Covid Futures: Austrian Green MPs Call Parliamentary Oversight by the Opposition 'Abuse' and 'Harassment'
Covid Futures: Austrian Green MPs Call Parliamentary Oversight by the Opposition 'Abuse' and 'Harassment'
Meet the New Bolsheviks--same as the old, but this time 'improved' with bio-tyrannical aspirations
Following on the heels of earlier reports this week concerning Covidistan’s Summer Madness (see here and here), I feel like informing you about a curious and very troubling, if expectable, twist of late.
As readers of these internet pages here know, there’s one parliamentary (systemic) opposition party, the Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei), which is the only major voice against the Covid mandates.
Sidenote: the other parliamentary parties are: the Social Democrats (really: New Labour), led by a trained physician, Dr. Rendi-Wager, their main platform by now is: Covid Hawkery with a Vengeance—and they are currently leading in the polls with some 31%. Then there’s the ÖVP, the fake-conservatives currently in power, assisted by the spineless, if power-mad Greens. Note that the ÖVP is poised to lose big (as in: half their voters from 2019 when then-leader Kurz scored some 38% of the vote). And, finally, the small libertarian-socially progressive (‘woke’) platform NEOS, or Neues Österreich (New Austria), which is, hilariously enough, mainly funded by one rich person, Peter Haselsteiner, who runs one of Eastern Europe’s largest construction firm (STRABAG), is notoriously close to most governments to win contracts for the (re)construction of large-scale infrastructure projects (think: motorways and railroad trunk lines). Some of the proceeds of these transactions are then funneled into these kinds of political pet projects…NEOS is currently the junior partner of the SPÖ in Vienna, the Greens are doing so on the federal level, and not even the Lord Voldemort party of yesteryear, the Freedom Party, is scorned, as their joint rule in Upper Austria indicates. In short: members of the political caste are perfectly fine with each other, while their opponents are—we the people.
While I commend the FPÖ’s stance, it’s also quite ambiguous, as there are many indications that the leadership of the Freedom Party is doing so not because of convictions, but for political reasons. I have been told so by a long-term ‘insider’ who, while no longer anywhere near the inner circles of the Freedom Party (as he was some 20-odd years ago), but who explained that Chairman ‘Kickl does so to score points’.
What is the Freedom Party?
Be that as it may, the Freedom Party is a curious admixture of mainly two contradictory ‘wings’, or camps: the right-wing, arch-conservative yet anti-clerical Burschenschafter (student associations), many of which have ‘fluid’ boundaries to the ‘old right’, i.e., the pro-German 5-10% of yesteryear. On the other hand, there’s also a sizable, if smaller, camp of ‘liberals’, by which is meant late 19th-century progressives. Surely, this characterisation is quite simplified, but the fact of the matter remains that the current leadership of the Freedom Party is closer to the Burschenschafter wing than to the other side of this particular divide, yet their anti-mandate stance, however politically motivated and phony, must be commended as they are the only outspoken voice for medical freedom and civil liberties that currently remain in parliament.
And as such, I have repeatedly come out in favour of their anti-mandate and pro-liberties stance, not so much because I subscribe to their particular brand of politics (I’m an issues person, not a party follower), but because I think they are on the right side of history on this one.
Freedom from Covid Tyranny
The main public face of the Freedom Party’s actions is one Gerald Hauser, an intrepid MP from the Tyrol, who is leading the charge by repeatedly using the constitutional authority of his office as a representative to question the federal government over their ill-conceived Covid mandates.
Why would he do that? Guess what: Mr. Hauser, according to an interview earlier this year (whose link I cannot find again right now), got ‘vaccinated’ and experienced adverse reactions. He and his team then began to question the government in parliament, which resulted, in a number of disclosures on the implementation of the Nuremberg Code and its likely consequences for those physicians who break the law, as the response by Minister of Justice Alma Zadić (Greens) shows:
MP Hauser also obtained information from Minister of Health and Human Services Johannes Rauch (Greens) on the government’s assent to the pending WHO power grab:
And, earlier this month, another one of MP Hauser’s enquiries was the reason behind the Mr. Rauch ‘informing’ the public that the government will throw the country’s physicians under the bus before accepting its own complicity for the fallout of the Covid mandates:
Meet the Bolshevik Shock Troops in Legacy Media
And now—MP Hauser is under ‘fierce’ attack from entirely expectable quarters: the Greens’ brown-nosing camp followers over at Der Standard. I shall translate a longish ‘guest contribution’ by one Christian Kreil, which appeared on 13 July 2022 as well as one more op-ed below.
