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April 30, 2002
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published March 15, 2002
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 30, 2002
Something
Rotten in Denmark
The New Danish Government
and the Extreme Right
by Steen Sohn
The Len Pen surprise in the recent French presidential
election has made European leaders and pundits comment on and
condemn the success of the rightist The National Front and its
leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have expressed their disgust,
as has Danish Prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
Rasmussen's reaction was especially interesting,
not to say hypocritical, as his government bases itself solely
on votes from the Danish equivalent of the Le Pen party.
Last November Rasmussen took office as
head of a new government consisting of his own right liberal
party, Venstre (which ironically means The Left, which
it was 130 years ago), and the junior partner--Konservative.
But as is often the case in Denmark they needed a third party
to gain a majority in our Parliament-- Folketinget. Venstre
campaigned to get the traditional center votes from the social
democratic party and to appeal to voters expected to back the
xenophobic Danish Peoples Party, DPP, headed by Pia Kjaersgaard.
This party had successfully made foreigners--immigrants, fugitives
and their crimes--a main issue in the campaign leading up to
the election.
So Rasmussen's party despicably placed
ads showing young Palestinians leaving a courtroom spitting in
contempt and displaying their longest finger on their right hands--just
to show what a menace aliens are to a western society and to
capture votes otherwise meant for DPP. And it paid off to some
extent, but not enough to stop our ultra rights in gaining 12
percent of the Danish vote.
And that was plenty to form a majority
with Rasmussen and today the xenophobic party is the parliamentary
safety net to Danish government, which has now for four months
run the country without even looking to the left side of the
Parliament. Social-liberals and socialists are more or less in
the gutter, wondering what hit them and licking their wounds..
The conservative policies of the Rasmussen
government (and the fact that it relies on parliamentarians from
the far right) has raised some eyebrows from sister parties in
countries such as Norway and Sweden. Rasmussen has been asked
to explain to them what was going on in the state of Denmark.
With the general European outburst of
condemnations against the rise of Le Pen, Rasmussen saw a chance
to explain to the rest of Europe that his parliamentary partner,
The Danish Peoples Party, is not at all the same as Le Pen's
National Front. That's why he was so very demonstrative in his
statements. He thundered "that Le Pen's proclamations and
whole politics were abhorrent." He took special note of
some remarks by Le Pen on concentrations camps and Jews.
It is well known that Le Pen some time
ago expressed horrible views that gave the impression that he
regarded Hitler's extermination of the Jews and the concentrations
camps as events that merely deserved a parenthesis in the history
books.
No Danish politicians have said things
quite like this, so Rasmussen seems in the clear. But several
members of the DPP have come close to explicit anti-Semitism.
In several instances the party has proclaimed statements that
are more or less same or, in some cases, even more chilling than
we hear from the rest of the European far right.
Leading members of the party even resort
to language that was common in Germany in the thirties. High
ranking DPP parliamentary leader, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, on
the eve of the last election, used the exact same words on Muslims
as German right wingers in 1932 used on Jews: The Muslims should
be sent out of the country on a one way ticket. On the issues
of stopping immigration and sending the foreigners--i.e. Muslims--out
of the country today in order to save our wonderful society and
the social welfare system, there is absolutely no difference
between the Danish, the French and other European rightist parties.
Hence Prime Minister Rasmussen's focus
on Le Pen's remarks on the Jews. But it's a hard sell. Rasmussens
efforts to make partner look nice, house trained and therefore
fit to do parliamentary business with collide almost daily with
their neo-fascist nature. Just the other day, right-winger Jörg
Haider of Austria invited The Danish Peoples Party to become
member of a common rightwing European party running for the European
Parliament in 2004.
Rasmussen can't talk away the smell.
Something definitely is rotten here.
Steen Sohn
is a freelance writer specializing in German and American politics,
including a book on McCarthyism. He lives in Aarhus, Denmark.
He can be reached at: steen@sohn.dk
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