A year ago I wrote in this space about “Austria’s American Elections” (July 4, 1986), when accusations were first leveled against Kurt Waldheim, the non-Socialist candidate for president of Austria. The man who was for ten years Secretary General of the United Nations was first described as a Nazi, and then, when this was proved to be untrue, as a war criminal who had committed atrocities in the German campaign against Tito’s sadistic bands. The indictment was cooked up by Austrian Socialists two years ago, and today it seems that the former chancellor, Fred Sinowatz, is going to lose his suit against an Austrian journalist who denounced him as the originator of the clumsily manufactured lie. But obstinacy has always characterized truly stupid people, and thus the warfare against Waldheim continues.
Wherever I go I find people shocked by the supposed fact that a sort of minor Eichmann is representing Austria. After my above-mentioned article appeared in national review, a reader sent me a cartoon from an Austrian weekly that, he declared, could have come from the Nazi Der Sturmer of Jew-baiting renown. Since the letter was anonymous, I could not explain to the brave man that the caricature represented our utterly “Aryan” chancellor, Dr. Sinowatz.
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