1-22-06, 8:57 am

Having just written a fairly grim article about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sending death row prisoners to their death, I thought it was time to write about the Arnold the world loves (to laugh at in politics) the Arnold with a song in his heart (one loosely translated as 'Arnold Uber Alles').

Like Forrest Gump, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a witness to history. He likes to say that he remembered the horror of Soviet tanks on the streets of his native Austria, even though he was born two years after the war ended and the Americans liberated Vienna. Actually, the allied forces were not fully withdrawn from Austria until 1954, when an unoccupied neutral Austria was established, so the very young Arnold, age three to seven, might have challenged Soviet soldiers to an arm wrestling match or a snowball fight.

Austria then became a neutral country with an advanced welfare state, which Germany might very well have become had the Truman administration not acted to violate the Potsdam Agreement of 1945 and merge, in 1948, the British, French, and American occupation zones to create, and later arm, the West German State.

The Soviets responded by supporting the creation of an East German State and forty years of arms races and war crises between U.S. and Soviet blocs followed. With all of the waste, danger, and real suffering the cold war created for the peoples of the world, it was really the sort of action adventure story that Arnold always loved.

Later, he disobeyed his ex-Nazi father by becoming a body builder. 'Ex-Nazis' in Germany and Austria could easily become born again defenders of the 'free world' and members of various conservative parties merely by dropping the Judeo from Hitler’s Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy ideology and participating in the collective denial of war crimes with the blessings of U.S. military intelligence and the new CIA, which recruited 'former Nazis' with Gestapo and SS experience to fight in Europe against Communists and the Soviet Union. The cold war waxed and waned as bigger bang for the buck became Eisenhower’s 'Atoms for Peace' propaganda at Geneva, bomber gaps became missile gaps became overkill became mutually assured destruction became détente became strategic arms limitations treaties became revoking strategic arms limitations treaties became closing the window (gap) of vulnerability became Star Wars.

By then Arnold had escaped neutral welfare state Austria to become an American movie star, a living monument to the statements of two old anti-Nazi German émigrés who also made their way much earlier to Hollywood. First, the movie industry dressed and sold stars the way butchers dressed and sold pieces of meat, and second, the American public, with a 'twelve-year old mind,' is happy to 'see life as it ain’t.'

Arnold, of course, joined the Republicans, the first party of the rich and an action adventure foreign policy, since he was now both rich and an action adventure hero. But, remembering perhaps that Austria prospered by trading with both East and West Europe, he married Maria Shriver of the Kennedy clan, ironically the daughter of Lyndon Johnson’s old anti-poverty program chief and George McGovern’s Vice Presidential candidate, Sargeant Shriver.

After Conan and the three Terminators, along with adventures with Kindergarten kids and in outer space, Arnold was ready for the Machtergreifung (seizure of power). In California a crisis loomed, brought on by the Enron criminals whose extortion of the whole state of California led to a spectacular rise in energy prices. Just as in Deutschland (Germany) during the Great Depression, reactionary forces now profited from a capitalist crisis.

There big steel and automakers helped bankroll Hitler’s Nazis and rightwing political power brokers made him head of an unelected right-wing coalition government. In California, super billionaire Warren Buffet and big money interests supported Arnold after the Republicans used the effects of the energy inflation to recall the Democratic governor and set in motion a wide open new election.

Even though Arnold as governor has tried to portray himself as a hero-leader and reach the 'Volk' above the parties through reactionary referenda, he has now suffered major defeats on all of these referenda.

When it comes to referenda, the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, we used to learn in our political theory classes when I was a student at City College, were very big on fixed plebiscites and on the Fuhrer (leader) principle as the basis of government, meaning there is a strong man who will make you strong and happy if you follow him blindly, whatever doubts you may have. .

Arnold’s right-wing referenda attacking public employee unions, education and other vital social services in the interest of the corporations, who seek to treat all workers as rats in maze, and the rich, for whom necessary social services are private party caterers, have been decisively defeated by Californians.

The majority of Californians are clearly opposed to Arnold’s anti-labor, anti-social welfare policies now that they have had time to recover from the semi-hysteria created by the Enron energy crisis and the low comedy of the recall election. As my old political science teachers at City College used to say, fascist movements like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s, built on fantastic contradictory appeals, slogans and strutting uniformed personalities, have to take power in crisis times rapidly. They then have to maintain power through dictatorial means or they fall apart, as people see through the nonsense and realize also that these movements cannot resolve economic and social crises except by preparing for wars of conquest (something Arnold, unlike GW Bush, cannot do).

Fortunately, Arnold also cannot use black shirt-storm trooper terrorist violence to gain his political ends outside of the movies, as Adolf and Benito did in real life. He could not for example burn down Disneyland, blame it on the Democrats and the state AFL-CIO, and declare martial law as the Hitlerites blamed the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on the German Communists (KPD) and the Soviet Union to gain support for a martial law dictatorship.

Instead, Arnold, still an authoritarian personality (another old, largely rejected concept we were taught at City College) if ever there was one, is turning to some hired gun Democratic image makers to portray him as a compassionate middle of the road Terminator.

But I doubt it will work. California has a strong and vibrant labor movement, strong people’s movements and a history as one of the country’s most innovative and progressive states. That is in itself a major reason why California has also produced sinister reactionaries like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Schwarzenegger to fight its progressive forces, just as Wisconsin, the state of the La Follettes, the Progressive party, and a socialist party which elected mayors of Milwaukee, produced Joe McCarthy, and Germany, the state with the most powerful Marxist socialist party and trade union movement in the world from the 1870s to WWI produced the Austrian immigrant, Hitler.

Hopefully, Californians will send Arnold back to Hollywood and end the destructive distraction that his 'administration' has represented. He might star in a Terminator 4, where he goes back in time to try to stop the Russian revolution from happening by assassinating Lenin, only to be stopped and physically crushed by Ellen Degeneres, who plays a heroic Krupskaya. Or he might team up with Nancy Reagan in a remake of the old Robin Williams TV sitcom, Mork and Mindy. Or he might take some acting classes and do serious drama about a death row inmate denied a reprieve by a rightwing Republican governor.

By making 2006 the year of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 'untergang' (decline) and political downfall, Californians will be setting the stage also for the defeat of a Bush administration so ultra-right in its policies that Schwarzenegger can, bad actor that he has always been, still portray himself as a comparative 'moderate.'



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs magazine and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.