Vienna, winter, 1913.
An empire entangled in a pointless war & a housing crisis.
At the same time, Vienna was incubating in its own streets some of the century’s prime virtuosos of violence. One of them was active close to the imperial palace, Schloss Schönbrunn, where the emperor had received his heir. An elegant building on Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse housed young Josef Stalin, dispatched by Lenin to explore the empire’s explosive nationalities situation. It was during Stalin’s weeks in Vienna that he initiated his lethal feud with young Leon Trotsky, who, a few streetcar stops away, was publishing the original Pravda. All this while on the other side of town young Adolf Hitler was seething obscurely, painting postcards for a living.
And how did all this mess work out? If you don't know w/o looking it up, you are too young & too ignorant to be reading this.
“Austria,” said Karl Kraus, who was Habsburg Austria’s H. L. Mencken, “is the laboratory for the apocalypse.” What would he say about America today?
Who knows, but we certainly have a few choice things to say concerniing America today.
No comments:
Post a Comment
You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney present while you are commenting. If you cannot afford an attorney, you are "Shit Outta Luck" (SOL). Anything you type here can & may be used against you in a court of law or in a personal "beat-down" administered by a staff member or "associate" of this "web log."
The publisher thanks Google/Bugger for denecessitating verification. (Not that we need explain anything to anyone.)