Europe’s history is littered with failed dictatorships: fascism, Nazism, communism…

Yet as the European Union expands to the east, old ideologies have begun to resurface. Over the last decade fascism and communism have re-entered politics. As a new generation of Europeans re-evaluates, and in some cases, re-writes history, we explore the rebirth of totalitarian dogmas and ask how, if at all, they can be repressed.

Austria, a country that took the side of Fascist Germany during the second world war. Today it's seeing a resurgence of extremist right wing politics. When the troops of the third Reich marched into the streets of Vienna in 1938 this was the only country to applaud, indeed they joined the Nazis.

As Hitler began his grand plan to conquer Europe Austrians embraced fascism wholeheartedly. Ever since then the extreme right has played a significant role in Austrian politics and today that history seems to be repeating itself.

Across this beautiful mountain country xenophobic sentiments are once again dominating Austrian politics.

Joerg Haider still says he'll govern Austria one day. He best expresses the new wave of fascist politics sweeping through Europe. Heider's election has been condemned world wide and though he resigned before a storm of international protest his Freedom Party will still be part of the new government.

Heider's parents were Nazis and his party is also rooted in that past. To many Austrians he is a hero though all know he's attended Nazi SS commemorations and once said the SS deserved admiration. Later he said;

Heider: I've no intention of wandering around apologising for all sorts of things.

Since then Heider has been more careful to guard his language but there's no disguising his distaste for foreign cultures.

Some one who comes to us has to accept our way of life - has to accept our traditions has to accept our language and has to be open to be integrated in our society and that’s an invitation because we want to make an Austrian citizen of them.

Haider’s resignation from the Freedom Party is seen by many as political manoeuvring, an attempt to assuage the outrage felt around the world.

Haider’s success is due to his popularity with the young. The Freedom Party won 40 per cent from the under-30s vote. First there was the Hitler Youth – now, Haider's young followers are being called Haider Youth.

Andreas Trammer: He's a very charismatic person and he has the touch of the young man. We can say it in two words Austria first or Austrians first. We first want to solve the problems of Austrians first - of our own people and then later on we can think about immigration.

But policies in the interests of one human tribe are firmly rooted in a dangerous xenophobia. Hitler rose to power in 1920’s Germany on the back of a nationalist agenda. He was part of a groundswell of right wing thinking throughout Europe, which saw other dictators rise to the fore. On the Right Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain; on the Left: Stalin in the USSR. Despite their differing ideologies they were ultimately fascist totalitarian regimes. Their success was built on militarism, control of the economy and media and the iron grip of the secret police. All would cause mass destruction. Yet some of their ideas are still alive today.

In former communist East Germany skinheads scream adoration for Hitler at a far-right gig. The band is called Zensur, which means ‘censorship’. Unemployment and immigration have propelled people like these to rediscover the nationalistic roots which created Hitler. The reunification of Germany put untold pressures on her society and it's caused historical fault lines to reappear. It’s here in the east that the far right is really kicking.

‘They gave their all when they were lying in the trenches’, goes the song. It's lyrics idolise Hitlers troops. They are typical of a new generation of European xenephobes, wary of outsiders and protective of their own culture. Their songs speak of belonging and sacrifice. Singer Manuel claims they’re not fascists. They just love their country.

IV skinhead Manuel: Just because Germany is already considered guilty, you only need say ‘I’m proud to be German’ and straight away you’re branded a Nazi and shoved into the corner.

IV skinhead Volker: Or else it comes from our admiration for Hitler, in an overall sense.

To an outsider, they embody the fascist ideology, standing for racism and selfish violence. Yet they claim to be the whipping boys for a country that can’t deal with its past.


Manuel: At out last concert in Leipzig we had only just gone on stage and played one song when the police came in and cleared the place out in a radical fashion. They beat everybody up with batons, no matter whether they were young girls or the older people who owned the house – they just beat them up.

Germany’s violent hard-core of active neo-Nazis is said to be around 47,000, and the police are certainly taking no chances. Today the right-wing National Democratic Party, is holding a rally and left wing activists have vowed to disrupt it. Last time that happened in Leipzig, the rioting lasted for days.

The searches turn up all manner of offensive weapons. Propaganda and flags associated with the Third Reich are also confiscated.

They're travelling to meetings like this one. Germany's National Democratic Party draws on Hitler’s fiery mix of nationalism and racism. It stands for fatherland, not foreigners. Inciting racial hatred means five years in prison here but freedom of speech laws still allow for a carefully crafted message of xenophobia.


