To kill one baby may be accounted carelessness, but to kill four . . .
Here is a classic gruesome shock horror well-I-never what’s-the-world-coming-to? story from timesonline. The headline says it all:
Mother hid dead babies in the freezer
Who says they don’t write headlines like that any more? They wrote that one today. No wonder Europe has a demographic crisis on its hands. These people really do not like to have children, do they?
To be more geographically selective, what is Austria coming to? To me Austria has long been a rather sinister place. It is one of the two national bits at the heart of Nazism, but unlike the other bit, Germany, it has never properly apologised. (Germany has never stopped apologising.) Very pretty waltzes, I agree. Nevertheless, Austria is, you might say, Japan on the Danube. Hitler, remember, was Austrian, and he incubated a lot of his worst ideas when living in Vienna. If only he had been frozen at birth. More recently we have had to share our planet with the creepy Kurt Waldheim.
On the other hand, I have only occasionally been to Austria, and have little first hand experience of its people. No doubt many of them are quite nice, and I do not just mean the Austrian economists.
This frozen baby thing happened in Graz.
Graz, a picturesque city of 250,000 lies 120 miles south of Vienna and is the birthplace of film actor turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
They do not spell it out, but the implication is clear. The baby freezing was Arnold’s fault! Along with most of the other Samizdatistas, I think Arnold is a good Austrian. However, according to this, Arnold invited Waldheim to his wedding, which I did not know until now. (Waldheim did not attend.) Nor do I know whether this means that Arnold is worse than I thought, or Waldheim better. Maybe it just shows that you get all sorts at weddings.
The Austrians are the cleverst people on the Planet. They have convinced everybody that Mozart was Austrian and Hitler was German.
The story is just another chapter in the war on children declared when abortion was legalised.
Eichmann was Austrian, as was Kaltenbrunner.
Graz is the regional capital of the province of Styria which has had a program in place since 2001 allowing women who don’t want to keep their babies to give birth anonymously. In June 2001, a baby hatch was installed at the LKH-Regional & University Hospital, Graz at the initiative of the Government of Styria, the charity Caritas (Roman Catholic Diocese of Graz-Seckau) and the Styrian Hospitals Authority.
This allows mothers who can see no alternative to give up their baby anonymously and without being observed (at a Babyklappe) at a place where it will be safe and properly cared for.Legislators use only one supporting argument: avoiding the risk of infanticide.
France, Luxembourg and Germany (through use of the Babyklappe)allowing such anonymous births. 42 US States have enacted “safe haven” laws which permit a person — usually a parent — to abandon a newborn baby, at a specified location (Texas 1st state to do so in 1999). Sweden has the “Allmänna barnhuset” which follows a royal decree in 1771 to prevent mothers of unwanted illegitimate children being sentenced to death. Despite objections that it steals the Right of the Child the knowledge of their parenthood there are more demands for the process – a major topic of debate in the Czech republic for the last 7 years.
“A Common Thread” is a French Film (shown London from 20th May) that won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 explores the topic through headstrong Claire who learns that she is five months pregnant at the age of 17, she decides to give birth anonymously.
The Legislative Decree on the Protection of Births was enacted by the collaborationist Vichy government in 1941 and has been said to be a result of the consequences of collaborators seeking to conceal the parentage of children by the occupying forces. Today the today the procedure for anonymous childbirth is set out in Social Action and Families Code (Art. 222-6) It is said 2 children a day are born under these “X” provisions but recently moves have been made to reduce the practice.
In spite of the passing of a law in 2002 creating a National Council for the Access to Personal Origins, the traditional line of ‘respect for life’ arguments for the maintenance of accouchement sous X has prevailed in France. Surprisingly, this line is supported by the feminist ‘pro-choice’ movement, and converges with a line of arguments that criticizes the supposed ‘biogenetization’ of society, and advocates a definition of the parent–child relation as a ‘purely social construction’.
Once identity erasure became institutionalized, it became normalized, giving the new government the same benefits that it gave the Vichy government: The X laws maintained bourgeois standards of family honor, paternity and sexuality. The X laws obscured criminal and abusive sexual relationships. The X Laws relegated and continue to relegate the victims and their offspring, not to mention just plain inconvenient children, as official state secrets.
The European Court of Human Rights in 2003 upheld the French law, ruling that denying children given up at birth the right to discover their biological parents’ identity did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights, and that such children were not victims of undue discrimination.
“I’m deeply, deeply upset,” said Pascale Odievre, who was given up for adoption at birth in 1965. She brought the case after trying for more than 13 years to discover her mother’s name through the French courts.
The Austrians are the cleverst people on the Planet. They have convinced everybody that Mozart was Austrian and Hitler was German.
Well, at the end of the day it was Germans who got him into power. He couldn’t have launched his Third Reich from Vienna.
Dear Yusuf
I don’t seem to remember the Anschluss was resisted too strongly. No that’s unreasonable, I don’t remember it, I wasn’t born.
Hitler was nothing until the men with money (Swiss, American and others) backed Hitler.
The Austrians can claim two of the most popular 20C artists in Klimt and Scheile. I think Schwitters was as well.
I don’t seem to remember the Anschluss was resisted too strongly. No that’s unreasonable, I don’t remember it, I wasn’t born.
Well, the Austrian Republic was only 20 years old – before that there had been two German-dominated empires. I’m sure some Austrians hated the idea of Vienna losing its status as a capital, apparently forever, and some pan-German nationalists who would have supported it with or without Hitler. I’m sure the people behind “Red Vienna” didn’t care much for the Nazi Anschluss.
What a strange post. A sad deranged woman kills her offspring and we get a lengthy comment on newspaper headlines, (not being what they used to be), and a load of flatulent rhetoric and criticism of a whole nation, covering music, politics, famous emigrants and sundry other rubbish, and the thoughtful summary that Austria has always seemed to be ‘a sinister place’, and ‘good Lord, what are things coming to’.
I did not see any similar analysis of life in the UK when it was reported that a gang of children had tried to murder another child, ‘just for fun’. No rhetorical questioning of just what Britain is coming to, or tenuous historical links.
GB seems to be a far more sinister place than Austria, where adults are frequently reported killing children, out of perversion, almost on a weekly basis, and where this is not the first instance of a gang of juveniles committing murder. Where gratuitous violence is the order of the day, and punishment is virtually non-existent, unless, of course you commit a ‘crime’ against the State, such as speaking your mind, or by parking in the wrong place, etc. etc.
I would remind you that ‘If you live in a glasshouse, you really should not throw stones’.
Great Britain is a far more sinister place than Austria has ever been, and by all accounts, would seem to be one of the nastier places to live, in Europe.
You should nt be hasty. No one is being charged with “attempted murder” – now it is gbh. The CMS are again peddling their War on Children, demonising them yet again.
G. Meldrew: I agree with you that this is a very strange post. Unfortunately (or not) I feel the exact same way Brian does. I guess I must be a very strange person. And I even never have been to Austria or met any Austrians. Go figure…
Anyone who quotes Saki is fine with me….
I had a professpr at University who was a distant Habsburg, born about 1910 and emigrated in the mid 30s.
He once said, “All those people wavingat Hitler in Vienna, what were they, extras flown in from hollywood?”