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Entry: Puritans or Habsburgs Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/puritans_or_habsburgs#1262 Post contents: It is a very interesting and thought-provoking article. It may be a minor point, but it is not entirely fair to say that the Hungarians did not give minority rights to ethnicities living in the Hungarian half of the Monarchy. All ethnicities living on Hungarian territorry kept their languages, which was not the case in post-Revolution France, and for example there were more Romanian language high schools in what was then Hungary than in Wallachia itself. Universities were only taught in Hungarian, but it has to be kept in mind that Slovak/Romanian/etc. national consciousness was not a widespread phenomenon. To some extent these national ideas came to life by Habsburg agitation who feared rebellion from the Hungarians (Slovaks for example sided predominantly with the Hungarians in 1848). On the other hand destroying the Monarchy and replacing it by mostly disfunctional mini-states was a deliberate way of weakening the region as a whole. It amounts to a cultural Holocaust and one can see that if one compares the architecture left by the Monarchy in Budapest, Zagreb, Fiume/Rijeka, etc. with what later epochs (communism) have brought in this regard. Many even the city of Trieste, which ended up in a better position (Italy), talk about the Monarchy days as a sort of Golden Age. It is entirely true that the WASP Empires (British and American) have brought immense destruction to this planet. One can only hope that this idea now culminates in the Neo-Cons and is then shoved in the garbage can of history, which is where it belongs. Sent at: 2008 05 16