Only a few days after Arnie's speech a few
historians start to question his
autobiographical speech against some basic historical facts, including
Timothy Noah from
Slate. "
I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes", said
Arnold Schwarzenegger to the
Republican Party congress...well, Arnie was born and raised in
British-occupied
Austria (specifically the village of
Thal, in the province of
Styria), quite a distance from where the
Soviets were positioned until they withdrew entirely from
Austria in
1955. Arnold's family was quite poor - without a car they were not able to travel very far, and there was little reason them to cross over to the
Soviet zone. Certainly he would not have seen
Soviet tanks on a
daily basis.
And if the Soviets did detain his family, they would have had good reason - his father was a volunteer Brownshirt (entirely coincidentally, both Adolf's and Arnie's fathers were named Alois).
Arnold's comments of Austria being socialist is either a sign of extreme ignorance or deviousness. Every Austrian chancellor from 1945 to 1970 has been conservative. The social democratic Beveridge style of governance in Austria cannot be compared with the centralised planning as practiced in the Soviet block.