Deutschsprachige Version vom 3.1. unter http://no-racism.net/article/4351
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### The nightmare of the leading order. The outsiders already won!
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"We don’t fight for warm beds. We want our future. We want to do
something for our live. We request from the government to give us a
chance and to hear and answer to our demands."
By Ljubomir Bratic
People who set their camp in Sigmund-Freud-Park, to demonstrate their
need for rights and equality and who sought shelter in Votiv-Church
during the weeks before christmas and went into hunger strike, belong to
the outsiders in our, the Austrian, society. They don’t not belong their
because of lack of ownership but because society doesn’t want them to be
a part of itself.
So as being people who don’t belong, per definition they could not be a
zoon politicon – an individual betting on equality beyond equals. The
fact that people who don’t belong here ARE here, for the administration
in the first place (because they have to deal with the fact that those
nameless people took a public place, the Sigmund-Freud-Park) and the
NGOs in the second place (because with the choice of a church as shelter
it diminishes their ability to help and organize the help), this
situation is incomprehensible so that they wish to turn it back and make
it forgotten as fast as possible. Just for their concern, you can say
that this nightmare is going to last a little while longer. In the
following, the question is asked, how such a thing could happen in Vienna!
The administration
Who are those Do-not-belongs in the eyes of the administration? As
known, this administration is left-wing-liberal. It contains the
powerful Socialdemocrats (SPÖ) who over the years managed to oust racist
positions from their midst (one of them is Johann Hatzl who worked under
minister Franz Löschnak and interestingly became head of SPÖ-close
aid-organisation “Volkshilfe”) and the green party (die Grünen), whose
head once made a public appearance to bring the “voice of migrants” into
parliament and who has given up her demand to go pragmatically ways
leading to personal success instead. The decision to give up such
demands made the green party a suitable partner for coalition.
Together they eliminated the conference of integration in Vienna. They
found a middle way in which one side could handle the public brutality
of the hardliners and the other side, who claimed more participation of
the migrants in society, had to give up that demand. A positive null sum
game so to speak. But now in this ongoing story a subject appears which
nobody noticed before, in other words, which only was noticed as an
object in need, of tolerance or of repression. Now this subject acts and
has demands everybody understand. It is those, who appeared in none of
the controllsystems (not even those of the police), people who were
tolerated as a non-participating part of society, refugees, who have to
live in insecurity and who now claim to enlarge the sense of collective
in society.
What happens, while reading these words? Those people talk, they express
their demands and more: they claim that no one besides them can speak
for themselves. This unveils every apparent authority of representation
as well as those powerful controllsystems and it appeared so, that the
authority has not enough arguments against this weak, sick and hungry
human being, which is not participating in structural force. It also
appears that this subject speaks the same language of political demand
like everybody else in society. But giving in to these demands would
lead to relativization of their manorial positions.
The only thing left for administration is a desperate act of
selfprotection: the removal of the outsiders from the position of a
public effective army of delegitimation. In consequence, all objects of
utility must be removed: tents, clothes, tables, benches, … in the
middle the night, on 28th of December at 04.00 a.m. Sigmund-Freud-Park
has been “cleaned” from the people and their belongings. If this
happened in awareness of all people who have found a seat in city
government is not important. The tents of the demonstrating people were
removed and destroyed. Instead of giving those people a cold and meager
possibility to spend the night their things were thrown in some magazine
of the city by bulldozers.
While at the same time on that lawn no one is allowed to build up his
tent anymore. So the city government did their chores. The tents were
never returned and the action took place in a way that’s final. To the
government’s regret it’s not like the protest and the voice of the
outsiders has silenced just by removing their personal things.
The church
And who are the outsiders in the eyes of the helpers. In the system of
the national state racism there are several divisions of labor. One of
them: The responsibility for the administration of that tolerated form
of being lies with those who dedicated themselves to aid: the aid
organizations including Social work and operative entities like for
instance “Volkshilfe” or “Caritas”. So what are the outsiders doing
while their voice of participation is shouting their demands? They
refuse the help of those aid organizations – from the beginning none of
those organizations was involved – and more, they challenge them by
focusing their protest on them: They own a church. This place is of
different nature as the one of the park controlled by the
administration. This is a place dedicated to mercifulness and its
history is includes a strong history of sanctuary.
Furthermore it includes something that is of immediate relevance in the
actual situation of the church: Caritas is a legitimate part of the
church. It manages refugeeshelters, has helpdesks for such and helpdesks
for people who want do return to their countries. Those organizations
get a great deal of the money which is to organize the tolerance of the
outsiders. With their act and their positioning on the sorted territory
called Vienna, the outsiders have chosen what concerns them the most:
the one organization which now is confronted with the question of nature
of their help. How can this rationality be questioned at all? That’s the
very question the administration and her entities (political parties,
lobbies, public media, etc.) are asking. What to do when someone who is
not part of the political order proving their rationality by suddenly
speaking a definite political language and not only speaking that
language but also acting in a way that makes this language heard.
Lost fight
In effect for the mentioned parts of administration this is a lost
fight. No matter what they do and how they do it, a new rational talking
political subject has appeared. We all have to learn to deal with it but
they can not make it disappear anymore. That is the greatest achievement
of these people in Sigmund-Freud-Park and Votiv-Church. To fulfill the
requirements of these people who have organized themselves as a
political subject, to make them politically equal conversational
partners and to accept them as lonesome speakers for their situation
would be good advice for the government. There is nothing else to do.
The outsiders have fought for a situation in which they are a political
subject. Now the ones are talking for whom others used to speak and they
are not only talking in public but also on the territory of an
organization which is managing the help on the same spot, where they
were degraded to objects.
That is the enormity of these protests. That is what makes it so hard to
understand and hardly acceptable for the defenders of the leading order.
P.S.: Weren’t those protesting refugees banished from Sigmund-Freud-Park
just like Sigmund Freud himself from Vienna in 1938? Is there a more
serious adverse event for the collective memory than that – different,
but still – repeating of injustice?
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German version published on: http://no-racism.net/article/4351
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