Because MP Hauser has become such a pain in the proverbial, and because Der Standard is such a disgusting purveyor of Covid hawkery, I shall do so with some gusto, mainly to indicate the rapid decay of criticism of the parliamentary enquiries that are based on constitutional provisions so that MPs can, in fact, hold the government to account.
None of these legal technicalities play any role for Mr. Kreil whose beef with MP Hauser reads as follows (my emphases):
In this guest blog post, Christian Kreil describes how a Freedom Party mandatary serves conspiracy theory narratives on Corona, the Ukraine war, and other topics.
Does it also send you shivers down your spine when you hear about events with these names: ‘Dark Winter’, ‘Atlantic Storm’, and ‘SPARS Pandemic’? We suspect that these are not cozy jazz festivals in the Waldviertel [one of Lower Austria’s regions]. One person who gets to the bottom of such things and goes where it hurts is Freedom Party MP Gerald Hauser. In his current enquiry to the President of the National Council, Wolfgang Sobotka (ÖVP), Hauser wants to know which Austrians were involved in these ‘pandemic planning games’…
Because of his rather mediocre wit and the bumbling conspiracy-peddling in his enquiry, one is tempted to call Hauser a naïve backbencher who falls for perfidious agitators. Yet, that is only half the truth. Hauser studied business education, he knows how scientific consensus is formed, and how to untangle media tangles of opinion and distinguish facts from fakes. But that is not Hauser’s agenda. Hauser does not fall for fakes and conspiracy chatter, he uses them in his political work. Hauser agitates in parliament and on the streets with content from dubious sources.
Hauser suggests that unspecified ‘elites’ had planned and rehearsed the dramaturgy of the Covid pandemic years before the outbreak of the unspeakable virus. Mr. Hauser could of course have looked at the websites (here, here, and here) set up by the obviously not at-all secret elites on the obviously not at-all clandestine planning games and leafed through the minutes and lists of participants. But then the fun of harassing parliament would only be half as great and he would not be able to ask Mr. Sobotka such questions in his motion: ‘Are you aware that the Corona pandemic has been prepared by the elites for years?’…
Hauser is educated enough to know that the planning games he cites, such as ‘Dark Winter’, are neither secret nor extraordinary nor threatening. All the information about them is easy to find and it is open to everyone. But Hauser is also cunning enough to supply his followers [die Szene, which conveys allusions of borderline illegitimacy and pathological impairments in German] with cryptic information to suit their liking. Hauser makes sure that dubious content from equally dubious media outlets enters public discussions—and then revels in the reporting. The right-wing illustrated magazine Wochenblick, one of the local central organs of conspiracy theory-peddling and antivaxxer sentiment, writes enthusiastically: ‘Gerald Hauser‘s enquiry into the pandemic planning games shakes up the mainstream.’ 20 years of pandemic preparation had been meticulously listed by the ‘courageous politician’ Hauser.
The milieu [another one of these loaded terms, which is used in the same vein as Szene above] applauds. For this, Hauser, the university graduate, obviously accepts making himself ridiculous with his attacks on honest discourse, science, and facts. However, it is not a laughing matter.
I think this speaks mainly for himself, but I wish to highlight merely two major items: first of all, the author who penned this piece, Christian Kreil, slanders Gerald Hauser, an elected (ahem) representative of a parliamentary party, for actually doing what MPs are not only ‘entitled’ to do—holding government to account by questioning them with what, in US parlance, would be akin to subpoena powers, i.e., cabinet officials *must* answer MPs’ enquiries. And for executing the powers vested into the office of a representative, Mr. Hauser’s work is slandered by Mr. Kreil as ‘the fun of harassing parliament’ (my emphasis). Whatever the merits of Mr. Hauser’s enquiries and his motives behind them, I wish to invite you to ponder the following: how low can one sink to publicly call out a representative asking questions—esp. those that the government isn’t asked about by their brown-nosing camp followers in legacy media, such as Der Standard—as ‘harassing parliament’?
