Tell Lies; Never Admit they are Lies; and be Singleminded...

The rise of Nationalist parties across Europe in the wake of the financial crisis and the ongoing high levels of unemployment follows a familiar pattern which in the not-so-distant past led to the rise of fascism and eventually war.

Whereas I don't believe we are on the eve of another continental European war, I do believe that we could quite quickly find ourselves in the midst of a nationalist nightmare.

In my youth there was a television commercial for a financial/insurance company whose motto was "Simple answers to complex questions".  It was very catchy.  And it was also patently untrue.  Complex questions, or problems, can't be solved with simple binary answers in most cases, because they can't capture the intricacies of the problem and more often then not solve one problem and create two new ones.

It is very easy to blame unemployment on globalism and immigration.  It is one step away from blaming it on domestic pariahs as well as long as one is looking for explanations which make for good soundbites and reverberate with those sections of the populations easily swayed by populist propaganda. 

And let's not be coy-propaganda is used to get results-it doesn't have to be based on truth-it just has to be effective. 

So it is half truths, quarter truths, with which these parties will make headway in future elections. 

What is truly disturbing is that the mainstream politicians have felt it necessary to pander to some of the nationalist propaganda thus opening the door to respectability.  What they have really done is demonstrated that their interests are not in making their countries, and by extension Europe a better place, but rather that their interests are actually in staying in power, regardless of the platform.

It is the failure of the mainstream parties to expose the fallacies of the nationalist rhetoric and to work with their electorates to forge a better future which has opened this door. 

It will take a massive effort to combat it, and I fear the train might have already left the station.