The Habsburg Achievement:Lessons for the World

For most of this century, the Hapsburg dynasty has been about as popular as a pork sandwich in a mosque among the intelligentsia. This fact has influenced a great many of the attitudes prevailing in our mass media and what passes for our education system.

Thousands of Australians will possess vivid memories of a school textbook that dominated our history lessons: Cyrus Leo Sulzber's(1) Fall of eagles'. Mr Sulzberger, as the very phrase 'fall of eagles' suggests, disliked the Habsburgs even more than the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs, the other two objects of his wrath. The book is a hymn of contempt for the entire Imperial system of Central and Eastern Europe.

A much more intellectually distinguished foe of the Habsburgs was the late Dame Rebecca West, who produced only two sorts of prose: brilliantly perspicacious and misguided. Alas, as soon as she came to write about the Habsburgs, misguidedness predominated. Her 1200-page-long volume of 1940, `Black Lamb and Grey Falcon',(2) purported to tell how those nasty old Habsburgs were to blame for every respect in which Yugoslavia failed to achieve perfection. Her ability to have a 1200-page book published amid the paper restrictions of wartime Britain testifies to the influence that she enjoyed, and `Black Lamb and Grey Falcon' became extraordinarily popular.

That West's tome is widely considered to be a work of history remains indisputable. Yet a few sbort quotations from it show precisely how fair-minded West was. Her observation that 'It is difficult to write the plain truth about the Austrian Empire as any historian not a Roman Catholic propagarndist knows it'(3) is remarkable for its total freedom from even the pretence of an argument. All it does is beat the drum of `No Popery': as a much more reprehensible fantasist than West, Titus Oates, did with more dramatic consequences almost 300 years earlier. West goes on to say, in prose as luridly purple and indifferent to factual niceties as that of any women's magazine:

"The lilacs and chestnuts of Vienna, the gilded staircases and crystal chandeliers of its baroque palaces, its divine musicians, great and little, have confused the judgement ofthe world;(4) but a defence of the Japanese Empire which relied largely; on its cherry blossoms and pagodas and the prints of Hiroshige would not convince. It is delightful to drink the heuriger wine in the gardens of Grinzing, but all the same Mr Glaldstone was not speaking intemperately when he said that he knew nothing good of Austria ... This family [the Habsburgs], from the unlucky day in 1273 when the College of Electors chose Rudolf of Hapsburg to be King of the Romans, on account of his mediocrity, till the abdication of Karl II [it was actually Karl I, but who's counting?) in 1918, produced no genius, only two rulers of ability... countless dullards, and not a few imbeciles and lunatics."(5) We may be permitted to wonder, of course, how a family that was allegedly infested with dullards, imbeciles and lunatics managed to stay in the business of politics for more than six centuries, and in charge of half Europe for nearly five centuries.

Earlier in the volume, in what she imagines to be a description of life at the court of Emperor Franz Josef, she says:

"Franz Josef rose at four each morning and worked on official papers for twelve or fourteen hours; and not a minute's thought was foundations of the Empire."(6) To which the best response is: how did she know that not a minute's thought was given to correcting the evils of the Empire? [Index]

for despotism and, paradoxically, ineptitude? for backwardness and, paradoxically, degeneracy? for being devils and, paradoxically, for being drongos?

There are several reasons, but these can all be summed up in one sentence. The Habsburgs never bothered with political PR. Every tyrant and would-be tyrant ever since the 1700s has appreciated the need for intellectual support. Catherine the Great lapped up tributes from Voltaire, Diderot and the French `Enlightenment' in general; the more domestic authors Catherine sent to Siberia, the more foreign authors praised her as a champion of tolerance and free thought. Moving on to our own century, we know that Stalin had an almost pathetic eagerness to win the admiration of writers and artists: especially from abroad. One of the happiest moments in his life was when Beatrice and Sidney Webb toured the Soviet Union (or as much of the Soviet Union as they were allowed to see), and gave Stalin the Good Fabian Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Yet if Beatrice and Sidney Webb had ever condescended to give any Habsburg ruler the Good Fabian Housekeeping Seal of Approval, the Habsburg ruler in question would probably have just yawned in their faces. The Habsburgs not only never got intellectuals' approval, they never wanted it. Everything that intellectuals have demanded since the French Revolution either bored the Habsburgs or actively repelled them. [Index]

That: * Christianity is ridiculous when not dangerous. The Habsburgs were devout to the very marrow.

