Posted on 08/03/2004 7:56:37 PM PDT by B-Chan
I would recommend Joanna and James Bogle's A Heart for Europe, available through the Remnant Bookstore. This is a well-written, sympathetic and Catholic-oriented portrait of Karl and Zita.
Thanks for calling my attention to this thread.
Thank you for your recommendation.
The United States and England have done far worse, not only to foreigners, but to their own citizens, or -- in the case of the U.S. -- those unfortunate natives who happened to be in the path of its expansion.
Unless of course, you are one of those who believes in "my country right or wrong", which is evidently the case.
For an American to call any other nation a blight on civilization is the ultimate hypocrisy. Look around you.
"America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening period of civilization." -- Oscar Wilde
That is my point - this man was no saint - his empire was just as bad as all empires. He did not even have the saintlyness to adhere to the treaty he signed with Serbia over Bosnia which caused the Great War nor end the war once it turned into an evil slaughter. He was no saint - he was an inbred man of an inbred royal line.
The treaty *he* signed? Charles I did not become Emperor until 1916, and was not even heir apparent until 1914. I assure you, he signed no treaties with anyone. Besides which, no treaty was responsible for the Great War. If you want to pin blame on someone, blame the Serbian terrorists who shot Archduke Francis Ferdinand or the scheming French politicians who kept pushing the Russians to mobilize against Austria and Germany just so they could get their grubby, republican hands on Elsass-Lothringen again.
"nor end the war once it turned into an evil slaughter" you say? Pray sir, you are misinformed. Emperor Charles I was, in fact, the ONLY leader in Europe, with the possible exception of Pope Benedict XV, who truly desired and worked for peace. He is certainly the only ruler to offer to give up some territory if it would mean an end to hostilities. He placed the welfare of his people ahead of personal pride and national ambition.
Charles I is a representation of the finest tradition of Hapsburg princes, following the illustrious example of Empress Maria Theresa, Emperor Ferdinand II, King Philip II or Emperor Charles V. He was a true son of the Church and a worthy successor to Francis Joseph, "the last monarch of the old school".
May God advance his cause and may Blessed Charles I pray for us.
Shooting a head of state who has command and control responsibilities is not an act of terrorism. If it was every time we bombed Saddam could be called an act of terrorism. And it was the Austrians who signed a treaty returning Bosnia to Serbia which they reneged against. As a king he inherits the signature. Responsibilities are hereditary.
Sun 15 Aug 2004
Serbs paid dearly for their freedom
GERALD Warner better go back to school and study history before he freely revises it to suit his own agenda.
In his column ‘Did Britain really have to be in the war to end all wars’ last week he makes several hideous mistakes. Or worse, deliberate omissions.
The truly injured party was the Serbs, not the Austrians. Missing from his article is any mention about the assassination of the Serbian king three years prior to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.
It is apparent by this racist slur at the Serbs that the writer believes it appalling to kill an archduke but acceptable to liquidate a Serbian king as Austria and their Croatian vassals were highly implicated in the murder of the Serbian king, especially Ante Pavelich, who headed the first independent state of Croatia (1941), a Nazi puppet state.
Also missing from the facts is that Serbia was internationally recognised at the Congress of Berlin (1876) as an international nation with one exception. Austria would be the protectorate of Bosnia for 44 years. When it came time to return Bosnia to the Serbs, Austria and the archduke refused.
As though this was not insulting enough, the archduke went to Sarajevo on the most sacred holy holiday of the Serbian people, Vidovdan, the commemoration of the Battle of Kosovo when the Serbs lost 77,000 victims and the loss of their nation to Ottoman slavery for 412 years.
If I were alive then I would have assassinated the archduke myself.
It is also insulting that Gerald. Warner makes no mention of the fact that the Serbs lost 52% of their adult male population in the [First] World War and 22 years later lost 1.4 million of their citizens to the Nazi hordes.
The Serbs have paid dearly for their freedom from the Austrian Empire - a corrupt government that deserved to be destroyed.
William Dorich, Los Angeles
Since you seem to be unable to tell the difference between an act of war and an act of terrorism, this is probably pointless, but here goes...
Anyone who has studied this period knows that the Black Hand terrorists targeted Archduke Francis Ferdinand precisely *because* he was not an enemy to the Slavic people, but their friend. He was an open advocate for "trialism", of making the southern Slavs equal partners with the Magyars of Hungary and the Germans of Austria. The Black Hand however, were Serbian ultra-nationalists (nationalism being pure poison for a multi-ethnic empire like Austria) who wanted to build a massive "Greater Serbia".
The problem they had with the Archduke is that, if he lived to become Emperor and made the Slavs partners with the Austrians and Hungarians, they might (gasp) be content and not wish to revolt in favor of joining their grand Serbian nation-state. Therefore, by assassinating the Archduke, the Austrians would come down hard on the Slavs and thus drive them into the arms of the Serbian nationalists who were planning war, safe in their knowledge that big brother Russia would come to their aid.
A very small part. Actually, almost all of Poland was under the control of the Tsar, and were quite happy when German and Austrian troops drove back their rulers. In fact, it was the Central Powers who set up the *first* Polish state, though they were careful to make it a Kingdom of Poland rather than a republic, a nation which the Allies quickly sold out after the war was over to establish one with a government more to their liking and which would include alot of German (rather than Polish) territory - recipe for future disaster. During the war, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, even sent relief supplies to the Polish Jews of Warsaw whom the Russians had left to starve.
