As survivors and the descendants march at Auschwitz today for Holocaust Remembrance Day, election results yesterday in nearby Hungary, where the far-right Jobbik party earned 16.7 percent of the vote, evoked memories of that time in a very different way: 

Jobbik’s leader, Gabor Vona, 32, is a former history teacher who tapped into a growing nationalism fanned by economic hardship. He is a founding member of the Magyar Garda, an association whose uniforms are reminiscent of those worn by the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s wartime Nazi party. The group, which was outlawed last year but has not disbanded, has revived dark memories of World War II, when Jews and Roma were deported to concentration camps.

Analysts said Jobbik’s growing popularity illustrates how the economic crisis was helping to fuel a regional backlash against minorities, as people look for someone to blame. In Hungary, at least five Roma have been killed in the past two years and Roma leaders have counted about 30 firebomb attacks against their people’s homes.

Hungary’s Jewish population of nearly 100,000 has also been one of its targets, with Jobbik claiming that “foreign speculators,” including Israel, want to control the country. A recent edition of the party magazine showed a statue of St. Gellert — an 11th-century martyred bishop — holding a menorah instead of a cross. “Is this what you want?” it asked.

Pope Benedict's personal preacher Father Raniero Cantalamessa also had the Holocaust on the mind last week when he compared attacks on the church over the ongoing sex abuse scandal to the "collective violence" inflicted on Jews by the Nazis. A retired Italian bishop also reportedly blamed the scandal on "Zionists," though he has denied making the comments. 

While it's certainly not fair to say sentiments like these are widespread, these incidents provide a disturbing contemporary backdrop to a day of historical commemoration. 

A Greek man has taken umbrage over the use of his face on Swedish containers of Turkish yoghurt. The offended party is not interested in reconciliation, either: he has sued Lindahls, the dairy company that puts out the item, for almost $7 million.

The man only found out his moustachioed face featured on the containers of Turkisk Yoghurt made by Lindahls when a friend living in Stockholm told him.

Athanasios Varzanakos told Swedish Radio his friend "was annoyed and asked how it was possible" when informed.

Lindahls claims to have bought the image legitimately from a photo agency. Hopefully, this won't have too much impact on the ongoing rapprochement between Greek and Turkish Cyprus.

The Greek government's budgetary woes are well known by this point, but a newly-released Flash Eurobarometer survey from last year reveals a different side of the financial crisis:

Greece's latest deficit-cutting measures may help the country escape its debt crisis, but higher taxes and wage cuts will be a hardship for many Greek citizens, who already are the most likely in Europe to report problems paying their bills.

Fully fifty-seven percent of Greeks answered that they are "Constantly struggling and have fallen behind with some/many bills." This number is twelve percent higher than the three runners-up, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Cyprus. Furthermore, forty-three percent of Greeks claimed that though they had no problems paying bills in 2008, they had begun having problems in 2009 and expected them to continue in 2010 -- a number also twelve percent higher than the E.U. average of 31 percent.

It looks like this big, fat Greek economic collapse will last well into the future.

In the latest development in the Armenian genocide resolution row, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted at expelling thousands of Armenians from the country. The threat was made as a result of genocide resolutions progressing in the U.S. Congress and Swedish parliament.

About 100,000 undocumented Armenians live in Turkey (and another 70,000 legal residents), many performing menial work.

Obviously Erdogan's words aren't helpful (and would seem particularly crass given the issue), but they're nothing new. Aris Nalci, editor at Agos, a Turkish-Armenian weekly, downplayed the remarks:

We are not taking it as a serious threat.

Checking the scorecard, the impact of the committee vote is now a threat to the use of Incirlik Air base, a crucial link in the supply train to Iraq; damaging the peace process and rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia; and now a warning that tens of thousands of poor, migrant Armenians might get deported.

Does the foreign affairs committee still think it was worth it?

The spiraling child sex abuse in the European Catholic church keeps getting closer and closer to Pope Benedict XVI himself:

The man, identified only as H., was allowed to stay in a vicarage while undergoing therapy — a decision in which then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger was involved, the statement said. It said officials believe it was known the therapy was related to suspected "sexual relations with boys." However, it says a lower-ranking official — vicar general Gerhard Gruber — then allowed him to help in pastoral work in Munich.

