Austrian History & German Language Lesson by HC Strache

In reporting the rise of Austria's far right, the Telegraph features an awkward video interview with the triumphant Heinz-Christian Strache, whose anti-immigration Freedom Party garnered a whopping 18% of the vote in Austria's snap elections last month.

Watch the video, you'll get a snack-sized German lesson by hearing authentic Austrian German translated into English.

You'll also get a history lesson. When asked to address the accusations that he's a Nazi, Strache says:

My party, the Freedom Part of Austria, has a democratic history since the year 1848

He chooses words carefully here because the Freedom Party was founded in 1955.

But he's right, it does go back further. The Anti-Defamation League provides us with a brief primer on the origins of the Austrian Freedom Party:

...founded in 1956, [it] is the heir to the League of Independents. Formed in 1949, the League was the direct descendant of the faction that promoted pan-German nationalism for Austria both under the Habsburgs and in the years following World War I.

In 1848 Jacobin rabble rousers ousted Prince Klemens von Metternich, at the emergence of a New Social Order and an era of democracy. So 1848 very well could be the birth year of the faction that would, over a century later, become the Austrian Freedom Party.

While Metternich was a despot of sorts, one can't help but laud his aristocratic disdain for the stupidity of the masses. Especially their tendency toward nationalism. Today, the political appeal of Austria's far right is based almost entirely upon nationalism, fear of foreigners, and populist tricks. Strache even gives props to Hugo Chavez, his ideological opposite but good enough as an insufferable chest thumper.

Fine. If Strache's into machismo, he should try this on for size: Metternich gave Napoleon his sloppy seconds before ruling most of Europe for half a century. Strache, on the other hand, is vying for minority parliamentary votes in a Wienerschnitzel-shaped footnote to Germany. His party may have a history steeped in nationalism, but it doesn't reach far back enough to claim anything vaguely glorious.

Furthermore, belonging to a party with a "democratic history" in no way precludes Strache from having the vilest of viewpoints and xenophobic policy platforms. Mentioning the date 1848 is a cheap trick to sway weaker minds that are impressed by anything "historic", but it hardly is a defense against Nazi accusations - he'll have to come up with something better.