Darkest Moment of the Night in AustriaA large minority of Austrians suddenly woke up and saw in the full light of day that their constitutional and fundamental rights meant nothing.
By Alex Story
February 16, 2022
A few weeks ago, as seems her wont, England bumbled into freedom.
With our current Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, saying “we must learn to live with COVID in the same way we live with flu,” COVID-19 left the realm of present emergency and progressed to the field of history.
The immediacy having gone, researchers and historians will be able to judge our collective response to it in due course. A great many stones will be turned.
This month, in a faraway country about which we know little, experts agreed with Javid’s assessment. They said Austrians should learn to deal with COVID “like dealing with a flu.”
But instead of stumbling, as the English did, into normality, the citizens of this beautiful Alpine country fell back into a darker past.
The Austrian government, a coalition of environmentalists (Greens) and conservatives (OVP), with the support of socialists (SPO) and social liberals (NEOS) passed one of the most repressive laws in Western Europe since 1945.
Alexander Van der Bellen, the Austrian president and lifelong green activist, signed the Vaccine Mandate Law on February 4.
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Karoline Edtstadler, the constitutional minister, had said in November that “the introduction of compulsory vaccination naturally interferes with fundamental rights.”
Waving the wand of expediency, however, she added with a toothy smile that the step was “necessary and justified” given the circumstances.
A large minority of Austrians suddenly woke up and saw in the full light of day that their constitutional and fundamental rights meant nothing and were no match against what experts—Austrians included—now concede amounts to a flu.
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Either “rights” are fundamental or they are not. If they are, encroaching on them should never be “justified”—certainly not according to what is expedient at the time in the minds of our lawmakers.
In Austria, as the emergency laws were discussed over the last three months, the majority of political parties openly broadcast their view that no fundamental rights actually existed.
In that time, the greens revealed themselves in full. While doubt is starting to creep in across the Austrian body politic, greens are digging in. The bunker is ready. They are still righteously and religiously certain that social repression is the only way Vorwaerts! as it were.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/16/darkest-moment-of-the-night-in-austria/
