TO JOIN THE E.U. IS TO BETRAY AUSTRIA AND BETRAY EUROPE. WHY?
In the E.U. question the Austrian public is being subjected to a dogmatic brain washing by the state-controlled media the likes of which has never been seen. Television, radio and almost the entire press are in the grip of a disgraceful veiled censorship.
I would also not think it possible in a democracy, if I hadn’t experienced this kind of censorship myself. More than once all manner of pretexts and excuses were made to obstruct and prevent me from stating an anti-E.U. opinion publicly.
The excuses were: it has no relevance to the broadcast; I may not deliver a prepared text; it was not my responsibility; I was crazy; or they resorted to deliberate diffamation to destroy my credibility.
And at that, my misgivings and fears have long since been corroborated in the E.U. states themselves. Why don’t people listen to Leopold Kohr (“The Breakdown of Nations”), Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (“Small is Beautiful”), Jimmy Goldsmith (“The Trap – and What If We Have Taken a Bad Road?”), Henry Coston (“The Europe of the Bankers”), Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Margaret Thatcher, Philippe Séguin, Marie-France Garaud, Elisabeth Guigou, Alberto Miele (“Let’s Drive the Merchants Out of the Temple of Europe”), Gérard de Selys, Dr. Manfred Brunner (Anti-Maastricht Party), Sir Ralf Dahrendorf (ex-E.U. commissioner: “Artificial super-construction not viable”), Denis de Rougemont (“Europe must strive for diversity”) and untold other warning voices?
Austria has been chosen by history to be an example and centre and mainstay in Central Europe. Austria is a bridge of hope towards the East.
Since the war we have built up with laborious toil a huge capital of prosperity, domestic peace, international respect and credibility as an independent, attractive, peace-loving, cultivated nation in the heart of Europe. That cannot be shortsightedly and irresponsibly put at risk.
At this very moment, after the collapse of the communist dictatorship and the opening of boundaries, Austria must be mindful of its responsibility in Europe and may not eliminate itself.
With a suggested last-minute panic, an “Anschluss” neurosis is being generated. Fear of what or whom? What enemies does Austria have? Who would jeopardise Austria’s security, and why? Precisely by joining a military block, Austria would, as a “fringe region East Mark”, first be an area for marshalling forces and then become an enemy and target of attack (warning by Erwin Lanc). There is no cure for the threat of nuclear attack, and in regional wars – see Bosnia – there is no E.U. protection, not even in Northern Ireland, inside the E.U. itself.
Austria’s neutrality is at this precise moment more necessary than ever before. One must call neutrality by its real name and stand up for it. Neutrality is a true value. Permanent neutrality is the foundation of our state and must not be betrayed and eroded. If we undermine this foundation, we will destroy this our state, Austria, which has been erected upon it.
As of now Austria’s neutrality means autonomy, independence, freedom, assuming responsibility, setting an example – an active neutrality.
Here, too, Switzerland is an example and is also cited as an example in the [Austrian] State Treaty.
There is no reason for cutting a divide right across Europe at this of all moments. It is as if to the east of Vienna were enemy territory. Border patrols are being deployed by Germany right where the Iron Curtain has just been removed! This new line of demarcation runs not only right through Europe, but right through Austria, where the Danube monarchy was. It would be irresponsible and dangerous to increase the difference with and the threat to the countries “on the outside” by an Anschluss with an economically and politically superior power. Austria’s cultural, economic and historic destiny, Austria’s responsibility and its appeal lie to the East.
That is also what the name Austria – Österreich in German – really means: realm to the east.
The fronts have undergone a change. It is no longer the political boundaries, the front is now drawn between the brutal throw-away society, which is only interested in business, and exploited nature and the destroyed soul of man.
There is a new resistance, and already there are once again cowardly collaborators.
The politicians who now bear the responsibility are puppets of business interests and pay hypocritical lip service to environmental awareness and cultural consciousness. They adopt measures which destroy the environment and culture and make our future doubtful.
The so-called E.U. is contriving to destroy our life base, our ageold cultures, our small, evolved idiosyncrasies, our species diversity and our self-esteem.