In fact, the founder of even the republican Polish government, whose name escapes me at the moment, was originally an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. I have also heard from at least one source (which may be entirely wrong I admit) said that Pope John Paul II was named after Emperor Charles (Karol - Karl).
He would have made who co-equal - the Catholic Croats or the Orthodox Slavs co-equals? Try your apologist view of history somewhere else. PS: The Hungarians never loved being part of that crappy empire either.
P.S. Then why were both efforts to restore Charles made in Hungary? Why did Hungary continue to function as a monarchy (though with a regent in place of the absent king) decades after they had been seperated from Austria?
Try your Hapsburg-bashing history some place else.
Hapsburg-bashing history is right in place in America - the nation that helped defeat that empire.
Guleph4ever has got you, Destro. The Habsburg commitment to trialism and the loyalty of Hungary to the Habsburg crown are matters of well-known historical fact. Despite your characterization of them as a band of patriotic freedom fighters, the Black Hand was in fact an anti-Christian organization, one that commited the sin of disloyalty towards God and the King that God had appointed over them. (Christians are called to honor Caesar, not to shoot him in the guts. Recall that Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in the very Pit of Hell.) They were instead a kind of blood-and-soil cult, an ethno-theist. ultranationalist terrorist organization dedicated to the establishment of a Serbian Empire — a sort of Balkan Taliban.
I don't refer to World War One by that false name. I call it what it was: the Suicide of the West. Gavrilo Prizip killed more than a man that day in 1914 — he set in motion a chain of events that killed Christendom, that killed Western Civilization itself. The results were World War Two, and the nightmare that continues all around us today.
Those people of good will in America and other nations who cling to the values, morals, and ideals that the Habsburgs stood for represent the last bastion of Christian civilization. Today, the light of Christendom is down to its embers, and is being smothered from without (Islam) and within (secular humanism). When that light goes out, only scattered sparks will survive — those few sundered believers and small communities that will remain, each alone in the darkness, each reflecting the Light that cannot fail.
May the Emperor Karl of blessed memory pray for us. May the Lord come quickly.
The Hungarians hated the Austrians more so than the Slavs. You pray to a false saint - a once enemy of the USA.
Wrong. The Hungarians reverted to being a kingdom in March 1920. Surely a nation that hated the Habsburgs would never have given up being a republic in an attempt to return a Habsburg to his rightful throne.
I am a patriotic American, but I do not worship the nation I love; I worship God. Only God is perfect; therefore, an honest American must admit that occasionally our country makes mistakes. Our entry into the 1914-1917 Suicide of the West was one such occasion. I blame Woodrow W. Wilson, the internationalist Democrat and the Jimmy Carter of his day, for that tragic error.
The Hungarians loved the Austrians so much they were responsible for creating the Ausgleich [compromise] of 1867, because they could not stand to be under Austria's direct rule - which in reality was the beginning of the end for this Frankenstein monster of an empire.
Habsburg bashing has no place on a conservative forum as the Hapsburgs were, for centuries, the conservative defenders of traditional European/Christian culture. In 1918, whether you were in Germany, Austria-Hungary or Russia you had two choices: socialist republic or Christian monarchy.
This is one reason why conservatism is losing the world war for the mind. All liberals, everywhere on earth, share the same core values, they all agree on socialism, class warfare, political rather than royal supremacy, nature-worship and opposition to organized religion. However, for a long time, particularly in America, conservatives have been divided, mostly because some adopt a little bit of liberalism and others do not.
After the fall of the Hapsburg monarchy, the success of liberalism and communism in southeast Europe was assured, just as the fall of the Romanovs assured the victory of Marxism in Russia and the fall of the Hohenzollerns assured the victory of National SOCIALISM in Germany. With leftist revolutions erupting all across Europe in 1918 I find it bewildering that any conservative would not rush to defend a traditional cross & crown monarch like Emperor Charles I.
Oh, silly me, I didn't see your last post. Since you side with the liberal revolution in Hungary I guess it comes naturally to oppose a conservative like Emp. Charles. Yet, here again, you have your facts wrong.
The liberal revolt in Hungary was largely an attempt by the leftists to massacre all the minorities in Hungary while the Austrian army was busy fighting back the massive liberal revolts that erupted across Europe in 1848. However, unlike today, the conservatives stuck together and Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, the "gendarmerie of Europe" came to the aid of Austria in crushing the uprising.
The Ausgleich was done, rightly so, after all of the liberal opposition had been wiped out. The new Emperor Francis Joseph intended it to be a gesture of humanity and reconciliation, and to avoid future problems by allowing the Hungarians their pride after being so soundly thrashed.
Not that I expect you to approve of any of this as you seem to be taking the side of the liberals in every showdown with the old, conservative Europe.
The cause of WW1 was the mistaken view of empires of that time that they had to expand or die. Austrians being blocked by Prussia in the north and Italy in the south decided to pick on the corpse of the Ottoman Empire - yet it ran into the force empires have not had to deal with before - nationalisim. The natives of the Balkans did not want to be ruled by the Austrians or the Turks or the Russians - but to rule themselves.
I asked my dad about my uncle's disbelief and he said that unc was a good hearted soul but not very smart and I shouldn't pay too much attention to what he said because he didn't know very much other than what the union and his "fraternal brothers" told him and that they certainly had their own agenda.
Are you my uncle? He also had an animose toward Austrians generally and the monarchy specifically.
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