The Two Faces of Extremism in Europe
SALPETER, ELIAHU
A LEFT-RIGHT ASSAULT The Two Faces of Extremism in Europe by eliahu salpeter Brussels A strange symbiosis is developing between the two extremes of free Europe's political underworld. The extreme...
...In Italy, some neo-Fascists enjoy the relative respectability of Parliament membership, perhaps because the past they are associated with is less bloodthirsty than their German colleagues...
...In their stead has risen a horrible sense of helplessness that the extremism of both the Right and the Left feeds upon...
...The "direct" thesis assumes that the German government's failure to control terrorism undermines trust in it, deepens its self-confidence crisis and weakens the State's normal operations...
...In Italy, semipolitical and plain criminal kidnappings and murders became an almost regular occurrence...
...A recent meeting of Flemish World War I veterans was taken over by neo-Nazis to hold what they billed as their first world conference...
...This has evoked concern throughout Europe about the possible consequences of the Continent's present economic slowdown and rising unemployment...
...The extreme Right has been diverting attention from its polar opposite, while the extreme Left's actions have been reinforcing the arguments of ultra-Rightist sympathizers...
...One can debate whether these are simply the 1977 versions of the diabolic spirits that every couple of years rise again from their 1945 tombs to haunt and frighten Europe, or whether they are new poisonous weeds sprouting among a generation that has never heard of Lidice, Oradour, Auschwitz, and Maidonek...
...That several Arab countries-including "revolutionary" ones-refused to allow the plane to land cannot obscure the fact that the network's smooth operation is dependent upon those very same "revolutionary" governments...
...This, in turn, has an impact upon nato, most of whose members are already using fiscal problems to justify their lag in beefing up defense budgets, as required by the recent London summit...
...But whatever the case, almost every country in Central and Western Europe has recently experienced a resurgence of fascist activity...
...That dubious distinction has fallen to West Germany, and to a lesser extent Japan...
...This past summer, it was the Rightists' turn to capture the headlines...
...Sociologists attribute the growth of the NF to the deterioration of economic and social conditions in Britain...
...The National Front feeds mostly on anti-Asian and anti-African sentiments, but an anti-Semitic strain in its ideology and propaganda is surfacing...
...Nevertheless, the Italian extreme Right today is totally fragmented...
...Although today the main targets of French Right-wing extremism are not Jews but immigrant North Africans, many Jewish leaders will tell you (strictly off the record) that anti-Semitism in their country is widespread and often close to the surface...
...Britain's defenses are being financially starved into obsolescence (although its military, miraculously, retains its high professionalism...
...In short, fear of the domestic enemy diverts attention, money and strength from preparations for a potential enemy invasion...
...Without them, the United States would find it very difficult to maintain a credible posture in Europe and might decide to withdraw, or at least move behind the English Channel...
...The regime of Spain's King Juan Carlos, by contrast, carefully nourishes anti-Israel policies inherited from Generalissimo Francisco Franco...
...Bonn is also happy about the overwhelming domestic rejection of terrorism...
...Success would not end terrorism there, but the outcome of the search could determine how close Left-wing terrorists can come to sabotaging democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany and eventually, perhaps, the rest of Europe...
...Germany, like anyone who has suffered a very dangerous disease, requires close monitoring of its political and social health...
...They want nothing less than to disrupt German society, and, most of all, to be able to strike again, thereby demonstrating that the authorities cannot assure public safety without an enormous cost to freedom...
...and the deliberate deletion of the Hitler era from the school system's history curriculum...
...Belgium, where former members of the SS brigade organized by Leon De-grell live peacefully, is a source of some of the most rabid neo-Nazi publications, while small Belgian towns are favorite venues for international Nazi gatherings...
...If anyone doubted that the network was unharmed by the aborted Lufthansa hijacking, events a few days later at the Abu Dhabi airport helped set things straight: Iraqi-inspired terrorists seized a Czechoslovak airliner and opened fire on Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam-wounded only a few months before in a similar attempt...
...Its rumored links with the underworld and a neo-Fascist MP's murder of a young man not long ago have divided and discredited it even further...
...Second, Israel is no longer-or is not at the moment anyway-the primary target...
...France, which so dearly loves to point an accusing finger at West Germany, conveniently forgets the extent of French collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation...
...Over the last several months, too: Leftists in London provoked a violent clash with police during a march of the fascist National Front (NF), thus steering political conversation away from the neofascist revival itself...
...South Yemen remains at the center of the system...
...The successful liberation of the hostages at Mogadishu has pushed such somber thoughts into the background...
...First, the international terrorist community has clearly acquired logistic underpinnings and resources independent of former Arab backers...
...Catering to deep-seated anti-German sentiments, France continues to harp on the glaring presence of former Nazis in West German public life...
...France, England, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway would probably not go to war for a Rightist, authoritarian Germany, and it is equally unlikely that the United States would risk a world conflagration to protect this sort of country...
...Moreover, unlike Sir Oswald Mosley's prewar movement, the NF has significant support outside London...
...and just as anyone who has had such a disease later fears its recurrence, so do the Germans themselves worry about a flareup of the Nazi plague...
...At the same time, it gives exposure on the state-run television to fugitive Baader-Meinhof attorney Klaus Croissant, whose extradition Bonn has requested on charges of his having acted as a courier for his jailed clients and their terrorist friends on the "outside...
