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Allah
tranceaddict in training



Registered: May 2008
Location: Kazak
Austrian

Austria is launching a propaganda offensive to counter the impression, following the horrific happenings in Amstetten, that the picturesque Alpine republic is not, as a Government spokesman put it: “A nation of child abductors.”


Indeed not. But there is, as any foreigner who has lived there for any length of time will tell you, something, well, odd about the Austrians.


Some Austrians recognise this. The country’s leading contemporary writer, the gloomy novelist and 2004 Nobel literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek, affectionately calls her country “the land of murder and death”.

The late Austrian psychologist Erwin Ringel even wrote a book, The Austrian Soul, in which he diagnosed a severe case of national neurosis. He likened his country to a house with two rooms - one in apfel-strudel order; the other - like the forbidden chamber in Bluebeard’s castle - a locked room where hideous, unnamed horrors lurk, but which no-one is permitted to enter.

The parallels with Josef Fritzl’s chamber are a little too close for comfort. I spent four years in Austria, in the 1990s, working as a radio journalist for the state broadcasting corporation, ORF. I arrived knowing that Austria has the second highest suicide rate in the world ( after neighbouring Hungary). But I hardly expected to be greeted by a concrete demonstration of the trait on my first day in Vienna.

While making my way to register with the Police a senior civil servant whistled past my ear on his way to a messy death on the pavement beside me. I discovered that the man was a high official in Austria’s Ministry of Forests who had been operating a profitable embezzlement scam for years.

As he approached compulsory retirement age, he knew the books would be examined, his misdeeds discovered and his guilty secret revealed. Fearing the shame of exposure above all else, he jumped from the fifth storey.

Attempts to deny or cover up some nasty secret have defined Austria throughout its history. As the more recent cases of Natascha Kampusch and the monstrous Fritzl demonstrate, sometimes the secrets can be very nasty indeed.

Some trace Austria’s warped coldness to its geographic location; what crimes does the chocolate box Sound of Music beauty of these hills really conceal? Hemmed in by mountains and dark woods, its closed rural valleys encourage deep and wharped introspection.

Others blame the Austrian neuroses on the greatest crime of all: the Third Reich. Specifically Austria’s refusal to recognise that it was part and parcel of its native son Hitler’s plan.

The official Austrian attitude had always been that it was ‘Hitler’s first victim’ - occupied in March 1938 ahead of Czechoslovakia and Poland. But the newsreels of the delirious crowds who greeted Hitler’s entry to Vienna told their own undeniable story.

In truth, as the Austrian-born British journalist Hella Pick recognised when choosing the title of her 2000 postwar history of the country Austria was a ‘Guilty Victim’.

When I was in Vienna a vaguely familiar foxy face could still be seen at receptions and formal occasions: Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian President and former Secretary-General of the UN. Though long since exposed as an accessory to Nazi war crimes in the Balkans, and banned from entering the US, the Austrians still clung to this slimy individual, denying his guilt until the bitter end.

At the other end of the social scale from Waldheim, the big story during my Vienna years was the case of Jack Unterweger, the fruit of one of thousands of post-war liasions between Austrian girls and passing US GIs. Jack grew up a small-time crook with a penchant for beating up women.

One night he went too far and killed a stranger in front of his under-age girlfriend. Jailed, he proceeded to bombard Austria’s great and good with prison-penned poems, plays and stories, together with lachrymose protests that he was a victim of society and his unfortunate upbringing. His pleas worked. Paroled, it took him just four months of freedom to resume killing.

In the meantime little Jack had become a media star - rarely off the radio or out of the glare of the TV cameras. As the tally of Austrian prostitutes strangled with their own underwear mounted from a postwar annual average of one to an astonishing eight in as many months, the reporter who seemed to be closer to the case than anyone else was dapper little Jack.

Curiously, it took the Austrian police many months to work out that Jack the lad was actually Jack the bad. In the meantime Jack had jetted off to California in pursuit of Hollywood stardom - killing a further three prostitutes while he was there.

Even when he was arrested and put on trial there were many, including the lawyer Astrid Wagner who continued to deny what was staring them in the face. Wagner - who runs a fashionable Viennese legal practice - even wrote a book seeking to prove Jack innocent.

On the night he was convicted, Jack hanged himself in his cell - using the same rare knot he had used to strangle his victims.

The Austrian great and good had been wrong all along. Again. Now the Austrian establishment - its closely intertwined knot of politicians, legal officials and police - has another crime of equal or greater magnitude to talk down. It will take some doing, but they’re used to it.

Their Austrian inner conception of themselves is so set in cement that when reality collides with their considered image, it is reality that goes out of the window.

Thus Fritzl’s latest plea that he actually saved his children/grandchildren from the wicked world’s contamination by locking them in a dark dungeon for decades may even be the truth - as he sees it.

He could actually believe this grotesque distortion. He is, after all, an Austrian. SHAME!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...5/09/do0905.xml

Old Post May-14-2008 19:01  United States
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Magnetonium
Dubstep = Douchestep



Registered: Sep 2001
Location: Port Burwell, Ontario, Canada



Yikes, thats UGLY!

Old Post May-14-2008 22:55  Canada
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Lira
Ancient BassAddict



Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasilia, Brazil




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Old Post May-14-2008 23:10  Brazil
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HardTranceProd
Supreme tranceaddict



Registered: Jun 2004
Location: Washington DC

Take a look at this latest story from Austria:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne...icle3931075.ece

Austrian man brutally murders entire family with axe

quote:

An Austrian man gave himself up to police yesterday after hacking his family to death with an axe, allegedly to save them from financial ruin.