NATSOF Udo Voigt, NPD leader: We know that there’s one reason why we in Germany today are better off than hundreds of millions all over the world. It’s because of our fathers, who built up this country, and over the centuries and the millennia they’ve defended it against all the enemies threatening it. Today we are called on to defend Germany anew.

IV Ilona Weber (Leipzig Social Worker):I don’t think that the real threat to democracy is the teenagers who attack the homes of asylum seekers, who beat up those who look and think differently – rather it’s the politics and ideology that drive such acts.

Ignorant of the past, young people make easy targets for the propaganda and anthems of the far right. Even denying or trivialising the holocaust is an offence under German law but confiscating fascist material may drive the problem underground. This band sets Hitler’s speeches to techno music.

IV Klaus Farin (Author): These days they don’t publish hymns about Hitler or Rudolf Hess. Instead they’re writing sad ballads about poor unemployed Germans who get nothing from the government while a refugee from another country drives his Mercedes to the dole office –– then drives to the next town and signs on for more government money.

As Europe's streets become more and more cosmopolitan some Europeans are feeling crowded out. Social ills and unemployment help to breed resentment against the outsiders. World wide the increasing gap between the first and the third world is meaning pressures on our boarders have never been higher. Now foreigners make up 6% of the workforce and their cultures and customs more and more a familiar part of our society. For right wing Europeans it's increasingly a catalyst to violence.

IV Nouria Darweshi (Refugee): We’ve been here for three years and haven’t been harassed in the past, but recently we have. They wanted to attack my husband. They throw stones at me. My child was threatened when he went to play football and they wanted to beat him. All foreigners have more problems nowadays.

The newly re-unified Germany has seen a spate of savage attacks by neo-Nazis on immigrants and their homes. When this Turkish cultural centre was firebombed, Hussein Barsch narrowly escaped with his life.

IV Hussein Barsch: It was quite clear that someone wanted to burn us to death. I just wanted to get out immediately.

Hitler said ‘I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker’. Hate crimes spring from the blind belief that foreigners are to blame for all ills. In over crowded Europe the Nazi obsession with ones own race seems to be thriving. It's almost impossible to believe the tragedy of the holocaust is not enough of a legacy to convince fascists of the dangers inherent in their politics.

Weber: I’m just afraid, based on our history, that we may go down a similar path. Of course I also like to think that this society has enough forces to mobilise against this. But I’m not sure any more – unfortunately.

The Austro Hungarian border and the gates into fortress Europe. It's a massive operation to keep this border secure. It takes the combined efforts of both military and police. Day and night these troops capture foreigners desperately seeking access to Western Europe. Many more manage to get through without detection.

Those that are caught are sent to Austria's immigrant detention centres like this one.

The people held here come from the world's most miserable countries. The one thing they have in common is that most will be deported. Austria's immigration laws are among the toughest anywhere.

IV Farif Sharif (Refugee): We came from Afghanistan by train by car - three months ago.

Q: And why did you come?

A: Because there is fighting.

This man fears for the worst if he is deported. He says he will be killed.

Q: they will kill you –

A: Yes.

But current Austrian policy seems little concerned with issues of human rights. Less than 10% of asylum claims are successful.

Haider: We have to provide working places we have to provide jobs for them. And if we have an increasing unemployment rate in Austria I think it’s not responsible to accept so many refugees - so many immigrants coming to Austria and asking for jobs.

Haider's rhetoric and the success of his party has shocked the world. Many now ask how the cold winds of fascism, ghosts from Europe's terrible past, could have re-emerged so easily.

While Fascism’s most enduring legacy might be German, it was actually born in Italy, after Mussolini seized power in 1922. Another great orator, Mussolini harked back to the grandeur that was Rome and for twenty years inspired a cult of personality around himself.

Mussolini collaborated with Hitler, crushed his opposition and glorified war. The Italian fascists were also known for their brutality towards ethnic groups. Their legacy became one of murder and executions.

Tullia Zevi (Rome Jewish Leader): They were Nazis. They accepted to go all the way with the Nazis, and they did terrible things in the north, terrible.

For fifty years the Italian fascists were shunned from politics, but they have since made a comeback. In 1994, a neo-fascist party got five ministers into the coalition government of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.

The new fascists, the National Alliance, campaigned against the poor, the needy and the foreign. The young fascists on the street were jubilant.

