The Importance Of Being Josef. Two Parallel Lives.

There was a supposedly lovable, well-meaning kind old emperor (in fact he wasn’t) who lived in a fabled palace in the heart of his great empire. He was in his 80s and senile. He practiced DEI policies to show he loved all his many peoples.

But his insane policies just destroyed efficiency and wrecked the economy and turned all his peoples against each other.

He was obsessed with “Standing Up to Russia” and “Expanding his Security Zone” to the East. He even claimed to be a friend of the Ukrainian people though he sent a million of them to hideous, violent deaths in a totally unnecessary war utterly bungled by his favorite generals.

Current US President Joe Biden of course.

But it was also the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary who destroyed his own 700-year-old empire. And he wasn’t even as stupid or ga-ga as Biden.

The earlier Joe was a much impressive figure than the current one, though the personal parallels between them are eerie. Both of them were eminent from an early age. Franz Josef became emperor of the still vast Habsburg Empire covering all of Central Europe with wide regions of Germany and Italy as well, at the age of only 18 in1848. Biden, to his own surprise, won an election victory in Delaware to become a United States senator at the age of 29, one of the youngest in history, in 1972.

Both of them seemed to have been around forever. Franz Josef reigned for 68 years until his death in 1916. Biden served 36 years in the Senate, and then another eight years as Vice President of the United States under President Barack Obama.

Both of them were haunted by personal tragedy, especially the appalling deaths of their wives and eminent sons. Franz Josef’s wife the Empress Elizabeth, a fabled beauty, was stabbed to death by an anarchist at Lake Geneva, Switzerland in 1898 at the age of 60.

They had several daughters but their only son and Franz Josef’s heir, the archduke Rudolph, committed suicide with his young, teenage mistress at an imperial hunting lodge in Mayerling, Austria in 1889.

Biden’s first wife Neilia was killed in a tragic car accident along with their one-year-old daughter Naomi in 1972 just a few weeks after he was elected to the Senate. His young sons, Beau, then aged 3, and Hunter, then aged 2, were both in the car at the time but survived.

However, some four decades later Beau, who had a promising political career in Delaware and looked set to eventually succeed his father in the Senate, died at age 46 n 2015 after a long battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer he may have contracted more than a decade before while serving with US forces in the 2003 Iraq War.

It was widely assumed that the incredibly long years of public service and eminence of both men gave them a wisdom and restraint with which to guide their vast realms. However, in both cases, nothing could have been further from the truth.

The late Senator Edward Kennedy, himself well known for being no Einstein but rather an alcoholic, always-out-of-control womanizer and at least semi-rapist, once memorably described Biden as the most stupid member of the Senate during all the many decades both of them served in it. Franz Josef’s dyspeptic dimness was universally recognized at the time.

Both men were genuinely committed to raising up the most neglected minorities in their empires and treating them fairly. But in both cases, this genuinely admirable goal was pursued through insane and unfair policies of racial or sexual identity favoritism that in practice ignored qualifications of genuine merit and achievement in multiple walks of life, but especially in the nation’s military forces.

Worst of all, both men were committed to maintaining and even extending the grandeur and power of their ancient realms. They both held special hostility towards Russia and sought to mobilize large Ukrainian populations against Moscow. In both cases, this policy eventually led to catastrophic military defeats in which the unfortunate Ukrainian people paid for Vienna’s – and Washington’s – insane geopolitical ambitions and intrigues with hundreds of thousands of lives.

Biden today, like Franz Josef 110 years ago, has shown no preference for peace and restraint in Europe whatsoever. Instead, like the senile old militaristic clown in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna all those generations ago, the President of the United States today clearly imagines a resurgence of imperial glory through direct confrontation with Russia.

Franz Josef’s dreams only led to the annihilation of his 700-year-old empire and plunged all of Central Europe into decades of bloodbaths, genocides, economic collapse, impoverishment and mass despair that lasted 75 years until the collapse of communism in 1989.

Biden, in his almost identical dreams, relentlessly implemented by his exceptionally dim and inept national security adviser, Jake Sullivan and secretary of state Antony Blinken, is as obsessed with humiliating Russia and its leaders as Franz Josef was more than a century ago.

But at least Franz Josef did not have to reckon with the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons, which would certainly be used in any war Biden or his heirs set off.

For veteran world leaders, both men were astonishingly ignorant of the wider world around them. Franz Josef at no point seems to have shown any realization that a full-scale war with Czarist Russia, while supported by the reckless fool Kaiser Wilhelm II in Germany, would inevitably bring in the colossal industrialized might of global empires of England and France against Austria-Hungary too.

Similarly, today, the unfailingly dim Biden shows no awareness of what it will truly mean to the United States and its hapless allies, if a full-scale, no-holds-barred war with Russia brings in China, Russia’s partner in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, let alone also India and Iran, which are now also SCO member states, as well as thermonuclear powers, as well.

Most of all, Franz Josef fought to preserve the hereditary heritage of 700 years of Habsburg dynastic marriages, ancestors and descendants. To him, the empty grail of the Sacred Imperial Blood was the supreme value. He was too dim and stupid to realize that in plunging into a war with Serbia, then Russia, and then England, France and even Italy too, he was dooming his own beloved empire. It totally disintegrated forever only two years after his own death in November 1916.

Biden loves to talk endlessly – even by American standards – of the global superiority of his own country and its political system of democratic government. Yet during his years in office, he and his administration have made a mockery of the for so long venerated values of free speech and open, free expressions of opinion across the United States.

No deviation from the accepted official government line that Russia and China are “evil” and no negotiation or compromise must be tolerated for a second with either or both of them – none of this is permitted to pollute the pristine purity and mindless lockstep unanimity of the US Mainstream Media (MSM). Franz Josef in war-encircled Austria-Hungary never enjoyed such sweeping powers to smother and deny the very dissent and questioning that was essential if the empire was to survive at all.

Franz Josef was clueless about the 20th century industrialized world of democracy and communism, mass movements and mass production that he had somehow survived into. Joe Biden today is equally clueless about the multipolar world of the 21st century, the resurgence of Russia and the rise of China, India and their BRICS partners and what it all means.

That is why at the end of the day, the Tale of These Two Joes is really the same story all along: in both cases, great continent-spanning empires had leaders who could not let go of the myths and fantasies of a long dead past.

In both cases, they looked to a single, senile and dim, clueless old goat to repeat the old cliches and go through the same empty rituals that, they imagined, had worked so well for so long. But the Magic was Dead, the Machine had Stopped: its gears no longer worked.

The theme is exactly the same. It is a tale of dying empires and bankrupt, long-dead dreams – and of the Judgment of History.