Winter is Coming: Austrian Media Warn of 'Winter of Rage' as it Pre-Emptively Brands Social Protests as 'Far-Right Extremism'
Now the Left has come full circle: no more social issues, please, this is something the right-wing does, preparing the way for the resurgence of 'national socialism'
As Europe descends further down the drain, many morbid symptoms come to the fore. This is most absurdly visible in the increasing (ab)use of the label ‘far-right extremism’ to virtually everything and everyone that can’t, or won’t, conform to the current thing.
Object to Covid injections? You must be a Nazi.
Protest against the conflict in Ukraine? You’re a Putin-Nazi.
Taking to the streets due to economic worries caused by sky-high energy, fuel, and food prices? You’re a far-right insurrectionist trying to overthrow the system.
No need for any kinds of arguments, debate, or the like, that is, at least if you follow legacy media portrayals, such as the ones dissected below. Both of these pieces ran in German-language media—on the very same day—one in Austro-Covidian self-styled ‘progressive’ daily Der Standard (but do check out a comparable piece by German public broadcasting corporation ARD).
Right-Wing Cells Plan ‘Winter of Rage’ Due to Inflation
Right-Wing Extremists are using the multiple crises to agitate across the country. After Covid, the heterogenous protest movement has found a new issue: inflation
Published by notorious Vienna-based daily Der Standard—the go-to page of the hip, urban chattering and laptop classes—we’re in for a wild ride (my emphases):
A protester with gallows at a campaign event with Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen. A country doctor who commits suicide after persistent death threats. Two Health Ministers and two state governors who speak about the hostile mood in the country when they resign.
Something has gone very much awry in Austria.
Yet, there’s no easing of tensions in sight: inflation, the energy crisis, and the dangers of a new Covid variant stand to further aggravate the mood in the country. On the far right, hopes are already blossoming for a ‘winter of rage’ that will lead to unprecedented demonstrations.
Where does this aggression come from?
Good question, dear authors. Here’s the answer by Der Standard:
The Covid protests provide an answer to this. The first infection in Austria had occurred less than two months earlier when the first anti-mandate protests were gathering. It quickly became clear that the anti-government protests were largely organised and supported by familiar heads [here, the authors cite a bunch of names, as if their naming would bestow any particular stench on the entire affair before contradicting themselves for the first time]…
Month after month, the protest movement grew until its temporary climax in November 2021, when more than 40,000 people marched through Vienna to fight against the ‘Covid dictatorship’.
Were there only right-wing extremists among the demonstrators? Not at all. The Chancellery’s Sect Surveillance Office [this is real, it’s the Bundesstelle für Sektenfragen, an office attached to the chancellery and offers ‘information and consulting services for “so-called sects” and on ideological predispositions] considers the attitudes of the protesters as ‘ascending in escalatory potential’. First, there were those who protested against the Corona measures for very practical reasons: they perceived compulsory masks or lockdown as a restriction without thinking in conspiracy-theoretical terms. On the next level, Covid mandates would be ‘intellectually questioned’, i.e., for example, greater damage would be suspected from lockdowns and the like rather than from the virus itself. Positions that can at least be discussed objectively in discourse.
Then, however, there is the mass of people often represented at protests who embed their views in conspiracy theories: for example, that a chip is implanted through vaccination, that Bill Gates is responsible for the ‘plandemic’, and many more adventurous considerations. The big problem, according to the Sect Surveillance Office: ‘Any protests and initiatives that emerge without conspiracy theory content are often very quickly replaced or displaced by actors and structures with a conspiracy theory agenda.’ There is a reason for this: right-wing extremists see the mass of opponents of the measures as an ideal target group for their anti-democratic agitation.
So, there you have it: what could be discussed peacefully among democratically-inclined participants quickly morphed into a maelstrom of crazy, tinfoil hat-wearing weirdos that seek to overthrown the government.
You know, while this entire piece reeks of cheap agit-prop and rank hypocrisy, there is a kernel of truth in it, as far as I can see: the Covid mandates could—and should—have been discussed more openly, but they weren’t. Because outlets, very much like Der Standard, have become so subservient to the Covid narrative espoused by the government that, as readers of these pages know all too well, that the call to calm, reasoned debate by those—in particular the self-identifying as journalists of Der Standard—who labelled those who protested against the mandates as conspiracy theorists, ‘Covidiots’, and worse is stunning.
