How Liberal Democrats, in their Infinite Ineptitude, Resemble the Last Habsburg Emperor
How the convergence of two factors, A) capitalist dislocations and B) a focus on minority rights, bequeathed fascism in Europe and might do it here
By
David Gottfried
Audio-Visual Prelude:
I am giving you this video, in part, because it is the custom to provide one’s readers with an audio-visual break from reading.
Although this video is somewhat in sync with what I have to say, I find the narrator’s praise for the Austro-Hungarian Empire saccharine and stupid. Although the Empire had a few good traits, it still, after all, was an autocratic entity that spat on the poor, democracy and minorities. Also, its arrogance bequeathed war. When Francis Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary demanded, as punishment, that Serbia cease to exist as a state and that’s its territory and populace be acquired by the Austro-Hungarian empire. The chastisement of millions of Serbs as punishment for the death of one overfed aristocrat recalls ancient Egypt, where thousands of Hebrew slaves were starved and whipped to build one lousy, useless pyramid. In any event, when Serbia declined to commit suicide, Germany and Austria started the First World War.
Liberal Democrats have soiled the political landscape with policies that recall the edicts and commands of the last Hapsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph. The last Habsburg emperor implemented various measures to boost the status of minorities in the Austrian empire. At the same time, all Austrians, regardless of ethnicity, were increasingly subject to capitalist traumas. His liberalizing programs, coupled with his obliviousness to the squalor of the urban poor, sparked the resentment and antagonism of the dominant ethnic group in Austria, the Germans. The hostility of German Austrians smoldered and spread and eventually gave birth to German fascism. Similarly, in America, programs such as affirmative action have kindled the rage of white Americans, who have endured the steady evisceration of the legacy of FDR, and this inculcated the fascism of Donald Trump. (And although Donald Trump may be finished, his incendiary rhetoric and ideas have a vast foothold in the body politic and remain a grave danger.)
The Hapsburg Empire was, essentially, the Austrian Empire. (In the late 19th Century, it was renamed the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the Austrians needed the cooperation of Hungarians to rule their vast multi-ethnic kingdom.)
The Austrians, who were the dominant ethnic group, were essentially Germans as, for example, they spoke German. (Footnote 1).
The Germans of the Austrian Empire sought to place Germans at the pinnacle of power. However, the Hapsburg emperor had different interests. First and foremost, the royal court in Vienna wanted to ensure that Viennese power, over so many states to the East and South of Austria, would not be abridged. They wanted to remain in power, and they did not want their teeming and restive minorities to raise the mantel of nationalism and undermine Vienna’s supremacy.
While Western European nations had colonies in Africa and Asia, Austria and Germany had colonies in Eastern Europe. Austria, for example, had taken Galicia from Poland in the late 18th Century. (Actually, Poland had been dismembered in the late 18th Century as Vienna, Berlin and Moscow gobbled up the whole of Poland.) Austria’s flag fluttered throughout Czechoslovakia, Hungary, most of Yugoslavia, and portions of Rumania and Bulgaria.
As the 19th century proceeded, Austria became increasingly wary of the nationalist aspirations of her minorities. Slavs, who were often members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, chafed under Viennese Catholic control from the West and Muslim control from the Ottoman Empire to the South, and gravitated toward the pan Slavic movement. Jews, aghast at an upsurge of anti Semitism in Russia and horrified that France, which had been seen as the citadel of liberty and tolerance (Napoleon sought to reconvene the Sanhedrin and France, after all, bequeathed the “Declaration of the Rights of Man”) had regressed to medieval antisemitic barbarism in the Dreyfus case (Footnote 2), raised the torch of Zionism and dreamed of a new Jewish state in ancient Israel.
Vienna was, of course, an ancient, arrogant outpost of unjust monarchical power. For example, it was so scathingly anti-Semitic that Empress Maria Theresea savagely decreed that not a single Jew should ever be permitted to live in Vienna and her edicts were scrupulously enforced. Because of the changes implemented by Franz Joseph and other modernizers, by the end of the 19th Century a very sizable proportion of Vienna’s population was Jewish.
