Anschluss Redux?

After the United Nations rejected a Libyan motion to dismember Switzerland, which Gaddafi had called "a world mafia and not a state", blogger Robert Farley muses on which other nations should be abolished:

"Discuss: What countries should be abolished? I say Austria; it's just like another little Germany all tucked away down there, and really, does the world need two Germanys?"

I personally am not in favor of an Anschluss.  If I had to pick a country to abolish I would probably choose Belgium.  However, Farley has powerful allies in Austria's two greatest postwar writers: Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek. 

Jelinek's extreme contempt for her native country is well-known.  For her, Jörg Haider and Josef Fritzl epitomize Austria. “The beauty of Austria – under which the corpses of the Nazi period are buried – has covered up much of its history,” says Jelinek.

But Jelinek's diatribes against Austria pale in comparison to those of Thomas Bernhard, the greatest Austria-hater of all time.  Here is Bernhard on his native city of Salzburg:

Salzburg is a deceitful facade, a monument to the world's mendacity, behind which creativity and the creative artist are doomed to atrophy, disintegration and death. The city of my fathers is in reality a terminal disease that its inhabitants contract through heredity or contamination, and if they do not escape at the decisive moment they sooner or later under all these dreadful circumstances either kill themselves suddenly or they perish slowly and wretchedly directly or indirectly,on this at bottom thoroughly and murderously misanthropic architectonic-archdiocesal-feebleminded-nationalsocialist-catholic soil. For anyone who knows the city and its dwellers Salzburg is superficially beautiful, but beneath the surface it is in fact a loathesome cemetery of dreams and desires.

Comments

[Katy]

Obviously, David, all states should be abolished. But we should probably start with the Vatican.