There are those in Corsica who virtually worship Napoleon, ‘the local boy who made good’, taking over the colonial power of mighty France and very nearly all Europe, like a new Roman Emperor. In the same way there are those in Georgia who adore the Georgian Stalin, who took over big brother Russia and Eastern Europe. And there are those in Austria who adore the Austrian Hitler, who took over colonial Germany and even more of Europe than Napoleon, from the Atlantic to the Volga. This is in part why Hitler was (and in parts still is) very popular in Austria. And that is why the Hollywood musical ‘The Sound of Music’ has never been liked in Austria.

The film was made by the Jewish-run MGM studios (Samuel Goldwin (Szmuel Gelbfisz) was a Polish Jew and Louis Mayer (Lazar Meir) was a Belorussian Jew, the songwriters Rodgers was a German Jew as was Hammerstein’s father). The film tells the story of how an Austrian family fled Hitler (in general, it was only Austrian Jews who fled Hitler), thus condemning the Jew-hating Western culture of the Nazis (The Nazis only massacred in Europe as other Western peoples had already done in the Americas, Africa and Asia). Released in 1965, it soon became one of the most popular musicals of all time and people loved its sugary sentimentalism, which the critics disliked.

Made at a time when those who worked in Hollywood were still largely Europeans, drawn to Hollywood by high salaries, and set in ‘Old World’ Europe, the film reflects old European Christian family and patriotic values – little Austria against giant Germany. What interests us here is the opening song:

The hills are alive with the sound of music,

With songs they have sung for a thousand years…

We suggest that the choice of these words is not at all random. What were the songs that had been sung for a thousand years before the 1938 Anschluss of Austria (938-1938)? We suggest that they were the songs of Western culture, the fruit of the first millennium of the Christian Faith in Western Europe. In this light we can say that this film is a lament for everything that was good in Western culture. By 1965 that was rapidly dying out, monastic life as portrayed in the film is gone, with its nuns’ habits and beautiful singing. By 1965 it had been abolished by the protestantizing and infantilizing Second Vatican Council.

The songs that ‘they have sung for a thousand years’ had fallen silent. Why? Because the Western world had deserted the Christian foundation of that culture through its apostasy. Its churches have emptied in favour of television, its classical music, played so well in the film, has been abandoned for rock ‘n’ roll. Today Austria has a huge Muslim population, sent it by tyrannical Brussels. In 1900 Vienna had been the cultural capital of Europe, but since then, Austria has become just another EU vassal state, its glory gone. The sounds of music may still be heard, but only because the songs were sung in the past: today they are but echoes. In the last fifty years we have witnessed the death of Christian culture in the West.