11.2008

Anyhow, I actually did do real research into the realities and history of Fascism in Europe.  As a little bit of evidence, I've gone through Time magazine's online archive of items and articles on poor stupid little Engelbert Dollfuss, and thought I would share some highlights.  I know that Time magazine does not count as actual research so much as a series of whatever some lazy asswipe thought would fly at that particular moment, but take this as a small and conveniant token of the actual research done:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,745566,00.html

Austrian Nazis promptly rushed to second-hand clothing shops and bought up all the old silk hats in sight, on the assumption that there could be no law against the wearing of a Cylinder, emblem of bourgeois respectability. For a few happy hours Viennese Nazis flaunted battered toppers above their sport suits until green-coated police pounced on them.

"There is no law against silk hats!" shrilled the Nazis.

"Ach, so?" said the police and marched them off.


Nothing says "strict opposition to Nazism" like hauling masses of people to prisons and concentration camps for voicing their political opinions and wearing certain identifiable items of clothing.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,753682,00.html

Police caught up with Frank and friends, busy on a haranguing tour of Austrian Nazi groups. They were told to leave Austria "rapidly." Then Dollfuss ordered 100 other German Nazis deported. He had already had 2,380 Austrian Nazis arrested for bombarding the Heimwehr with stones, vegetables and eggs filled with ink. He pondered banning Nazi emblems in Austria, dissolving the Austrian Nazis, entirely.

Oh, and deporting them in the thousands and "dissolving them" after pronouncing them as "undesirables", too.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,745683,00.html

One night last week in Innsbruck near the border, Nazi students spied the car of Prince Aloyse Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg, onetime German Catholic Centre Party official, refugee from German Naziism. On it they spied the black, red and gold Heimwehr (Austrian Fascists) pennant. Students surrounded the car, jumped on the running board, ripped off the pennant. Up rose Princess Löwenstein, pulled a revolver from her purse and began firing at random into the crowd. The students fled, the Prince drove on.

I would love it if we lived in a Fascist dictatorship that allowed our wealthiest members to pull guns out of purses and shoot student demonstrators.  I would also love it if we lived in a place where student demonstrators were as likely to be Nazis as Communists and not really anything else at all, so that I could always feel good about shooting them with a revolver.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755185,00.html

^ this one's just about how the British might or might not have been planning on using Hitler against their real and more dangerous enemies, Mussolini and Stalin.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747660,00.html

This one is great because it mentions the trials of 144 Nazis who killed Dollfuss.  It is a fact of history that 8 Nazis participated in the putsch.  It also seems to be a fact of history that 144 Nazis were put on trial for it, although only the ones who directly participated were executed.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761728,00.html

I like this one because it was published in 1934 and involves a mob of Austrian citizenry shouting that a priest should be sent to Dachau (a "naziconcentration camp").  Really drives a stake through the heart of that whole "we didn't know about the camps" thing.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760012,00.html

Apparently the nazis loved the proletariat and were loved by them in turn, unlike the poor stupid little fool Dollfuss.  Also, there's another mention of Dachau, apparently investigated by the man who made this report.  He apparently looked into Dachau and didn't really see anything worth mentioning other than that it was big.  I guess as a commie he cared about the proles but could not give two fucks about the Jews, Heimwehr, religious leaders, political prisoners, animal abusers, or complainers being put to death right on his walking tour, but he seems terribly upset about the proles being happy.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748856,00.html

My God, the whiny spoiled liberal bitching is strong in this one.
Marxist right.  Mass justice.  Jesus, I can't figure out which of those two wordings is more oxymoronic.  If there's two words that do not, never have, and never will belong together, it's "mass" and "justice."  "Mass justice" is what the Klan dispensed, like it or fucking not.  Anybody who has ever seen people coalesce into a "mass" knows that if there's one thing they become incapable of in that state, it's justice.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,848315,00.html

THIS IS "MASS JUSTICE" IN ACTION.  THIS.  ONLY THIS.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,759369,00.html

Burly, raspy-voiced Major Emil Fey, Vice Chancellor under Dollfuss and former Vienna commander of the Heimwehr of Prince Ernest von Starhemberg,* shot his wife, his 19-year-old son, then turned the gun on himself. Ruthless suppressor of the incipient Nazis and Socialist workers alike, he momentarily expected "liquidation" after the Nazis came into power.

"Momentarily" must have meant "really fucking soon" back then, instead of "only for a short amount of time, or in a quick but easily suppressed impulse."  Of course if I were the guy who ran Dollfuss' crimes against humanity in suppressing the Nazis and the Nazis had suddenly come to power in my country, I probably would have done much the same.