Dear people over at Der Standard, you should know that the internet won’t forget what you wrote half back then. ‘Fortunately, I’m keeping (some) of the receipts, and here I’d like to direct the readers to a couple of such examples of gaslighting:
Back to the story.
But it is not only ideology-driven agitators who are involved in the demonstrations: Profiteers are also on the move in a big way. First and foremost, so-called ‘alternative media’, such as the right-wing internet portal Auf1 or the right-wing extremist Wochenblick, which were not only able to multiply their access figures during the pandemic, but also earn a lot of money with shops.
So, while government-affiliated media outlets such as Der Standard received unprecedented amounts of ‘Covid Support’ (i.e., taxpayer subsidies), those that didn’t are getting by doing reporting on top of their own ideological slants and biases. This brings them a lot of readers, which the economically illiterate and intellectually stunted ‘journalists’ in legacy media cannot understand.
Here’s a pro tip, dear Standard journos: if the stuff you package as ‘reporting’ won’t sell, perhaps it’s got to do with your biases and condescending opinion pieces that call parliamentary oversight of government ‘harassment’ and ‘abuse’?
So, how does that piece twist and turn? Well, here’s how a piece that began with the intimation that identified the anti-mandate protests as the root cause of the looming ‘Winter of Rage’ spins this:
Yet, what can one still protest against in terms of Covid mandates? Compulsory vaccination has been abrogated, and even the quarantine for infected people no longer exists. So, will peace now return?
I won’t comment on this absurdity: these pages here are full of ample examples of Covid mandate hawkery from Der Standard, hence, let’s continue down the intellectual drain masquerading as analytical writing, according to the authors:
The opposite is to be feared. The anti-mandate protests were not an exception, but part of a development that did not begin in 2015 during the refugee crisis, even if it escalated at the time. The founder of the racist and Islamophobic Pegida, Lutz Bachmann, who was convicted of incitement to hatred [Volksverhetzung] in 2016, called for the first ‘evening walk’ [Abendspaziergang] in Dresden as early as 2014. The Pegida protests, initially described by some media outlets as a ‘citizens’ movement’, were in fact mass protests organised by the Right, which were joined by people who were less familiar with this kind of protest culture [Protestkultur], but who were definitely xenophobic.
There is no evidence cited, even though there’s plenty of evidence that right-wing agitators, including hooligans, were among the protesters. Still, even the Ministry of Truth™ explains, in its German-language entry, that, although attempted, no evidence-based quantitative survey of the thousands of participants would be possible. Yes, there’s a lot more to say about Pegida, which was formed to protest what they called the ‘crowding out’ of indigenous Europeans by immigrants, most notably from Islamic countries, which, if the banlieus of Paris and Brussels, as well as certain ‘no-go areas’ elsewhere in Europe attest to, are potentially problematic, but they aren’t the focus of today’s piece. Back to the media piece:
In eastern Germany, the then-chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) repeatedly had ‘vociferous’ experiences with this. Especially in the years after 2015 [in which Germany let in hundreds of thousands of refugees], she was received with shrill tones and booed at events. Because of her initially liberal asylum policy, Merkel was considered a ‘traitor to the people’ by protesters, which at the time were not spontaneous but organised. The CDU tried to meet the challenge technically: if the boos and whistles were particularly loud, technicians simply turned up the volume of the loudspeakers.
Der Standard then moves to connect the tragic murder of CDU local politician Walter Lübcke, who was killed in June 2019 by right-wing extremist Stephan Ernst (sentenced in January 2021) with the current affairs, even though, let’s not forget, the piece began with the Covid anti-mandate protests.
Whistles, shouting, booing—this is what the popular Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) experienced in Germany recently. ‘Get lost, get lost!’ some people shouted, but Habeck was also called a ‘warmonger’ and a ‘liar’ on placards. Habeck had experienced similar abuse in Chemnitz, while still leader of the German Greens, when he was campaigning for his party there in the 2019 state elections. At the time, many resented his asylum policy and his advocacy for an end to the internal combustion engine.
