Alte Hofburg, Vienna, Austria. By Sina Ettmer Photography @ Shutterstock.com
Taki Theodorocopulous writes in Taki’s Mag:
With its baroque streetscapes and rambling imperial palaces, its winding cobbled lanes and art-filled museums, the Austrian capital is a natural for invading tourists ….Last week, though, I had the whole place to myself, walking up and down the pedestrians-only Karntner Strasse, along with a few bikers and some normally unfriendly Viennese.
The Austro-Hungarian empire made the E.U. look like the midgets they are, although some twenty years ago the dwarfs forced Jorg Haider and his Freedom Party to step down or else.
Six hundred and fifty years of dead Habsburgs must have jumped out of their royal graves after such a humiliation. Belgian dwarfs forcing Austrians to capitulate. Gott in Himmel! Never mind, the place is a socialist republic and there’s no room for brave men to tell the bureaucrooks to get stuffed. The longest period of peace in Europe—99 years—was conceived in the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
Compare that with the greatest jerk ever, Woodrow Wilson, who not only brought America into the war for no reason, but then punished Germany unnecessarily in order to play tough guy. His peace lasted twenty years.
I walked around the magnificent Belvedere and its sculpture-strewn gardens—the Klimt gallery and its masterworks were closed due to you-know-what—and looked down on the beautiful capital that has seen so much for so long. The place drips with history and historical names, museums galore and famous cafés. The night before, I walked with Alexandra in Vienna’s magnificent Hofburg palace complex, without a soul in sight.
Vienna exemplifies this tragedy, a once proud capital with an empire benevolently ruled, now a museum city of ghosts and magnificent past splendors goggled by people in funny hats and funnier faces. Still, I’d rather be here than in Minneapolis.
