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Entry: Puritans or Habsburgs Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/puritans_or_habsburgs#1287 Post contents: Splendid article by Paul Gottfried. Now we need a counter-factual history that has the Central Powers winning the Great War, written my someone who has absorbed the teachings of Gottfried and John Lukacs. My own version: – Europe and the Near East ruled under a sound mixed constitution (Polybius) in six federal empires – resembling big Switzerlands: a Romanoff, a Windsor, a Hohenzollern, a Habsburg, an Ottoman, and a Iberian-French Bourbon (the Spanish Whites having been restored in Paris) – all living peacefully together – first class opera houses performing the works of Richard Strauss in Messina, Constantinople, Sarajevo, and Dublin – the Mengerian School of economics dominant in Cambridge, Heidelberg, and Harvard – children reading the work of Schiller and Mann in grade school, and listening to Bruckner and Haydn – St. Petersburg a city renowned for its cultural sophistication – a Milan of the north – Ashkenazy and Sephardic culture as commonplace and respected as Irish and Amish – Lyonel Feininger, not Picasso, recognized as the supreme modern painter – the Gringoland no more than provincial outpost, similar to Canada and Australia – Brecht a stagehand a the Hofburg Theater – Benito an executive editor for a Marxist newspaper with no visible circulation – Uncle Joe a paper-pusher at some rural Imperial post office in the remotest corner of Czarist Georgia – Osama the spoiled brat of a rich oil millionaire, retired on a villa somewhere in an Ottoman province – ol’ Adi a copy boy at the architecture firm of Speer & Speer – Prof. Dr. Paulus, Freiherr von Gottfried, Rektor, Universitaet Wien – Sacher Torte, not IHOP, the choice for carbohydrate and sugar excess – English cooking seriously improved Sent at: 2008 05 16