Blogged

Terminating the truth

Arnold the First of California would like nothing more than to follow in the outsized footsteps of Ronald Reagan, marching inexorably from silver screen to governor’s manse to White House, crushing girlie-man opponents beneath his hobnailed heels. Apparently, he’s so anxious to follow the example of the Master that he’s already adopted Reagan’s tactic of distorting historical facts for political purposes (known outside of politics as flat-out lying). Schwarzenegger’s account of a childhood spent under Austrian socialism, relayed to a rapt audience at the Republican National Convention, left Austrian historians blinking in disbelief:

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

Recalling that the Soviets once occupied part of Austria in the aftermath of World War II, Schwarzenegger told the convention on Tuesday: “I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes.”

No way, historians say, challenging Schwarzenegger’s knowledge of postwar history — if not his enduring popularity among Austrians who admire him for rising from a penniless immigrant to the highest official in America’s most populous state.

“It’s a fact — as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria,” the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.

Schwarzenegger, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born on July 30, 1947, when Styria and the neighboring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone. At the time, postwar Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the United States, the Soviet Union and France.

The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.

“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 honestly, I never saw a Russian tank there,” retiree Franz Nitsch said Friday. “He said it all on purpose — and that’s bad.”

The gullible convention delegates may have eaten it up, and the accomodating press may have given Schwarzenegger the same pass on veracity it so often gave Reagan, but Austrians themselves are less confused about the truth - even if they are somewhat sanguine about Arnold’s misuse of it:

“Maybe he has a wrong recollection — it’s so many years since he left,” said Wilma Fadrany, 32, a Vienna waitress.

“There must be political reasons for such comments,” she said. “You’ve got to tell the (convention delegates) what they want to hear in order to win them over. Politicians always talk the way it fits into their agenda.”

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