History’s Mysteries
When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes. I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector. Growing up, we were told, “Don’t look the soldiers in the eye. Look straight ahead.” It was a common belief that Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him off to the Soviet Union as slave labor.
My family didn’t have a car — but one day we were in my uncle’s car. It was near dark as we came to a Soviet checkpoint. I was a little boy, I wasn’t an action hero back then, and I remember how scared I was that the soldiers would pull my father or my uncle out of the car, and I’d never see him again. My family and so many others lived in fear of the Soviet boot. Today, the world no longer fears the Soviet Union and it is because of the United States of America!
This entire story is a lie.
Schwarzenegger, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born on July 30, 1947, when Styria and the neighboring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone. At the time, postwar Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the United States, the Soviet Union and France.
The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.
The defense?
“Never in there did the governor reference that the tanks were where he grew up. It was a reference to visiting Soviet-occupied Austria,” she said.
When the Schwarzennagers made their cross-country roadtrips once a year?
Sayseth Schwarzennager:As a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left. I love Austria and I love the Austrian people – but I always knew America was the place for me.
Yep. That’s a lie. But Martin Polaschek, a law history scholar and vice rector of Graz University, told Kurier that Austria was governed by coalition governments, including the conservative People’s Party and the Social Democratic Party. Between 1945 and 1970, all the nation’s chancellors were conservatives — not Socialists.
What’s more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative government headed by People’s Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists and the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.
No “third way” politics there.
More from the Governor that Enron Built: I finally arrived here in 1968.I had empty pockets, but I was full of dreams. The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon and Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend who spoke German and English, translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism which is what I had just left. But then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting government off your back, lowering taxes, and strengthening the military. Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air.
Apparently, in the California Governor campaign he made explicit what he’s learned to make implicit here: that he was watching a presidential debate between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. There were no debates between Nixon and Humphrey; Nixon nixed them because they’d damper his uber-safe strategy. (As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Hubert Humphrey very nearly “pulled a Truman” — even with the same circumstance Truman had of having two wings of his party deserting him… had he had one more week, he probably would have pulled it off.) But, the networks did air half hour question and answer sessions with each of them, so it’s possible to give this Austrian some leeway here. But, a correction has altered his storyline subtley.
Except for the fact that… Schwarzenegger did not leave a Socialist country. Perhaps Austria had nationalized medical care like most industrialized countries do… but …
#2: Zell Miller
In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee.
And there is no better example of someone repealing their “private plans” than this good man.
He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.
And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.
Shortly before Wilkie died he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between “here lies a president” or “here lies one who contributed to saving freedom”, he would prefer the latter.
It’s a little ironic that Zell Miller picks out Wendell Willkie as the Republican hero … Wendell Willkie was the very epitmoe of a political party picking out a candidate for pragmatic reasons, to paraphrase Howard Dean “Democratic Lite”.
The situation is described here, and I quibble with just one piece of it.
My quibble would be merely to point out that Wendell Willkie himself was actually a Democrat right up until he started seeking the Republican nomination… so it’s even worse than a matter of pre-aligned politics of selecting a member of the Liberal wing of the party… the Republicans were in such desparate shape that they essentially nominated a Democrat. But the point stands…
The point, at any rate, is that it’s very easy to put party aside for the sake of national unity when — like Willkie in 1940 or Miller in 2004 — you don’t actually disagree with the other party’s agenda.
Other than that, I tend to view John McCain’s recent comments about Vietnam rearing its ugly head in the election as another example of the powers that be trying to defeat “Vietnam Syndrome”. “Vietnam Syndrome”, you see, is an ugly eclipse that blocks the sunny disposition that comes with “WWII Syndrome”… we end up ignoring the lessons of one of them, and not taking heed of lessons from both of them.
#3: George W Bush
America has done this kind of work before and there have always been doubters. In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to allied forces, a journalist wrote in the New York Times, “Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. [European] capitals are frightened. In every [military] headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.” End quote. Maybe that same person’s still around, writing editorials. Fortunately, we had a resolute president named Truman, who with the American people persevered, knowing that a new democracy at the center of Europe would lead to stability and peace. And because that generation of Americans held firm in the cause of liberty, we live in a better and safer world today.
Interesting. Apparently Bush ripped the paragraphs out of context.
The president distorted the columnist’s dispatch. (download a PDF of the original column)The “moral crisis” and failure she described were in the British and French sectors. She reported that the Americans were doing better because of their policy to “encourage initiative and develop self-government.” She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course – not cut and run.
Also notice the date. 1946. The Marshall Plan had yet to be proposed.
Added to the beuracratic struggle facing Europe at the time and Iraq now, not seen in Europe: guerilla fighters…
…
Other than that, their version of the events leading into Iraq tend to blur 9/11 into it, and … I may as well add this to the list:
#4: George Bush sayseth: After more than a decade of diplomacy, we gave Saddam Hussein another chance, a final chance, to meet his responsibilities to the civilized world. He again refused, and I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office a decision no president would ask for, but must be prepared to make.
The inspectors were on the ground…