Meanwhile, Turkish Immigrants Take over Parts of Vienna, Austria
Celebrating Mr. Erdogan's election win, police was overwhelmed and pushed aside: good-bye to the state's monopoly on legitimate violence
Welcome to Western Europe’s next state-less zone, which bears the wonderful name of ‘Favoriten’ is used to be known as Vienna’s 10th District.
The reason for this development was Mr. Erdogan’s election win last Sunday evening, which witnessed the incumbent to garner 72% of the vote of Turkish nationals residing in Austria. (Incidentally, massive price hikes of 30% on basic staples as well as goods such as cigarettes were withheld by Turkish authorities until Monday…)
To set the stage, here’s a screenshot of breathless reporting in Heute on 28 May:
Deafening shouting, honking concerts, Turkish music and thousands of people on the streets. Shortly after Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s election victory in the run-off in Turkey, a state of emergency prevailed—in Vienna! The district of Favoriten was completely paralysed—hundreds of people gathered at Reumannplatz, long convoys of cars flying Turkish flags paralysed the streets of Favoriten. There was no way through for public transport and emergency services. Observers on social media: ‘Reumannplatz escalates’.
Below are translations, with my emphases, of Austrian legacy media reporting on 30 and 31 May 2023 (sources here and here), respectively; as always, [comments in squared parentheses] are mine, as are the bottom lines.
Turkish Riots in Favoriten ‘peaceful’, According to [Vienna’s Mayor] Ludwig
Heute, 30 May 2023
After Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s election victory, a state of emergency prevailed in Favoriten on Sunday. Now the mayor of the city, Ludwig, is speaking out for the first time.
Deafening screams, honking horns, Turkish music and thousands of people on the streets: after the announcement of the election victory of incumbent Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, thousands of supporters of the politician—who rules not without controversy in his home country—no longer held back. A state of emergency resulted: neither public transport nor first responders could pass.
Strong Criticism from the FPÖ and ÖVP
The opposition [in Vienna], above all the FPÖ and ÖVP, raged: ‘Vienna’s SPÖ and Mayor Ludwig have turned Favoriten into a caliphate’, said Dominik Nepp, chairman of the Vienna branch of the FPÖ. Vienna’s ÖVP leader Karl Mahrer stated: ‘Vienna has a problem.’
Mayor Ludwig: Celebrations were ‘Peaceful’ and ‘Loud’
Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday [30 May], Vienna’s Mayor Michael Ludwig (SPÖ) commented briefly on the joyful rallies in Vienna-Favoriten after Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory in the Turkish presidential election. The celebrations were ‘peaceful’ and ‘loud’, said Ludwig. However, he also admitted that there had been administrative violations [by which are meant infringements of public order that don’t rise to the level of felonies]. Ludwig refused to comment on the election results themselves, in the same way as he would also deny other countries to comment on an election result in Vienna, said the city leader [with the exception of Russia, of course].
Death Threats Against Former MP
However, the celebrations may not have been quite so peaceful. As the former Green state and later national MP, Alev Korun, tweeted, she and her family were threatened with murder. Her ‘crime’: she had asked celebrating Turks who were shooting into the air in front of her house to refrain from doing so.
Forbidden ‘Wolf Salute’ Among Protesters
As the Ministry of the Interior together with the Vienna State Police Directorate announced in a statement, several task forces intervened on Sunday not only because of the many mass gatherings or car parades in Vienna’s tenth district, but also because the forbidden ‘wolf salute’ was also seen among dozens of protesters. [That particular sign is a hand-salute associated with the ultra-nationalist ‘Grey Wolves’; as ‘reported’ by behavourial (wolf) scientist Wolfgang Kotrschal back in 2020, ‘The “wolf salute” is therefore a kind of “Hitler salute”,’ hence its ban[
A day later, Wednesday, 31 May 2023, Heute ran a follow-up piece that informs the reader about the extent of the chaos last weekend. Citing numerous police officers, the picture that emerges is, well, not pretty:
Chaos in Favoriten! ‘We as Police Have Lost [Control of] the District’
By Joachim Lielacher, Heute, 31 May 2023
A policeman on duty in Favoriten speaks about what happened in Vienna’s 10th District: ‘We as police have lost. The district is firmly in Turkish hands.’
A [regular] police officer and an senior officer who were involved in the operations in Favoriten in the last few days vent their anger in disgust and disillusionment. They were on the scene and were forced to watch helplessly. First 45,000 Austro-Turks had celebrated Erdogan’s victory, then Galatasaray’s [an Istanbul-based football/soccer club] championship title was cheered.
‘We as police have lost the district. The district is firmly in Turkish hands’, a police officer who was present during both operations told Heute on Wednesday. ‘We are only standing on lost ground, we can accompany events, but we can’t do anything anymore—that has to be said in all clarity’, the officer adds.
‘Statements by Michael Ludwig are a real mockery’, said a police officer about the incidents and celebrations in Favoriten.
‘Entire streets were cordoned off and intersections were regulated [by rioters] on their own initiative. Here you go, where are we?’, the experienced police officer continues. The two officers are speaking to Mayor Michael Ludwig: ‘Many of us are really angry with the mayor. How can he play it down like that?’ the police officer wonders:
Would he have reacted the same way if Nazis had marched there with Hitler salutes? But as it was, it was ‘only’ the wolf salute. It's an unbelievable mockery on part of Michael Ludwig. It’s over and done with, we have definitely lost this district. And we are certainly not the only officers who think that way.