That said, you’re probably asking yourself: who is this Mr. Kreil anyways? Well, Der Standard refers to him—and I kid you not—as ‘someone who blogs for three years on esotericism, conspiracy theories, and pseudo-medicine’ (that is, ‘alternative medicine’). While the seemingly spineless editors over at Der Standard didn’t link to his blog—gee, I wonder why…—I do: here’s the link, and here’s his website. It’s a veritable rabbit hole, but basically Mr. Kreil, a trained anthropologist, is a PR / spin advisor who, as recently as April 2019 was portrayed glowingly by none other than Jonas Vogt in (you probably guessed it) Der Standard (if you have the stomach for it: here’s the link), and I shall provide you with a brief explanation as to where Mr. Kreil’s vitriol comes from. You see, Mr. Kreis was trained (my emphases)
At [the University of] Vienna’s Department of Ethnology, now the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology, where there were two schools of though in the 1980s: a strictly materialist-Marxist one and one fascinated by the esoteric, voodoo, and shamans. ‘This preference for the spiritual soon annoyed me massively’, says Kreil. His scepticism towards esotericism grew more and more pronounced during his years of study and was also nourished by his strictly materialistic professors…
Guess what else is in the portrait? (My emphases)
His enemies are not the believers, but the profiteers who want to take the money out of their pockets…
After [graduation from the U of Vienna in the early 1990s], Kreil’s life does not run in a straight line and is repeatedly characterised by detours. He does a lot and doesn’t stay anywhere for a long time…
Kreil started blogging four years ago [2015], and at the beginning of 2018 his blog moved to Der Standard, signifying a bit of a homecoming: his first journalistic publication was an Op-ed in these pages, published on 6 May 1993…
Kreil is not a radical, he has a thoroughly differentiated approach to esotericism and to the people who enjoy it [apparently, not to everyone’s individualism, as the above hit-piece on MP Hauser shows]…
‘The scientific method is not perfect, but it is the only way to explain the world.’ And it must be defended against all attacks.
The ‘homecoming’ of someone trained ‘by strictly materialistic professors’ is quite telling about the inner self of Der Standard, eh?
I personally find the calling out of Mr. Hauser’s questioning—being sceptical of established issues is, I’d argue, the very essence of ‘science’, but I digress—hilariously stupid. Then again, what is there to expect from a devout Marxist whose contempt for the deplorables, antivaxxers, and the like drips from every line of his piece?
You know, this is so absurd, and I’d say that a hit piece by a blogger of such ideological bent and qualities shouldn’t be highlighted. It’s simply too stupid to consider relevant.
True Colours: Green MPs Call Fellow MPs Actions ‘Harassment’ and ‘Malpractice’
But the relevancy of the piece, I’d argue, is this: Der Standard’s editorial team positioned Mr. Kreils’s otherwise quite obscure blog rather prominently on display on 13 July 2022.
And now we also get to learn as to why: on the very same day the Committee of Public Safety stood ready to end the quarantine impositions (26 July 2022), Green MPs Eva Blimlinger and Ralph Schallmeiner (bios here and here, respectively, courtesy of the Nationalrat’s website) were given a prominently displayed platform—their op-ed went live at 6 a.m. and remained on the top of their website for hours—to disparage their fellow MP (as always, emphases mine).
FPÖ Enquiries: An Abuse of Democracy
Parliamentary Enquiries are an Important Instrument of Control. However, when a Party Relies on Fake News and Disinformation, this Right is Ridiculed.
In an op-ed, Green MPs Eva Blimlinger and Ralph Schallmeiner vent their frustration about a parliamentary enquiry by the Freedom Party. In their view, no answers can be provided, because democracy.
Our elegant federal constitution regulates, among other things, the rights of members of Parliament—of both the National Council and the Federal Council—vis-à-vis the federal government. These include the right to scrutinise the management of the federal government, to question [with de facto subpoena powers, i.e., cabinet officials must answer these enquiries] the government and to demand all relevant information. This is a central democratic instrument, especially for the opposition—but by no means only for them—to be able to exercise one of the core tasks of parliament, namely oversight. The questions and answers are public, and everyone can see how the state—the legislature and the executive—acts.
[note the absence of the judiciary from the MPs understanding of ‘the state’]
How this can happen is regulated in parliamentary procedures [Geschäftsordnung]. There are urgent questions in the sessions of the Nationalrat [the almost all-powerful ‘lower’ chamber], where ministers have to answer questions, oral questions that are asked in open session or during theme-specific hours [Fragestunden] that take place regularly at the beginning of a plenary session week. And then there is the possibility of written questions to members of the Federal Government, but also to the President of the Parliament.