This E.U. is a gigantic sales outlet of big business, the labour unions, the trade associations, the major banks, the poison corporations, the monoculture monopolists and the nuclear and genetic lobbies, which are about to load us like meek sheep onto a train going in the wrong direction, together with the cattle for slaughter.
This huge business mafia is interested solely in power and money and not in the well-being of nature and man.
Remote-controlled, gigantic misguided planning by irresponsible strategists sitting at their desks is destroying the foundations of our Europe, which have taken ages to grow.
Europe is undergoing the grossest rape in its history.
From Brussels no spiritual and cultural renewal of Europe will come. From there come no answers to the questions occupying the conscience of the peoples of Europe (Alberto Miele).
From this new hegemony no messages come regarding the identity, our age-old values, the substance of our civilisation and the longings of the people of Europe.
Where are the cultures, the religions, the philosophies to launch a new European epoch?
Precisely now, when our society is reaching the limits of growth, decentralisation is our only chance of survival.
An Anschluss with this overpowering central authority, which, despite all evidence to the contrary, still intends to push economic growth through as its central dogma, will have catastrophic consequences for all concerned.
What this E.U. is trying to draw us into is a merciless competitive struggle, to make us run amok in a great, dangerous illusion, in the cul-de-sac of economic growth. It would be madness to join this exclusive club of throw-away society which is throwing itself into the dustbin and reducing itself to absurdity.
If the E.U. is such a good product, why do they have to promote it so intensively? And this suspicious pressure: we must dispossess ourselves immediately or it will be too late! All good things happen slowly, in an organic process, of themselves. A tree cannot be convinced and persuaded even by threats to blossom in the middle of winter.
I do not understand why they want at all costs to persuade us to board the E.U., this sinking ship, right away.
This E.U. is a gigantic Titanic. The analogies to the sinking of the Titanic are horrifying. In both cases lack of planning, megalomania, immoderation, blind faith in technology and the mania of speed at all costs. If the former raced for the Blue Ribbon through the deadly icebergs, the latter is in a murderous race to the limits of growth of the throw-away society which is destroying our environment and us.
One should not board such a “doomed steamer Europe” and entrust it with our life and future. Better to stay in a small but maneuverable boat.
Just about everywhere in the E.U. things are out of control: Northern Ireland, the Basque region, Corsica, the Mafia, Camorra, persecution of foreigners, racial hatred and pogroms, discrimination against Greenlanders, Macedonians and the Bretons, brutal strikes, bloody excesses, student revolts, drug crime, nuclear-plant mishaps, devastated tracts of land, apathy and a feeling of looming disaster, juvenile crime, soon 20 million out of work and a split-up of the country into Flemish and Walloons, in Brussels, of all places, the seat of the European Union. Compared to this, “isolated Austria” and the Scandinavian countries, whom they want to herd into the E.U. at all costs, are pretty well off “on the outside”.
In the E.U. human fates are juggled like pawns [called “farmers” in German] on a chessboard. But you can’t fob off free farmers with money and send them off to their allotted property, that is humiliating, or use them as folklore and alibi farmers, to be trotted out for the tourists; that goes against honour and self-respect; that is worse than murder.
They are paying the farmers for their suicide. The E.U. is demanding that the farmers destroy their age-old culture. For this they will receive money. In contrast to disaster relief, the disaster is first made to happen on purpose. Evolved structures cannot be compensated for even with a great deal of money once they have been done away with. You can’t raise the dead with money.
A few powerful and competitive industrial magnates favour membership in the E.U. in order to gain even more economic advantage. But that will happen at the cost of small business and small farmers, which are jeopardised as it is.
I know from my own experience that in the E.U. countries, in France, for example, only agrarian co-operatives with over 100 hectares have a chance of survival.
This is then how it will look: either barren fields lying fallow, deserted villages or the levelling of terrain, the removal of copses, trees and rocks which get in the way of large machines, the razing of ancient farmsteads, the regulation of brooks. Perfidious destruction, with gigantic repercussions in excess of any war.
The increased use of artificial fertilizer, pesticides, genetic manipulation, radiation and environmental toxins of all kinds, of course manufactured in the E.U. A sadistic, technocratic destruction of any kind of romanticism with the catchword “unprofitable”. Monoculture as far as the eye can see. The farmer is advised to systematically violate the basis of our survival, to poison and destroy the soil, forests and meadows entrusted to his care. Agriculture will then become a gigantic agribusiness industry.