* progress is both inevitable and desirable. The Habsburgs disagreed. They suspected that when man goes one step forward in one area, he invariably ends up going three or four steps back in another.

* majority rule and freedom of the press are intrinsically moral. The Habsburgs certainly did not think so; they knew that, for example, majority support for peddling heroin to primary-schoolers does not make such peddling justifiable. They nowhere needed our own experiences to teach them that phrases like `freedom of the press' are meaningless even in theory, and in practice are a mere excuse for plutocrats to indulge their own and their customers' pornographic fantasies without limit.

Habsburg rulers' public utterances, few enough in number compared to the verbal dysentery that afficts American and Australian leaders, dealt with the very concepts that most grate on intellectual, and especially liberal, nerves. The Habsburgs favoured, not an interminable bill of rights, but a clearly defined set of reciprocal duties; not the brotherhood of men, but the fatherhood of God. They knew that there has never been any such thing in human civilisation as a classless society, and that there never will be. Their religion taught them that social inequality was not something to be ashamed of, but something that God had rejoiced in ever since He preferred Abel to Cain.

The Habsburgs' government was not what we in the 1990s increasingly understand government to be, a gaggle of largely moronic and otherwise generally unemployable puppets obediently appeasing pressure groups and opinion pollsters. Government in the Habsburgs' eyes meant the courage to persevere with policies that in the short term were sometimes unpopular, because the alternative was far worse. Above all, the Habsburgs were keenly conscious of the fact that their primary allegiance was to Europe as a whole, not to one particular corner of Europe.

They scorned the modern idea that anything which calls itself a nation has an absolute right to exist, whether it be as productive and peaceful as Switzerland or as barren and enslaved to homicidal lunatics as Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Lebanon, Rwanda or Northern Ireland.[Index]

How did they do it? Where did they succeed? Where did they fail? What lessons does their achievement hold nowadays? At first, it was difficult if not impossible to tell the Habsburgs apart from any other noble family. Edward Crankshaw, who wrote the best book in English about Habsburg rule, said:

"It is needless to dwell in detail on the lives and wildly fluctuating fortunes of the mediaeval Habsburgs. They were warring princes, distinguished from other warring princes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries occasionally by their nobility, almost invariably by their extreme tenacity." (7) The victor of 1273 was a Habsburg general of considerable imagination named Rudolf. Partly by conscious action and partly by a sort of osmosis, Rudolf realised that the one hope of keeping Europe more or less at peace was to revive the dream of a Holy Roman Empire, embracing as much of Europe as possible. It was a dream which thanks to Emperor Charlemagne had come true; and though after Charlemagne's death in 814, the dream too died, the memory of it as a desirable ideal remained strong. Naturally European princes did not stop fighting the moment that Rudolf had been crowned Emperor. History fails to work that way, outside the feverish reveries of a Woodrow Wilson. Bohemia's King Ottokar opposed Rudolf's ambitions until his own death in 1278.

What Rudolf did succeed in doing was threefold. First of all, by being made Emperor, he got himself recognised as the leading lay figure of European politics. Second, he met with the approval of the Pope, which meant that the warfare between Pope and Emperor that had dominated the previous decades was halted, at least for a while. Thirdly, and crucially, he wielded enough might to have his son Albert formally hailed as Emperor: though not, admittedly, until after a seven-year interregnum in which an anti-Habsburg candidate prevailed.[Index]

The succession issue was Rudolf's most exacting test: if he had failed it, his other attainments would probably have been straws in the wind after he died. For the central fact about the Holy Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages and long afterwards, was its elective nature. When a Holy Roman Emperor died, an Electoral College (made up of the King of Bohemia, several princes and several archbishops) existed specifically to elect the next Emperor, generally from four or five candidates. Sure enough, after Rudolf's son Albert was assassinated in 1308, the College decided that it would keep the Habsburg family off the Imperial throne for a while, and for the next 130 years it did precisely that. The policy's shortcomings in practice finally led the College to allow the Habsburgs the Imperial dignity once again. Another Habsburg became Emperor, and took the title of Albert II. He scarcely survived his coronation; but it testifies to how powerful he had grown that when he did die, his nephew was elected Emperor Frederick III in 1440 .

