Harrowdown Hill

Some choice quotes from Haider

A couple of quotes thanks to Christianfuchs’s Weblog:

“… the right of natives for their country is stronger than the right of foreigners for family life. Austria should therefore exit the European Human Rights Convention.”

“I visited friends in Namibia, the former German Southwest-Africa, together with my family, because I wanted to test a little bit how living together with the blacks looks if they have the majority. It is really a problem with the blacks. Even in places, where they have the majority, they accomplish nothing. This is really a lost cause”

What a thoroughly nasty man Haider was.

wahlkabine.at political orientation thingy

More FPÖ in the international press (this time BBC)

From over here:

…the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) calls for “Real Representatives instead of EU Cheats” and “Our Country in the hands of Christians,” over the slogan “Payback Time”.

In one of the grand basement rooms of Vienna’s enormous town hall, Andreas Moelzer, the Freedom Party’s lead candidate in the elections, speaks to his audience of 150 or so pensioners about the asylum seekers who never go home, scrounging foreigners and an overcentralised, meddling Brussels.

The claim, made by political opponents after his party ran an advertisement opposing Israeli entry to the EU, that the Freedom Party is anti-Semitic is, he says, “nonsense…the discussion [about Israeli accession] was already there”.

But Islam is a different matter. “We are opponents of Islam, we are very strong opponents of Islam.” It is not, he says, a religious dispute, but a cultural issue.

Some in his audience are more extreme. In the question and answer that follows his speech, one speaker talks about how Turkish women are using their fertility as a weapon. Another says the answer is sterilisation. There’s some nervous laughter, but it didn’t seem like a joke. Mr Moelzer makes no comment, offers no rebuke.

The FPOe has bobbed up and down in the polls over the past few years. In 2004 it picked up a measly 6% of the vote. But last year in local elections it soared to 18%. And now it seems to be dominating the debate in the European election, largely because the major parties have so little to say to an electorate unwilling to be enthused by the EU project.

“Unfortunately Austria joined the European Union at the very time that the negative effects of the globalisation process began to hit this country,” says Hans-Peter Martin, independent Austrian MEP and author. That, he says, led people to associate the problems springing from globalisation with the EU.

“And, as far as the EU is concerned,” he goes on, “there have been a lot of expectations when Austria joined, and most of them have not been met. There were unsubstantiated promises that everything would become cheaper, everything would be safeguarded at the same time, and that has not been true.”

The analysts are wary of calling this election. But on one thing nearly everyone, from pro-European pressure groups to parliamentary candidates, agrees. The Austrian people and the EU do not get on at all right now. And that must play to the benefit of the Freedom Party and its candidates.

FPÖ in international press

Getting there slowly.

According to the EuropeanVoice,

Switzerland’s Tages-Anzeiger writes that the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) is running advertisements against EU membership for Turkey and Israel – even though nobody has suggested that Israel should be a member. The party is using slogans like “Abendland in Christenhand” – the Occident in Christian hands – for its election campaign for the European Parliament.

Datamining to catch terrorists

Apparently it wouldn’t work, say the following groups of the US National Academies:

• Committee on Law and Justice (CLAJ)
• Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT)
• Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB)
• Engineering and Physical Sciences (DEPS)
• Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (DBASSE)

in this book: Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment.

[via The Register]

Silly SCUNT

“Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it be and be lost to humanity. A smart tyranny, he said, would remove words like justice, fairness, liberty and right from usage. But my thought occurred to me when I saw a graffito which took up a whole gable end wall in London the other day. It proclaimed, in great big strokes of white paint: “One nation under CCTV”. A good angry point – the American dictum ‘one nation under god’ sardonically replaced with a comment about Britain’s unenviable position as the Closed Circuit Television capital of the world. But … the satirical shout all but fails for one simple reason: CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch. If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials. For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” … etc etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS. ‘Britain’s SS is bigger than that of any other country.’ ‘The SS has taken over the UK’.”

(Stephen Fry, Don’t Mind Your Language, November 2008)

The 35 articles of impeachment again

Nice PDF over here.

Peter Wilby on Yachtgate

(New Statesman, 27 October 2008):

…

My mind goes back now, not only to Cripps, but also to the 1930s when politicians, aristocrats, diplomats and businessmen met at country house weekends and decided Hitler was quite a decent chap who should be allowed to have most of what he wanted; and to the early 1960s when half the ruling class seemed to be involved in weekend sex orgies, complete with specially hired prostitutes, on country estates.

Those matters concerned only the Tories, but this one now involves both government and opposition, showing, in the northern phrase, how they all piss in the same pot. The details, obscured by denials and counter-denials, will escape most voters. But there is a sense, perhaps more in the middle class than the working class, that a super-class of rich people lives on a different planet from the rest of us and most politicians have been bought by them.

While the rest of us get screwed, our rulers, enjoying parties and freebies, making deals and exchanging gossip, are too busy to care.

Everything really is going to be fine

“There’s nothing anarchist or Marxist about letting the ruling classes take over the distribution of analysis and intellectual content. I hear this complete rubbish about people saying getting a degree makes you middle class. That attitude makes me sick. Every working class person, every Marxist and every anarchist should seek to further their education as far as they possibly can. If you don’t think higher education is for you, make sure you support those who really want to. We live in a new age now, strikes aren’t the most effective way of changing things no matter what you think. We need to move out of the stupid idea that associating with the establishment: the media, politics, intellectualism is somehow not anarchist. The establishment have you EXACTLY where they want you and you think you’re obeying your principles. The media is right-wing. Get in there and fight it. Politics is right-wing. Get in there and fight it. Intellectualism is held by the middle and ruling class. Get in there and take it the fuck back.”

This from the blog of the delightfully named Class War Youth Death Brigade(!).  (The comments weren’t all appreciative.) Isn’t it great what you find on Google?