The 39-year-old, who for legal reasons has been identified as Reinhard S, first killed his wife, Barbara, 42, and his daughter, Natalie, 7 in their family home in a prosperous Vienna district. By his own admission, he repeatedly struck them on the head with an axe that he had bought at a DIY store.

He then drove 170 kilometres (105 miles) to his parents’ house in the city of Linz. He then killed them with repeated blows of the axe as they slept in front of the television in their living room. They were identified as Engelbert and Gabrielle S.

The next stop was Ansfeld, a town near Linz, and home of his father-in-law. The old man, identified as Heinrich R, was felled as he opened his front door. On his return to Vienna, the murderer calmly walked into a police station at 3.20am yesterday covered in blood and in a “confused state” and confessed to the crimes. “My dead wife and my dead child are in my flat,” he told the officers.

Police said that the suspect claimed he had murdered his entire family to spare them from disgrace. “He claims to have borrowed a six-figure sum from someone from the family but then lost it in failed investments,” a police spokesman said. “According to him, the motive for the gruesome murders was to spare his family from the shame of finding out that he become financially ruined.” Detectives arriving at the family apartment in a three-storey house Vienna’s upmarket 13th District found the mutilated bodies of his wife and daughter, their heads “severely injured”. Barbara S was reportedly lying in a pool of blood in the bathroom, while the body of their daughter had been placed in a walk-in wardrobe and covered with a blanket.

The suspect told police that he killed his daughter after she watched him murder her mother. He also confessed to killing his father-in-law and his own parents.

Reinhard S, a PR consultant, told police that he had tried to commit suicide by hanging himself in a wood. It was after that botched attempt that he returned to Vienna to compose several confused notes trying to “explain and excuse” his crime, police said. He told officers that he bought the axe for the purpose of murdering his family.

Alois Lissl, the chief of police in Linz, said: “The attacks were extremely brutal and he always aimed for the head as he struck his victims. We found several confused letters in which he tried to explain and excuse his deeds. It would appear that we are dealing with a premeditated crime.” The suspect and his wife were described as a “well-to-do” family.

The news of the killing spree comes two weeks after it was revealed that another Austrian, Josef Fritzl, 73, imprisoned his daughter in a purpose-built dungeon not far from Linz, and kept her as a sex slave for 24 years, fathering seven children with her.

Michael Braunsperger, a police spokesman, said: “The suspect appears entirely composed and is answering all questions without showing any emotion. He has given a detailed account of what he had done. It is not possible to conclude whether he is suffering from some mental disorder, but one would assume that a normal person would not be capable of committing such a crime in cold blood.”

A neighbour who lives next door to the apartment said: “We admired the family. She was working on her career and he was taking care of the child. There is nothing unusual about them.



And also, take a look at this story, about the hunt for the Austrian Nazi named Heim, who is one of the most horrific Nazi figures still alive. Yup, he's Austrian, and still here. He's responsible for some horrific murders of Jews.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24373158/

quote:

Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."



Yup -- there's definitely something fucked up about Austria. Remember, 80% of the top Nazi command responsible for the Holocaust (organizing the logistics etc.) were Austrians, not Germans.


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Last edited by HardTranceProd on May-15-2008 at 01:13

Old Post May-15-2008 01:07  United States
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Lira
Ancient BassAddict



Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasilia, Brazil

Yup -- there's definitely something messed up about Austria: three Austrians were sure among the top 100 thinkers of the previous century (Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein)... yet, its population is rather small.

It must be something in the water they drink


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Old Post May-15-2008 01:20  Brazil
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HardTranceProd
Supreme tranceaddict



Registered: Jun 2004
Location: Washington DC

quote:
Originally posted by Lira
Yup -- there's definitely something messed up about Austria: three Austrians were sure among the top 100 thinkers of the previous century (Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein)... yet, its population is rather small.

It must be something in the water they drink


People don't get much more naive than you (i've read many of your posts... not just here but elsewhere too). But it takes all sorts.

BTW, ever been to Austria? I have.


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Old Post May-15-2008 01:24  United States
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Lira
Ancient BassAddict



Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasilia, Brazil

quote:
Originally posted by HardTranceProd
People don't get much more naive than you. But it takes all sorts.

BTW, ever been to Austria? I have.

It's not naivety, it's fairness: I don't rush and generalise because of absurd cases like that. I've never ever seen a country without stories of brutality and horror. It's bound to happen anywhere in the world, and just because the crimes get reported more often, that doesn't mean similar cases didn't happen before (and aren't happening elsewhere).

Oh, and even though this is completely irrelevant to our discussion, yes, I've been to Austria as well. I will never forget the my problem with diarrhoea in Salzburg


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Old Post May-15-2008 01:30  Brazil
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TranceGiant
randomly disappoints



Registered: Jun 2001
Location: (Strudel)-City that never sleeps
Thumbs down

I urge you to have your focus on any random country (say Greece) for the next couple of weeks. Local news etc. By the end you'll have a pile of horrible crime and disgusting violence. Then we'll sit down and draw the line to Aristotle.


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Old Post May-15-2008 07:20  United States
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George Smiley
Supreme tranceaddict



Registered: Jan 2004
Location: 9 Bywater Street, Chelsea, London

quote:
Originally posted by TranceGiant
I urge you to have your focus on any random country (say Greece) for the next couple of weeks. Local news etc. By the end you'll have a pile of horrible crime and disgusting violence. Then we'll sit down and draw the line to Aristotle.

Sod that, why don't we compile a list of known paedophiles from Austria and compare that to the number of known paedophiles in America? Or why don't we conduct an in depth analysis of fucking weirdos in America and jump to some conclusions about the rest of the population?

Fuck me! "Foreigner thinks people from another country are different to them" shocker!

Old Post May-15-2008 08:12  England
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