It was under Frederick that the concept of the Habsburg family as a clan apart, especially preserved by God for great things, really swung into action. Not that Frederick himself was what might be called a Man of Destiny. He was the despair of his mother; half his own territories were seized by rival monarchs, including his own sibling; he was all too famiiiar with the interiors of pawnbrokers' shops, since he proved unable to obtain the revenues that his subordinates owed him, and if he tried to claim these revenues he could never afford to hire a decent set of minders to protect him against highway robbery. For much of his long life his illnesses took such foul-smelling forms that he had to put coins at the doorway to his bedroom, that the servants might be bribed to enter. But Crankshaw's wonderful simile concerning Frederick demands quotation:

"All his actions suggest that his metabolism was extremely low, and this enabled him to live through defeats and humiliations that would have killed a livelier man, as fish may live when their pond is frozen into a solid block of ice."(8) Frederick obsessively used as his motto the initials AEIOU:

Alles Erdreich Ist Osterreich Untertan (`The whole world is subject to Austria`). Afterwards there emerged a Latin form of the acronym, meaning much the same thing:

Ausrriae Est Imperare Orbi Universo. Frederick, in his timid way, lived up to his slogan by adopting the geopolitical policy of :`lf you can't beat them, wed them'[Index]

In this, unlike in everything else, he was so effective that when he died in 1493 the election of the next Emperor was little more than a formality. His son Maximilian succeeded him. By the time Maximilian died, in 1519, the Habsburgs had linked through blood ties almost every European royal house. This did not go down well with their remaining opponents, one of whom (Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary) voiced his irritation in a Latin hexameter:

Bella gerant fortes: tu, felix Austria, nube. "The strong wage war; you, happy Austria, marry." But they could say what they liked. The Habsburgs, from having been a standing joke only fifty years earlier, had become the principal and in some respects the only game in town. Shortly before his death, Maximilian actually planned to be elected Pope as well as Emperor. It is regrettable that he failed, since his life indicates that he possessed enough spirit and shrewdness to have cut the ground from under Luther's feet: something that the actual Popes of the time were too gormless, too corrupt and too self-indulgent even to envisage.

The man who above all others had cause to regret this was Maximilian's grandson and successor Charles V. Charles governed dominions so vast that they're almost unbelievable. He ruled directly over Spain, he ruled indirectly over the Low Countries, he was the de facto ruler of much of Italy, nearly all of Central Europe, sections of Eastern Europe, and large parts of Central and South America.

Charles' problem lay in his unambitious, dogged temperament, occasionally fierce but never spiteful. For him, having to wield authority seemed more like a punishment than like a reward. He was the only leader of Europe at the time whose entire life was not a perpetual orgy of Looking Out For Number One. His upbringing had been cosmopolitan in the extreme; as such, he never fully understood the tribalism, the parochialism, that the Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, and Anabaptist leaders harnessed with such unscrupulous skill to use against everything that the Habsburgs stood for.[Index]

Charles V commanded the Spanish, German, French and Italian languages with equal ease; his self-confessed preferences lay in speaking

Italian to women, French to men, Spanish to God, and German to his horse. But a world was emerging (thanks partly to Charles' own undue tolerance) where the ability to speak and think simultaneously like an Italian, like a Frenchman, like a Spaniard and like a Cerman was becoming not merely obsolete but suspect. Had he adopted a scorched-earth policy towards his opponents, world history would have been very different. He would. certainly have delayed the advance of Lutheranism, since most of the German aristocrats who provided Luther's chief support were not at all sincere Protestants but merely Arfur-Daley-type spivs, happy enough to do deals with either Luther or Charles.

As it was, Charles did not have the type of personality that browbeats antagonists into submission. When he made his first royal tour of Spain, he attracted considerable adverse criticism because of his huge sagging jaw, which prevented his lips from ever closing and which obliged him to swallow his food at a gulp. One onlooker said to him: `Your Majesty, do shut your mouth, the flies in this country are very insolent'. Many a more recent head of state would have inflicted a terrible vengeance on any commoner who thus dared to mention the great man's deformity. But Charles, ostensibly in charge of three continents, took no action whatsoever against that figure who mocked him. In the end, the petty-mindedness of his foes became too much to endure; he abdicated and retired (while retaining keen interest in European affairs) to the monastery of San Jeronimo de Yuste, with a plainness that amazed a good many monks.

