They'll never agree

What a delight European harmony is. Why did the western socialists not realize that with East Europeans in the EU the goalposts of the debate would be moved? Couldn’t hear anything inside the bubble, I expect.

A wonderful story reported by Associated Press in the International Herald Tribune this morning of a row between an independent Polish member of the European Parliament (memo to AP – them is not lawmakers, them is members of the Toy Parliament) about Franco.

It seems that Maciej Marian Giertych, father of Roman, leader of the right-wing and somewhat unappetizing League of Polish Families, decided to depart from the usual script:

“Maciej Marian Giertych, an independent lawmaker and the father of Poland's deputy prime minister, Roman Giertych, said Europe "lacks such statesmen today." He praised Franco and Salazar for preventing the spread of what he called "the plague of Communism" and defending what he said were Catholic values.

"Christian Europe is losing against the Socialists," Giertych said.”

That was a “fascist speech that has no place in the European Parliament” fulminated Martin Schulz, the leader of the Socialist group. That’s as maybe but Herr Schultz had better get used to the idea that there are millions of people out there who do not share his rather easy-going attitude to Communism. They think (such is the wrong-headedness of people) that other, not so bloody, systems may have been preferable.

It is true that few of us in the West would have liked to live under Franco or Salazar. But even fewer would have enjoyed the pleasures of living under Stalin and his East European henchmen. The socialists in the European Parliament refuse to acknowledge this fact and have consistently refused to anathemize Communism in the same terms as Nazism, making it clear that those victims do not matter to the enlightened establishment. They will have a few more rows on their hands.

(Huh, wait till Romania is a member and the Transylvanian question is reopened in earnest.)