Free Republic

RUSSIA’S CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION of World War One was an army without a country. The 60,000-man unit, raised between 1915 and 1917, was made up of Czech and Slovak patriots keen to free their ancestral homeland from Austrian rule. By taking up arms in the name of the Russian Tsar, the men of the unit hoped that after the war the great powers would reward them with statehood. But when in 1917, the Bolsheviks rose to power following the collapse of Russia’s Romanov dynasty and then made a separate peace with the Central Powers, the Czechoslovak Legion suddenly found itself trapped...

The Habsburg Monarchy has long been seen as an outdated empire doomed to fail. To the Central European societies it sheltered before 1914, it may have had a cosy charm, but as a dynastic empire among nation-states, critics and historians deemed Austria an anachronism. Nineteenth-century liberals judged the Habsburgs for ruling a prison of peoples and siding with fellow despots. William Gladstone, the British prime minister who epitomized liberal moralism, called Austria “the unflinching foe of freedom in every country of Europe.” Never and nowhere, he insisted, could it be said that “here Austria did good.” Those charges defined narrative...

The state’s highest court has toppled a cultural taboo — legalizing a degree of incest, at least between an uncle and niece — in a unanimous ruling. While the laws against “parent-child and brother-sister marriages . . . are grounded in the almost universal horror with which such marriages are viewed . . . there is no comparably strong objection to uncle-niece marriages,” Tuesday’s ruling reads.

Had Germany been triumphant in today's semifinal match, all the talk would have been about the Dutch seeking revenge for World War II. Instead, Spain scored the one and only goal, proving once again that Paul the Octopus is all-knowing. (He is now taking bets for the Super Bowl.) Nevertheless, being Europe with its long history of cross-border conflict and bloodshed, a grudge match it will be come Sunday—at least if you are Dutch and are familiar with the War of the Spanish Succession as well as Schiller's Don Carlos, Infant of Spain (not to mention Verdi's opera of the...

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...