After Berlusconi lost power in 1995 the National Alliance's leader Gianfranco Fini has tried to steer the party back from the extreme right. He calls it ‘post-fascism’ but his party remains a direct descendent of Mussolini’s. The popularity of politicians like Fini is a symptom of a greater malaise at the grass roots of European society. Today his National Alliance remains popular but avoids controversy.

Though many of it's politicians remain extreme. One was shown on Italian TV commemorating the dead who fell in bringing Mussolini to power. Others are even more forthright.

Nicola Cucullo (National Alliance): I’m a Mussolini man, if you want to know. I’m a Mussolini fascist, mark my words. Everything was positive except the war. We shouldn’t have gone to war, but unfortunately we were forced to.

And when state TV showed the strung up corpse of Mussolini for the very first time, it invited the party to comment. Its praise for him caused a storm.

Giano Accame (National Alliance): Without doubt he remains the greatest Italian political figure this century. In a hundred years it’ll be hard to remember a name other than Mussolini.

The execution of Italian fascists caught blowing up bridges behind allied lines during WWII. They were special forces agents for Mussolini's dictatorial regime. So feared were the Italian fascists they were immediately killed. Right wing Italians still hail them as heroes.

Giano Accame (National Alliance): These were heroes of the Italian Social Republic, a republic that had 800,000 men under arms. And some of them went on sabotage operations behind enemy lines. These were really brave old boys, who died for the cause, as you can see on the film. I can only describe them as heroes.

Italian school children learn little about fascism, and there's a feeling in Italy that behind the scenes, history is quietly being re-written.

Tullia Zevi (Rome Jewish Leader): In the rest of Europe, 70, 75% of the Jews were destroyed and the rest survived. Here, 25, 30% were destroyed and the rest survived. But that doesn’t make the story any better.

By the end of the 2nd WW the facist legacy had been cleansed by the victorious Western Allies and Italian politics had been injected with a caring agenda. It's left a legacy of two extremes. Though there's a strong fascist support base among ordinary Italians the government is good to it's minorities and foreigners. For refugees Italy is seen as a paradise of opportunity.

In the southern village of Badolato the locals found their town swamped when hundreds of Kurdish refugees arrived in a boat called the Ararat.

The influx of so many immigrants is testing the community’s resources.

Kurd: Even Arabs have television and recorders! Why can’t we have these things?

Though the state seems happy to oblige it's scenes like these which are driving less fortunate Italians to right wing anti- immigration parties.

Kurd: Brown paint and black paint for the shoes. Washing machine.

Mayor: Television and washing machine, lundi. Monday. On Monday.

Some of the Kurds want to join relatives in Germany, Sweden and England, but with two meals a day provided for them here, they’re in no hurry to leave Italy.

Recognised facist parties in Italy are still on the fringes of mainstream politics. But their influence could yet rise again.

The Schengen Agreement of 1985 saw Europe's internal borders virtually disappear. But the agreement was made with Europeans in mind. Many of Italy’s immigrants go to France where benefits are higher.

With the costs of looking after refugees and asylum seekers there's growing resentment over those countries which allow more foreigners in.

So the French are putting pressure on the Italians to arrest the immigrants and send them straight back to wherever they come from. Across Europe anti-immigrant feelings are at the root of most emerging right wing blocks. And it's exactly the message of Western Europe’s largest and most xenophobic party, France's National Front.

The National Front has surged ahead in towns like Vitrolles, fuelled by fears from poor French that the government gives too much to foreigners. The National Front won over 15% of the vote in the 1998 elections. The Front’s election promise was to send Moroccans, Tunisians and Algerians home, even if they have French citizenship.

Bruno Megret (Formerly National Front): Those people endanger civil peace and the cohesion of our French country, unbalance the employment situation and so pose a large problem. We want to bring down the numbers below the threshold of tolerance, to bring harmony back to our country.

Election night,1997. Vitrolles is rocked by the rise of what some are calling neo-Nazis.

Bruno Megret (Formerly National Front): If they call me a Nazi they’ll just make Nazism more attractive, because I got 52% of the vote in my town.

Voters like taxi driver Lucien Roch.

Roch: It’s not a racist party. For me it’s just a normal party. I think it’s a normal party. It’s a party that’s straight and honest – and that’s its appeal.

Even Roch’s black wife voted for them. Some polls say 35% of the French agree with their stance on immigration.

Roch: Above all I’m French. I love the French – which doesn’t mean I don’t like foreigners. I was first married to a Spanish woman who became a French citizen and now I live with a coloured woman from Reunion. So I’m not a racist. But I don’t like immigrants coming in to ruin the country.

