“Imagery of the Nazis”: Massive criticism of the video of the FPÖ youth

The Greens see “baiting, financed with tax money”. The SPÖ calls on the Deputy Governor of Lower Austria, Udo Landbauer, who appears in the video, to distance himself from the video.

A video of the Freedom Youth published on the YouTube channel “FPÖ TV” on Sunday drew violent reactions. The FPÖ youth presented themselves as “Austria’s last chance” that resisted “left-liberal indoctrination”.

In the video, the Freedom Youth presents itself as an organization that finds itself in times of environmental pollution, inflation, “gender madness”, “rainbow terror” and “population exchange”, in which the prevailing politics ensure “that we will have no future”. Above all, male adolescents and young adults are shown in the forest, with torches, at courses and demonstrations. Lower Austria’s Deputy Governor Udo Landbauer (FPÖ) will also be there. While there is talk of a “multicultural dystopia”, images of riots in the streets and the burning Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris are contrasted with those of folk dances and soldiers.

The storm is mainly directed against links, but also figuratively against journalists. The FPÖ youth postulates that the times “when the left dictated the issues and we patriots could only react” are over – underlined with photos of the journalists Armin Wolf and Florian Klenk, the political scientist Natascha Strobl and the right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism researcher Andreas Peham from the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW).

Maurer: “Imagery of the Nazis”

The Green Club Chairwoman Sigrid Maurer saw the video serving the “Nazi imagery”. “The recently published video of the Austrian Freedom Youth shows in a shockingly clear visual and spoken message what has been running through the entire Freedom Party lately: the focus on agitating against other people and institutions and on the resurrection of dictatorial dream regime. And all of this is financed with taxpayers’ money,” criticizes the Green youth spokeswoman, Barbara Neßler. Above all, she comes across the literature presented in the video – such as “some books by the right-wing extremist Antaios Verlag, whose boss Götz Kubitschek can be considered the foster father of the Identitarians and is being observed by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution.” Founder of the so-called ‘New Right’ in France, to whom the Identitarians refer significantly” and “Karlheinz Weißmann, whose revisionist view of history is accused of a ‘trivialization of the Holocaust’”.

Criticism also came from the SPÖ. The impression is created that political opponents are being threatened, Hergovich is quoted as saying in a press release. He demands that Udo Landbauer distance himself from the video, that state governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner (ÖVP) should clarify with her coalition partner “how this video came about and how it is ensured that something like this doesn’t happen again”. Nessler also appealed to Mikl-Leitner to “set limits for your coalition partner”. (APA/red.)