New Europe Stands With the USA...

January 30, 2003

... though I have a hard time thinking of Spain and Portugal as "New." This open letter from Jose Mar�a Aznar, Jose-Manuel Dur�o Barroso, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, Peter Medgyessy, Leszek Miller and Anders Fogh Rasmussen credits the USA with helping to set Europe "free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and communism." The signatories, 3.5 of whom hail from nations with fascist histories, do not mention "fascism," which was also a form of tyranny and arguably encompasses Nazism. You may recall a similar ellipsis in President Bush's September 2001 speech, in which the phrase "path of Fascism and Nazism and imperial Communism" was changed—out of concern for offending the Russians—to "path of Fascism and Nazism and totalitarianism." Mentioning communism does not present the same problem here, since Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia all had that misfortune imposed on them by outsiders.