I've rarely enjoyed a book so much that I've been in disagreement with, but this could be because Kuehnelt-Leddihn attacks leftism from such an unfashionable catholic monarchist viewpoint.

It seems that he wrote this book when he was 81 years old and it reflects his idealised memory of pre WW1 Vienna, capital of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire, in which a multitude of races enjoyed a benevolent freedom under old Emperor Franz-Jozef. He rightly points out that the WW1 destruction of Austria-Hungary was followed by the disasters of communism and national socialism in the "liberated" territories and he sees the root of these "isms" in the French revolution with its exultant destruction of tradition, monarchy and religion.

He's not a friend of the proletariat and sees socialism inevitably sliding into populist big government and finally dictatorship, with a notable lack of morality in this religion free process.

There are some very doubtful aspects to his world view. He doesn't admit that aristocratic rule is also a dictatorship without guarantees (which still didn't manage to stop Communism in Russia) or that a constitutional monarchy has little relevance as a defence against leftist activism.
He also looks at the populism of the French revolutionaries, Russian Bolsheviks and German National Socialists (he sees them as popular leftists) but completely ignores the mainspring of German nationalism sourced in the displacement of Germans by Jews in positions of influence most notably in pre WW1 Vienna.

As a German-Jewish writer who had moved to Vienna from the German Reich said, "....all public life was dominated by Jews. The banks, the press, the theater, literature, social organizations, all lay in the hands of the Jews.... The aristocracy would have nothing to do with such things.... The small number of untitled patrician families imitated the aristocracy; the original upper-middle class had disappeared..... The court, the lower middle class and the Jews gave the city its stamp. And that the Jews, as the most mobile group, kept all the others in continual motion is, on the whole, not surprising."
The author also knows that in the Germany of the 1920's the words "Bolshevik" and "Jew" were interchangeable and he misleadingly describes the Bolsheviks as led by, "...men who either belonged to the lower nobility, or had a middle class intellectual background (both Jews and Gentiles), or were ex seminarians."

In reality they were almost exclusively Jewish (Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Radek, Litvinov, Kamanev, Uritsky, Lenin in part) in the critical revolutionary years of 1917-20 and David R. Francis, United States ambassador to Russia, warned in a January 1918 dispatch to Washington: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."

A good warning, as they went on to murder the Russian Czar, Czarina and their young children (on the direct order of Lenin and Zinoviev and witnessed by Jewish commissars) and set in train the largest terror campaign in history which went on to consume 20 million ethnic Russians and Ukrainians lives.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn has unforgivably edited out this essential aspect of leftism in what is otherwise a worthwhile and interesting book. ( )

To Ed_ from his old trusted friend_ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn- the author in gratitude! Los Angeles_ Oct. 18_ 1991.