Letter from the Continent

Never in history has there been such a plentiful Christmas in Europe. Record sales are reported, and the statistics published at year’s end showed unmistakably that the working class has reached a new high in its wellbeing. There are, of course, groups like the lower and middle middleclass, the “new proletariat,” below 1914 standards; but, due to its lack of organization, this group counts much less, politically, than labor. Western Europe, on the whole, is in a self-congratulatory mood, and this in spite of the fact that the “spirit of Geneva” has been quietly buried. It seems that Western Europe is comfortably settling down on the rim of the abyss.

The Austrian press has written about a phenomenal influx of Soviet citizens into Austria, all to live there as diplomatic or commercial attachés, ready to pay tremendous prices for villas and huge rents for apartments; but the public remains apathetic. (It is interesting to note that some of the Soviet diplomats who had made propaganda for Austria’s neutralization are now moving to Bonn; among them Kudryavtsev, an understudy for the last Soviet High Commissioner for Austria.

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Never in history has there been such a plentiful Christmas in Europe. Record sales are reported, and the statistics published at year’s end showed unmistakably that the working class has reached a new high in its wellbeing. There are, of course, groups like the lower and middle middleclass, the “new proletariat,” below 1914 standards; but, due to its lack of organization, this group counts much less, politically, than labor. Western Europe, on the whole, is in a self-congratulatory mood, and this in spite of the fact that the “spirit of Geneva” has been quietly buried. It seems that Western Europe is comfortably settling down on the rim of the abyss.

The Austrian press has written about a phenomenal influx of Soviet citizens into Austria, all to live there as diplomatic or commercial attachés, ready to pay tremendous prices for villas and huge rents for apartments; but the public remains apathetic. (It is interesting to note that some of the Soviet diplomats who had made propaganda for Austria’s neutralization are now moving to Bonn; among them Kudryavtsev, an understudy for the last Soviet High Commissioner for Austria.