{"id":392098,"date":"2010-03-04T13:26:14","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T18:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonplanet.com\/?p=35903"},"modified":"2010-03-04T13:26:14","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T18:26:14","slug":"when-is-it-ok-to-call-people-nazis-when-they%e2%80%99re-euro-sceptics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/392098","title":{"rendered":"When is it OK to call people Nazis? When they\u2019re Euro-sceptics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Hannan
\nLondon Telegraph<\/a><\/a>
\nMarch 4, 2010<\/p>\n

According to Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian Prime Minister who now leads the Liberals in the European Parliament, \u201cThe ultimate consequences of identity thinking are the gas chambers of Auschwitz<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n

Politicians should be careful about dragging Holocaust<\/a> references into everyday arguments. Even Churchill \u2013 who arguably had more right to make such references than the rest of us<\/a> \u2013 suffered when he tried to draw a parallel between socialism and the Gestapo during the 1945 election campaign. Yet Euro-integrationists make the link so habitually and so matter-of-factly that they no longer realise what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

During the last session of the European Parliament, both the Liberal and Socialist leaders said that Euro-sceptic MEPs made them think of the Nazis (see here<\/a>). And who can forget the words of Margot Wallstr\u00f6m, then Sweden\u2019s European Commissioner, at the anniversary of the liberation of the Theresienstandt concentration camp: \u201cThere are those today who want to scrap the supra-national idea. They want the EU<\/a> to go back to the old purely intergovernmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am uncomfortable drawing contemporary political lessons from the Nazi<\/a> genocide: I still can\u2019t get this photograph <\/a>out of my mind. But, if we must,\u00a0let us<\/a> consider the Wallstr\u00f6m-Verhofstadt theory that nationalism causes genocide. Something that struck me, both at Yad Vashem and when reading Robert Wistricht\u2019s brilliant factual\u00a0chronicle, Hitler<\/a> and the Holocaust<\/a><\/em>, is that national sovereignty was often the only defence against the murderers. Almost all European states, including fascist and Quisling regimes, recognised their responsibility to their own passport-holders. The Jews who were most at risk of deportation were those who had arrived as refugees. The Nazis realised this which is why one of their first acts, on occupying a country, was usually to declare all Jews stateless.<\/p>\n

Nation-states have, over the years, been a pretty sturdy defence against totalitarian ideologies, whether\u00a0fascism, Soviet Communism\u00a0or jihadi fundamentalism. Rooted as it is in organic loyalties, the nation is a naturally democratic unit. This is not to say that all nation-states are liberal democracies; simply that ideologies which claim to be bigger than national allegiances can be dangerous. They can even lead, as Mr Verhofstadt really ought to know, to mass murder.<\/p>\n

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