White Niggers
Chapter 50
Thursday, September 12th, 2019, 10:30
Südtiroler Platz (South Tyrol Square) subway station, 4th district of Vienna
Lisa gets off the subway and begins to walk down the Favoritenstraße.
There is an old Russian song which claims that in St. Petersburg every monument is a state of war. Vienna is like St. Petersburg, not just in architectural beauty.
Take the subway station she just left. Thousands of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian tourists move through it without strong emotions. At best they may think of South Tyrol as a picturesque skiing destination.
For better or worse, I'm not a tourist, Lisa thinks. South Tyrol is the perfect example of irredentism done right, without becoming a gangrene that threatens to kill the entire country. It's also a perfect example of a forgone opportunity for Ukraine.
South Tyrol is to Austria what the Eastern Ukraine and Crimea are to Russia. It's a region populated primarily by the Austrians which became part of Italy after the end of World War I.
The problem is similar, yet the approaches taken by Austria and Ukraine are very different. Dr. Zemanek may be right when she says that both the Austria and Ukraine are idiotic nations. But there are degrees of idiocy.
The Austrians, over the last hundred years, learned to exert their soft power over the economically and militarily stronger Italians. That mostly peaceful struggle resulted in Italians making German an official language in South Tyrol. The Austrians living in South Tyrol can live their culture freely, without any persecution from the Italians.
The Italians don't seem to mind that in this region the language of their former oppressors is spoken. Neither did the Austrians try to de-Italicize South Tyrol, nor did the Italians try to de-Kakanize it.
Probably it's not only the ingenuity of the Austrian diplomats that made it possible, but also the rationality of their Italian counterparts. They haven't banned the German language, nor have they been shelling civilian facilities in Bozen for years. And the results speak for themselves – the potentially separatist South Tyrol is now one of the wealthiest regions of Italy.
Somehow, the Italians managed to avoid a coup masquerading as a revolution of dignity on Piazza del Popolo in Rome. The South Tyroleans did not feel compelled to form the Bozen's People's Republic. And Giovanni Ferrero did not start the OAT (operazione anti-terrorismo) which led to tens of thousands of dead on both sides.
South Tyrol is everything that Donbass could have been, but failed to become.
Lisa walks past a large Baroque building that spans several dozen meters.
It houses two institutions that collectively form the answer to the question that Lisa obsessively thinks about: Why didn't Donbass and Crimea turn out like South Tyrol?
There are two entrances to the building, with two different addresses. Favoritenstraße 15 houses the Theresianum school. Several meters away is the entrance to the diplomatic academy (Favoritenstraße 15A).
Theresianum is a school where gifted children are groomed to become the future elites, not only of Austria. Its list of alumni includes people as diverse as the actor who played a glamorous Nazi in "Inglorious Basterds" and the head of the Imperial House of Osman.
After graduation, they walk from Favoritenstraße 15 to Favoritenstraße 15A, and continue their studies at the diplomatic academy established in 1754.
And again – not just every monument – every building in Vienna is in a state of w… anti-terrorist operation, Lisa thinks.
Including this one. The Soviet Union is very similar to the Austro-Hungarian empire, in that there were two dominant powers in both states – the Russians and the Ukrainians in the former, the Austrians and the Hungarians in the latter.
When Ukraine became independent, we started to desovietize the society. Often this meant the destruction of our own diplomatic academies and Theresianums.
When the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed after World War I, the Austrians did not de-Kakanize to the ground the old institutions. They preserved what worked and improved what didn't.
And the results speak for themselves. They have a machine which takes gifted kids as input and produces members of the elite, indoctrinated according to Austrian standards.
We Ukrainians have destroyed the evil Soviet Theresianums and diplomatic academies, but failed to create good Ukrainian ones to replace them.
The Austrians brainwash their elites themselves, thus making them act in the interests of Austria. We've outsourced the grooming of our elites to Washington, London, and Vienna. This is why nobody is defending the long-term interests of Ukraine.
Lisa hears: "Good morning, Lisa."