The archdiocese says there were no accusations against the chaplain relating to his February 1980 to August 1982 spell in Munich. However, he was convicted of sexually abusing minors during a stint in nearby Grafing between September 1982 and 1985.

The church continues to maintain that Benedict was unaware of the decision to reassign the priest: 

Gruber told The Associated Press by telephone Friday that he was in sole charge of staffing decisions. "Personnel matters were delegated," Gruber said. "I decided that on my own."

Gruber also said Benedict would not have been aware of his decision because the case load was too big. "You have to know that we had some 1,000 priests in the diocese at the time," Gruber said. "The cardinal could not deal with everything, he had to rely on his vicar general."

Gruber's statement nominally protects Benedict but also implies that the reassigning of a priest suspected of sexually molesting children was such a non-issue that if fell under the general category of "personnel matters" to be handled by a lower-ranking official. It also implies that Benedict knew about the priest's case but didn't consider it worth following up. 

In any event, even if Benedict had no idea what was happening, he should still take responsibility for the decisions of subordinates under his command. If it's true for the CEO of Toyota, it should at least be true for the spiritual leader of millions of people.

Sex abuse scandals have rocked the catholic communities in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland in recent months. Patsy Mcgarry of the Irish Times wrote recently for FP about how this has undermined Catholic institutions in Ireland. 

Earlier today, former U.S. President George W. Bush called British conservative leader David Cameron to try to convince him to urge his allies in the Northern Irish Ulster Unionist party to support a deal that would give the government in Belfast control over police.

As one source told the Guardian, "This is the most active thing George W Bush has done in his post-presidency period." Declan Kelly , the U.S. economic envoy to Northern Ireland aparrently asked Bush to make the call after the White House became increasingly concerned over Belfast's inability to strike a deal. 

It might seem odd that Bush would choose break his radio silence on Northern Ireland, an issue on which his track record isn't well known. But as the Guardian's Henry Macdonald writes, his role in the peace process is more substantial than many realize: 

Nationalist Ireland has enjoyed a love affair with former US president Bill Clinton since the earliest days of the search for peace in Northern Ireland. His high profile post-ceasefire visits to Belfast were meant to set the seal on the process.

However, it was arguably his successor in the White House, George Bush, who drove the political process forward to the once unthinkable scenario of the Democratic Unionists sharing power with Sinn Féin.

The deal that led to power sharing between the DUP and Sinn Féin was sealed at the St Andrews negotiations in 2006. Central to that deal was Sinn Féin agreeing to drop its historic opposition to the police in Northern Ireland - a key DUP precondition before entering government with the republican party.

The key figure in the Americans persuading the DUP and Sinn Féin to come together was Bush's special envoy to Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss. Reiss, in the summer of 2006, won the confidence of the DUP by insisting Bush's ban on Sinn Féin raising funds in North America would remain in place.

Bush's intervention doesn't seem to have had much effect. The Unionists are still opposed to the deal. But coming after Obama sent Bush, along with Bill Clinton, on a mission to Haiti in January, it does seem like something of an olive branch to the former president. It's hard to imagine there are too many international constituencies that are looking forward to receiving a call from Bush -- Ulster Unionists, Kosovar nationalists, the Georgian government -- but there's no reason not to enlist his services when they may be of help.  

Daniel Charbonnier, co-founder of Minds in Motion, an international hospitality advisory and services company, has recently partnered with concept artists Frank and Patrik Riklin to transform the 'Zero-Star Hotel' into a worldwide business opportunity. The 'Zero Star Hotel' is an art installation, a Swiss nuclear bunker converted into an 'eco-luxury' hotel that can host 14 guests in a configuration of 6 single beds and 4 double beds. Larger groups can also be accommodated in an adjacent room highlighting original military-style bunk-beds.

The Controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders is feeling pretty confident after his freedom party gained ground in local elections, seeting the stage for parliamentary elecitons in June: 

"Today Almere and The Hague, tomorrow the whole of the Netherlands. This is our springboard for success in parliamentary elections," Wilders said as the returns came in.