Fode Sylla, an anti-racism worker, had to be smuggled into the local high school. The headmaster has right wing sympathies like many families in the area. And when so many of these children's parents have voted National Front the politics of hate become even more difficult to beat.

Fode Sylla (SOS Racism): It’s a fascist party. You know they say that blacks are inferior to white people. They say that if you are black, if you are an Arab, you are a criminal. And when you really read their programme, you see it’s really the beginning of a fascist party.

Unemployment in immigrant suburbs can exceed 30%. The youth here commit a disproportionate share of French crime. But they also live under curfew and claim police harassment since the National Front came to power.

NATSOF 1st youth: If the police find you out after 10pm they beat you up.

NATSOF 2nd youth: If the police find someone out after curfew there’s no mercy. They hit you, handcuff you.

NATSOF 3rd youth: They say that every young immigrant is a potential delinquent. They want to cut our lifelines – housing benefit– to make us go elsewhere.

At 6am one morning 14 year old Najib was dragged from his bed, accused of setting a car on fire. He suffered a severe neck injury in police custody.

Najib Boucherit: They punched me, kicked me until I was ready to tell them anything they wanted to hear.

Immigrants here say racism has the sanction of politicians.

And that alienation has increased thanks to National Front policies. Since coming to power it has expelled Algerians from council flats, cut funding to cultural organisations, banned ‘left-wing’ books and sacked social workers of foreign birth.


Bruno Megret(Formerly National Front):It’s true we’re abolishing those jobs and recruiting more police. But what are they really? They’re gang leaders with a council salary. They’ve been paid to keep their mates calm so everything will be OK. That’s a mafia technique – it’s a complete denial of the law and State and that’s why we’re abolishing those jobs.

Monsieur Megret has since left the National Front to head his own race obsessed party. So the Front’s power base is split, but few believe they’re gone from mainstream French politics.

When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989, communism across Europe began to crumble. But since then, the euphoria which promised freedom for all has evaporated. As living standards have plummeted and unemployment risen, many East Europeans seek others to blame. If Western Europe is seeing a right wing resurgence it's probably in the East that political extremism is more likely to re-emerge.

To mark 50 years since Hungary’s holocaust, a new party dedicated to intolerance and the extreme right-wing was born.

The overtly fascist New Nation party has now been driven underground but at one stage it could attract 40 000 Hungarians to it's demonstrations. It's typical of the sort of right wing politics quietly brewing in Eastern Europe's underworld.


Albert Szabo (World Nation People’s Rule Party): Europeans and Hungarians – let’s just say white people – are far above Negro or negroid type of people in their culture. And this difference in culture doesn’t allow us to forcibly or quickly let them mix together, because it will create a breed which will be unable to fit in with any society.

It’s the Jewish community that most fears the rise of neo-Nazi politics in Hungary. Six hundred thousand Jews perished here during WWII. These are the survivors of those who endured the worst of the 20th century. Jews fear not just physical attack but the unceasing campaign of intimidation.


Mid Lazarovits:(Jewish Leader): Violence is of course not just threatening letters. But you can also suppose that it was also enough, such and other letters like these.

Hungary has laws against hate mail so the anti-Semitic letters are anonymous. Szabo’s party denies charges of anti-Jewish activity, but the refrain is familiar enough: Jews can always go back home.


Albert Szabo (World Nation People’s Rule Party): If they don’t like our service to our race and our nation, there’s something they can do about it. If they don’t like this country - they can do something about that too. If they don’t like Hungarian laws and the laws we want to bring in, then they can do something about that. There is a repatriation law. As dual Israeli citizens they can go back to Israel whenever they want, they can resettle whenever they want.

Szabo has now been forced from the mainstream after being taken to court for his extreme views. His popularity though demonstrated how easily a charismatic extremist could quickly raise a large following.

Hungarian facism is also deep rooted in the national fabric. It had its hey day in the 1940’s when the Arrow Cross movement seized power in a coup. The Arrow Cross was a mirror image of Hitler’s Nazis. It included the theories of racial purity and the desire to exterminate the Jews.

Before the war there were up to a million Jews in Hungary. The Holocaust, combined with post-war emigration, now leaves the community at less than 100,000. Preserving the memory of what the Nazis did here is profoundly important.

Following a robbery which looted the entire collection of the National Jewish Museum the local community is desperate for any Hungarian Jewish momentos.