In that same article:  Tyrolean Tycoon Friedrich Reitlinger, ardent Catholic and financial backer of the Heimwehr, had his daughter shoot him, then herself.  COWARD.  KILL YOUR DAUGHTER AND THEN YOURSELF, THAT IS YOUR FUCKING RESPONSIBILITY, NOT HERS.  In a downtown café, a Jewish diner rose, sneered "Heil Hitler!" stabbed his table companions with a butcher knife, then slashed his own throat.  THIS MAN KNOWS WHAT HE IS DOING, FOLLOW HIS NOBLE AND HEROIC LEAD.

At week's end the jails were filled to overflowing. Nazi officials took over the Northwest Railway Station, unused for traffic, converted it into a makeshift concentration camp. Crucifixes on the walls of devout Kurt Schuschnigg's Fatherland Front Headquarters, which had now become Nazi Headquarters, were torn down by Nazis who stuck them up with guffaws in the water closets.  SOUNDS LIKE SOPHISTICATED NEW YORK MODERN ART.

Barbarians. This week 150,000 was the estimated number of German Army troops in Austria and their officers, most of whom are not Nazis, in many cases asked tourists they happened to encounter: "You don't think we are barbarians, do you?"   WELL YOU DO HAPPEN TO BE SACKING THE FUCKING PLACE, DON'T YOU, JACKASS.

Also, Time magazine of the 1930s seems to have an unhealthy and even blatantly sexual interest in referring to Hitler as "Handsome Adolf."  They aren't complimenting his speaking skills directly, they aren't talking about his fervor or his emotionally connective ability, they're just saying that he looks reeeeeaaaal nice and they wouldn't kick him out of bed.  The only man in politics whom I have ever heard referred to as being so attractive to the extent of casting such a spell over all who see him in person was JFK.  Some people claim that Obama is as handsome as "Handsome Adolf" and has the same JFK magic, but I've seen Obama in the debates and I've heard him speak and frankly in rhetorical aptitude he's no JFK.  I can't understand a single fucking word of German and even I can guess at Hitler's charisma, but I hear Obama seeming to stumble with English.  Obama's full of pauses, stops, restarts, false starts, weak and wet phrases, and ill-advised extensors (my greatest personal rhetorical sin, I don't know any actual term for it but am using "extensor" to refer to the employment of a phonem as a delaying tactic, a way of going "I've got something to say, now please let me work out what it is," generally an "ah" or an "uh" or an "eh" but among those such as Obama who stand more skilled than myself essentially any vowel sound in the middle of any word or any such exploitable pause between words.  Having seen speeches by both of them I must say it seems like Hitler paused for effect and to invoke the crowd to roar their support in just such a way that his speech would seem to be carried by the furor of the audience, as though summoned through their own spirit; Obama pauses merely to grab for time to arrive at a decently moderated and castrated phrasing that won't turn anyone off but won't exactly summon up the GLORY AND FAME AND BLOOD IS OUR NAME SOULS FULL OF THUNDER HEARTS OF STEEL KILLERS OF MEN pride and confidence that Hitler instilled in a style that JFK consciously and cynically endeavored to emulate [tune out the words during the "we choose to go to the moon" speech and a whole bunch of others, try to get over the accent difference, just listen to the rhythm and the INSISTANCE of JFK's voice]).  His voice carries no magic, his words hold no power, his platitudinous chimes for patriotism do not reach deep enough to penetrate my callous and hardened heart and do not strike with the fervor necessary to reach into my primitive lizard-brain, there are no secret godforces sparking off of his tongue.  He does not move me, and while I am already disposed to listen to and agree with whatsoever he actually says he does not actually inspire, and I keep waiting for some vague hint of the greatness everyone else seems to see constantly pouring forth, it seems as though it's just not there.  His Imperious Majesty seems to lack proper attire, but perhaps the cloth is merely too fine for such an unsophisticated and unintelligent man as myself to perceive.  He's a better orator than anybody else in that election or any of the primaries, but by fuck if that of itself is enough to get someone labelled "great" then I'm Ivan IV, Czar of All the Russias.




Also, Dollfuss was a fool.  He had his own private army of a few hundred thousand and he got capped by eight completely incompetent dudes in his own fortress stronghold.  That's like if a party of a wizard, an elf, a dwarf, a human swordsman and two halflings managed to kill a dark lord in his own dark tower despite having thousands of loyal guards and magical powers and artifacts.  If it happens you just know that the dark lord just wasn't any good at either the darkness or the lording.  I have little sympathy.

Do yourself a favor, though.  Remember Dollfuss and everything that happened to him, and whenever anyone argues that America cannot kill her more charismatic and powerful enemies because then we "make them into a martyr," point them in the direction of this article in Time magazine and ask if this is what they mean by a martyr:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747609,00.html

Because, yeah, totally, that definitely energized all of Austria into exactly the sort of massed, dedicated, organized, and thorough resistance to German expansion that Time Magazine believed it would.  Surely such a martyr was enough to have inspired a generation of suicide bombers.