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anything to do with the brutal treatment of innocent people - not these days, certainly. Moreover, I fully
accept Dr Waldheim's explanation that when he saw 40,000 Jews being loaded onto cattle trucks at
Salonica, he genuinely believed they were being sent to the seaside for a holiday.
For the sake of fairness, I should point out that Waldheim insists he never even knew that the Jews of
Salonica were being shipped off to Auschwitz. And let's be fair - they accounted for no more than
one-third
of the city's entire population
(italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking Nazi
officer in the district could have been quite unaware of what was happening within his area of command.
Let's give the man a break. I mean to say, when the Storm Troopers burned down forty-two of Vienna's
forty-three synagogues during Kristallnacht, Waldheim did wait a whole week before joining the unit. And
after the Anschluss, he waited
two whole weeks
before joining the Nazi Student Union. Christ, the man was
practically a resistance hero. I don't know what all the fuss is about.
Austria should be proud of him and proud of itself for having the courage to stand up to world opinion
and elect a man of his calibre, pugnaciously overlooking the fact that he is a pathological liar, that he has
been officially accused of war crimes, that he has a past so murky and mired in mistruths that no one but he
knows what he has done. It takes a special kind of people to stand behind a man like that.
What a wonderful country.