Jewish man: It’s a very sad thing to show to the camera but it’s so-called Jewish soap. You can see.

The soap, also known as Clean Jewish Fat, is made from the boiled down bodies of the crematoriums.

Jewish and other concerned groups say that in Hungary there's also a strong movement to deny the holocaust. Szabo and his ilk are controlled by laws stopping extremists getting a platform. Their tactic now is to join mainstream politics through more accepted right wing forums.

But racism finds many outlets. Football culture encourages tribal worship and the hatred of others, a breeding ground for racism. When the skinhead right comes out in force, as at this football match against Slovakia, hatred of all minorities: blacks, Jews, gypsies…is palpable. They're like a political force of shock troops waiting to be deployed.

But the road to extremism goes both ways. Germany, for example, is seeing a boom in both far-right and far-left parties. Just a decade after the hated Berlin wall came down, the communists are making a comeback.

Communism: a system of social organisation where property and production is vested in the community; each gives and receives according to his needs. But communism in 20th century Europe was as guilty of crimes against humanity as fascism. Some call them totalitarian twins.

In East Germany, communism came to mean savage dogma. Set up by the Russians after WWII, East Germany was a prison, policed by the terrifying Stasi Secret Police. There was no freedom of thought or religion. Foreigners and intellectuals were persecuted. In 1961 the Berlin Wall was built to stop people fleeing to the West.

Sebastian Pflugbeil (Former Dissident): Not so many people were really killed, but their methods of instilling fear and wielding power were to my mind even more refined than what the Gestapo did. The Stasi learned from the Gestapo and from the KGB too.

And yet the Communist party or PDS is now the fastest growing party in Germany. Young people like Jana can’t believe it.


Jana Simon: It frightens me a bit. But I have some friends and they vote for PDS and we have lots of arguments. I mean I can’t understand it because I just can’t forget how I felt in East Germany, and how my parents felt. I mean we were under secret surveillance… and I won’t forget that. I can’t forget that. It's as if these East Germans have tragically short memories. Why are so many now trying to reinstate a system which such a short while ago caused them misery. The politicians of course say the past couldn't happen again.


Petra Pau(Party of Democratic Socialists (PDS)): We have changed not only the dogmas but also the simplistic views of the world. But I’m not going to condemn everything that went before because that’s how progress works.

Siberia, closer to the North pole than to Moscow. It's a metonym for cruelty on an unimaginable scale. Millions of political prisoners were sent here by Stalin, under his version of Communism. They were slave labour used to build the coal mines and they were left to perish in the camps or gulags. In Stalin’s purges against ethnic Russians, He was responsible for the deaths of more people than any other dictator last century. Few survived the terrible conditions of the Soviet Gulag's

Pavel Negretov(Gulag Survivor): I didn’t belong to the Communist Youth League. I wasn’t an atheist then – although I am not much of a believer now – but I thought that if I went to hell after I died, I wouldn’t be scared because I had seen hell on earth.

Pavel Negretov spent ten years in the Vorkuta Gulag for anti-Soviet activities. He feels an anger that nearly fifty years have failed to heal and a fear the past could return. Between 1922 and 1953 10 million peasants died under Stalin’s , programme of collectivisation.

If anywhere in Russia has a reason to hate the communists, it’s here. Yet the Vorkuta communists have also made a comeback, simply because the regime of Boris Yeltsin became more despised than they were. Yeltsin drove out communism, yet did little for its worst victims.


NATSOF communist: I am sure that the Communist party will have many allies now. The people who are in power now are bureaucrats who call themselves democrats, and don’t even know what democracy is.

Under Yeltsin coal miners’ lives became as uncertain and unremitting as their work. Before the free market, they were well-off by Soviet standards. They got higher pay for the danger and isolation. They could save money and travel to the warmer south.

But Yeltsin’s government cut the mines’ subsidies, while hyper-inflation has eaten their savings, and many aren’t even being paid.

The threat of revolt has never been stronger in post-communist Russia. Over recent years the nation has been rocked by a series of strikes, a sign of the frustration of millions of unpaid state employees.


Vladimir Miller (miner): We have to wait for months. We wait for only two months because our mine is OK. At other mines people haven’t been paid since last year.

Vladimir Miller’s father and grandfather were sent here as forced labourers in the Second World War. Their crime was having a German surname dating back to the 18th century.


Millerminer: I can’t say how all the miners will vote but most of them will be supporting Communists. They are promising us better – and we lived better under Communism than now.

