Schwarzenegger the good immigrant

Old Hickory's Weblog, 09/01/04, after Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech at the Republican convention:

Maybe it's quibbling, since in American political language "socialism" just means "bad."  And of course which of those foreign governments over there in Europe could possibly be better than America under Nixon?  But Austria had "Grand Coalition" governments from 1945 to 1970, in which the Socialist Party was the junior partner with the conservative Peoples Party.  The exceptions were a brief period in 1945 when a socialist-led coalition government was installed by the Allies, and 1966-1970 when the Peoples Party had a majority government without the Socialists in the coalition.  Except for those few months in 1945, the first Socialist-headed government in Austria was that of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky in 1970, after Arnie left Austria.

But I guess that's quibbling.

The Associated Press, CNN.com 09/03/04:

Austrian historians are challenging California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican National Convention that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and that he left a "Socialist" country when he moved away in 1968. ...

In his convention address, Schwarzenegger also said: "As a kid, I saw the Socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left" in 1955 and Austria regained its independence.

But Martin Polaschek, a law history scholar and vice rector of Graz University, told Kurier that Austria was governed by coalition governments, including the conservative People's Party and the Social Democratic Party. Between 1945 and 1970, all the nation's chancellors were conservatives -- not Socialists.

What's more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative government headed by People's Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists and the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.

Schwarzenegger "confuses a free country with a Socialist one," said Polaschek, referring to East European Communist officials' routine descriptions of their countries as Socialist.

This will basically not process in the brains of Foxists.  But throughout the 1960s, Austria was one of the poorest countries in Europe.  The Socialist Party government of Bruno Kreisky that took power in 1970 - Kreisky had converted to Christianity but both parents were Jewish - instituted economic reforms based on the social-democratic model of Sweden, where he had lived for a time.

Since that time, Austria has gone to being one of the poorest countries in Europe in terms of per-capita income to being one of the richest.

Yes, that's right.  After Kreisky's social-democratic reforms, Austrians became dramatically more prosperous than before.

Yes, I know.  No matter how many times you repeat it, it just won't compute in good American Republican heads.  Schwarzengger told them what they expected to hear, things like a "good immigrant" is supposed to say. At the Potemkin convention, the rule was strictly "if it feels good, say it."  Reality didn't need to interfere.

I remember an episode of "Law and Order" where the detectives are interviewing a Russian immigrant couple at their shop.  The man says in Russian something like, "The American police are stupid.  They're too soft to get any information out of people."  One of the detectives asked his wife what he said.  She translated, explaining that he had said, "America is a wonderful country.  Anyone can get rich here."  They were satisfied.