Charles' relatives failed to remake Europe into that great Carolingian unity that was his hope. Yet they at least provided a bulwark of civilisation against those who, on their own testimony, wanted (as their spiritual descendants still want) to smash Europe into little pieces: the better to remould it nearer to their hearts desires of gutter-patriotism, of genocide, of ethnic cleansing, of manipulating uneducated or half-educated mobs, of Bolshevism subsidised by Wall Street, of deliberately engineered famines, of the squandermaniacal Welfare State, and indeed of everything else which goes to make up what that eminent political philosopher Idi Amin described as 'all de smart modern stuff'.[Index]

The Habsburgs after Charles V, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, managed this in part by the simple expedient of not quarrelling too much among themselves. Thus they differed greatly from the Spanish House of Bourbon and the Portuguese House of Braganca: the victorious branch of each of which, having extirpated its natural supporters on the political Right, depended on the political Left to prop it up, thereby bequeathing petrol-pumps and matches to pyromaniacs.(9) The Habsburgs had too much commonsense to make that mistake. True, there were sometimes severe disagreements between the Austrian and the Spanish wings of the family; overall, the Austrian Habsburgs favoured a comparatively mild policy towards Protestants, whereas the Spaniards (above all, and most famously, Philip II) favoured much greater toughness towards them.

But their disagreements never reached the stage of armed conflict, though they sometimes threatened to do so. Apart from any other factor, there was always that Electoral College which had to have an eye kept on it. The Habsburg Emperors had lost elections before; they might lose them again This explains why the Austrian Habsburgs tended to be more cautious than the Spanish ones. A hostile Electoral College could not determine who ruled in Madrid; it could very easily detemine who ruled in Vienna.

Emperor Ferdinand11 Once armed conflict did break out, it broke out when an Austrian Habsburg revealed Spanish character traits. The Habsburg in question was Ferdinand of Styria, later Emperor Ferdinand II, who thought that most of his fellow Austrian Habsburgs had no courage and were half Protestant into the bargain. To Ferdinand who would spend hours on his knees before the altar of his private chapel day and night, this was abominable. Protestantism, according to him, had to be stamped out for good and all. He was the man to do it. His was a project which in every sense epitomised superlative political wisdom, except for one thing: it was a hundred years too late. Had it been enunciated by the Emperor in 1520, when Protestantism was still weak, it would have carried all before it. Being enunciated in 1620, it suffered from the fact that the Protestants had enjoyed almost a century of freedom and land, which they were not about to give up. What Ferdinand expected, once the Protestants in Bohemia rose up in arms against him, was a short sharp victory...[Index]

A long war of any kind was no part of Ferdinand's plan. On the whole, he won more battles than he lost, and by the mid 1630s he was the most powerful man in Europe. He had anticipated every possible contingency, save the contingency that Catholic France, under Richelieu, would support the Protestants against Catholic Austria. That is precisely what happened, and the fighting raged for thirteen more years during which it has been estimated that parts of Central Europe lost a third of their population. Over and over again the Austrian Habsburgs stated their peace tenns, which were certainly not vengeful. Over and over again they were rebuffed, for fear that Richelieu and his successor Mazarin would be deprived of the chance to turn the screw some more. It is symptomatic that the actual peace conference took three years to start.

However much anguish the Thirty Years' War might have caused Christianity, there was one power bloc to which it presented a very appealing spectacle indeed. That was Islam. It is to the Habsburgs' credit that instead of hatching revengeful plots to take back lost European territories, they turned their eyes east. What they saw alarmed them. For a century and a half their own policy had been: no appeasement of Moslems. Sometimes, as when the Turks encroached upon Hungarian territory after killing Hungary's King Louis II at Mohacs in 1526, a short-term agreement with particular Moslem viceroys might be necessary, in order to avoid an even worse situation; but no more than that would they countenance. They never propitiated the Sultan in the way that Louis XIV did.

Though they had many Islamic subjects in their Empire's later stages (notably in Bosnia), the idea that their Islamic population should be allowed to place their faith above the Empire's law never occurred to them. They considered that Europe was too small to accommodate Islam and Christendom. Between on the one hand a religion which produced a St. Hildegard of Bingen, a St Joan of Arc and a St Teresa of Avila, and on the other hand a religion which would have circumcised all these ladies with rusty blades if given a quarter of a chance, there was and is a gulf that not all the Al Grassbys of the world can fill. This the Habsburgs realised.

