Covidistan Annals XII: Days of Protests, Régime Condescension, and Willful Ignorance on Part of the Covid Puppets

If last weekend's continued protests across Covidistan--and esp. the police's 'lacklustre' performance pretending to be on the side of the régime--are any indicator, time is running out

Yesterday, I brought to your attention the latest developments in Covidistan, with a particular emphasis on the high and mighty. Today, it’s time to address a few of the items that also caught my eye to further add analytical depth and lend more interpretative meaning to my consideration of these events.

First up, Police Overstretch

In late December, the state of Upper Austria asked retired police officers to re-join the ranks to allow active-duty police, already spread thin and overworked, to face the quite different policing environment created by Covid-19. Only a handful of retirees elected to help out.

By early January, even state broadcaster ORF reported private security providers such as G4A or Securitas cannot find temporary employees. Their work environment had changed, too, and while pre-Covid, private security contractors mainly worked on large events (sporting or musical, etc.), they are now supposedly conducting a sizable chunk of the vaccine status checks.

Concerns about privacy and the legitimacy of private contractors asking not only for a photo ID but also your health records while you go and buy a pair of pants aside, this is surely worrying for the régime: they certainly want to ‘play’ strongmen and -women, yet, they are not only inept but after 30+ years of austerity and (mainly fake) attempts to ‘shrink the state’, the Committee of Public Safety’s capacities to actually do so are, thankfully, very limited.

Still, as self-identifying as left-liberal daily and de facto Green party mouthpiece Der Standard reported a week ago, Covidistan’s police are conducting some ‘30,000 Covid Checks’ daily. Admitting, somewhat sadly, that these activities were documented for the period from 15 Nov. 2021 onwards ‘but also included a general lockdown’, the key part is this (my emphases):

It is particularly difficult to conduct random checks when only a part of the population is in lockdown. Since everyone is allowed to go for a walk, police are mainly placed in neuralgic locations, for example outside shopping centres. ‘The Covid checks in public spaces are challenging but necessary’, says Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP).

Leaving aside the inanity of the circular ‘logic’ employed by the Interior Minister, a pertinent question certainly is this: are police there to harass their fellow-citizens or to protect the shops from vandals, protestors, and looters?

The Standard piece then regurgitates the common trope of right-wing extremism, noting that, while more protests were expected this past weekend—the article went online on 4 Dec., and I’ll cover the protests further below—there is a private video circulating on the web. It shows a previously unidentified person calling ‘the military [is] the only way out of this predicament’.

Of course, domestic intelligence and security services are all over this, but still: yes, there are certainly individuals and groups of this or that ideological bent among the protestors, but to simply label the entirety of them as far-right extremists is quite certainly stretching truth quite a bit (yes, there’s a quite direct comparison to the 1/6 incident in the US, and before you, my dear readers, get too agitated, I refer you to these pieces by Glenn Greenwald before you start pointing out this or that).

(Sidenote: I had a professional-private conversation with one of my friends who happens to live in South California last night. During out chat, he mentioned that he received a phone call by his congressperson who inquired about the ‘radicalisation among decommissioned and demobilised soldiers in Germany after WW1’, which greatly troubled the lawmaker. I asked if this happened at or around 1/6, and my friend replied in the affirmative, hence you can see the twisted logic of a 3yo with a hammer at-work: there’s only nails, you see.)

Next up, Protests and Police Dissent

As I mentioned in my pre-Christmas pieces (e.g., here) as well as in the update dated 27 Dec., the Covidistan putschists certainly hoped that the protests would stop after the holiday break. Back in late 2021, I suggested that they wouldn’t go away, and the past weekend ‘proved’ me correct (for which I don’t take credit: it was obvious back then and, given the looming power grab by the executive branch, it was also entirely foreseeable).

There were not only more protests last weekend, with Vienna seeing again tens of thousands of protesters last Saturday. According to both state media ORF as well as de facto government mouthpiece Der Standard, there were again ‘40,000’ protesters. Given the under-reporting of participants, I suspect there were at least twice that number.

(Sidenote: I discussed the numbers in detail in mid-December; and while I do not claim any ‘special insights’ into these, here’s another piece of confirmatory insight, courtesy of Johannes Waldmüller, a self-described human rights and peace activist and academic anthropologist with extensive work experience in the Global South, who claims there are frequently ‘between 40,000 and 100,000 protesters roaming the Inner City for weeks now’. Of course, given Mr. Waldmüller’s apparent ideological blinders, he goes on to list the protesters in the following way: ‘Neo-Nazis, anti-Covid measures dissenters and obscurantists [he uses the term Esoteriker in the original, i.e., a somewhat more ‘academic’ word for ‘deplorables’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’], fundamentalist “Christians”, and in fact concerned citizens’. Yes, they are there, too.)