The dependence of farmers and of all of us on industry, chemistry and monopolistic businesses, this new serfdom, will be increased to an intolerable level by joining the E.U.
Foreign, more powerful, more brutal commanders take the place of the smaller domestic companies.
This will also be the fate of the smaller, i. e., all human business operations: they will be destroyed; instead, there will be more large department stores, large banks and large-scale industrialisation. In short, everything which makes our life romantic, attractive and worth living will scarcely have a way of surviving. Stupid brutality will be victorious; the delicate values will perish because they can’t defend themselves.
Agribusiness in the E.U. practises, in a close analogy to the Third Reich, a brutal selection process of pure-blooded, conformist “elite” products and the elimination of “inferior” genotypes or seeds.
This begins with the nice big apples which all have to be alike, which are bred in monocultures, of the same “race”, with the same taste, and is continued with genetic “improvement of economic animals” and the batteries of laying hens. Any unproductive life is eliminated. All unprofitable diversity, everything which is different, everything small-scale, all useless species diversity, all unprofitable beauty, are destroyed.
This makes the small farm die, too, the family farms, romanticism: in short, our quality of life.
The dying-out of the mom-and-pop stores, the farmers, family farms and small businesses, the death of small entities brings about a conformism and anonymisation of our society. Man is robbed of his dignity. This creates a new dependence, a new enslavement, a new serfdom on an unheard-of scale.
That is the end of humanistic Europe.
What then remains is a world not fitting to man, but a machine-compatible, computer-compatible one. It is a destruction of higher values which in their diversity are what make Europe what it is. It is the destruction of Europe.
The small farmers must sell their houses, their barnyards, their land; they are then either unemployed or join the urban proletariat or must join agribusiness co-operatives, where they merely take orders, with no freedom to decide for themselves, on land which once belonged to them.
The E.U. is plagued by a growing army of unemployed, which even now amounts to the working population of a country 7 to 10 times as big as Austria!
One can imagine what a devastating example the E.U. is setting for the world if the three thousand million people who are eking out an existence on the land in the Third World are forced to follow this E.U. example.
A gigantic deluge of refugees, two thousand million people from rural areas – this “global rural exodus”, as Jimmy Goldsmith warns – would be more than the world can cope with.
Boundaries are like our skin. They protect the grown organism, our individual differentness, from danger from the outside, such as heat and cold. If the skin is removed, the organism dies because it has no protection. That is why we have protective tariffs to protect an endangered polity. Like the way we use sunglasses and vaccinations against Lyme’s disease etc., for our protection.
What God has separated we should not unite by force.
There are natural boundaries, e.g., the Sahara, the Mediterranean and the Alps, under whose protection age-old cultures have evolved, such as the African, the Mediterranean and the Northern European cultures. The Alps have a protective function for the North as well as the South.
Unencumbered, senseless transit traffic is tantamount to tearing down and levelling off the Alps, even if the traffic is routed through tunnels. Austria has a function as an Alpine protective sentry for Europe, just like Switzerland.
This feverish, unnatural, mindless racing back and forth is madness and becomes in the E.U. “madness unlimited”. Wherever we happen to be, we ruin everything; then we flee from our own destruction, only to ruin everything somewhere else, and on the way there everything is destroyed, too. This false trend is encouraged and supported in the E.U.
Elisabeth Guigou puts it this way: an economy which is only geared to short-term profitability, without planning, without vision, without meaning, which produces labour-devouring machines, which is more and more dependent on the speed of communication and which with no regard to ecological balance forces people to an equally forced mobility, like its goods, capital, technologies and information, in contempt of human dignity and protection of the accustomed way of living, [is] an economic dictatorship which triumphs over all human activity …
If you kill what you are supposed to protect beforehand, you don’t need to protect it anymore. First the farmers and mom-and-pop shops have to go and the small businesses and “useless” species diversity, “unprofitable” variety. First we must adapt to international mediocrity, to poisoned food, genetically engineered and irradiated foodstuffs. First, in our haste to obey, we must reduce ourselves to the lowest common denominator and annihilate ourselves; then the E.U. can march in unresisted and march right through.