In Austria, the [right-wing] scene has now set its sights on Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen in particular. In Telegram groups, dates of his election campaign appearances are spread in order to specifically disrupt them [as if campaign stops wouldn’t be, you know, publicised in advance to increase turnout]. This goes to show: issues may vary, but often the agitators are the same. Take, say, Jenny Klauninger, who was not recently sentenced to conditional imprisonment [teilbedingte Haft] and who attracted attention by tearing up a rainbow flag at an anti-mandate protest, who ranted against refugees in Spielfeld, Styria, as early as 2016. These protesters try to stir up sentiment against environmental protection as well as against LGBTQI rights.
This is one of the more perfidious lies of omission: yes, Ms. Klauninger tore apart a rainbow-themed flag at an early anti-mandate rally on 5 September 2020, which led to court proceedings. The state attorney suggested incitement to hatred (Volksverhetzung) while Ms. Klauninger claimed that she tore the flag apart because it showed a double heart, which she claimed, according to an ORF report, represented ‘paedophiles’. In the end, that court hearing ended with a dismissal of charges, which the Standard piece conveniently, if factually incorrectly, omits.
Ms. Klauninger was actually sentenced for something else: while protesting against the Covid mandates on 20 December 2021—yes, more than a year after the above allegations of incitement of hatred—she got into a physical confrontation with police, which resulted in charges of ‘resistance to law enforcement’. It is very odd that these details are glossed over in such a way, for there’s ample evidence of journalistic malpractice (lying): just venture over to Ms. Klauninger’s Ministry of Truth™ entry: even if you don’t read German, you can see that Der Standard and, of all people, Colette M. Schmidt herself had reported on this particular protester earlier:
Would that render Ms. Klauninger someone you’d like to meet? I’m unsure about it, but personal considerations aside, the main point is this: Der Standard had reported on her, and there’s plenty of other media sources that described the above-related circumstances quite accurately, yet, none of this seems to matter in the context of the presently-described media piece, hence the inescapable spin, which can’t do without cheap agit-prop against Mordor (Russia) and Sauron (Vladimir Putin):
With the rising cost of living, an explosive new issue is likely to be added in autumn. One that really moves and concerns many more people in Austria.
Each of these protest themes brings new followers. Especially on Telegram, thousands of chat groups have formed whose core is hate and agitation. Between December 2020 and April 2021 alone, the readership of radical Telegram groups grew by 471 per cent, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) explained in a study. There are practical and ideological reasons for this: on the one hand, Telegram originates from Russia and is thus not part of the ‘US imperialist system’ that many so-called Querdenker criticise. On the other hand, Telegram hardly cooperates with European authorities and has no built-in protection mechanisms against hate postings and propaganda—unlike the products of Meta [Mr. Zuckerberg’s parent company, which implemented measures on Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp after the Russian manipulation of the 2016 US election campaign.
Welcome to the crude Lala-Land these ‘journalists’ inhabit: the spreading of misinformation and fake news is now so far internalised and normalised that you get to spread BS like this without editorial review. Or worse, the editors are in on this. Hey, why not do some reading, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, or look at the many instances social media giants are manipulating their users.
Yet, what Der Standard does is this:
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, i.e., domestic security services, akin to MI 5] no longer exists, instead the Directorate for State Security and Intelligence [Direktion für Staatschutz und Nachrichtendienst, or DSN] is now responsible for the observation of groups that pose a threat to the state...
The Covid anti-mandate protests are said to be a ‘rallying point’ for the disillusioned and desperate, whereby some protesters are held not to have recognised, at least initially, who was behind the protests. It is clear, however, that by repeatedly taking part in such demonstrations, many ‘slide into the radical milieu’ [according to DNS Chief Omar Haijawi-Pircher].
But it is just as clear, says another high-ranking official of the DSN: security authorities cannot overcome the division in society as a whole.
Massive Loss of Trust
This is actually the task of politics. But trust in the political system as well as in its protagonists is more than damaged. This is especially true for the lower income groups.