[Why, you might ask? Well, the President of the Parliament is, constitutionally speaking, the second highest-ranking public official in Austria, right below the President and, importantly, technically ranked before the federal chancellor; see the Ministry of Truth™ on this here]
A Mockery of Science
In July 2022, several MPs of the FPÖ submitted a written enquiry to the President of the National Council, Wolfgang Sobotka [ÖVP], entitled, ‘Concerning the Preparation of the Pandemic’. As a page-long introduction, a summary of the contents of Thomas Röper’s work Inside Corona precedes the question. The person named here has been running the blog Anti-Spiegel [as many readers know, Mr. Röper’s independent journalism is a good thing; he’s based in St Petersburg, Russia, and a pain in the proverbial of legacy media ever] since 2018, is ‘loyal to the Kremlin’ and a pro-Russian propagandist and a master of spreading false allegations, disinformation, conspiracy narratives, and ideologies in various fields, including Covid. And, how could it be otherwise, he does not shy away from anti-Semitic ciphers and codes, as they are almost fundamental concepts of all these conspiracy narrative media disseminations.
Politicians—and of course all other people—should therefore, as they say in Viennese, ‘not even bother to acknowledge the existence’ (net amal anstreifen) of people and publications that make a mockery of science and research, whose interest is to undermine democracy with fake news, whose interest is to divide society, and who take anti-Semitism for granted. Not so the FPÖ enquiry, whose authors—deriving from Röper’s absurd representations—address their 25 questions and sub-questions to the President of Parliament.
Disinformation and Fake News
The central notion [of Mr. Röper’s book] is that the Corona pandemic ‘has been prepared for years by the elites’, a common narrative by those who suspect a worldwide conspiratorial, self-evident Jewish network that is ultimately working on the downfall of the West and the establishment of an ‘eco-dictatorship’ [gee, I wonder where people would get that idea…]. Thus follows one nonsensical question after another, always assuming that the pandemic was prepared long ago, of course by dark forces. And then there is the question of how ‘these findings will be taken into account in your decisions on Corona measures in the future’. Disinformation and fake news are simply not findings, they are simply put into the world for the most diverse motives—often and very often in order to delegitimise democratic states.
Of course, the FPÖ wants to make it clear once again that everything was wrong in the pandemic, especially in terms of healthcare: ‘these wrong decisions are to be blamed on the governments’. A horse de-wormer, whose use the FPÖ has propagated, certainly does not protect from, or help against, Covid, as people are not horses.
[Line break inserted, as this is too absurd not too comment on this right here: it’s one thing to assert this and that, as in the above paragraph, but after hectoring fellow MPs for spreading ‘disinformation and fake news’ while, apparently, failing to even begin to comprehend that there’s no such thing as ‘a horse de-wormer’, not because of Ivermectin’s qualities or anything, but because pharmaceutical products aren’t designed for animals, they are designed for humans and used in veterinary science because animals don’t have human rights and can’t object, or sue, for malpractice. It’s plain to see that the two Green MPs are not only rank hypocrites but, perhaps hilariously so, calling the FPÖ out for spreading ‘unsourced’ information while—doing exactly the same thing. On Ivermectin, please understand that I’m not a medical doctor—and neither are these two Green MPs—hence this is not medical advice, for which the concerned reader may or may not turn to experts, such as Dr. Pierry Kory (listen to an interview here) of Dr. Peter McCullough’s podcasts. Back to the op-ed.]
And if the governments are supposed to be to blame, since they could have prepared themselves because the pandemic had been planned for decades, then it remains completely puzzling why this question is addressed to the President of the National Council, because the President of Parliament is not part of the government [see the above comment regarding the order of precedence]. What’s more, then there are the questions as to whether members of parliament or former members—there are no female forms in the FPÖ, because gender mainstreaming should be abolished—were involved in some kind of planning games in the USA and took part.
Clear Abuse [Missbrauch]
As is written so well in the Parliamentary Procedure [Geschäftsordnung]: ‘The motioned—i.e., in this case, the President of the National Council—must provide answers in writing. If it is not possible for the respondent to provide the requested information, he or she must provide a justification for this in the reply.’ The justification for not being able to provide the information must therefore be: no information can be provided here, because of democratic policy [whatever that means] and because the request itself is based on false reports and disinformation. Questions like these are an abuse of parliamentary democracy, have nothing to do with the constitutionally guaranteed right of interpellation or the right to ask questions, for they merely make a mockery of these rights.
Bottom Lines: Back to the Past
When I first saw the esotericism blogger’s posting, I thought ‘oh my, WTF’, and moved on quickly. It was, simply put, too stupid to ponder.
