BRUNO KREISKY - THE GREAT RECONCILER AND EDUCATOR

YouTube Premiere "From Kreisky's living room"

On the 111th birthday of Bruno Kreisky

BRUNO KREISKY - THE GREAT RECONCILER AND EDUCATOR

SPEECH BY BARBARA COUDENHOVE-KALERGI
Journalist, publicist, STANDARD columnist and former ORF correspondent for Eastern Europe

Bruno Kreisky's thinking and will - as he himself put it - „the courage to leave things unfinished“ played a major role. This had nothing to do with hesitation or half-heartedness. On the contrary, the courage to leave things unfinished meant that ideologies and social structures were not a self-contained, final system for him and certainly not the final stage of history. It was a commitment to the new, to gradual reform, a commitment to the verifiability of political decisions in the sense of Karl Popper. And it was a demarcation against dogmatic or even totalitarian positions.
Every political and social system is unfinished and must remain unfinished. Because what people do can also be changed for the better by people. The freedom to do so must not be taken away from them.