People who have forgotten more than I’ll ever know about bias will tell you that oftentimes, media bias is not so much about what gets reported (Ra^thergate being the rare exception), as what doesn’t get reported, or what gets buried in the fine print.

Take, for example, the recent regional elections in and around Berlin, Germany. By all accounts, the center-right and center-left parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, respectively, both fared poorly, while extremist parties on both ends of the spectrum did disturbingly well. On the one hand, the “Democratic” Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD), the bastard sons of the Nazi Party, garnered 9% of the vote in Saxony, nearly double the number they needed to send one crank to Parliament for everyone else to ignore. On the other, the Party of “Democratic” Socialism (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, or PDS), the former communist party that ruled East Germany with an iron fist for forty years, received a whopping 28% of the vote in Brandenburg.

Any fair-minded, freedom-loving soul should be troubled by both results. Communists and Nazis alike have wreaked havoc over the past century, both around the world and on German soil in particular. Thus, one can and should be very upset to see so many Germans voting for either party today. If one must differentiate between the two trends or decide which is “worse” than the other, one should be more upset about the recent gains of the PDS, for two reasons. For one thing, numbers don’t lie. For either party to get 9% is bad, but 28% is much worse. For another, while the historical link between the National Socialists (Nazis) and the NPD is a bit strained, the link between the PDS and the former ruling party in East Germany is not. Shortly after World War II, West Germany banned both the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) and the Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands). Both bans were, to a certain extent, exercises in futility, as legal clonesswiftly replaced both parties almost immediately. Once the National Socialists (NSDAP) were gone, the National “Democrats” quickly took their place, using a party platform that was just barely reformed enough to pass muster under the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany. The commie dodge was even more transparent than that, with the now-forbidden Communist Party of Germany (KPD) being swiftly replaced by the almost identically named German Communist Party (DKP). If that sounds like replacing the People’s Front of Judea with the Judean People’s Front, well, that’s because that’s just about what happened. Still, there was some purging of both parties in the process, as the new parties did have to adopt platforms that were not completely incompatiable with those of a functioning democracy, which both parties’ predecessors had eschewed.

But that was West German history. These latest elections were held in former East Germany, whose post-war history is completely different. There, too, the Nazi NSDAP was banned, of course, but the Communist KPD was not. Instead, the KPD forcibly merged the East German fragments of the Social Democratic Party into itself, creating what was for all practical purposes just a larger version of the former KPD. The resulting party, dubbed the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) ,went on to preside over what was easily one of the most repressive states of the East Bloc, second only to Nicolae Ceaucescu’s Romania. Not until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did the SED even pretend to reform itself or change its name to the present one, PDS, and that only to preserve a modicum of viability under the new democracy the SED-PDS had fought tooth and nail to prevent.

Short story long, the party that built the Berlin Wall and murdered its own citizens for attempting to escape has, for the first time in history, received more than a quarter of the vote in part of the same area that it once terrorized. At the same time, roughly a third of that number in another terroritory has voted for the descendant of the other party that caused so much suffering in and around Germany earlier in that same century. Based on this, the Sydney Morning-Herald reports:

Neo-Nazi surge in German poll awakens bitter memories

Translation: if a far right party (though some would dispute even the nomenclature) gets 9% of the vote, that’s a big deal. If a far left party gets 28%, no biggie.