WHY CAMERON IS A FUNDAMENTALLY WEAK MAN

By Marjorie Smith

One of the marks of anybody who aspires to true leadership is the ability to acknowledge when he or she has made an error and change course accordingly. Only the weak or megalomaniacs carry on regardless in the face of overwhelming evidence they have made a wrong choice.
Cameron's European policy bears all the hallmarks of a calculated rash promise being fulfilled in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that he has made a wrong decision.
Initially trailing in the leadership stakes to David Davis, he made the tactical decision to pander to the extreme eurosceptics in his party as a way of shoring up his right flank in the face of possible attack from the neo-Reaganite and Bush apologist, Liam Fox who had also entered the Tory leadership contest.
Under pressure from an obscure collection of the mad, bad and sad more extreme Conservative MEPs, he pandered to their prejudices and promised to withdraw from the main centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, the European Peoples' Party, because it was, allegedly, too 'federalist', code for 'not being anti-EU enough'. As far back as three and a half years ago it was apparent to those on the left in Europe that Cameron was already making a disastrous choice.
Tribune's 28 April 2006 issue (entitled Chameleon Cameron and his fellow reptiles) was one of the first to neatly exposed Cameron's allies and warned of the danger of associating with them. Nicolas Watt, the then Europe Editor of the Guardian; did an expose piece the following week, laying out how extreme Cameron's future allies really are. Toby Helm in the Observer last Sunday (October 13) reiterates why the Polish Law and Justice party are highly unsuitable allies for the Tories (probably not for the majority of Tory members but for Cameron's presentational-obsessed leadership clique).
Despite being warned as to the foolhardiness of his choice by the leaders of most European centre-right parties, including Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, Cameron ploughed on regardless impervious to constructive criticism from his natural allies. Following the European elections in June, William Hague and David Cameron made good on their promise and set up his new EU-wide group
Even after, fulfilling the promise he recklessly made, he appears to still not only be happy to live with the consequences, but he allows senior Conservative figures to defend the decision to allow his party to be aligned with Nazi sympathisers, homophobes, climate change deniers and anti-Semites in the European Parliament as part of the newly founded European Reformist and Conservatives group; whose midwives were William Hague and the bumptious Tory spokesperson on Europe, Mark Francois..
The Polish Law and Justice party (or if you prefer, the Union of Polish gay-bashers and holocaust revisionists) and the Latvian for Fatherland and Freedom parties ( or the Latvian Coalition for Peace through Waffen-SS security) are reprehensible examples of right-wing idiocy run wild and now given a veneer of democratic legitimacy by being aligned to the UK Conservatives.
Roberts Zile, the Latvian chairman of the For Fatherland and Freedom party and a Latvian MEP, cannot make any excuses for his party's close links with Waffen SS veterans. Each year on March 16, veterans of the Latvian Legion of the SS march to commemorate their fallen Kameraden. March 16 is no anniversary of Latvian democracy or benign nationalism; it is the anniversary of both brigades of the Latvian Waffen SS fighting together under the banner of the Latvian legion in 1944.
Although the Latvian brigades were to become reliant on conscription (some of it forced), its founding members were virulent anti-Semites who took the lead in the slaying of the entire Jewish population of Latvia. Members of the infamous Arajs SonderKommando, formerly Latvian Auxiliary Police, for example, alone killed over 26000 Jews in Latvia (out of a total population of 60,000) after the German invasion of Latvia and the capture of its capital, Riga. It should be noted that more Latvian Jews were killed by local anti-Semites than by the invading Germans, whose bestial Einsatzgruppen where particularly grateful of the assistance. The Arajs SonderKommando grew to 1500 men and with other home-grown murderous groups formed the core and philosophy of the Latvian SS, being its founding volunteers.
The vile Fatherland for Freedom party, to its eternal shame, are one of the very few democratic parties in Latvia that still give the Waffen SS veterans in Latvia a veneer of political respectability. The Latvian Waffen SS were also guilty of a war crime against Polish troops when they murdered 32 of them by tying them up with barbed wire and burning them alive in a Church. This in no way can be explained away as a fight against Soviet aggression which is the modern-day excuse for the actions of the Latvian SS.
This goes to the very core of Cameron and Hague's judgement on this matter, they are willing to associate with a party that sees nothing wrong in commemorating the Latvian Waffen SS whose founding members were virulently murderous total believers in the Final Solution and shared all aspects of the Nazi's extreme nationalistic theories. Current day apologists for the For Fatherland and Freedom party are sailing very close to the wind when they excuse such parties by trying to emphasise their anti-Soviet rather than their pro-Nazi sympathies, as if the two were mutually exclusive.
Michael Kaminski, the Polish leader of the Law and Justice MEPs in the European Parliament (and thanks to the support of Cameron's Conservative MEPs the leader of ERC group) is clearly a holocaust apologist. In that he argues that the example of one Polish village (Jebwabne) that rounded up all the Jews who lived in the village and murdered them by burning them all alive does not have the moral equivalency of German Nazis when they were murdering Jews. For those villagers who murdered the Jews of Jebwabne and the Jewish victims themselves this was a total holocaust. He has refused to apologise for such actions instead excusing such actions as being the over zealous actions of Polish patriots who were suspicious of their Jewish neighbours loyalty to the Polish state.
Cameron's other main ally in his European cabal is the Czech ODS party. Whose most prominent member is the Czech president Vaclav Klaus an arch-climate change denier and unreconstructed Thatcherite who often states that the European Union contains some of the worst aspects of the old Soviet Union.
Let's be clear, this motley collection of obscure eastern European right-wing parties and mainly virulently eurosceptic Conservative Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) is an obnoxious amalgam of some of the most bad and mad political scum that mask there extreme views behind the slightly less extreme neo-conservative views as espoused by right-wing think tanks mainly based in Washington DC.
Both David Cameron and his shadow foreign secretary (and arch-Atlanticist) William Hague, shoulder a great deal of responsibility for the disastrous choice made. Hague himself took well over two years trying to find stitch together a coherent coalition of interests in the European Parliament
Yet the so-called anointed caring and compassionate modern-day Tories still make excuses for their Latvian and Polish Kameraden especially and continue to work closely with them in Brussels. Eric Pickles, the chairman of the Conservative Party even went so far in defending the Latvian for Freedom and Fatherland Party links with the Latvian Waffen SS legion by explaining that the Latvian veterans had only been following orders. Sometimes modern politics is truly beyond satire.