In the last edition of Weltwoche there is an apt analysis of the political mood in the Central European countries, which ends with the statement that the bourgeois camp has long since lost control of the social debates. Left post-Marxism, which is guided by the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, cool pragmatists of power who are not even afraid to take up the ideas of NSDAP lawyer Carl Schmitt when it comes to achieving them, has taken on the power to interpret current events the hegemony goes over the heads of the people and the takeover of state power. The central strategy of this new left is to denounce all ideas, opinions and movements that oppose them as right-wing, right-wing extremist or even fascist.
The left-wing bourgeois children, who represent the social basis of post-Marxism, are particularly impressed by the movement of those who refuse to vaccinate and the critics of compulsory vaccinations. Already during each of their demonstrations they skilfully flood the Internet with “factual reports” about the violent right-wing radicalism of the manifestants.
Skepticism towards these representations is indicated because there is empirical research on the social composition of vaccine skeptics, who show a quantitatively significant proportion of fanatical fanatical supporters of alternative medicine who are close to the Greens and who are close to the Greens. This could also explain why the Greens, with the exception of their unpredictable party leader, are quite reluctant when it comes to criticizing the vaccine skeptics.
Last Sunday I happened to have the opportunity to attend the anti-vaccination demonstration on Mariahilferstrasse. As a matter of principle, I myself do not go to demonstrations because anyone who goes into such a crowd loses his mind and fits into the irrational rhythm of the herd like cattle, which is guided by excessive stimuli, as Sigmund Freud has already established.
There was no mass madness in this melancholy community that trotted past us, nor any aggression. They cheerfully held up their little signs on which banal sayings on the subject of freedom were dealt with and all in all reminded more of an indoor pilgrimage procession on the way to Medjugorje. Anyone who is afraid of them has a resilience problem.
On the other hand, there are also activists close to the Greens, such as the German Carolin Emcke, who, following the aggressive course of the post-Marxists, the liberal constitutional state that guarantees civil rights and freedom of expression, accuse them of “infantile freedom of expression nihilism” and demand that people who speak out against ecototalitarianism, legal escape routes or the general vaccination requirement, which is to be denied access to the media. Ms. Emcke is also of the opinion that climate researchers are the Jews of the present because they are being persecuted by all over the world. In fact, they are literally showered with millions of research scientists.
The Viennese political scientist and SPÖ functionary Natascha Strobl is the chief ideologist of the radical left. But she has not yet fully mastered the Laclau and Mouffe jargon. The language of her new, by the way superbly written book “Radicalized Conservatism” is still clinging to the dusty style of the Leninist primitive-stamocapism of the socialist youth of the 1990s. Old terms like working class, class struggle, revolution and proletariat haunt around and the paradise of a post-capitalist order is invoked as the goal of a sacred story of redemption.
The real purpose of the book, however, is to bring the Austrian conservatives close to right-wing extremism with all the linguistic tricks and finesse at their disposal. Attempts are made to achieve this in particular by equating the American President Trump and the Austrian Ex-Chancellor Kurz. The simple formula of the book is: Trump = short = radicalized conservatism.
One can undoubtedly accuse Kurz of many things, but one cannot say that, like Trump, he tried to be a symbolic figure of the “white trash” on the political stage in order to win over the lowest social strata of the descent society with crude slogans. Kurz was also unable to speak of an alliance with an equivalent of the alt-right movement that did not exist in Austria anyway. In contrast, he mimed the smart, polite and pragmatic political manager who stands above all ideologies.
He had absolutely no relation to the clerical totalitarianism of the interwar period, on the contrary, he quartered the Dollfuss portrait from the parliamentary club of the ÖVP and distanced himself from the church Caritas, which, like the SPÖ, cares more about refugees and migrants than about those in need People of the Austrian lower classes. The parallels between the political conditions of our day and those of the Weimar Republic, insinuated at the end of the book, are also drawn by the hair and absurd.
But the book contains two passages in the text that are nothing more than twisting the truth and bad dirty campaigning. In one of them it is explained to the readers that a ban on the Antifa is not possible because it is only a “label for a broad stream of anti-fascist groups”. In reality, the Antifa is a well-organized and powerful anarchist secret organization whose aim is the annihilation of the bourgeois state and the breaking of the rule of capital. Of course, a secret society does not register an association with the association authorities, because otherwise it would be served on the platter to the law enforcement authorities. There is of course no point in banning a secret society, but you can do it with its symbols and magazines that are sold in left-wing bookstores.
The other suggests, in a perfidious way, a connection between the conservative protest against the St. Nicholas ban in schools in Vienna and the mass murder of Anders Breivik in Norway in 2011. With the formulation “such seemingly banal exciters have real consequences”, a possible joint responsibility of conservatives and FPÖ for the killing spree is put into the room quite openly. Reason: Breivik also addressed the St. Nicholas ban in his delusional manifesto. Anyone who establishes such connections does not want to enlighten, but rather cast politically dissenting people in a crooked light.
With everything that is happening in Europe today, no serious analysis can come up with the idea that we are dealing with a radicalization of conservatism, which, on the contrary, is tame as never before. More likely with a radicalization of democratic left-wing parties such as the SPD, SPÖ or the Greens, which give space and voice to anti-fascist apologists and anti-democratic and anti-equality identity politics in their ranks.