Austria as a whole will become a vassal state, a new Ostmark. Needless to say, Austria’s position as a neutral, environmentally conscious nation free of nuclear power will scarcely be tenable any longer. Then Austria will no longer be able to decide what it wants to do for itself, what and how much it produces and to which countries it will export and from which it will import goods. Austria’s fortunes will be decided by strangers in Brussels or elsewhere in the E.U., by strategists sitting at their desks who don’t care a fig about Austria’s autonomy.
Austria’s wish for neutrality, Austria’s environmental awareness will only be a source of mirth in the E.U. command centre.
The slogan “alone or together” is an alarmist, demagogical appeal to insecurity, to servitude and dependence. It may sound paradoxical, but anyone is strongest when he is alone. I know from personal experience that a person standing alone is just as strong as the group; he is not weaker. The man on the outside is more mobile, more effective in his action and reaction than a cumbersome, bureaucratic, chaotic organisation.
Europe is only strong thanks to the diversity of its autonomies. This small-scale diversity must be bolstered and protected. This diversity is Europe.De Gaulle already realised that Europe only has a chance as a Europe of independent, free fatherlands.
It is incomprehensible how irresponsibly our politicians now intend to relinquish our most valuable asset, our independence, freedom and autonomy and declare Austria legally incapacitated.
That is a betrayal of Austria.
The last time there was an Anschluss there were any number of Seyss-Inquarts, Quislings, Pétains, too, who in their situation at the time probably also thought that their convictions and patriotism were making them do the right thing, that they were doing their duty by entrusting their country to foreign hegemony.
Today history teaches us that their actions were wrong and harmful, and they have long since been branded, punished and executed as traitors and collaborators.
Cling together – swing together.
Beneath the smokescreen of the E.U. the Anschluss is taking place, unnoticed by everyone. When this E.U. then founders, we will have lost one more piece of our independence and will be stuck to our German big brother.
While bearing all the differences in mind, Austria already experienced a similar fate when, in 1937–1938, an Anschluss to the “Old Reich” was propageted, also for economic reasons. “Back home to the Reich” was the slogan then.
The exchange of the schilling to the superpower-Euro brings ominous analogies with the exchange of the schilling to the Reichmark in 1938 to mind.
It must not be forgotten that the promise of financial and economic improvement for the future population of the East Mark was the main reason that many Austrians intended to vote for the Anschluss.
The acclaimed integration with Greater Germany was followed by disenchantment.
Now it is similar. Precisely what they are touting in the E.U. is what we will lose in the E.U.: social prosperity, full employment, an intact environment, our high quality of life, our homeland, our self-esteem, our nature and our age-old cultures.
One is only a European if one retains and values one’s independent, autonomous European-ness. Switzerland, prosperous and democratic, also located in the heart of Europe, should be a shining example to us.
I also don’t understand why our Federal President is urging us to give up our sovereignty. After all, he, our highest-ranking patriot, should be issuing a warning and protecting our constitution. Is treason not a crime, the intention to subject Austria to a foreign central authority?
The State Treaty brought liberation to Austria. The E.U. Treaty is a capitulation by Austria, a legal incapacitation of Austria, a subjugation to a new, anachronistic hegemony – and a breach of the State Treaty.
It is incredible: the politicians are preparing for a second Anschluss and want to present a fait accompli to the Austrian people. Are our politicians out of their minds, so that only history can show them the error of their ways?
I am not a lawyer, but I am firmly convinced that we are being manipulated by powerful interest groups which are outside the pale of any ethical, historical, moral, cultural and ecological legality with a despicable demagogy, just like with Zwentendorf back then (the beginning of operations at the nuclear power plant was prevented by a plebiscite).
The E.U. countries are being reduced to the lowest common denominator, rendered anonymous and robbed of their identity. That is the direction this is moving in and not in the direction of decentralisation and the deepening of autonomies.
As proof, just take the E.U. flag with, as of now, 12 five-pointed little stars exactly alike. Which of these stars would stand for Austria, the one third on the right from the bottom, maybe, or the second, which looks exactly the same?
