Archives for January 20th, 2006

The xenophobic KHD unwilingly gets p0wned with a bilingual sign.

There are about 14,000 Slovenes living in the Austrian state of Carinthia. Unfortunately for them there are also about 25,000 members of the Kärntner Heimatdienst (KHD) in the same state. The KHD is a group that organizes such wholesome, fun-for-the-whole-family activities as the memorial festival for Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS veterans in Ulrichsberg every year. They’re also fighting on the front lines of the most important battle in Carinthia today: stopping the Slovenian minority’s nefarious plan of putting up bilingual signs in towns where they live. (Oh no!) In a dastardly set-back, Austria’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2001 that towns whose populations are at least 10% Slovene should put up such signs. But luckily for the KHD and other xenophobes, Austria’s highest court is more of an advisory board than anything else, because Governor Joerg "An-orderly-employment-policy-was-carried-out-in-the-Third-Reich" Haider has refused to put it into effect. (It’s worth noting that Slovenia has put up Italian-Slovene signs in coastal cities and that, so far, there have been no casualties, and no apocalypses.)

Which brings us to the photo you see above. It seems that someone (a genius by any measure) went to the lair of the KHD and replaced their sign with a bilingual one. Needless to say, the KHD didn’t think it was funny — it was "provocative." Their press release also included this very revealing sentence: Auf
diese Aktion wurden Funktionäre des KHD heute Nachmittag erst aufgrund eines
Berichtes im slowenischen „Volksgruppen-Radio“ des ORF aufmerksam. (KHD officials first became aware of this deed after a broadcast on the Slovenian radio service of ORF.)

That’s right: A group whose entire raison d’être is that bilingual signs would be catastrophic for Austria didn’t even notice when someone put one up at their place. They had to hear about it somewhere else first. There’s a lesson there, but I think the members of KHD aren’t sharp enough to get it.

(Many thanks to AZ2SI!)