

A Bridge too Near When jokes threaten to become reality A long time ago at the beginning of this ‘refugee crisis’, people used to make a joke and say, “If this keeps up, liberals might start asking for a bridge to be built so that no one would need to smuggle humans across water any more”. Who could have known that this joke would become a jinx? Watch this: Youtube: The Bridge (28 Sep 2013) Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad has called for the construction of a 200km long bridge from Al Huwariyah in Tunisia to Agrigento in Sicily. This is after Konrad had previously called for housing solutions to be constructed in Austria as hundreds of asylum seekers currently staying at the Traiskirchen reception centre in Lower Austria are sleeping in tents due to overcrowding there. Education Minister Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek is tasked with devising proposals on how to integrate refugee into Austrian schools. This integration will likely be of the sort that parents of non-Muslim children will have no ability to veto. Integration of school systems never seems to come ‘organically’. Social Minister Rudolf Hundstorfer will be looking for ways to ease the strictures of employment laws, so as to make it easier for big businesses to employ refugees, and for the purpose of lowering the standards that govern social bargaining at the enterprise and state level, the standards which Austria actually would have had to agree to have upheld upon joining the ERM back in March 1979. So now they have come full circle, and have ended up considering imposing a very ‘American’ form of social bargaining and employment laws, even though the European approach was supposed to have some significant differences. Under the so-called emergency, the crisis that ‘demands’ compromise, one of the supposed prized qualities of the European labour market, will be dismantled for the benefit of a certain cross section of large companies which see it as being in their interest to use these migrants as a battering ram against any attempts to have any kind of organised labour movement in the continent. It is against this backdrop of the tendencies within the Austrian ruling class, that this bridge proposal is set. Construction companies The construction company STRABAG AG would get the contract for the bridge. STRABAG AG is a company that was created through the merger of ILBAU and STRABAG in the 1930s, both being founded by Anton Lerchbaumer. It acquired Deutsche Asphalt Group in 2002, Waltr Bau Group in 2005, it took on a majority stake in Ed Züblin in 2005, Adanti SpA, KIRCHNER Holding GmbH, F. Kirchhoff AG and Deutsche Telekom Immobilien und Service GmbH in 2008. In 2013 the Supreme Court of the Slovak Republic stated that it believed that one of the companies of the STRABAG Group participated in bid rigging cartel of construction companies in that country. Amongst the companies involved in that cartel, was a company called Doprastav a.s., which is part of Doprastav Group. The illegal conduct centred around the D1 Highway which was constructed from 2004 and continued to have work done on it and its surroundings up to at least 2010. STRABAG is managed by CEO Thomas Birtel. The Chairman of the supervisory board at STRABAG is Alfred Gusenbauer. Alfred Gusenbauer is an Austrian politician who until 2008 had spent his entire professional life as an employee of the Social Democratic Party of Austria or as a parliamentary representative. He headed the Social Democratic Party of Austria from 2000 to 2008, and served as Chancellor of Austria from January 2007 to December 2008. Since then he has positioned himself as a consultant and lecturer, and as a member of supervisory boards of Austrian companies, STRABAG being one of these. Gusenbauer is known for having exploited the occurrence of the BAWAG Scandal, in which BAWAG—the bank of the Austrian Trade Union Federation—engaged in failed bets using risky undocumented derivative instruments held off-balance-sheet. After the losses became unmanageable, Fritz Verzetnitsch resigned from the Austrian Trade Union Federation in disgrace, and Gusenbauer used this opportunity to exclude all of the Trade Union leaders from the ballot lists of the Social Democratic Party, an action which moved the party to the right structurally. STRABAG’s Gusenbauer and Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad obviously are not strangers to each other, seeing as they come from the same party and travel in the same social circles. In the world of business and politics, it’s quite often about who you know and who you’ve worked with. Aside from the fact that STRABAG is one of the largest construction companies in Austria, there is also the political connection that would exist between persons within the state and within that company’s structure. Russian-Jewish Mafia involvement A notable stakeholder in STRABAG is Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, a extremely wealthy Russian oligarch, who—when he is not exploiting the mineral and energy resources of impoverished Asians in Siberia—also has for some reason cultivated over the years a very amicable relationship with people who may or may not be associated with former Russian soldiers who had been veterans in Afghanistan who may be part of the presently existing heroin smuggling operations which have been occurring at an ever-heightening rate since the year 2005. Additionally, Deripaska has a good relationship with the Russian-Israeli Mafia, which helped him with the purchase of Sayansk aluminium plant in Siberia when he was first starting up as a businessperson in the 1990s. He has a especially tight relationship with the Israeli business and crime figure known as Michael Cherney, who personally assessed Deripaska and pulled the necessary strings on his behalf. Deripaska has since operated in the debt of Cherney and the Russian-Israeli Mafia. Cherney also operates security think tank groups, which may or may not be actually just front groups which allow him and his criminal networks to plug into the stream of intelligence exchanges that go on in the War on Terror, so that he can smuggle contraband through conflict zones with less risk of detection. Cherney also publishes anti-fascist publications through the Michael Cherney Foundation which is registered as a ‘charitable foundation’. Interfacing with activist groups The proposal for this Africa-to-Europe 200km long bridge, whose construction contract sits at the centre of all of these groups and individuals, also is associated with a local Austrian ‘anti-racist’ activist group. That group is named Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, which in English is ‘Centre for Political Beauty’. The Centre for Political Beauty refers to itself as a group that “makes art” for the purpose of encouraging the European peoples to adopt a more liberal-humanitarian outlook on the world. Much of what they do is done for the sake of “not rendering void of the legacy of the Holocaust”. One of their members, Massimo Sestini, is perhaps known to Majorityrights readers because he is one of the persons who has consistently been providing ‘humanistic’ photography of the migrants to various media outlets including the British Newspaper, the Guardian, since at least mid-2014. The power of images cannot be underestimated. The Centre for Political Beauty takes its activism beyond simply creating static pieces of art, and in fact, merges art with political action while invoking shadows of past events which they believe hold immense sway over the European psyche. Here are four relevant examples of them merging art with political action: They have removed sections of the Berlin Wall monument, the sections that contain Christian cross logos with names on them. They have removed some of these because they have transferred those crosses to the outer border fences of the European Union, and affixed them there. In some images African migrants are posing with the crosses for photographs. This is a kind of art creation that is apparently supposed to symbolise the idea that the internal wall between the West Germany and East Germany that was removed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is ontologically the same as the border between Europe and Africa which they believe would be removed after the fall of racially cohesive European identity.



