Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-03-Speech-4-094"
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"en.20000203.2.4-094"2
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"“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
It is with these phrases that Albert Camus, at the close of the long allegorical novel describing the difficult fight of the citizens of the town of Oran against the plague, reminds us, at the close of the Second World War, that the fight against Nazism, “the brown plague” as it was termed at the time, could not enjoy a definitive victory. That because racial hatred, xenophobic violence, fear and rejection of what is different, have deep roots in all that is basest in humanity, they may re-emerge at any moment and take over any group of human beings.
In this light, the events we are seeing in Austria must be seen as tragic. For the first time since the Second World War, a party which is openly pro-Nazi, racist and xenophobic has gained access to power in a European country. Confronted with this threat, which carries with it the negation of the very idea which lies at the heart of the construction of Europe, nothing must deter us: not the legal quibbling about what the treaty does or does not permit, not the legitimate questions about the right to intervene, not the derisory respect for formal democracy, and, above all, not the feeling of powerlessness which grips us in the face of an event which we reject with all the force of our convictions but which we are powerless to control.
As the representative for a French overseas department, the island of Réunion, a land of racial and ethnic intermixing, where the population has been forged in the course of the last three centuries by the successive contributions of Europeans, blacks from Africa or Madagascar, enlisted men from India or Pakistan, or even Chinese, every day I experience the profound truth of the remark by Saint-Exupéry, “In being different to me, you are not doing me harm, brother, but enriching me!” This human diversity is our main sources of wealth, and this is the reason why it is my duty to track down and to condemn anything which may be harmful to it, wherever it may exist.
For all these reasons I voted most decidedly in favour of the resolution before this House on the formation of the government in Austria."@en1
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