Today, of course, the Habsburg attitude towards Islam is regarded (when it is regarded at all) as a shocking exhibition of `racism', `Eurocentrism', the `Dark Ages mind-set' and whatever other voguish swear-words one cares to invoke. The Vatican has made no secret of its current aim at something called `inter-faith dialogue' between the Pope and Moslem leaders on Mount Sinai in the year 2000. Alas, contemporary Islam gives no grounds for supposing that inter-faith dialogue rates highly on its list of priorities. Why would it, when on present demogoraphic trends it will be the dominant religion of Europe in two decades' time? That this fate was delayed by a few hundred years is due to the achievement of Emperor Leopold I and the Polish King John Sobieski, who in l683 drove a gigantic Turkish army back from the gates of Vienna.[Index]

The first two thirds of the eighteenth century were not among the Habsburgs' happiest times. In 1700 the family had lost control of Spain altogether, on the death of King Carlos lI (10). Moreover, during the mid-eighteenth century and the War of the Austrian Succession, the Electoral College bared its fangs and voted for an anti-Habsburg Emperor (Charles VII) for the first time since the 1400s. What the electors had not predicted was the determination and popularity of the Habsburg heiress Maria Theresa. Although the 1749 Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle compelled her to surrender the crucial territory of Silesia to Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa succeeded in having her handbag husband made Emperor Francis I once Charles VII obligingly died young; and she provided her Central European dominions with their first real matriarch.

Her reign signified the domestication, as it were, of Habsburg rule. At no stage had the Habsburgs way of life been anything like as flamboyant as that of Louis XIV (not to mention the Kennedy tribe); but from Maria Theresa's lifetime onward the Habsburgs had, and disseminated, the image more of a devout, dignified, fecund, middle-class family than of a race of mysterious beings.(11) Maria Theresa's grandson Francis II furthered this idea. Partly under pressure from Napoleon, Francis scrapped the Electoral College in 1806 and abandoned the title of Holy Roman Emperor. At the same time he gave himself a new title: Emperor of Austria.

Nevertheless, the ghost of an electoral system still walked in Habsburg life, as the year of revolutions, 1848, revealed. That year, the Austrian Emperor (another Ferdinand), whose bashful nature and two dozen daily epileptic fits made him an administrative encumbrance, handed over the Imperial crown not to his nearest male blood relative, as he would have been compelled to do under a Windsor-style system, but to his eldest and most competent nephew, Franz Josef.[Index]

At sixty-eight years, Franz Josef's reign was so long that it defies summary. It saw military humiliation at the hands of the French and the Prussians; it saw repeated family tragedy in the death of Franz Josef's son Rudolf (probably but not certainly self-inflicted), in the assassination near Geneva of Franz Josef's wife, and in the murders at Sarajevo of his nephew and niece by marriage, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek. Through it all Franz Josef bent but did not break. Deeply despised by every Central European with intellectual pretensions, he was as deeply beloved by most of his subjects. Their preferred epithet for him is notable, embodying both respect and fondness: `unzser alter Herr' (roughly translatable as our old gentleman ).

No dreams of martial glory swelled his breast. He did not have that luxury. Stopping the whole joint from falling to bits under the combined pressure of mutually antipathetic Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians and Slovenians was a full-time job in itself. The criticisms of Franz Josef and his government were always the same: that he was too honest, too legalistic, too determined to play by the rules.[Index]

Even an analysis of the Habsburgs, as brief and necessarily superficial as this one has been must devote some attention to an episode of World War I which, though long familiar to scholars, has been airbrushed from generalist history texts: namely, the frantic efforts in 1917 of Franz Josef's geat nephew and successor Karl I to end the war.(12) Rumours of these efforts so enraged the German government which was Austria's nominal ally, that there were actual fears in Vienna of German agents murdering Karl if the compromise peace which he proposed was made public. (Karl's suggested compromise included the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine, which the French had not even asked for yet.) Anyhow, the French Cabinet, followed with some reluctance by the British, rejected Karl's offer out of hand; so the war dragged on for eighteen more appalling months, the better to make the world safe for Lloyd George and suchlike paragons of virtue. Among Karl's few French defenders was of all people, the veteran socialist Anatole France, who observed:

