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How Fascist is Austria?
I was raised with democratic values, but have seen them decline horrifically in recent years.
21/11/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
How fascist is Austria today? Quite a lot. One of the main reasons I left Austria was the rise of fascist patterns in society. By “fascist,” I don’t mean that everyone is far-right—though support for the Austrian Freedom Party has certainly grown—but rather the ways in which certain attitudes and structures resemble historical fascism.
Anyone who is critical of the Nazi era and has seen how a minority was made into a scapegoat by the ruling elite and widespread antisemitic groups—not only at the beginning of the Second World War but also long before—knows how hatred was spread through the news and public gatherings. These groups gained support among the police and other authorities, who then acted against Jews. Anyone who has witnessed similar dynamics reappear—targeting different groups, though not at the same stage as when Jews were sent to concentration camps—can see the parallels to the early rise of fascism before World War II and would understand why some people feel compelled to leave Austria.
The group being targeted these days (as strange as it may sound) consists of women, truth-tellers, and introverts. Yes—introverts are being persecuted by extroverted malignant narcissists who cannot deal with anything other than people like themselves. They want to make “introversion” go extinct by denying it, attacking it, and annihilating anyone born with this “disease.” They label introverts antisocial, not friendly enough, not outgoing enough, not spending enough time with others (if you aren’t one of the codependents). And if you do your work alone—actually working and making progress—a company may fire you because you were not social enough and did not let colleagues constantly interrupt you. Don’t believe it? I am living proof.
Your career may also be stalled by male narcissists, and when you speak up—about harassment of women, stalking, silencing of victims, and the gaslighting of anyone who shares uncomfortable truths—people will attack you as if you showed up at their doorstep with a weapon, even though you merely voiced simple truths on your blog or in private. Some may even claim that your private emails were their business, and then attack you for expressing opinions you are “not allowed” to have—often men trying to dominate women and silence them until they break, lose their rights, or are pushed into a prison of verbal abuse, degradation, and other horrific behavior they have tried but failed to stop.
If you keep speaking the truth, narcissists will come after you day after day until you go silent—either because they kill you, because you kill yourself, or because they use such extreme violence and punishment that it is shocking how primitive and uneducated people can act. And so many behave this way that even posting a simple blog article can trigger a smear campaign that lasts years.
Those of us who believe there is nothing wrong with telling the truth may be shocked when we are excluded from our families for simply stating what seems obvious, or punished for having been born with a mouth—and a brain—and for using that mouth for speaking, not just eating. You may speak the truth rather than what feels comfortable to others and be punished horrifically for it. Being ostracized from family and from parts of society is something many truth-tellers have experienced in Austria and in other European countries these past few years.
So when the U.S. vice president pointed out that democracy in Germany is endangered, it was no surprise to me—only a surprise that people in other countries still speak freely without fear. In Germany, this truth was certainly unwelcome among people in power. They gaslit it away as if it weren’t true, even though it is—and it is blatantly obvious to anyone who has gone through what I have. It is shocking how many people deny the truth simply because it makes them uncomfortable. Those in power deny it because, if they admitted it, people would see what is really happening. And you cannot hold up a mirror to what is happening if you want to keep controlling people and increasing your own power while reducing theirs.
Fascism—present not only in censorship and persecution of the innocent—reared its ugly head years ago. I have dealt with so many attacks from narcissists who tried to destroy me, reported me to authorities (falsely) to silence me or stop me from asserting my rights, lied about me, or otherwise harmed me, that I ultimately decided to leave Europe. This was not the only reason, but also that my life had been put in danger by narcissists who were trying to kill me. There were at least four who did so, and I woke up one day in a horrific country, experiencing hell on earth every day, but finding no one who had been through what I had been through, since others were oblivious to what was going on—most weren’t born truth-tellers who can see what others cannot.