...That leaves West Germany, along with the United States, to shoulder most of the defense burden on the Continent...
...The behavior of the European governments has merely aggravated the situation...
...In October, the focus shifted to the far Left with the Lufthansa airplane hijacking that was foiled by West German special troops at Mogadishu, and the subsequent retaliatory slaying of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer...
...Eliahu Salpeter is now a European correspondent for Israel's Ha'aretz...
...Whatever hurts it, or reduces its readiness to stimulate its economy, hurts the whole European Economic Community by increasing overall unemployment and social instability...
...The French, their improved relations with nato notwithstanding, continue to disrupt the Alliance's defense contiguity by their absence from the joint military command...
...On the Iberian peninsula, Portugal has generally succeeded in liberating itself from its fascist past...
...Yet together they have had the effect of overwhelming the consciousness of the average European, of numbing his critical faculties...
...The most striking resurgence of neo-Nazism in Europe, however, can be found, of all places, in Great Britain...
...One need neither believe Moscow has decided to use terrorism to foster its aims, nor that there is a Russian colonel somewhere synchronizing the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Palestine National Liberation Front, to notice a dovetailing of interests between the Kremlin and the terrorists...
...And with the kind of pedantry that marked some of the darkest pages of German history, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Administration went to incredible lengths to avoid accusations of harshness toward the incarcerated terrorists-making it possible for them, it now appears, to turn their cells into a command center of the Red Army Faction underground...
...Resurrected Rightward tendencies, this argument goes, would revive the latent fears of Germany's neighbors, rooted in the memories of two World Wars...
...This is exactly where Left-wing terrorism helps the Soviets, many observers feel, and two theses are being advanced as to how that is being accomplished...
...And nobody expects the smaller allies to do anything more than support their bigger partners...
...West Germany is today the cornerstone of the Western Alliance in Europe...
...But further economic decline, especially if it primarily affects the young-already the hardest hit-could create precisely the climate Rightist movements need to become a genuine threat...
...Distinctions between the serious and curious, between dangerous and obnoxious, between empty shadows of the past and new threats to the future have tended to disappear...
...The Germans, situated along the frontiers of the Soviet Empire, have good reason to keep their military sharp, and their sturdy economy enables them to pay for it...
...Italian authorities, for example, refused to hinder the takeoff of the hijacked Lufthansa plane when it stopped in Rome-a move explained in Germany as influenced by Bonn's refusal to extradite Nazi war criminal Herbert Kappler, who in August had escaped from one of Italy's traditionally lax prisons (see "Italy's Great Escape," NL, October 10...
...Algeria serves as the "Main Exit...
...The troublesome signs include the outpourings of sympathy for mass-murderer Kappler that enabled him to disappear from the public eye after he was smuggled into Germany...
...Iraq and Libya provide the training and planning, with Libya specializing in "diplomatic services" for the terrorists-that is, passports, communication channels and use of the diplomatic mail for transporting arms and explosives...
...A scruffy group calling itself the Neo-Nazi International met at a beer hall in a small Belgian town, and fighting broke out at demonstrations led by Communist-incited "environmentalists" against nuclear sites in Germany and France...
...Priorities get confused, the important becomes secondary, the marginal central...
...At present, neofascists represent a negligible minority on the fringes of Western politics...
...At the other end of the extremist spectrum are the numerous signs of a neo-Nazi revival...
...the raucous and increasingly public gatherings of SS veterans...
...For this, they need only a few score of cadre and a few thousand sympathizers willing to offer hiding places between operations...
...The importance of the individual items on it, and the extent of their connections, vary greatly...
...through it, blood money and ransomed terrorists pass from the floodlights of publicity into the underground and onto their next crimes...
...The terrorists, though, are not running for reelection, and they are not interested in receiving a high score in the next public opinion poll...
...Italy is scarcely a pillar of strength, militarily or otherwise...
...The ability of Andreas Baader and his aides in the Stuttgart prison to maintain contact with the abductors of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, who moved easily from one cover to the next across national boundaries, and with the Arab and German hijackers of the Lufthansa plane in Majorca, dramatically demonstrated the coordination of the world's terrorist network...
...To capture the 16 terrorists on its most-wanted list, Bonn has staged the largest manhunt in postwar German history...
...There is no easily dismissing the fact, either, that for many the evilness of the terrorists who murdered him is diminished by Schleyer's having achieved prominence in the West German business community despite his active membership in the SS during World War II...
...The latest rash of terrorist actions points to several new developments as well...
...Left-wing extremism presents, of course, a much more immediate danger...
...Germany's former victims worry, too, that this summer it took international publicity to draw attention to symbolic "Jew burnings" and "Heil Hitler" salutes among young West German officers, and that these incidents were covered up by their superiors...
...The "indirect" thesis-dependent upon the odd symbiosis mentioned at the outset-accepts the above scenario up to a point and then forecasts a sharp Right turn in reaction to Leftist terror...
...Yet they seem surprisingly blind to some of the symptoms, understandably producing anxiety among neighboring nations...
...The list is virtually endless...
...In the last election the party collected more votes than ever before, emerging as the fourth largest in the nation-after Labor, the Conservatives and the Liberals-but due to the proportional representation system it failed to win a single seat in the House of Commons...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