Yet, when I saw two Green MPs—remember: they are in the federal government and, due to their grip on the Health (and Human Services) Ministry since early 2020, in charge of Covid policy implementation—using strong legal wording (‘abuse’, ‘disinformation and fake news’, and the like, peppered by du jour allegations of ‘Anti-Semitism’), it made sense to me:
These ‘Greens’ are actually laying the groundwork for their eco-tyrannical utopia, which will end, like all these pipe dreams, in rivers of blood. Don’t take my word for it, because there’s no need for this, as this was—in perhaps the only actually correct prediction in the field of social theory—foreseen by none other than the Greens’ ideological and virtue-signalling ancestor, Mikhail Bakunin, as inferred by none other than Noam Chomsky (source here, my emphases):
[Bakunin] was arguing with Marx, and it was well before Leninism. He predicted very presciently that the rising class of intellectuals, who were just becoming identified as a class in modern industrial society, would essentially go in one of two directions.
Some intellectuals would believe that the struggles of the working class would offer them an opportunity to rise and take state power into their own hands. And at that point, he said, they would become the red bureaucracy who would create the worst tyranny the world had ever known, of course all in the interests of the workers. That’s one direction.
The other intellectuals would realize that you’re never going to get power that way. Therefore, the way to get power would be to associate yourself with what we would nowadays call state capitalism and just become a servant of its ruling class. Then you become one of the managers or an ideologue and so on for the state capitalist system.
The Greens, in espousing these non-sensical, if ultimately anti-popular rule, position are actually managing to (re)unite these two positions: the claim to believe in the struggles of the chattering and laptop classes, have successfully carried out their ‘long march’ through the state institutions (to paraphrase former German vice-chancellor and Green party stalwart Joschka Fischer), and they are currently building a bio-red bureaucracy that, if memory of the past 2.5 years serves—in particular in Austro-Covidistan—the ‘worst tyranny’, of course all in the interests of bio-medical security.
At the same moment, as the Greens are staunchly supporting whatever military aggression the Swamp Masters are dreaming up, they also fall in the second category: they associate themselves with ‘the state’ and have become the most vociferous ‘servant of its ruling class’.
On top of this is the equally troublesome, if not even more pernicious, issue of levelling abuses on other MPs. Look, I know parliamentary representative democracy isn’t perfect, and I understand that ideological differences are real, but to call the political opposition’s constitutional right to petition state officials—with the equivalent of subpoena powers—to ask for redress of grievances—and act of ‘abuse’ [Missbrauch] is tantamount to declare open season on dissent.
Note that the esotericism blogger also used comparable language (‘harassment’, or Belästigung) to refer to the FPÖ’s enquiries.
I’m appalled by all of this. Look, I’m a historian, and while I don’t work on contemporary issues (there are reasons for not doing so), I read a lot about it. Among the best books about the descent of Central Europe into the maelstrom of civil war, blood on the streets, and the eventual triumph of National Socialism, there is certainly Dirk Schumann’s Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-33 (New York: Berghahn, 2009; see here), whose main conclusion is that responsibility for the end of the republic rests with the choice of the middle classes to abandon ‘democracy’ and side with Hitler.
We’re in very dangerous waters, and while I don’t want to blow these above-related instances out of proportion, I do think that these statements—and the platform provided by the Greens’ de facto party paper, Der Standard—is highly corrosive.
Furthermore, it’s even worse if we take the Green MPs claims of their political opponents to not only be without merit, but to be ‘conspiracy theorist’, a term introduced by the CIA in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination to discredit any criticism of the official Warren Report’s many holes.
It’s highly problematic that legacy media provides MPs of one of the parties currently in government with a platform to hurl—unsourced—allegations of ‘mak[ing] a mockery of science and research, whose interest is to undermine democracy with fake news, whose interest is to divide society, and who take anti-Semitism for granted’ at fellow MPs.
Lest we all continue to remain asleep and distracted, we may, one day soon, awaken in a kind of second Bolshevik utopia that, as Marx himself so eloquently put it (in the opening paragraphs of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, first published in 1853)
History repeats itself first as tragedy, second as farce.
He certainly didn’t discount the notion that the farcical reprisal will be less bloody than the original tragedy.
Why are the parties that are traditionally classified as very right or very left so often amalgams of at least two parties? In Germany, the AfD surely is two parties, and die Linke might be even three (the Western communists, the Eastern realists, and Sarah Wagenknecht).
Just to separate this from the diatribe below: I think mr construction company cum party funder is looking to lucrative contracts in Ukraine, paid by the EU...