieves...

...Science is out, New Age is in...

...Not surprisingly, citizens have reacted with rage and taken to the streets...

...T he extreme case of this malady is Germany, long a favorite of psychohistorians and never more appropriately than today...

...The failure of Italy to deal with the legacy of Communism is of a piece with the Germans' obsession with their Nazi past, and it is echoed in the recent French debate occasioned by the publication of the so-called Black Book of Communism by a prestigious group of scholars...

...The Communists were thus guilty both of corruption and of acting on behalf of an enemy power, but not a single major figure was even indicted...

...Instead of giving this beast radical surgery, the Europeans are headed toward an even bigger version...

...But Berlusconi, with no previous political experience, created a new movement, formed an alliance with the Northern separatists and the post-Fascist party, campaigned on a platform of lower taxes, smaller government, and anti-Communism, and won a surprising victory...

...All those intellectuals surrounded by the luscious ladies on the Left Bank and elsewhere were Communists, or were sympathetic to the Communists, or at the very least were sympathetic to Communism's purported humanitarian goals...

...Those who try to raise the question are dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration...

...These events, like the shocking illiteracy levels of German youth, testify to corruption of national virtue...

...Parliaments have become increasingly irrelevant...

...The Germans think they're dangerous, and must be restrained...

...But what is left of the "nation" without a credible vision of the national mission...

...Unlike the enormously creative generation or two following the debacle of the Second World War, today's Europeans suffer from an enormous sense of taedium vitae...

...In keeping with the Italian model, the only potentially effective challenge will be in a courtroom, paradoxically in Germany...

...The surge toward greater freedom was blocked, and those politicians who spoke of reducing the state's influence were defeated...

...Corruption may have been a threat to well-being, but Communism threatened existence...

...During these years, politicians, journalists, and judges conspired to cover up the growing corruption, fearing that scandal might expose the West to a mortal threat...

...E ver since the Renaissance, Italy has been the political laboratory of the Western world, and the tyranny of the Italian judges, combined with the failure of the Berlusconi experiment, foreshadows the future of Europe...

...Once upon a time, the French president's year-end speech to the nation used to survey the entire world, as he explained France's global ambitions and obligations...

...For the first time since the turn of the century, there was neither a substantial military threat nor mass movements demanding restrictions on individual freedom in the name of some higher national or racial objective...