Ahhhnold a bit "off" on the details..

[Steff]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS...r.ap/index.html

 

 

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- 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."

 

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 as well as the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain."

[Gene Honda Civic]

Politics: Never let the facts get in the way of patriotic rhetoric used solely to stir "nationalism" and sway the weak-minded's opinion.

[Yossarian]

Politicians lie, what a shock. Clinton lied about black churches burning in his home state of Arkansas. Gore lied shamelessly about taking tobacco subsidy money after his sisters illness. He also lied about his fathers civil rights record in the US Senate. And then he invented the internet and was the inspiration for the sappy novel that became a sappy movie called Love Story. Kerry's "seared" in his brain memory of Christmas 1968 in Cambodia is a big fat lie. Hell he even accused "President" Nixon of sending him there only Nixon wasn't even President yet. All right you want balance? George Ryan lied about his involvement in the license of bribes scandal, among other things. Although the evidence is incomplete and sketchy and would never hold up in court, George W Bush may have lied about his Alabama National Guard service. To the best of my knowledge he didn't lie about his 1976 DUI arrest in Maine, but he sure as hell didn't volunteer anything. Clinton no doubt lied about "inhaling" and he seems to have lied to his draft board and GW is mute on his wild and crazy days of youth. Politicians lie all the time and that is one reason I for one, am so fed up with the two major parties at this point. It may be an over generalization but I think comedian Lewis Black is onto something when he says that the Democrats are the party of no ideas and the GOP is the party of really bad ideas. One good thing. I'm glad there are still competent researchers and historians out there who can correct the historical "mistatements" of people like Ahnold, Gore and the great prevaricator himself Bill Clinton. Historical knowledge which is almost extinct among the masses is also fading in the so called intelligensia. By the way sweet ole Bill may have had a heart attack today and the Christian in me wishes him a speedy recovery, although personally I have no use for the man.