The polling firm Sora asked people for their attitudes for its Democracy Monitor in 2021. The results are shocking: only 18% of the bottom third of the income distribution think that people like them are ‘well represented in parliament’. In the middle class and the top income brackets, the majority of respondents still think so.
But there, too, confidence is falling fast: while, in 2020, 70% of the middle class still thought that the political system in Austria functioned very well or at least fairly well, by the end of 2021 only 42% thought so. However, support for democracy as a form of government is still very stable, with almost 90% of respondents expressing their preference for it. It is striking that among the 10% who reject democracy, criticism of the Covid mandates was named as the most important concern.
Want more figures? A survey by the Institute for Demoscopy and Data Analysis in June 2022 showed that only 18% of respondents trusted the government and only 22% the opposition. There was a great longing for party-political alternatives, it was said among the respondents.
Under the header ‘Yellow Vests in Austria’, the piece then explains that while the Freedom Party (FPÖ), the one clearly-positioned anti-mandate parliamentary opposition party that exists, would agitate against the Covid measures, but that while
traditionally, it was the FPÖ that was able to channel the protest vote…[the party] never quite ran with the topic, because…gaps between the propagated contents and the behaviour of their own politicians are noticeable. Many MPs have been vaccinated several times, they protect themselves privately against infection, and, should they test positive, in all likelihood did not take the horse dewormer Ivermectin that [FPÖ chairman Herbert] Kickl had recommended.
Therefore, in large parts, the FPÖ leadership might be quite relieved that new protest issues have emerged. Party strategists are said to be dreaming of an Austrian yellow vest movement that will take to the streets in autumn against high fuel, electricity, and energy costs. The model is the protest movement in France in 2018, which was triggered by an increase in fuel tax and brought together a broad, heterogeneous spectrum of political groups, including those on the far right.
The mobilisation potential on the topic of inflation is enormous, and a protest motive in view of economic inequality is also broadly comprehensible.
While you ingest these absurdities, don’t forget about two crucial, if unmentioned issues here:
Der Standard is socially liberal (i.e., ‘left of centre’), but apparently doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the working class and social issues. It’s a telling example of the condescension many of the ‘white-collar lefties’ exhibit when talking about their hardships while remaining aloof of the travails of the working classes. If this demeaning view of ‘regular joes’ is what constitutes ‘the left’ these days, I’m proud not to associate with them.
But the bigger issue, I’d argue, is the transformation of social policy issues into ‘far-right’ or ‘right-wing extremist’ hallmarks. Given the history of neoliberal politics, esp. the abandonment of blue-collar workers by what can arguably be called Old Labour and its subsequent transformation into ‘New Labor’ (New Democrats in the US), the bottom rungs of the income distribution had nowhere else to turn but the ‘new right’ telling them that, partially correctly, that globalisation and immigration were to blame for the loss of jobs, employment security, and the massive changes of the past 30-40 years. In other words: this dynamic is what fuelled the rise of UKIP, the Alternative for Germany, the Freedom Party, the Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy, and, of course, Mr. Trump.
Needless to say, none of these factions was honest, but they at least brought this topic up. The most important analytical take-away is that these ‘new right’ parties and factions function as a ‘conveyor belt’ taking formerly left-wing voters to the ‘far right’ before they, disillusioned by experiences of the ‘new right’ in power, don’t return to the bosoms of ‘new labour’ (which had moved on to social justice and climate change issues) but constitute the electoral bloc that, while no longer affiliated with any one big-tent party, has the potential to shift elections. Thus, we see large swings in turnout and election results that mainly derive from recklessly pandering to these ‘politically homeless’ voters.
So, how do the journos over at Der Standard think about doing something?
How can politics pull the emergency brake? ‘You have to cushion the social dislocations that were first caused by the pandemic and are now fuelled even more by inflation’, says political scientist Weidinger, ‘so that there is no reason to take to the streets’. And one has to ‘pay attention to the general sense of justice’, warns Weidinger, ‘if big corporations receive generous subsidies and there is not enough left for others, that is dangerous’.
