(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

1) Dear completely batshit insane Carinthians - please take your crazy somewhere else. Seriously. This is embarrassing.


2) Okay. I'm not gloating over someone's death or its circumstances, even if that person has been racist, borderline fascist, insulted, lied, ignored the law, used his political talent and personal charisma to bring out the worst in people, the easy prejudice, the mindless hatred, whenever it suited his needs, definitely changing the Austrian political climate for the worse, and aggravated me my whole adult political life. And I am sorry for his family. But that if things are heading the way the seem to be heading very soon the whole of Austria will look at the FPÖ and BZÖ personnel past & present and speculate which careers were made in the Führer's bed... Damn right, Schadenfreude. I'm no saint.

Of course the genuinely sad and a bit tragic thing about this is that, even if judging from the rumour mill and photos that surfaced recently, in the end it was more of an open secret than a very tightly shut closet, if you're Landeshauptmann and a right-wing party leader in Austria you can't have your chauffeur pick you up from a gay bar, and you can't have someone you met there drive you home to your family and 90 year old mother whose birthday you're going to celebrate, even if they offer. Instead, you kill yourself losing control of your car at 140+ km/h because you're too drunk to notice the driver in front of you in time.

[ETA: Holy shit, poor guy. Yet another right-wing idiot who'll mangle the (Greek) name of a politician from the Green party and justify it by saying that it's too difficult and he prefers German names, major weirdness, and I have no idea why he's even willing to do that in front of a camera, but, poor man. I could almost - almost - wish it weren't so very obvious he'll fail abysmally.]

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Gay bar, eh? I should have seen that one coming.

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

There've been plenty of rumours for a long time, but in Austria a politician's private life still is actually treated as private unless they themselves invite the press in, like former president Klestil did.

And (generalising from my own feelings on this matter) I guess no one even (or especially) on the left side of the political spectrum, however much they wanted him gone, wanted his career to take a dent because of his sexuality instead of all the hateful, racist, antisemitic shit he constantly spewed; for people who were perfectly fine with the latter to judge him because of the former. It's a bit of a dilemma...

[nacktmull70.livejournal.com]

Well, even though he was, as you correctly say, a racist mudslinger of the nastier sort, there is one positive thing to be said for him (and most other FPÖ politicians).

The world over, your typical right-wing party has homophobia pretty high on the list of things they keep going on about. It is somewhat to the credit of Haider and his FPÖ/BZÖ goons that they never jumped on that particular bandwagon. They just kept their mouths shut, and kept going to gay bars after hours.

Which is at least marginally better than being gay AND homophobic (always a popular option with closet cases, and all the nastier if done in a political context).

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing these days the danger of getting outed himself would have been too great if he'd done that?


Hatte ja gestern gleich wieder ein schlechtes Gewissen, dass ich in meinem Posting zu gemein war, als ich dann das Video mit dem schluchzenden Petzner sah... Die machen's einem wahrlich nicht leicht. *seufz*

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As far as I am concerned, Greens are ludicrous enough not to need to mangle their names. Anyway, given the abundance of non-German names in Austria, I would have thought this a self-defeating strategy.

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

Hi, Green voter here... Although admittedly partly for lack of better options, since the liberal party was sadly short-lived.

A certain FPÖ politician changed his name from Hojac to Westenthaler. They're weird like that.