The World Bank has concluded that a third of Russia’s coal mines will never be viable. It says the industry should cut its work force of 900,000 people by half.

But the local communists say they’ll keep the mines open. Economic hardship has fuelled all of the 20th century’s totalitarian systems, on the Right and the Left.

Vladislav Asadev (Communist Party): We will restore the popular economy, which means we will restore mines, collective farms and everything else we used to have. The coal industry will be subsidised and people will get paid.

Fyador Dominin (‘Our Home is Russia’ Party): Ultimately we would centralise the economy and declare a monopoly on ideology, a monopoly on decisions and on everything else. Those who disagree will be sent to concentration camps, or shot. That is the ideology of Communism.

It's an idealogy which shares its roots in the fascist principles of violence and oppression. This is what happened to an anti-government demonstration in Belarus. Here persecution is no threat but a reality.

More disturbingly, in this film, Belarus president Lukashenko, spoke publicly of his admiration for Hitler.

Belarus is run with an iron grip. President Lukashenko likes to reminisce back to the days of Soviet supremacy in the region. The Belarus opposition is severely restricted and Lukashenko all powerful here.

President Lukashenko should have stepped down in the summer of ‘99. The EU no longer considers him the legitimate leader of Belarus. Yet he controls the courts, the media and the local KGB.

Andrei Sannikov (Opposition activist): He’s changing people… because I think the most dangerous factor that is now active in Belarus is that people rediscovered the fear of Soviet times.

Across Europe the cold war might be over but there’s a new chill in the air. Right wing parties are no longer underground fringe groups, they’re part of mainstream politics and their veiled mandate is to eradicate all things foreign. Are Austria's Freedom Party, the National Alliance of Italy and the National Front in France all the hallmarks of a radical new shift against foreign ideas in Europe?

Haider: It’s like a river, the water is going down the river and sometimes you have to build a cataract to slow the water. We want to bring power back to the people.

Doran Rabinovic: He knows very well that people vote for him only because of his racist motives.

Doran Rabinovic is a writer and a Jew. His community has reported a ten fold increase in harassment and abuse since the election. He believes Haider is blaming economic problems on non ethnic Austrians.

Rabimovic: His policy is to strengthen the problems of every day life to make out of social problems ethnic problems.

The largest welfare organisation in Austria is Caritas. Across the country they give refuge to foreigners seeking asylum. In shelters like this the growing antagonism to foreigners is keenly felt and there are fears that the Freedom Party's success will encourage some to believe that attacking outsiders is the right thing to do.


Barbara Greinocker (Caritas director): You can express in public now that you don’t like foreigners that you prefer Austrian culture.

Caritas director Barbara Greinocker has seen a shift in public perception.

Greinocker: Well in the beginning when I started in 91 it was like oh you’re helping people. It was the Mother Teresa theme . It changed towards - oh do you think this is the right thing to do nowadays...to bring in so many foreigners.

Haider resigned as leader of Austria following massive pressure from Europe and elsewhere. He is a figurehead to a movement and following within our society which won't go away so easily. It's clear European safeguards put up to stop such extreme politics taking root are in danger in Europe of being eroded. Extreme politicians everywhere are adjusting their views just to contain their controversy. Like chameleons they soften their rhetoric but their supporters still know their true colours.


Doran Rabinovic: It would mean that it was possible and it would stay possible for the future too to make racist opposition policy and then when you get near to power to get more rational so this means that racist standpoints get more accepted.

Greinocker: In my district where I live there are foreigners and I hear in the street when I go to the shop people complaining about those Turkish people coming to that apartment and the new Yugoslav cafe over there and why is there no Austrian cafe and more and stuff like that. Our country is building it’s own iron curtain on our side and this makes me angry.

As Austria's famous Ball got under way this year the vibrations running through the country were not from the dancing of feet but rather from the violence generated by political choice. Austria's lurch to the extreme right immediately caused a gulf to open between citizens who can trace their past in Austria and those who can't. For many it was a rude shock, a sign of how things have quietly but radically changed in Europe over the last decade. What will happen if a truly fascist party is voted into power? Hitler came to power on a wave of strong national suopport. Would we go to war to stop it?

The Holocaust never had more contemporary relevance. In a Europe that has recently witnessed ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia the present is not so far from the past. Ethnic tensions, overcrowding and third world poverty will create new waves of refugees. And within Fortress Europe interracial tension will not go away either. Our past stands as a warning. Otherwise it could serve as a bitter prelude to the future.
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