By the end of the 19th century, Vienna was the glittering cultural diadem of “fin de siè·cle” Europe. A Jew, Gustav Mahler, conducted its orchestra. Sigmund Freud, a Jew, traumatized Victorian sensibilities with a succession of subversive insights as he held that the military, the church and competitive sports were fueled by “homosexual libido” and that one’s love for one’s parent of the opposite sex is, in part, sexual.
While Westerners were awed by the heady intellectual and artistic ferment of Vienna, many stout and conservative German Viennese were not. In their view, Mahler, a Jew, was unsuited to appreciate the grand gravitas of the German musical tradition, and Freud was as decadent as what they saw as mongrelized America (America was considered mongrelized, and fatally decadent, because of race-mixing, particularly with respect to Jazz in which blacks and whites together committed the heinous act of appreciating musical forms with African roots)
Although Jews were hated by rank and file Viennese, the man at the top of the totem pole apparently held them in high esteem. I have read, for example, that Emperor Joseph respected Jews for their tightly knit families. Indeed, I read that a belief in the benevolence of Franz Joseph gave rise to an old expression among some Jews: When a Jew was leading a charmed and happy life, another Jew might remark that he was as “happy as a Jew under Franz Joseph.”
Of course, the Germans of Austria did not believe that Franz Joseph should be interested in furthering the frolics of happy Jews. Most commentators adjudge that Austrian Anti Semitism was more rabid and exterministic than German anti semitism. (Of course, Adolf Hitler hailed from Austria.) In March 1938, when the Reich effectuated the Anschluss, or Austria’s absorption and integration into Germany, the Jews of Vienna were forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes.
In America, white resentment has been brewing and festering for decades. Union membership has been declining since the 1950’s. When Ronald Reagan took office, Washington, formerly a bastion of the New Deal, began to fill up with conservatives who seemed to think the Robber Baron Days of starving miners and millionaires smoking cigarettes in hundred-dollar bills were accurately portrayed in “Meet Me in St, Louis” starring Judy Garland.
From the 1960’s until the present day, two themes have assumed an inordinate importance in American life:
A) The Civil Rights Movement has appeared to focus more attention on the plight of black Americans (Footnote 3)
And
B) Conservatives, with the assistance of lily-livered Democrats, have endeavored to dismantle the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society.
Similarly, in Vienna two of the most salient social themes consisted of the following:
A) Franz Joseph improved the status of non-German minorities
And
B) The entire populace, German and non-German alike, becoming increasingly pauperized because of the depredations of capitalism.
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Footnote 1: Today, most people are aware of Germany and Austria, but had history worked out a little differently, we might now be aware of only two German States, Austria and Prussia.
Germany was chronically subject to divisions. It was divided between those states that had been under the control of Rome and those states which eluded Rome’s yoke, between those states which were Catholic and those which were Protestant, between those realms under the control of Charlemagne and those which were not.
By the 19th Century it was clear that there were two head honchos in the running to be the chief kraut nation. Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia, which among, other thing things, contained Berlin. In around 1864, Prussia defeated Austria at the battle of Sadowa and this meant that Prussia would be the big wheel and top “Macher” (big shot in Yiddish) among the Germans. In 1870, Prussia went to war with France, the other German states, with the exception of Austria, were all welded to Prussia, and this new enlarged Prussian State became Germany.
Had Austria beaten Prussia at the aforesaid battle of Sadowa, the German states might have been formed around Austria with the result that today there would be two German states: Prussia and Austria or Prussia and Germany.
Footnote 2:
Dreyfus was a Jewish Officer in the French army. He was wrongly prosecuted for allegedly selling French military secrets to the German High Command. This sparked severe and strident anti-Semitic demonstrations and riots. After he had been subjected to years of abuse in Devil’s Island, the actual culprit was identified, and Dreyfus was acquitted. Incidentally, while Paris was beset with anti-Semitic turmoil owing to the trial, Eleanor Roosevelt was being schooled in England. Young Eleanor’s observation of the havoc of Paris allegedly prompted her identification with the Left.
Footnote 3:
Activism for Civil Rights has APPEARED to whites to have helped blacks a lot; of course, its accomplishments, in terms of avoiding “accidental” executions at the hands of the police and attaining economic justice, are dubious at best.
it feels like this article could use a part 2. the hook is really interesting but the point on capitalist dislocations seems underdeveloped. Aside from that this is a nice little history lesson. GG