"We're going to take the Netherlands back from the leftist elite that coddles criminals and supports Islamization," said Wilders, who campaigned in Almere for banning Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public.

On Friday Wilder will travel to Britain -- from which he was banned last year -- to show his anti-Islam film Fitna in parliament at the invitation of the U.K. independence party. He also showed his film at the Capitol last year at the invitation of Sen. Jon Kyl.

The efforts to shut Wilders up -- prosecuting him for hate speech, banning him from traveling, not to mention the numerous death threats he's received -- have clearly not worked. Wilders has only used them to his advantage portraying himself as a free-speech martyr. As odious as opponents may find his views, Wilders clearly has a growing constituency and  mainstream Dutch politicians are going to have to find a way to defeat his arguments in the cout of public opinion, rather than criminal courts. He's not just a sideshow anymore.

Yesterday, the Greek government announced a spate of emergency austerity measures, designed to help the country close its yawning budget gap. Half are new taxes, and half are spending cuts, including:

• Hiking the VAT from 19 percent to 21 percent (worth 1.3 billion euros)
• One-off corporate tax (1 billion)
• Cutting "holiday bonuses" by 30 percent (740 million)
• 2 percent supplemental gas tax (450 million)
• Freeze on state pensions (450 million)
• Reducing bonuses and pay by 7  percent for public sector employees (360 million)
• 2 percent supplemental cigarette tax (300 million)
• Supplemental electricity tax (250 million)
• One-off tax on vacation homes and oversized properties (200 million)
• Cuts to pension subsidies (150 million)
• Supplemental tax on luxury goods, e.g. yachts and cars worth more than 35,000 euros (100 million)

Other measures include: an additional 1 percent tax on income over 100,000 euros, reducing government overtime hours by 30 percent, cutting public-sector benefits 10 percent, and taxing the commercial activities of churches. And it's still not quite enough -- Greece needs an additional bailout to help it pay off debt due this spring. 

Last weekend, the Dutch coalition government, headed by Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, fell apart. The Labor Party wanted all of the Netherlands’ troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2010; the Christian Democrats wanted to agree to a NATO request to extend their stay. Labor pulled out, and now Balkenende needs to scramble to create a new government. It’s all a bit less dramatic than it sounds; Balkenende’s last three coalitions governments disintegrated as well.

But it’s ginned up some very dramatic bellowing from across the pond. None less than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lamented the Dutch pull-out (the Orwellian New York Times headline, sadly now changed, read "Gates Calls Europe Anti-War Mood Danger to Peace").

The real stick the U.S. and NATO seem ready to use to punish the Dutch? Ejecting them from the G-20. Granted, it sounds a bit wet noodle-ish. But the Dutch have tried to get into the G-20 for years, and won their observer status by being strong international partners during the financial crisis. It's going to smart.

Two weeks ago, European leaders tapped Germany to lead a bailout of Greece. Since then -- sturm und drang and chaos. Germans are infuriated over everything from Greece's hiring of Wall Street firms to hide its debt to the country's retirement age (in Germany, 67, in Greece, 61). In turn, Greeks have accused German papers of racism and western European leaders of paternalism.

Yesterday, a 60,000-person strike shut down Athens and turned violent, Theodoros Pangalos, the deputy prime minister of Greece, brought history into it. In an interview with BBC radio, he invoked the 1941 Nazi invasion of Greece, which caused an estimated 300,000 deaths:

[The Nazis] took away the Greek gold that was at the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back. This is an issue that has to be faced sometime in the future. I don't say they have to give back the money necessarily but they have at least to say "thanks."And they shouldn't complain so much about stealing and not being very specific about economic dealings.

All in all, I can't see anyone benefiting from this diplomatic low blow. The Greeks don't want German help, and the Germans don't want to have to give it to them. But, the alternative is mass unemployment and emigration, deep cuts to social services, and a prolonged depression. As I understand it, even moderate austerity measures combined with very high taxes on the rich, the Greek populist proposal, simply will not work. And, just as an aside, I'll go ahead and guess that Angela Merkel saying "Thanks for the gold!" would not go down well in Athens at all.

How much does it matter that the Netherlands and other European countries appear to have little interest in continuing the war in Afghanistan -- or fighting wars in general? Quite a bit, says Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats. 