If you are so inclined, do read that piece by Der Standard, for it actually contains two items that are worthy of consideration. At one point, Mr. Martin Rutter, a known right-wing activist, positions himself in front of the protesters (my emphases):

Then police suddenly put-up barriers and the protesters are stopped. Large parts of the protest leaders are surrounded by the officers and can move neither forward nor back… The situation quickly seems to escalate. firecrackers are set off, beer cans fly [towards police], and a group tries to break through the barriers. Police use pepper spray…the Vienna State Police Directorate (LPD Vienna) later justified the intervention by saying that they had noticed individuals who were carrying dangerous objects and pyrotechnics or had set them off. Among other things, the officers discovered batons disguised as flagpoles and gloves filled with sand, according to the LPD.

‘The aim was to separate the provocateurs from the rest and carry out ID checks’, says a spokeswoman, which is what happened. After about 45 minutes, the Ringstraße [Vienna’s main avenue] is reopened and the protesters continue to march. The protestors merge, cheering, with a second group that had gathered on the other side of the police cordon in the meantime.

Notice all the conventional trappings of propaganda: police say ‘dangerous objects’ were found, such as ‘batons disguised as flagpoles’ (this is my favourite /sarcasm) and the like. Do note, though, that ‘the thin blue line’ found itself right in the middle between two groups of protesters: neither of these groups did anything but wait (there are no reports of injured officers), but after some time, police retreated.

This occurred on Saturday, and there was, again, no single big-tent organisation that brought 40,000-100,000 protesters onto the streets.

Meanwhile, the Freedom Party had organised a protest in Innsbruck, the state capital of a western state, which took place on Sunday, which garnered some 10,000 protestors (according to certainly incorrect official numbers).

Disingenuously, Interior Minister Karner appealed to the protesters, in particular to ‘the sense of responsibility of a parliamentary party to debate political issues in parliament and refrain from carrying their agenda into the streets’. Whatever one’s personal sympathies (or lack thereof) with right-wing political parties, if a member of the régime that openly not only ridicules its political opponents but at every possible turn also ignores them calls for restraint on part of said political party, you can easily see through the propaganda fog.

Also, as I will not tire to point out:

Police don’t like the Covid putschists

Don’t just take my word for it.

Exhibit A would be this little video posted by a Twitter user by the moniker ‘Antifa-Prinzessin’ (Antifa Princess, which by itself is a ludicrously idiotic nickname for someone pretending to be with, or is actually a member of, Antifa, but I digress).

Click on the link and watch the 15-second clip. Faced with a small number of determined protesters and literally holding the high ground, police retreated. Certainly, media was there and imagine the ‘problems’ the régime would find itself in if police had pushed back and injured these protesters.

Exhibit B, though, would be an open letter by some 600 (!) officers, which appeared yesterday (11 Jan.). As reported by tabloid media (and, certainly, others) Oe24 (my emphases),

In an open letter to the Minister of the Interior, Gerhard Karner (ÖVP), police warned of a lasting division of society and in the police apparatus in view of the planned mandatory vaccination law. According to their own information, the 600 officers appealed to the Interior Minister to, among other things, put an end to discrimination against unvaccinated colleagues.

In its response, the Ministry of the Interior could not understand the allegations. Rather, [a spokesperson] stressed in a statement to APA [Austria Press Agency] that the police were behind the necessary measures to contain the Covid pandemic.

You can see the entire inanity of the régime at work: on the one hand, they pretend to be in charge, and when that façade is challenged, the putschists continue to pretend otherwise. This is prima facie evidence of cognitive dissonance.

Also, it is important that the 600 officers stress that there is ‘neither a party, nor a union or a legal person or conspiracy theorists’ behind all of this. Rather,

‘[we] are several hundred police officers from all over Austria who have come together informally [united by a] concern for the rule of law, freedom of expression and fundamental civil rights as well as medical freedom.’

The open letter was signed by police chaplain Uwe Eglau, who works in staff support at the Vienna State Police Directorate and who supposedly functions as a spokesperson for the group, as well as by a female officer from Tyrol and an officer from Lower Austria.

Way back in autumn 2021, I mentioned an open letter by some 50+ dissenting officers from Covidistan’s smallest state, Vorarlberg. Then there was another open letter by some 150 dissenting teachers in the same state.

Here’s the state of play as of today, 12 Jan. 2022

Dissident sentiment among police has now spread throughout the country. It appears to be fuelled, in no small part, by bullying and mobbing among officers, hence its hardly surprising police isn’t pushing back against anti-vaccine mandate protestors.

Covidistan’s putschists remain incredibly aloof and detached from sentiment on the ground.

Sure, all politics being local, there’s a huge gap between local politicians and the swamp creatures and bottom-feeders at the federal (national) level everywhere.

If anything, Covid functions like a catalyst that exacerbates pre-existing divisions, thereby drawing into the open, for everyone to see, the decrepit state of the body politic.

At this point, the one and only thing that matters is this: will events and developments emanating from outside the régime’s power—which renders them, by definition, something the Covid Puppets cannot control—irrelevant?

In other words: will Omicron and the increasing evidence of vaccine failure, including a plethora of ‘(serious) adverse events’, simply bypass the Committee of Public Safety?

If so, will this happen before the vaccine mandate will be pushed through?