A Few Memories About The Firing Squad
Erinnerungen an das Erschießungskommando / A propos de ce peloton d’exécution / Ce putain de peloton d’exécution / Случаи, связанные с командованием по охране окружающей среды / זכרונות של כיתת היורים
History is a complicated thing. I wouldn’t rememeber what I did a few hours ago. I just got up. I guess I might have fallen off the chair and asleep. I didn’t announce it so nobody could know what exactly has happened.
Cowards
Vienna happens to be the place where the police or whoever in charge of arresting people beheaded (!) dozens of anti-fascists / critics of Hitler / political opposition / not racists and that in the last days of WW II already aware of that they will lose.
Why? I guess because anti-fascist eye-witnesses surviving and telling the truth would have blown up their plans for a prosper claiming the first first victim of this terrible terrible war.
THE you leave NOW, and not later
The majority (about 88%, I guess) of young (?) police officers here almost seem as if could be fans of because support the Nazi Party. The local city government is not Nazi at all but, in fact, the heart and birthplace of the Social Democracy (which is NOT communism!). Nobody ever complained about that a single building in which only the police lives is handled a separate district whenever elections. You gotta keep an eye on them because the police and the military used to attack homes (with artillery) and have murdered families for not supporting fascism already long before they celebrated Hitler with standing ovations.
In the 1940ies, Viennese police used to murder everyone they accused of being gay. Well, not everybody: Working class people only. Only the poor. They used to show odd respect for money.
Where I grew up, nobody ever uses the term “police” and probably never will. In fact, even teenagers consider it an insult if I used the term “police”. Unfortunately, I understand but don’t speak the language and cannot even pronounce the adequate term. The weather forecast is all I need to know and can handle the vocabulary necessary. Well, actually, not even that. If someone asked at which hotel I would stay I will not deny than I were a tourist.
Frantic walls of nostalgia
That is all true but had not been allowed to be taught in history class at school. I am not that old. It took until 2016 or so, for the Austrian government to finally (at least partly) admit that Austrian Fascism used to be an actual thing. If you had gotten convicted for not supporting fascism in 1933 and also managed to flee from here to avoid death penality, you remained enama of the state until 2011. That is what governments here discuss and communicate in public for the whole world to see. Whatever might continue in their heads could be a different story.
I would not know if school books received updates since. In 2018, a member of the parliament described the situation in the former fascist and only recently rebranded corruption party here as Frantic (Rasender) Stillstand (l’arrêt rapide).
Graffiti saying “Ganz Wien hasst die Polizei” (Everybody in Vienna hates the police) is not considered vandalism. Not here, after what they did to us. We wait for the rain. I think they use water-proof paint these days. The rain will still wash it away, it just takes a little longer. Blame it on the weather.
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