"No one will ever persuade me that the war could not have been ended long ago. The Emperor Karl offered peace. There is the only, honest man who occupied an important position during the war, but he was not listened to. In my opinion his offer ought to have heen acceped. The Emperor Karl has a sincere desire for peace so everybody hates him ... A King of France, yes, a King would have taken pity on our poor people, bled white, attenuated, at the end of their strength. But democracy is without heart, without bowels. a slave of the powers of money, it is pitiless and inhuman."(13) Memorable though France's protest is, it should not be the last word. That honour belongs elsewhere. As our television screens continue to transmit blood-soaked footage from the Balkans, where the boundless blessings of an Eastern Europe with no Habsburgs left in it are proclaimed afresh each time a new mass gravesite is discovered or a refugee camp transmogrified by mortar shells, let us ponder the sentiment expressed between the wars by a Bosnian Serb, republican priest who, while standing beside Franz Josef's grave, said:

"Well Franz if only I had known what a mess Bosnia would be in after your death, I would never have worked to depose you."(14)[Index]

It is very unlikely that you will persuade Americans generally that most of their problems result from "democracy" and "one man, one vote." I would ask Free Republic folks to contemplate the Kerry voter, and consider what a disaster it is that such people have the franchise.

This "democracy" problem has been around since the beginning of this country. Alexander Hamilton said that democracy would destroy the Republic, which it has. Well, on to the next thing!

Ok, well heres a slightly different perspective on that issue, I just finished this article when I read your post.

The State: Its Rise and Decline

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=527

The author touches on the EU, which I admittedly had always viewed as a very bad thing, about 2/3 of the way down. I'd be interested to hear from any European posters if this is actually happening, the distingration of the modern state can only be a good thing for humanity.

"If implosion is one result that may follow from the weakening of the state, integration may be another. From ASEAN through the EU and NAFTA and MERCOSUR, technological and economic changes are forcing states to cooperate with each other, not seldom at the expense of at least some parts of their sovereignty. Particularly in Europe, the process whereby individual states are being taken over by a larger organization is well under way. At present this new organization already makes law, exercises justice and makes money, though it does not yet either declare war or levy taxes. Above all, it is not sovereign and does not represent a state; that is why it is called a Union or a Community. To the extent that new members are joining it or are trying to join it every day, the Union is growing and may indeed soon cease to be European at all. Even in places so far removed that they cannot join it, it is often regarded as a model.

As states integrate into a larger organization that encompasses them, they are often made to devolve some of their internal powers to regions, districts and communities. In this respect, too, Europe has led; with the result that, from Spain through Belgium to the United Kingdom, regional autonomy is the order of the day. In the US, too, the Republican Congress has promised--though to date it has scarcely begun to deliver--a greater emphasis on the rights of individual states as opposed to those of the Federal Government. Even where regionalization has not yet started, as in Germany, it is very often being discussed as one way of responding to, and benefiting from the changes brought about by the European Union. The days when statehood necessarily meant a movement towards greater and greater centralization are clearly over."

Thanks for the ping to this informative article.

But wait a second, I saw you post your score on that thread about the libertarian quiz. You scored a lot more libertarian than I did, both economically and socially. I notice that the Hapsburgs would not have scored so high:

"progress is both inevitable and desirable"
The Habsburgs disagreed. They suspected that when man goes one step forward in one area, he invariably ends up going three or four steps back in another.
"majority rule and freedom of the press are intrinsically moral"
The Habsburgs certainly did not think so; they knew that, for example, majority support for peddling heroin to primary-schoolers does not make such peddling justifiable. They nowhere needed our own experiences to teach them that phrases like `freedom of the press' are meaningless even in theory, and in practice are a mere excuse for plutocrats to indulge their own and their customers' pornographic fantasies without limit.
Habsburg rulers' public utterances, few enough in number compared to the verbal dysentery that afficts American and Australian leaders, dealt with the very concepts that most grate on intellectual, and especially liberal, nerves. The Habsburgs favoured, not an interminable bill of rights, but a clearly defined set of reciprocal duties; not the brotherhood of men, but the fatherhood of God. They knew that there has never been any such thing in human civilisation as a classless society, and that there never will be. Their religion taught them that social inequality was not something to be ashamed of, but something that God had rejoiced in ever since He preferred Abel to Cain.

thanks for the post--this was a good one. while popular belief is that the 30 year war was a war within the german nations to settle their religious differences, and while there is some truth to this, the real battle, which engulfed most of europe, is that the emperor (a habsburg) wanted to evolve it to a monarchy, thus getting more power over german dukes and barons, and being a threat to others, like the french.

on second thought, maybe we should have rooted for the habsburgs in the 30 years war (sarcasm).

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