Arnold's Oppressed Upbringing

I didn't see Arnold's speech last night, but checking out the text I can't help but note this bit of misleading-without-lying that's worthy of the president himself:

When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes. I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector. Growing up, we were told, "Don't look the soldiers in the eye. Look straight ahead." It was a common belief that Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him off to the Soviet Union as slave labor.

My family didn't have a car -- but one day we were in my uncle's car. It was near dark as we came to a Soviet checkpoint. I was a little boy, I wasn't an action hero back then, and I remember how scared I was that the soldiers would pull my father or my uncle out of the car and I'd never see him again. My family and so many others lived in fear of the Soviet boot. Today, the world no longer fears the Soviet Union and it is because of the United States of America!

As a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left. I love Austria and I love the Austrian people -- but I always knew America was the place for me. In school, when the teacher would talk about America, I would daydream about coming here. I would sit for hours watching American movies transfixed by my heroes like John Wayne. Everything about America seemed so big to me so open, so possible.

It seems to me that the point of this is to try and make a person who doesn't know Austrian history believe that Arnold grew up on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. First came the Soviet occupation, then, after their departure, they left behind the dread socialism. His family "and so many others lived in fear of the Soviet boot." But this is the story of a young Czech (or Polish or Hungarian) bodybuilder, it's not what actually happened in Austria. Rather, the Soviets occupied part of the country (and the Americans [and maybe the other Allies] occupied the rest). Then everybody's troops came home and Austria became a democracy, whose democratically elected governments constructed a mixed economy, much like the democratically elected governments in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the rest of western Europe. As elsewhere in Europe, the Austrian welfare state was more generous than the American one, but as an politico-economic type the two models were very similar -- a liberal democratic government, an economy organized along market principles but constrained by regulation in which government programs were financed through taxation.

Now Arnold didn't come out and say he grew up in Communist Eastern Europe -- he didn't, and if he had he might have gotten in some trouble -- but applying the usual technique he talked in a way so that if you don't know anything about Austria other than that it's in Europe somewhere and that Vienna is well to the east of Paris of Rome, I think that's the conclusion you would draw. It's a conclusion that lends its hand to a much better story than the real one. (Others have noted, of course, the absurdity of citing Richard Nixon as a paragon of American freedom and market democracy).

UPDATE: Jesus H. Christ if I read one more blog post or receive one more email saying I "don't know history" because just as Arnold said Soviet troops did occupy part of Austria I'm going to kill someone. I say that Soviet troops temporarily occupied part of Austria. The point is this: Arnold's speech implies that he grew up in a Communist bloc country and he did not. He grew up in a democratic social democracy after experiencing a few years of Soviet occupation (caused, let us not forget, but the Austrian public's wild embrace of Nazism, a political ideology Arnold did not see fit to distance himself from until he acquired US political ambitions).