This is also the argument held by the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB). They are currently working on a plan how not to leave the protest potential to the extreme right-wing groups. Already on 17 September there are to be Austria-wide demonstrations in which the core demands of the ÖGB will be spread: i.e., structural measures against inflation, such as a reduction of VAT.
Although inflation hits poorer sections of the population the hardest, it also affects large segments of the middle classes, warns SPÖ politician Wolfgang Katzian, who heads the non-party trade union federation, in an interview with Der Standard. One-off payments were nice, but far from sufficient. The government is too hesitant in implementing measures, says Katzian, not least unemployment benefits urgently need to be raised.
See what I mean? The new labour SPÖ cares so much about the middle class that they specifically emphasise their plight (don’t get me wrong, it’s real), but that’s not how socialist and social-democratic politics used to work.
Here’s Der Standard’s conclusion:
The Covid crisis has shown that it was not the market that was the hero, but the welfare state is. This is because ‘the market took off and [corporations] begged for help’, while the welfare state moved to alleviate the suffering.
And here, in a nutshell, you can see that what the self-styled progressives are advocating out in the open: socialism for the few, with taxpayers footing the bill.
This piece is so disingenuous and, frankly, outright absurd that it boggles my mind, in particular given the paper’s long history of left-wing activism and the like. These days, though, Der Standard has become a hell-hole of social justice warriors, climate activism, and cheap agit-prop to render its hip, urban, and well-off readership feel a bit better about their lives.
This isn’t reporting or journalism. This is propaganda of the worst kind, for I’d suppose that most of its regulars readers will nod while sipping their latte macchiato over avocado toast while shaking their heads in disbelief over those deplorables who protest with the right-wingers. And of this will, of course, be done without ever thinking once or twice about the causes and origins of this situation, as well as their own complicity in the building-up the boogeyman of right-wing extremism as the thing that drives these protests.
Yet, the worst issue, to my mind, is that agit-prop crap like this will only work to fully transform social issues into something the right-wing will embrace. In other words: if we’re headed for a resurgence of ‘social nationalism’ or ‘national socialism’, it will be due to the conscious abandonment of social issues by ‘the left’ (whatever that means anymore) that considers everyone who cares about, say, food on the table, reasonably priced energy and fuel, as well as being able to buy new clothes for their kids as ‘right-wing extremism’.
This will only make a sizable chunk of people who so far have eluded the temptations of ‘the extreme right’, reconsider their stance.
Buyer beware, then, but I’d say that these ‘leftists’ are so far gone, I’m almost tempted to with them ‘good riddance’.
Great catch about Jenny Klauninger. Yeah, that's the sort of thing that "journalists" do. They put two facts next to each other (tore a flag; got a suspended sentence), strongly implying that they're related, even though they aren't.
They even do it in very small things, where you really wouldn't expect them to. Want my favorite example, courtesy of the NYT?
"Croft, the translator of Ukrainian literature, announced last summer that she would no longer translate works if her name didn’t appear on the cover — as it didn’t with her translation of the 2018 novel “Flights,” by the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/translator-credit-cover.html
Okay, reading comprehension question: What language does Olga Tokarczuk write in? [Hint: Not Ukrainian.]
Olga Tokarczuk is Polish and writes exclusively in Polish. I know that because I happen to have read a couple of her books recently, though of course, a 10 sec Google search would have told you as much. But anyway, it's ludicrous. They write an opinion piece about literary translation, and they cannot resist inserting "support for Ukraine" by - do you call it lying? I suppose they would say "But look, it's true, Croft translates from Ukrainian, and Tokarczuk did win the Nobel Prize, so nothing we said was false!" Right. That's "journalism" now.
“The first infection in Austria had occurred less than two months earlier when the first anti-mandate protests were gathering. … Then, however, there is the mass of people often represented at protests who embed their views in conspiracy theories …”
It seems likely to me (perhaps epimethius can confirm or refute) that when those “first anti-mandate protests were gathering,” presumably no later than mid-2020, the very premise that there would be vaccine mandates was dismissed by Der Standard writers and readers as a “conspiracy theory.” It certainly was by their counterparts in respectable opinion in the U.S.