Recently, there was a heated family discussion about my magazine subscriptions. You have to know that I purchase a number of unusual print media that are not available in Austrian stores. These include titles such as “New Germany”, the former central organ of the SED in the GDR, “Junge Freiheit”, a right-wing conservative weekly, “Bahamas”, a magazine from the scene of the so-called anti-German left and “Sezession”, a publication of the law-based institute for state policy, where Götz Kubitschek is editor-in-chief. In addition, there will soon be the Junge Welt, a daily newspaper that is close to the German Communist Party, because I don’t feel like driving halfway across town to one of the few sales outlets where you can get it.
My family is afraid that the postman could denounce me to radical leftists and then the Antifa might catch me in front of the house and beat me up in front of our children. The Antifa, which I personally consider to be a collection of petty-bourgeois jokers from a good family, i.e. spoiled non-achievers from academic families who try to compensate for their well-founded fears of social decline by denouncing righteous citizens in order to damage their reputation, is strong here at home emotionally occupied, because I was once threatened by the carnival troupe, who, as is well known, like to hide behind bed sheets smeared with all kinds of senseless slogans during demos.
The facts described would not be particularly remarkable if they did not symbolize an important general aspect of our present, namely the undermining of the constitutional right to freedom of expression through the structural and manifest violence of left-wing radical roll commandos and the verbal terror of the combat troops driven by “wokeness” on Twitter, who try to deprive all those of their job and income by denunciation who do not immediately react to their regressive “You can’t do that, you don’t do that” chatter with recantation and atonement rituals. One cannot help but notice that the petty-bourgeois neo-left shows very strong similarities to the Christian stake religiosity of the Middle Ages, but luckily it still lacks the executive power to legally carry out its cruel conformist judgments and punishments. It is evident that many people in some Central European countries no longer dare to say what they are thinking. For example, the Allensbach Institute published a study for Germany in 2019, which shows that 63% of Germans are convinced that you have to be careful what you say about certain topics today. 68% were also convinced that it is not possible to say something “bad” about foreigners today without risk. The study bears the significant title “Limits of Freedom”.
According to a theory by the scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, this phenomenon is called the “spiral of silence”. It occurs when there is a threatening social atmosphere that inhibits people from speaking their minds openly. Moods in postmodernism are predominantly created by the mass media. Mass media are usually products of the journalistic opinion elite. The media purportedly disseminate opinions that are in fact representative of an elite minority. At this point I would like to come back to my unusual magazine consumption. In the media of the left and right fringes one often finds information that the elite mass media withhold. It was mainly through the communist newspaper “Junge Welt” that I became aware of the conflicts that are currently raging between the government of Brandenburg, Tesla and citizens’ initiatives because Tesla needs vast amounts of water for its battery production and, in the worst case, the underground water reservoir of the city of Berlin , on which the new Tesla plant is located, and could give the German capital a veritable drinking water problem. I learned about strikes at the Monster bicycle delivery service in Berlin, which mainly employs migrants and treats them like mobile goods rather than people.
The sleeping car unionists of the ÖGB don’t like to talk about such conflicts. They want to set up a social partnership with global digital capital, as they have done with national capital, but obviously do not know that there is no union representation anywhere in the USA, for example, at Amazon and that everyone from the workforce stands up for it , will be released immediately. Then, when they meet a delegation of Bezos’ or Musk’s aggressive lawyers, they’ll bang their ears and retreat, trembling, to their ink castle on the new Danube. With the sleazy Viennese “shame” and the hypocritical wine-loving corporatism of the time of Anton Benya and Josef Sallinger, and this is exactly where the ÖGB is still stuck, you will not be able to impress the professionals of the class struggle from above.
From the “Junge Freiheit” I find out weekly about the latest idiocies of the woken left. Now, for example, the University of Northampton is warning students about George Orwell’s 1984 because it contains “explicit material” that delicate academic snowflakes might find “offensive and disturbing.” For my part, I will now hide Otto Weininger’s book Gender and Character in the basement. Just in case the Antifa vice squad stops by looking for material for their funeral pyres. This year’s edition of the Austrian Youth Values Study by the Institute for Youth Culture Research will be published in two weeks. This time, like the Allensbach Institute, we have dedicated part of the study to the “Limits of Freedom”. And it turns out that 78% of young people in Austria already think that it is better to be careful today and not say what you think right away. It is better to keep your mouth shut, especially when it comes to migration, asylum, LGBTQ+ and Islam. Twitter rambos like Fussi Rudi and obviously insane AK councillors, who put the ÖVP chancellor in the vicinity of fascism and its handling of gas and denounced traditional costumes as “legal symbols” of illegal Nazis, contribute to the anxious silence in the milieus of ordinary people. And that means that they swallow their emotions and affects, poisoning their souls and eventually storming the streets embittered and driven by resentment. The downfall of Weimar was due to the interaction of radicals of all stripes. If our democracy tilts towards totalitarianism, the Twitter radical battlegroups will be relevant contributors.