Bottom Lines
For readers from other countries that have long experienced the formation of this kind of ‘parallel societies’ (Parallelgesellschaften)—here’s looking at, say, France and Sweden, in particular—this might seem strange, if not a nice thing: people celebrate the outcome of elections or some sporting event quite peacefully…
But.
More often, police are now going public with such statements. It’s not that people shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate this or that, but there used to be something that’s called the ‘state’s monopoly of legitimate violence’ (Max Weber), which is more and more a kind of dangerous illusion.
Last weekend, it went over well because people were in a celebratory mood. Imagine, if you will, how and what the situation will look like, say, in not-so-celebratory circumstances.
After decades of ‘new public management’, most Western police forces are way to small to be actually able to handle any of these issues.
After decades of gaslighting, bull-shitting, and—in my opinion thoroughly disgusting and misleading—’pro-immigration’ brain-washing, most Western police forces are demoralised to a dangerous extent: no touching of non-’whites’ is permitted for anything these, lest these individuals might cry ‘racism’—which would then be played up by legacy media and misused by spineless politicians, most of whom would be affiliated with one or the other woke-infested left-of-centre parties, most notably the Greens.
Sadly, however, the ‘conservatives’ and ‘right-wing’ factions are no better.
Before Covid, in 2019, 42% of Austrians voted for the conservative-in-name-only ÖVP, whose now-disgraced former leader Sebastian Kurz ran on an anti-immigration and law & order platform. Once returned to power, the ÖVP ran the Interior Ministry—and did nothing.
From 2017-19, the ÖVP was in a coalition gov’t with the Freedom Party, of FPÖ, whose current chairman, one Herbert Kickl, served as Interior Minister during this period. His record on anti-immigration and law & order is, well, comparable in its insufficiency.
National Political and the EU’s Contributions
Sure, it would be unfair, to a certain extent, to merely blame these two ‘right-of-centre’ parties, or to point to the disgusting collusion between left-liberal, thoroughly woke-fied ‘journalists’ in legacy media. Sure, it helps to further our understanding of these problems, but let’s not forget two major players here:
First, the EU and, more specifically, its Schengen Treaty. Once one crosses into the Schengen Area, there are, technically speaking, no more border and ID checks. Hence the visceral reactions on part of Brussels to politicians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán who takes border protection a bit more seriously than most, if not all, of his EUropean (or, judging from the chaos along the southern US border, also American) peers. Yes, back in 2015, Hungary has permitted tens of thousands of ‘refugees’ from the Middle East to pass through, thereby making this a problem for countries further west, specifically, Austria and Germany.
As to the lunacy of the EU, look no further than what is technically known as ‘Dublin III’ compact, and if you haven’t heard about it, here’s what it means in a nut-shell:
On 23 September 2020, the European Commission adopted the New Pact on Migration and Asylum following consultations with the European Parliament, Member States and various stakeholders. The New Pact covers all the different elements needed for a comprehensive approach to migration. In particular, the New Pact recognises that no Member State should shoulder a disproportionate responsibility and that all Member States should contribute to solidarity on a constant basis.
It all sounds nice, it comes with lots of blabber and links, but here’s what Dublin III and the EU’s asylum scheme mean in practice:
‘Solidarity’ means that, while each person may apply for asylum in any EU member-state, applications must be filed in the first country any asylum-seeker arrives, which, by definition excludes any EU member-state that do not share land borders with non-EU states. The latter, by the way, include Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, as well as the Spanish exclaves Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa and the ‘boat people’ who, in their desperation, try to cross the Mediterranean and reach Malta or Italy.
Dublin III proscribes that any asylum-seeker must file their paperwork in the country they arrive-in first, which excludes, by the way, all the rich, north-western member-states. Squabbles about quota relegation of asylum-seekers from, say, Greece to Luxembourg or the like are about as level-headed and sane as comparable notions in the US (e.g., transporting ‘refugees’ from south Texas to Martha’s Vineyard).
Sure, you could say that these (and many more related insanities) are ‘part of the game’, but let’s not forget that these address the consequences of ‘instability’ elsewhere.
At the root of these large-scale migration streams, second, stands the West’s devastating foreign policy (blunders) esp. in the Greater Middle East. And these developments are intimately linked to the post-9/11 attacks on a growing number of countries, beginning with Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2009), and Libya (2011), as well as the Western-instigated Saudi-Yemeni conflict, the dispatch of Western troops to Mali, the ramping up of US Africa Command, and many more instances.
In a way, ‘9/11’ has not ended, in particular as far as the foreign policy blunders are concerned.
Yet, it would be ‘unfair’ not to mention the many failures of Western governments to try to integrate (assimilate) recent immigrants into their societies. Part of these problems stems from the sheer scale of these demographic changes that occurred, generally speaking, over the course of the past generation: most Western European countries now have immigrant population shares of 20-25%. In some places, most notably in Linz, Upper Austria’s state capital and the third-largest city of Austria, Muslim students outnumber Catholic ones in schools.
Change isn’t ‘coming’; it is already here, but so far the consequences did not frequently appear on the front-pages of national newspapers.
As this is changing now, expect internal discussions to deteriorate in quality (calling any opponent names or Nazis), in particular as the economic situation will soon go from bad to worse.
Buckle up.
I wondered what all the noise coming from my provincial (Bavarian) city centre on Saturday night was all about. Maybe such celebrations?