More happened than can be mentioned here. I have been degraded so horrifically that it was shocking to witness it, to try to stop it by arguing and mirroring back the behavior, only to be painted as the “evil narcissist” harming the other person’s reputation.
A narcissist will often attack you first and call you the narcissist—and people may believe them if the narcissist holds high social standing. They simply act like the victim, and empathic people will believe them, erasing your story and your right to speak about your own experience.
You may remove harmful people from your life out of necessity—to survive, not because you’re antisocial—yet people may attack you for being unkind or unloving. These people downplay the depth of destruction a narcissist can cause, or they simply do not understand how many narcissists exist and how dangerous they can be. They are not always the “nice people” they pretend to be in public.
Those who are not truth-tellers may not have experienced such horrific treatment. But truth-tellers are seen as threats and are attacked simply for having boundaries and enforcing them. I myself have been attacked horribly by a narcissist—a singer who constantly denies the truth even though it could not be more obvious. He is running from reality and attacking me for not putting his mask back on when it slipped. Truth-tellers may make a narcissist’s mask fall without meaning to—they simply point out facts rather than lying about someone’s looks, achievements, or importance. Truth-tellers are attacked no matter what, because they were born to tell the truth and do not keep a narcissist’s mask on by lying about them or to their face, portraying them as flawless human beings instead of horrific abusers who have no conscience.
Living in a country full of people who lie to serve those in power—whether in government, at work, or elsewhere—people who avoid speaking up or who cannot see the obvious creates a dangerous environment.
People also constantly confuse unrelated things—such as mistaking someone with moral values for a “moral narcissist,” or mistaking a true victim for someone merely playing the victim to gain pity. We need empathy for real victims and enough intelligence to recognize when a perpetrator is pretending to be a victim. However, the behavior we show toward someone merely playing the victim should not be the same as the behavior we show toward true victims, who deserve genuine empathy, understanding, and compassion. There are many such confusions, but the signs of fascism—especially observed over several years—could not be clearer. Anyone telling me Austria is not fascist, or that I am imagining things, has no place in my life. I know what I have lived through, and I have studied how fascism developed in Austria and Germany before the Second World War. I will not allow anyone to gaslight me out of reality, as the similarities could not be more striking.
I have experienced how narcissists who are in denial about anything being wrong with them—ever—will attack those who are simply pointing out their flaws. They project onto you the idea that you are the one who is the problem and that they don’t need to change. In reality, you may simply be acting like a normal person, while they act out constantly—harassing, attacking, violating, punishing, raping, or doing whatever else they do. When you try to make them stop by asserting your rights, they project their flaws and their behavior onto you.
This is what Jung called the shadow—the unconscious aspects of oneself. In the case of a narcissist, these aspects are denied to such an extreme that the person who is merely acknowledging the narcissist’s flaws can be attacked to the point of life-threatening danger—either through the narcissist killing her or degrading her so horrifically that she wishes for her life to end, since the abuse does not stop when it is pointed out.
Normal people can see that they have flaws, and they do not feel the need to appear flawless—it would not feel genuine. But a narcissist must pretend that everything is perfect: in themselves, in their lives, and in how they are perceived. They constantly project onto you that what they are doing is actually your behavior. The narcissist projects their shadow qualities onto you, forcing you into a role you were never meant to play.
The narcissist sees his own shadow attributes in you, though they exist within himself, not you. When you point this out, you become his enemy—the one who must be killed, persecuted, annihilated, isolated, degraded…
In a society where fascism is rearing its ugly head, the more you point out the truth, the more you’ll be attacked by narcissists who cannot deal with that shadow being made visible—integrating reality through talking about it, having it validated, and then accepting it. Not by denying it, running away from it, or pretending it doesn’t exist. Because that doesn’t heal anything—neither you nor the narcissist (who will never heal, by the way, and who will make you the identified patient if you point out his shadow to him, showing that he is the one who needs to get treatment, not you).
Have you experienced similar dynamics?