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Posted on 10/11/2003 1:00:26 AM PDT by ambrose
Edited on 04/23/2004 12:06:00 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Austria raises a toast to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Saturday, October 11, 2003 12:01 a.m.
GRAZ, Austria--Those of us from his hometown here who have known Arnold Schwarzenegger a long time--indeed consider him a friend--never had any doubt that he could win the California election to become governor.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Are you trying to imply that the author is lying and that Arnold is, in fact, a Nazi sympathyzer?
I might have said the same thing if Arnold had been of Swedish ancestry, noting that it is seldom ever mentioned -- outside of Sweden -- that Sweden, as noted by Alan Bullock in his Study In Tyrany, shortly after WWII, was the engine that drove the Nazi war machine in WWII, providing the iron ore that was the sine qua non of the Nazi munitions industry. Pre-war WWII racial policies in Sweden were the subject of much soul-searching as recently as a few years ago in Sweden itself, but this scarcely surfaced in the international press, outside of the U.K.
By a skillful practise of 'political science', as for example in the award of Nobel Prizes by the Swedish Academy to an appropriately conspicuous proportion of diverse racial groups (most notably Jews in the western world), much criticism that might otherwise have been directed to Sweden has been defelected. On the other hand, Switzerland, which was, like Sweden, also an ostensibly 'neutral nation' during WWII, has been much less successful in deflecting world attention from their misdeeds, especially in respect to Jewish possessions, and France, with its potent partisan opposition (symbolized by De Gaulle) to the Nazis, has been quite unsuccessful in deflecting the justifiable criticism of the role played by the Vichy government in dispatching French Jews to Auschwitz.
Even the Fascist government of Mussolini, which seems to be admired in no small way by the present Italian head of government, has come in for high praise for the way in which it obstructed the Nazi and Vichy forces' best efforts to deport Jews to Auschwitz. [See, for example, Robert Wistrich's book, Hitler and the Holocaust]. By all of what I have said, I only mean to point out that there seem to be individuals, and nations, which display an aptitude for deflecting potentially damaging information, and others who seem to be 'error prone' in this respect. There are, of course, countless North American examples. Richard Nixon's reputation has been sullied considerably by his remarks about Jews on his White House tapes.
However, Nixon's remarks could almost always be seen to be directed at liberal Jews who he saw as political enemies, and when it is implied from these remarks that Nixon was therefore antiSemitic, it is never mentioned that Nixon's opinions of Israelis were impeccable, and invariably positive, and only seldom mentioned that Israeli prime ministers from Meier through Rabin regarded Nixon as the greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House -- mostly because he ignored the threat of an Arab Oil Boycott and over-ruled his Secretaries of Defense and State in re-supplying Israel at the time of the Yom Kippur War -- the only time in its history that Israel's very existence hung by a thread.
I asked a simple question (not meant as an attack) which required only a simple yes or no answer. Instead, you expounded at length on political science (which I have a degree in), refered to Nixon (whose foreign policy I am a great admirer of), and still managed not to answer the question. Your original statement and your well crafted (albeit defensive), response to my query are ambiguous. The question still stands.
"The whole end of speech is to be understood." - Confucius, Analects, c.400 b.c.
I freely admit I used this thread as a vehicle for sharing a pithy quotation pertaining to Austrians and their political skills -- as I think Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit understood.
In your second enquiry, you say I asked a simple question (not meant as an attack) which required only a simple yes or no answer. One is not, of course, required to give a response to a question one cannot answer -- in this instance, about "whether or not the authors are lying, and that Arnold is, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer."
I can only say I have no knowledge of the bona fides of the authors, or of the practises of the Wall Street Journal in respect to vetting the identities and claims of its correspondents, e.g., Did the WSJ check any of this out with Arnold before publishing what the authors had to say?. As one who has a degree in political science, you will understand why it would be valueless for me to comment on the reliability of what the authors have said without first vetting the affiliations and claims mentioned in the article, which I have not done. Perhaps you have?
As for venturing a guess, which is solely based on an assumption that these are real people who have the credentials assigned to them by the WSJ, and who do have the relations they claim to have with Arnold, then I see no reason to think they are lying.
Mark Fuhrman's experience taught us to be evasive about giving 'Yes' or 'No' responses when cautious ones are more appropriate to our knowledge. In brief, am I cautious? I plead guilty. Am I defensive and/or ambiguous? I think not.
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