The five-pointed star is not a symbol from European history, and certainly not from Austria’s. In the evolution of the states of the Occident it does not occur. The pentagram, an occult symbol of the Druids and Free Masons, is a foreign body to western heraldry.
The five-pointed star serves rather as a sign of subjugation, conquest and colonisation, as on the flags of Australia, New Zealand, America and diverse colonial regimes.
This E.U. flag is in addition a plagiarised version of the Stars and Stripes. The United States of America were also arranged as five-pointed stars, white on blue, at first in a circle, just like the would-be “United States of Europe”. Later, when there were more of them, they were brought into rank and file.
These little five-pointed stars are just like the Soviet star, the star of the Yugoslavian, Chinese, Cuban and the other people’s epublics. Indeed, this symbol is pathetic proof of the evolved identities of Europe.
It is a bad omen when even the symbol is wrong. This E.U. flag of stars symbolises Europe’s self-sacrifice.
In the so-called E.U. culture is less than a secondary matter. Creative talents are being trimmed down to useful idiots. To support and window-dress and legitimise a mercantile and industrial growth which is self-destructive.
Culture is not present in Brussels. It is not relevant in the solely mercantile and industrial E.U. In Brussels they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
In this culture-devoid so-called E.U. only numbers count: production figures, deadlines and terms, transition times, population and cattle statistics. Gross national product, agricultural, forest and pastures in square kilometers, labour costs, social benefits, ancillary costs. Export figures, tonnage of heavy transport, milk prices, price adjustments, financing figures, compensatory figures, percents, price reductions, sugar, milk and fish quotas, transit restrictions in numbers, contingents, co-financing, tables, statistics, market-access restrictions in figures. Terms of validity, ecu exchange rates, high unemployment figures, low employment figures, subsidy figures, the number of eco-points, monetary remittances of all kinds, irreal figures on economic growth, poll results in numbers and percents, number of votes in the Council of Ministers and of the blocking minority, majorities, minorities, voting results, E.U. advertising expenditures. Even altitude statistics for alpine famers in meters and latitudes for agriculture in Finland.
If that is not symptomatic!
Environmental protection is also absent in the Brussels hegemony. Only 0.3 percent of the E.U. officials (30 out of 10,000) are concerned with ecology. Talk of environmental protection across borders is just that. Austria must share in the financing of nuclear energy and admit, e.g., plastic bottles and genetically engineered products and idiotically dangerous regulations on the size of apples and monoculture fruit varieties. I have seen this myself.
In Brussels nobody speaks of culture and Western values. Brussels only makes expenditures for culture when asked to. Cultural studies, indeed all study courses, are oriented in the E.U. to their usefulness for industry and to exaggerated growth goals.
Only creation can teach us creativity and organic growth. Only creation can teach us to respect species diversity and its incredibly rich variety, of which we are a part ourselves.
In the E.U., however, efforts are being made in precisely the opposite direction: destruction of the small-scale, creative values in favour of a completely false and outdated automatisation, centralisation and rationalisation, which will be our ruin sooner or later.
The conscience of our civilisation, our age-old destiny to strive for higher values, is being left behind.
Written in Vienna – Paris – Kaurinui, 1988-1994. Passages in italics: La Picaudière, 1997.
Published in:
Witzany, Günther (ed.): Verraten und Verkauft - Das EG-Lesebuch. Salzburg: UNIPRESS, 1993, p. 65-68 (Text Anschlußpsychose, 1988) (German)
protokolle. Zeitschrift für Literatur und Kunst. edited by Otto Breicha. Vienna: Verlagsbüro Lehner, 1997, pp. 185-193 (German)
Witzany, Günther (ed.): Zukunft Österreich - EU Anschluß und die Folgen. Salzburg: UNIPRESS, 1998, pp. 83-99 (German)
Schmied, Wieland (ed.): Hundertwasser 1928–2000, Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. II: Fürst, Andrea Christa: Catalogue Raisonné. Cologne: Taschen, 2002, pp. 1151-1162 (German and English)
Schurian, Walter (ed.): Hundertwasser – Schöne Wege, Gedanken über Kunst und Leben. (Beautiful Paths – Thoughts on Art and Life) Munich. Langen Müller Verlag, 2004, pp. 55-64 (German)