They plan to actually cut holes into some segments of the EU border fences on 09 November 2015, during the commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This would allow migrants to break through the fences at the precise timing of the celebrations, so that they can link the celebration of one thing, with the celebration of another thing that they plan to superimpose onto it.



Since the idea for the creation of a bridge between Africa and Europe is a project that would take them until the year 2030 to complete if it gets started on time and isn’t thwarted in some way, they want to call on Austria to supply state funding for 1,000 rescue platforms to be permanently installed into international waters between North Africa and Italy. The first one of these platforms will be unveiled in the water on 01 October 2015, in Licata Harbour. The press will be invited at 0630 on that day.



Dead African and Middle Eastern bodies will be exhumed and transported from the sea and into the capital city of Germany. The bodies will be displayed and placed into open shallow graves in plain view, so that persons running the media operation can then talk about the ongoing crisis in terms that have allusions to the narratives of the Jewish Holocaust. They are absolutely serious. It would not be hyperbolic to say that the intention behind these actors who have come together to make these things happen, is that they would like to inflict extreme demographic damage onto the European Union. The resources being allocated to these plans, and all such operations, stand in stark contrast to the fact that countries in the South of Europe have been placed under austerity policies so harsh that civil society in countries like Greece are breaking down, and money allocated to even basic state functions like national defence have been so low that the topic of whether enough counties are meeting the basic NATO obligations is often raised. Yet, mysteriously, certain richer state governments of north-western and south-central Europe seem to be very capable of sourcing funds for extravagant migrant rescue operations and even funds for building a 200km long bridge. Where is it coming from? It’s coming from your bank account via taxation. Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.



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