Ever wonder just why it is that the names of many of these pan-European-Parliament-funkadelic political parties sound so much like third world terrorist “liberation” organizations.A Federation of Euro-harmony filled by ultra-nationalist xenophobes is almost too droll a jest. My favourite of these new national parties is Ataka, which is a Bulgarian word meaning—oh, go on, take a wild guess. That’s right: “Attack.” What a splendidly butch name. The Attack party was formed from last year’s merger of the Bulgarian National Patriotic Party, the Union of Patriotic Forces and the National Movement for the Salvation of the Fatherland, and in nothing flat managed to get 13 per cent of the vote.
Obviously cultural sensitivity is their strong suit, and given that you don’t have to come from the often ethically nebulous former east to tout your ideas as “human rights”, we’re sure to see a pan-European culture emerge from this, their common “humanity”, which has always and still is, little more than something that someone finally found a big and serious-sounding word for: ethnic cleansing.
Like Attack, many of these lively additions to the political scene favour party emblems that slyly evoke swastikas while bending the prongs in different directions just enough to maintain deniability. Other than that, they don’t have a lot in common with their colleagues in the no-bloc bloc. I don’t just mean in the sense that the leader of the Slovak National Party said a couple of years back, “Let’s all get in tanks and go and flatten Budapest,” which presumably is not a policy position the Hungarian nationalists in Jobbik would endorse. But there are broader differences, too. The SNP is antipathetic to homosexuals, whereas Krisztina Morvai, the attractive blonde Jobbik member just elected to the Euro-parliament, is a former winner of the Freddie Mercury Prize for raising AIDS awareness. I can’t be the only political analyst who wishes that, instead of a victory speech last Sunday, Doktor Morvai had stood on the table in black tights and bellowed out, “We Are The Champions.”
Like our chums at Canada’s “human rights” commissions, Doktor Morvai is a “human rights” activist—and, indeed, a former delegate to the UN Women’s Rights Committee. One thing a woman has a right to is an uncircumcised penis. In the course of her successful election campaign, the good doctor told Hungarian Jews to “go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tails.” I don’t know what Krisztina has against circumcised penises, but it’s probably not her pelvis.
Either way, the names of these freaky love-collectives reminds me of the array of set-ups that would claim responsibility if a bomb went off in west Beirut in 1977. What they have in common is that they’re made up on the fly, and are only there to conceal identities, and seek public attention.
You’ve come a long way, baby!
Either way, the results are in, and the cultural sophisticates of the political class have made their mark: you can choose things that either sound like badly armed revolutionary movements trapped in a jungle somewhere, or socialist “ugly, toothless, inebriated mob” exploitation outfits from a century ago.
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