"I saw their [Soviet]tanks in the streets. I saw Communism with my own eyes,"(1) said Governor Schwarzenegger in his speech August 31st at the Republican National Convention, of his native Austria and not for the first time either. He's made similar remarks in speeches before and the major media outlets simply do not correct him, which is why dumb-ass conservative voters put him in power. Even the relatively few media outlets who do talk about Schwarzenegger's inaccuracies do not mention the connection to Nazi ideology.
"'As a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria,' Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.
"Mr Schwarzenegger, now a US citizen, was born on 30 July 1947, when Styria and neighbouring Carinthia belonged to the British zone. Austria was occupied by the Allies, including the US, the Soviet Union and France.
"The Soviets left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war,' Mr Karner noted.
"Another sceptic, Franz Nitsch, said: 'Let me tell you this: as a boy, I lived for many years across the street from where the Russians were based in Vienna -- and I never saw a Russian tank. He said it all on purpose -- and that’s bad.'
"Mr Schwarzenegger also said in his convention address: 'As a kid, I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left.'
"Austria regained its independence in 1955 after the departure of Soviet forces. But Martin Polaschek, of Graz University, pointed out in Kurier that the country was governed by coalitions, including the conservative People’s Party and the Social Democratic Party. Between 1945 and 1970, all the nation’s chancellors were conservatives -- not socialists."(2)
Listening to Schwarzenegger, one would have thought Austria was behind the "Iron Curtain." Instead, he lived in the British zone of occupation and likely not allowed out of it. The Soviet occupation was relatively light in Austria and all Soviet troops were gone by Schwarzenegger's age eight. This brings us to the point. A boy ranging from age 1 to 8 does not know he is looking at Soviet tanks unless an adult told him. Schwarzenegger's father belonged to the Nazi Party as a stormtrooper.(3)
Schwarzenegger is great proof why MIM is right and there has to be a joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations (JDPON). Even in a dramatic change like the collapse of Nazism, an imperialist country like Germany (which had annexed Austria) in 1945 does not go through immediate revolutionary transformation. Children such as Arnold do not receive proper education without JDPON and the whole world is still paying for that in 2004.
In countries where the "workers" are infected with parasitism, the people continue trying to sponge off the rest of the world through colonialism/imperialism. In such a context, it becomes possible to buy the old Nazi propaganda equating Jews, capitalist Allies and Soviets. The key is making an accurate judgement of the old social material--the Nazis in this case. The Nazis were simply not ready as people to go forward and communist strategy must take that into account.
In 1941, the outlines for propaganda work written by the Nazis said that propagandists should stress that Jewry "is ready to turn all of Europe over to Bolshevism, its only goal being to destroy Adolf Hitler and his people."(4) Taken in this light, Schwarzenegger's comments about communism in Austria make more sense. It's 2004 and pitiful dinosaur Arnold Schwarzenegger still thinks someone turned over Austria to Bolshevism--(and we say, if only!)
The day after Schwarzenegger's speech, radio talk-show and TV host Rush Limbaugh defended Schwarzenegger; although we did not hear the Soviet tanks subject brought up. Limbaugh said the speech was "conservative" and not "moderate" and went so far as to defend the speech against reactionaries from California who oppose Schwarzenegger as a "liberal."
Likewise, on Sean Hannity talk radio we heard praise. Since Schwarzenegger rehabilitated Nixon in his speech, the reactionary talking heads were eating that up too.
Mushing together socialism, Jews and Western democracy--that is a Nazi propaganda trick that treats everything outside Nazi ideology as the same. Speaking of pre-Nazi Germany, the Nazis said, "Its constitution was based on the political doctrines of foreign peoples, particularly Western democracies, and were strongly influenced by the Jewish spirit."(5)
The most sophisticated Nazi propaganda distinguished among Western "democracies" and the Soviet Union by referring to "the plutocratic-Jewish-Bolshevist world coalition."(6) In 1944, warning Germans to fight hard even as the tide had turned in World War II, the Nazi propagandists said that a Jewish journalist favored by Stalin said: "The remains of the European peoples who escape our tanks and flame-throwers — and not only the Germans — will be sent to work as slaves in the mines of Siberia."(6) That comment was typical of how the Nazis prepared their own people in 1944. It is not a mere coincidence that Schwarzenegger has made speeches talking about Soviet tanks sending Austrians to work in Soviet labor camps. The Nazis are the originals putting such talk in the air. The Nazis' accusations and fantasies about the Soviet Union lived on in young Arnold.
Of course, MIM is not the only one to denounce Schwarzenegger for calling parliamentary democracies "socialist." A law history professor in Austria pointed out how Schwarzenegger was mushing things together before defending him as just a "politician." What the media does not do is explain who it was that originally referred to everything as communist and all of Europe under communist power--the Nazis.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has become a big donor to Jewish Holocaust causes,(3) but taking the Jewish part out of Nazi propaganda and leaving the rest the same is not correct either.
Today reactionaries are doing the same thing as the Nazis--calling everything "socialism" including conservatism in Austria. As is typical for reactionaries, they justify this, because they believe all politics is lies and spin anyway.(7) This is not surprising, because most reactionaries in the West base themselves in Christianity and assume that politics is just another fairy-tale like the Bible. For them, consistent use of words like "socialism" is not necessary. If they like something, they call it "conservatism." Otherwise, if something bad happens, it's supposed to be "socialism"'s fault according to these pre-scientific reactionaries. It becomes pointless to discuss with them--another reason that force is the only thing that educates people like Arnold Schwarzenegger's father. Try to avoid the truth of the necessity of the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations and the children turn out like Arnold--damn confused politically and historically.
Notes:
1. http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/31/gop.schwarzenegger.transcript/index.html
See also, http://hnn.us/articles/911.html#tanks11-26-03
2. http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1040052004
3. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/2003-08-24-arnold-father_x.htm
4. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/salzburg1.htm
5. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/du.htm
6. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/niemals.htm
7. A Schwarzenegger defender said this:
"He did not speak as a historian, after all, but as a politician."
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/03/schwarzenegger.ap/