President Clinton
Please keep President Clinton in your thoughts and prayers.
Dan Weintraub links to this Frisco Chronicle story purporting to debunk Arnold Schwarzenegger’s childhood memories of Soviet tanks in Austria. Unfortunately, like the Snopies and the Martini Republicans, they don’t do a very good job.
“It’s a fact — as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria,” the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.
Neat. It’s also a fact, though, that Arnold never claimed to have seen any Soviet tanks in Styria, and in fact made it quite clear they were not. Had Mr. Karner bothered to read a transcript of the speech before weighing in to debunk it, he would have had his Emily Littella moment upon reading this:
I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector.
Granted, Arnold did not come out and say “oh, by the way, for the benefit of you strawtards in the back, the Soviet sector did not include Styria. Thats why we had to cross ‘into’ it. You don’t must cross in, if you are already in, ja? Don’t be a illogical girlyman.” Still, I think his point was clear enough for those who were trying to understand it rather than looking for an excuse to deliberately misunderstand it.
Meanwhile, the Vienna Kurier reports that Austrian Interior Minister Ernst Strasser, a member of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), has responded to Arnold’s description of Austria as a “socialist” country by urging the Governator to learn his history, even while conceding that it was an “understandable mistake” given how badly the Social Democrats have fouled things up in the interim. The theory, for what it’s worth, is that Austria couldn’t have been a “socialist” country when he left in 1968, as the ÖVP, not the SPÖ, was in power then.
This is a problem of transatlantic semantics. As one who spent two years under two “conservative” Western European governments (Germany, 1987-88 and Austria 1989-90), I can assure you that both countries are and were much, much more economically regulated than the U.S. was under its most Democratic leadership. So from an American perspective, or from that of an Austrian national itching for American-style freedoms, Austria was, like most other Western European nations, a “socialist” country, whether or not it happens to be governed by the major party with “socialism” built into its name.
This potential for miscommunication is increased by the fact that Western Europeans, or at least the German-speaking ones, generally refer to members of their center-left party as “Social Democrats,” and not simply as “Socialists.” The latter term is generally reserved for the real socialists, to whoem we ‘Mercuns generally refer as Communists. Remember, Gorby’s evil empire was officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not the Union of Soviet Commie Scumbags. Similarly, the ruling party in East Germany was called the “socialist unity party of Germany” (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, or SED), not the “communist party” per se (though one of the two parties “unified” into the SED had been previously known by that name). Given that, I can understand why Arnold’s fellow Austrians might have been confused by his description of his former country as “socialist.”
Anyone who’s still unclear as to what Arnold did or didn’t mean when he described Austria as “socialist” should be reminded that he used the term not only to describe Austria, but also to describe the policies advocated by Hubert Humphrey in 1968. I don’t think anyone intepreted that statement as equivalent to calling Humphrey a communist.
