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Vice Blog

THE AUSTRIAN ARMY IS LAME

Hey. Ever heard of Austrians? We're pretty simple. We usually can't tell something's great even when it's right in front of us. We produce great sons and daughters but we never realize it until they're no longer Austrian. Then we get really into them and base our "Austrian identity" on it in a twisted way. Schwarzenegger. Billy Wilder. Freud. Our culture is basically a rip-off of other countries' ideas of what our culture is supposed t be like. Unsurprisingly this has given us a fairly hardcore inferiority complex and pretty messed up moral values. That guy Hitler also factors into this equation.

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Everything happens a bit slower here. We still don't have anything remotely close to a Netflix. Or a smoking ban. Actually we tried to ban smoking in the beginning of 2009, and for the first two and a half weeks the bartenders kind of said "Oooh, sorry, but uhm…", then everybody just smoked anyway and bullied the bartenders into bringing ashtrays back to the table. And that's that. Now it's 2010 and our bars smell like Romanian bus-stations in 1972.

Did you know the world's largest newspaper in terms of per capita is Austrian? That's the sort of mind-bogglingly boring facts we're forced to cling to. Anyways, said newspaper is one of those right-wing rags with topless girls in it that the British used to call "red-tops." It's called Kronen Zeitung and its layout hasn't changed in 20 years.

Austria also has an army that produces commercials. When the US does this sort of thing it usually involves really attractive, multiethnic marines fighting CGI lava monsters with swords or transforming into knights. Here's ours:

The best part is it's not even original. The Ukrainian army did the same, uhm, treatment at least 3 years ago. Or wait, sorry, it was a Ukranian TV-comedy spoof. Shit, my head just collapsed.

CARSON BAUMGARTNER