Herbert Kickl is calling for a “healthy slap” for children.
The adjective is a rhetorical trick. It is meant to turn violence into medicine. As if there were a sick slap and a healthy one. As if the boundary between discipline and abuse were a matter of dosage.
It is not.
Children can never help it. They do what parents, surroundings, and culture have taught them. Every “difficult” behaviour in a child is a message about the system in which it lives.
Whoever hits the child hits the mirror. The system remains untouched. The child pays the bill.
That is an inversion of responsibility.
I know what I am talking about.
As a child I learned to make myself small. Learned to be a victim. Out of helplessness, out of trauma — a language the system passes on from generation to generation.
That does not make it harmless.
As a victim I wanted to die. As a free person, I no longer do.
That is the whole point.
Kickl’s sentence kills. Slowly. Across generations. It cements a system that turns children into victims. And victims who do not know they are victims find no way out.
I found one. Many have not.
Kickl is selling authority as care. He implies that children who do not function have received too little pressure. Too little of a firm hand.
In his world, children are fundamentally disobedient. They must be broken.
Whoever demands a firm hand for children prepares the ground for a conception of the state that turns citizens into subjects. Authoritarian politicians need people who have learned to make themselves small.
That is method.
We must stop disguising this cruelty as tradition or discipline. It is the core of what we as a society must overcome.
Children can never help it. Politicians who recommend slaps can.
By René Jochum and Claude (Anthropic). License: CC-BY-4.0.