I have changed the title of my Substack channel to “VERUM ET GLADIUS” (“TRUTH AND SWORD”) because our battle for the truth and for the right to speak the truth has not trumped all other concerns, at least in my mind. I am making almost all of my contributions public these days, because I feel the need to inform and be informed as much as possible. Nevertheless, if you feel so inclined, a subscription is not only welcome but it helps me devote more time to writing. You, my Substack audience, have become my confidants and best friends in these times of uncertainty and instability. Love to all!
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The last time we visited Prague in 2016, my wife and I took a short side trip to Vienna. The difference in vibe between the two cities was palpable. Prague was dirtier, more chaotic, less comfortable, with slower service and that slight tinge of sweet decay, an air of shoddy decadence, like the most comfortable old hotels have. Vienna, on the other hand was cleaner, tidier, with old-world obsequious service (except when delivered by apathetic Romanian immigrants). The hotel smelled new, the museums smelled clean, the stores were spotless. Yet everything about Prague was fun and everything about Vienna seemed funereal. Prague was vibrant and loud, exciting and forward looking. Vienna was old, wrapped up in her not-always-glorious history like in a warm blanket, too safe to peek out and look forward. I could not wait to get out of the sterile air of Vienna and back to the chaos of Prague. In Prague, nothing is taken seriously - except the beer. “God is in the beer” as one pub proclaimed loudly on a huge poster above the bar. On the way back, we had a long wait at the Hauptbahnhof - the Central railway station, which made up in stench and squalor for the 24 squeaky clean hours in the city. The restrooms - one had to pay a Euro to enter - were absolutely disgusting. A truck-stop restroom in West Virginia is considerably cleaner than the absolute cloaca that is the Vienna train station bathroom. (The WV truck stop restroom also has much more interesting graffiti: “Billy, I’ll be at the scenic lookout at 10 tonight. $20 for a blowjob but make sure you have cash this time”) As if the toilets weren’t bad enough, the station teemed with dangerous looking and dirty men who all looked like perfect Central Casting selections for an Isis terror group. They milled about the place in clusters of three or four, with the occasional lone wolf in a leather jacket, five day beard, sunglasses and a bulge under his jacket (or so I imagined). We felt so unsafe inside that building that we took the escalator up to track level and waited on a bench outside in the 40 degree Vienna dusk. Our trip was then crowned by getting robbed by two Moroccan hoodlums on the train, just as it had crossed the Czech border. They only managed to steal a small briefcase containing $100 in cash and a couple of short stories of mine. Luckily, passports and the rest of our cash was in the breast pocket of my jacket. All in all, our conclusion was that while Vienna had fabulous architecture, breathtaking museums ( we saw a collection of Rembrandts that was beyond belief), fine food and nice white wine, it was still a dump. A city with a past, much of it shameful and with not much of a future as far as we were able to discern - beyond having to deal with Moroccan thugs and licking the wounds of its irrelevance.
It’s been five years and the memory of our 2016 trip has largely faded but Vienna is in the news now and so I began reflecting on what I saw and felt back then. It seems like Austrian eagerness to return to its past and never let it go is even stronger than I had suspected. I’m reading in the news that soon, the current Austrian Chancellor, Alexander Schallenberg, plans to issue an edict that has strong echoes of an era from 80 years ago, not exactly Austria’s proudest moment. Apparently, in his eagerness and haste to cleanse his country of the plague, the esteemed Austrian leader plans to put millions of unvaccinated (“the unclean”) citizens under house arrest, while the rest of the population will presumably still enjoy their fabulous Vaccine Pass-enabled freedom. When I read the news, I took a quick peek at Wikipedia and learned that despite the Austrian population comprising only 8% of the Third Reich, 13% of all SS personnel were Austrians, 40% of concentration camps staff and a whopping 75% of all death camp commanders were Austrian, the most notorious sadist Odilo Globocnik among them. Globocnik bears some if not all of the responsibility for the wholesale slaughter of Jews in Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor. Despite the Keiser calling Hitler “the Bohemian Corporal”, old Adolf was an Austrian, born just south of the Bohemian border. The other Adolf of world notoriety - Eichmann - was German born but raised and schooled in Austria and another infamous Austrian, Ernest Kaltenbrunner ran the the Reich Security Office after Czech paratroopers offed his predecessor, the womanizing tall sociopath, Reinhardt Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague” (who was not an Austrian for a change)
Why is all this relevant? Are today’s Austrians in any way equivalent to the Eichmanns and the Kaltenbrunners of the 40’s? Of course not. I may not be a big Vienna aficionado, but I have no doubt most Austrians are fine people, content to live in their ossified central European city with its churches, 19th century coffee houses and mouth watering “sacher torte” and cappuccino. That said, the optics could not be worse. All of our governments have proven to be fools and cowards, bending to the will of unelected public health commissars and nameless desk-jockeys, many of whom are trained in the CCP methods of public policy. Nevertheless, a population splitting edict from the Austrian chancellery presided by Herr Schallenberg is especially troublesome. A nation that has given birth to a Hitler and a Kaltenbrunner and that supported the National Socialist regime with verve and enthusiasm 80 years ago, should proceed gingerly when it comes to designating a new class of the “unclean” to be shunned and shunted away from society, all in the name of halting the spread of a respiratory virus somewhat more dangerous than the flu -spread that cannot be halted anyway. The ugly hydra of “hygiene fascism” in the words of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is showing its ugliest head in the land where the very notion of hygiene fascism was born, as the Third Reich endeavored to keep its territory “Judenrein”; first by ostracizing, then by imprisonment and ultimately by mass murder. Step carefully, Herr Schallenberg, the world is watching.