Springtime for Neonazis: Strange Bedfellows in Austrian Legacy Media, Politics, and the Judiciary
A long-form essay, just out, with the good people at 'Propaganda in Focus'
Dear readers,
the past couple of days were quite strange. As you’ve undoubtedly notices, Nazi and WW2 Revisionism are picking up speed, esp. among those who used the ‘worse than Hitler’ (holier-than-thou) bludgeon in the past.
Long-term readers of these pages will perhaps remember this one piece from last summer, which features in the weekend read; there is much more on the topic, and while I won’t go into details here, I’d just point to a very egregious, and telling, example: one Prof. Malte Theißen of the Arolsen Archives (Int’l Tracing Service) gave an interview in the depths of December 2021 on the subject ‘how they [anti-vaxxers] radicalise’, explicitly drawing the parallels between anti-mandate protests and Nazism:
Springtime for Neonazism, 4 Feb. 2023
Far-Right Aesthetics and WW2 Revisionism Making for Strange Bedfellows in Austrian Legacy Media, Politics, and the Judiciary
Leading voices of Europe’s political-media complex (PMC) are elated: for the first time since 1945, German main battle tanks are rolling east. Again. In a notorious statement, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, speaking in the Bundestag on 24 Jan. 2023, noted that ‘Germany will always be in the vanguard when it comes to supporting Ukraine’. Citing ‘Russia’s terrible, imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine’, the country’s left-of-centre PMC erupted with joy.
Katrin Göring-Eckardt, Vice-President of the German Bundestag and a Green, cheered: ‘The Leopard is liberated! Now hopefully it can quickly help Ukraine in its fight against the Russian attack and for the freedom of Ukraine and Europe.’
Ms. Göring-Eckard was seconded by her coalition partner and fellow representative Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP), who burst out, ‘Slava Ukraini. The only heroines and heroes are the brave people of Ukraine. Together we are Team Freedom.’
The German government’s assent to the delivery of Leopard 2A6 main battle tanks to Ukraine was greeted with exuberance by Andrij Melnyk, Kyiv’s former ambassador to Germany and current deputy foreign secretary, in the following way:
In tune with Sigmund Freud’s aphorism — ‘The voice of the intellect is a soft one’(1) — there were but a few lone, warning voices. Most prominent among them is Sahra Wagenknecht, the German Left Party’s former parliamentary chairwoman, who, like Cassandra, warned:
The [governing] coalition now wants to supply German Leopards as part of a tank coalition for tank battles around the Donbas and Crimea. Against this madness, which could end in disaster, we need a grand coalition of all forces of reason!
Gazing into the Abyss
As I write this essay on a grey Thursday afternoon in late January, I am reminded of a couple of seemingly disconnected puzzle pieces that appeared over the course of the past months in Austrian legacy media. Re-reading them in preparation for this piece, cold shivers run down my spine, and I ask myself: have we managed to learn nothing, at all, from the horrors of the 20th century?
Born in Vienna, Austria, in the waning years of the Cold War, I ended up becoming a professor of history, currently working at the University of Bergen, Norway. The distance from the country of my birth, which, let’s not forget, is also the literal birthplace of the most prominent Nazi ever, is a particularly strange topic to write about.
Yet, write about it I must, for these days, we stand on the precipice of disaster, brought about by the ever-widening conflict on the blood-soaked fields of eastern Europe. Again, for the third time in little over a century. How, I ask myself, did we end up celebrating sending main battle tanks to Ukraine, surely followed shortly by calls for other, perhaps even more lethal weaponry, such as fighter jets, submarines, and, inevitably, ground forces?
One way to understand this race to the precipice, I would submit, is the creeping normalisation of National Socialism across the West, the strong Neonazi presence among the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and the wilful blindness of most journalists in legacy media. I have written about this interrelated nexus before in these pages, and this piece is as much a follow-up of that earlier investigation as well as a call to action.
In this article, I am looking at two pieces that appeared in the Austrian daily Der Standard in recent months that convey a good, if not very advantageous, impression of the creeping normalisation of Neonazism while, at the same time, displaying gross levels of hypocrisy and double-standards. Due to events moving swiftly since, I wrote this piece, another, perhaps even more telling episode follows the detailed discussion of these two pieces.
What makes this such an exemplary, if harrowing, case study is the fact that the newspaper itself was founded in 1988 by Oscar Bronner, an editor of Jewish extraction. Its origins revolve around the formation of the Green party, i.e., Der Standard’s came into being as an alt-left paper with a strong emphasis on left-liberal positions, including environmentalist activism and a strong pacifist tradition.
The below consideration is a testament to the distance in time and space between my own World of Yesterday, to paraphrase Stefan Zweig’s memorable account of pre-WW2 Europe, and the fate that appears to await us in the not too-distant future.
Read the rest over at Propaganda in Focus, and please share the information. Those who hold such views should be better known for them.
Coverage on Covidistan will continue tomorrow, with much more to come.
They don't see it, because the old symbols aren't present.
No Totenkopf-emblems, no marches with torches and drums, no military parades.
So it can't be (inter)national socialism (aka globalism).
Magical thinking at its finest is what we are seeing: if the sigil isn't present, the thing is not the same thing. Just look at the language used in Canada by authorities currently re-enacting the eugenic programs of the early 20th century. Nothing about "improving the racial stock", but lots and lots of blather about rights and mercy.
Yet the end result is the mentally ill, the handicapped, the poor, and the old and debilitated are being euthanised, "by their own choice".
Bitterly funny is that the same nation is adamantly against capital punishment, not due to lack of trust in the court system, but that it is morally wrong to execute criminals.
The exact same impulse as was evident in nazi-Germany and Soviet Russia, that normal criminals were treated with some level of respect while the "useless eaters" and the political criminals were only worthy of loathing and hatred.
Interesting thoughts.
But I also want to add a clear and evident political thing happening and a real question: How the Kingdom of the Holocaust's victims is completely siding with Neo Nazi Americans and Ukrainians? I mean, doing this they loose any respect for what they suffered in WW2. So, we should also review the WW2 saying that maybe after that war Israel started collaborating with ex nazi... May be while hunting for ex nazi all around the world, Mossad become more and more Nazi! It make sense to me.