Anecdote Monday: The Socialist Scare

At the Republican National Convention in 2004, Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered a speech supporting President George W. Bush's re-election campaign. Schwarzenegger recalled that Austria had become a socialist country after the Second World War and said he remembered seeing Soviet tanks in the streets.

It was promptly pointed out that when Schwarzenegger emigrated to the United States (in 1968), Austria was ruled by the conservative People's Party and had not had a single socialist chancellor. "As a child in Styria," Austrian historian Stefan Karner added, "he could not have seen Soviet tanks. By the time Schwarzenegger was born in 1947, the province was occupied by the British."