But in a piece in Foreign Policy's new print magazine, Andrew Bacevich takes a different view, arguing that it makes little sense to reast NATO -- a remnant of the Cold War -- as an American-led instrument of power projection. Europeans should focus on their own problems:

This doesn't mean that NATO is without value. It does suggest that relying on the alliance to sustain a protracted counterinsurgency aimed at dragging Afghans kicking and screaming into modernity makes about as much sense as expecting the "war on drugs" to curb the world's appetite for various banned substances. It's not going to happen.

If NATO has a future, it will find that future back where the alliance began: in Europe. NATO's founding mission of guaranteeing the security of European democracies has lost none of its relevance. Although the Soviet threat has vanished, Russia remains. And Russia, even if no longer a military superpower, does not exactly qualify as a status quo country. The Kremlin nurses grudges and complaints, not least of them stemming from NATO's own steady expansion eastward.

So let NATO attend to this new (or residual) Russian problem. Present-day Europeans -- even Europeans with a pronounced aversion to war -- are fully capable of mounting the defenses necessary to deflect a much reduced Eastern threat. So why not have the citizens of France and Germany guarantee the territorial integrity of Poland and Lithuania, instead of fruitlessly demanding that Europeans take on responsibilities on the other side of the world that they can't and won't?

What do readers think?

This weekend, the New York Times reported that Greece, in the midst of a massive economic crisis, had none other than Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs help it keep its books in the black with some creative financial maneuvers, such as selling away the rights to future lottery earnings.

[Greece] engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels. Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November...a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills.

The story is a bit less fantastic than it seems at first blush. First, Felix Salmon notes, the world has known about the investment banks' advising the Greek government for the better part of a decade. In 2003, Nick Dunbar of Risk Magazine published a long piece on the giant swap deals Goldman was engineering for Athens.  

Second, Greece is hardly alone in papering over or effectively doctoring its stats. The New York Times article notes that Italy partakes in similar banker-confabulated deals and implies that others do too. France pulled a similar 9 billion euro debt maneuver, revealed in 2006. China cooks its books to boost its GDP numbers. Name any of a dozen developing nations (Zimbabwe springs to mind) and someone will have plausibly accused it of lying with statistics.

But, of course, Greece is no Zimbabwe. The ousted Greek government knew better than to amp up the creative accounting as its economy was tanking. It made a bad situation worse, imperiled Greek livelihoods, hurt its partners in the eurozone, and possibly even destabilized the euro itself.

What I can't figure out is how much the Eurocrats and eurozone finance ministers knew about these deals. The European Monetary Union has bureaucrats aplenty to keep track of the eurozone economies and prudential measures to prevent countries from over-extending themselves, debt-wise. Is the issue that they didn't know enough -- or that they didn't act?

Italy has now essentially banned talk shows on state broadcaster RAI from commenting on politics ahead of regional elections: 

The ruling PDL Party's majority on the parliamentary watchdog that oversees public broadcaster RAI forced through rules that mean the state broadcaster's most popular talk shows will have to scrap their political content – or face a transfer from mid-evening to graveyard shifts. Programmes such as Ballarò and Annozero, which have frequently held Mr Berlusconi to account for alleged sex scandals and even Mafia links, will be the main victims of the month-long clamp down that prompted accusations of censorship.

Political content will be allowed – but only if all 30 or so parties standing in the elections are represented on every show, which programme-makers said would make their formats unworkable.

The rules will apply from 28 February until 28 March, when the country's regional elections are held. Government

supporters said the rules were needed to ensure political neutrality during the election campaign.

Naturally, broadcasters owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset will not be effected by the rule. 

This joke of a law is the sort of thing one would expect out of Vladimir Putin's Russia or Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and makes one wonder if Berlusconi would be taken at all seriously as a democratic leader if he didn't happen to live in Western Europe. With his attempts to control Italy's media and judiciary, a trail of corruption charges involving 2,500 court hearings, and -- let's face it -- somewhat unbecoming personal behavior, Berlusconi is becoming an embarassment not just for Italy but for the European Union. 

Can the E.U. really be an international voice for democratic reform with one of its core members behaving like a tinpot dictator?