The Covid Coup II

Protests and Propaganda in Austria, 20 Nov. 2021

Due to my ‘detour’, of sorts, through the ‘mainstream media’ thickets surrounding last weekend’s protests, here’s an update on the Austrian situation.

As is well known, there was a mass protest on Saturday, incidentally scheduled for the same day the self-identifying as left-liberal piece ran in the Austrian daily Der Standard, which told of the travails of police officers checking Covid-19 Passports in shopping streets.

Whatever the merits of this particular awful ‘policy’ (if that’s indeed the right word), right now there’s only one partially systemic opposition party that’s raising a stink about the imposition of pseudo-medical tyranny in Austria. This is the far-right Freedom Party whose chairman Herbert Kickl had called for a day of protest to take place on Saturday, 20 Nov. True, the Freedom Party wasn’t the only faction that did so, but it’s by far the largest of these groups, and given the systematic obstacle parkours for non-parliamentary opposition groups in Austria, this focus is (sort of) justified, whatever the questionable merits of their other policy positions.

So, before the protest took place, the self-identifying as left-liberal daily Der Standard ran a gleefully headlined article that spoke of ‘up to 15,000 protesters’ that were expected, most of whom were, of course, characterised as ‘weirdos’ or ‘far-right, tinfoil hat-wearing’ cretins. That website was changed after the protest took place (with many more people in attendance than anticipated), and you can still see this by looking at the URL:

https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000131303742/bis-zu-15-000-corona-massnahmengegner-in-wien-erwartet

A translation reads: ‘up to 15,000 anti-Corona measures protesters expected in Vienna’, which went online sometime on 20 Nov. 2021, with the timestamps in the revised piece reading 15:20 and 18:05, respectively (note that the URL is still the same, and say thank you to the WaybackMachine)

Let’s sum up:

• Before the protest took place, the header was ‘up to 15,000 anti-Corona measures protesters expected’.

• At 15:20, it was changed to ‘Ten arrested at Corona demonstration in Vienna, with 1,300 officers deployed’, including the admission by police that the number of actual participants was ‘35,000, according to the police’.

In other words: according to official numbers (which are, of course, as cooked as the books of Enron or the Covid-19 dashboards around the world), there were at least three times the number of protesters than expected. Note further that the Austrian Press Agency (APA) mentioned two other numbers in this regard on Sunday, 21 Nov.:

‘According to the police, there were 40,000 participants, the [organisers from the Freedom Party] spoke of 100,000 protesters. The lockdown for everyone from Monday [22 Nov. 2021] onwards and the announced compulsory vaccination probably led to more participants than originally expected. The atmosphere was heated, there were isolated clashes. “Several people were arrested and reported to the police”, the police report said.’

Now, it’s obvious that authorities conventionally, if not habitually, downplay (lie about) the number of protesters, and it’s reasonable to assume this to be the case here, too. It’s equally obvious that the organisers would also lie about the true number of participants.

So, what to make of these contradictory statements? I think the safest bet is to assume the true number of protesters to be somewhere between both numbers, thus let’s just agree on the arithmetic middle-point, i.e., around 70,000 participants. (As an aside, Vienna has about 1.9m inhabitants, hence these 70k protestors—who didn’t all come from the city—corresponds to a fictive participation rate of some 3.5 to 4% of the city’s total population).

Also, do note that this quite impressive number of protesters came together despite ‘police had already advised people to avoid the city centre of Vienna’, one can read in another article over at Der Standard as well as on the police’s Twitter feed:

‘We are deploying around 1300 police officers to ensure a safe event and compliance with COVID regulations. Due to the current epidemiological situation, we ask citizens to refrain from participating.’

(Note, again, the insinuation in the article’s URL, chastising all protestors as right-wing extremists: https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000131307965/zehntausende-bei-demo-gegen-corona-massnahmen-rechtsextreme-als-anfuehrer = ‘tens of thousands protesting the anti-Corona measures, led by right-wing extremists’.)

Note, finally (for this post), that this ‘it’s a right-wing extremist’ meme was casually set up well in advance, as two more pieces illustrate.

First, here’s a comment in French media, dated 16 Nov. 2021, which informs of the reluctance of Austrian police to support the anti-protest efforts. Note, in this particular regard, that the biggest and Social Democratic Party affiliated police union chairman is quoted as follows:

‘The president of the Social Democratic Trade Unions (FSG) and the police union, Hermann Greylinger, left no doubt in an interview that the police feel unable to carry out these checks according to the weekly Wochenblick.’

While this is problematic, the police union actually referred to exhaustion and depleted manpower that’s compounding the problem of crowd control (more on this in my next post on the government’s reaction).

Second, here’s Der Standard, again, this time on 18 Nov. 2021, which ‘informs’ its readers about a potential military putsch:

‘Parts of the Army Promote Vienna Corona Protest on Saturday: Two officers and FGÖ [Freie Gewerkschaften Österreichs, a party-independent] union called on their comrades to join the ranks of the “critics of measures” and Corona deniers.’

This is a long post already, but I feel it’s necessary to add more detail on this ‘news’ item (my emphases):

‘While police in Vienna are gearing up for another Corona demonstration on Saturday so that protests do not get out of hand in the middle of the lockdown for the unvaccinated, parts of the Austrian Armed Forces are calling on their comrades to march out on Saturday as well: but to join the ranks of the “critics of measures” and Corona deniers and also to stir up anti-vaccination sentiment. Two high-ranking officers posed in an open letter as “officials for enlightenment” and compared the measures against Corona to a “rape”.

In addition, the men trivialised the Nazi regime in their letter, writing that unvaccinated people would now be “stigmatised, marginalised and locked away” again “after 75 years”. According to army spokesman Michael Bauer, the case is already in the military justice department.

But there are probably more Corona-harmless people in the army. The FGÖ federal army union is also calling for a demonstration on Saturday “For freedom and human dignity”: it wants to gather with like-minded comrades, like the Freedom Party, in Vienna, at the Platz der Menschenrechte [Square of Human Rights].’

This is the tone that comes from the self-identifying left-liberal segment of the political continuum, and it’s got everything that makes these self-declared virtue-signalling ‘journalists’ foam: how dare you to object to the right to decide what you’d put into your own body? How dare you protest against government decrees that will, if everything goes according to the government’s plans, make ‘vaccination’ with experimental gene therapeutics mandatory?

Here, again, the propaganda is clearly visible: everyone who protests—actually, one of the centrepieces of any bill of rights (freedom of assembly and speech)—is a crackpot. In addition, charges of Holocaust denialism can be levelled easily, which is not to say that the few protestors who did so shouldn’t have pointed out these absurdities, but it’s something of an unforced error, which makes the government’s lackeys’ ‘job’ much easier.

Still, the totalitarians stand before us in all their self-righteousness.

Stay tuned for the government’s and the media’s reaction to these protests.