Dolfuss, Not Haider

A blog to which I shall not link, because it links to something very unfortunate indeed (as well as to here, to Peter Hitchens and to John Laughland, so I don't know why), is away with the "Jörg Haider was murdered" fairies. In fact, that scariest and Blairiest of politicians (he even looked a bit like Blair, whom he much admired, and extremely few people manage either of those, never mind both) was drunk and speeding, of both of which he had a history.

But that blog also gives much praise to another Austrian, one of the greatest statesmen of the twentieth century, Engelbert Dolfuss, Chancellor in the Thirties until murdered on the orders of Hitler. No one could have been less like Haider. Or, indeed, Blair, and therefore also Cameron and Clegg.

Like António de Salazar in Portugal, Dolfuss is sometimes categorised by the lazy as a "Fascist". In fact, whether in Austria (bordering Italy and Germany) against both the Communists and the Nazis, or in Portugal (bordering Civil War-ravaged Spain) against both the Communists and the "National Syndicalists" (rather more like, and closer to, the Nazis than to the Falangists, or indeed than the Falangists were), they acted to defend, in one case Catholic Social Teaching and what remained of the thoroughly multiethnic Hapsburg imperial ethos (to this day, numerous German, Magyar and Slavic names are found throughout the former Austria-Hungary), and in the other case the Estado Novo and exceedingly multiethnic, indeed multiracial, Lusotropicalism.

In this, they were much like economically social democratic moral and social conservatives owing patriotic allegiance to the United Kingdom and to the Commonwealth. Yes, they were authoritarian. But look at their neighbours, and look what they were up against domestically. Imagine if a Fascist putsch in the Irish Free State (and at least one was attempted) had coincided with very serious Communist and Fascist threats in Britain. The British Government of the day would have been authoritarian, too. And, while the emergency lasted, it would have been right.