On 'historical grievances,' or how to ask the wrong questions

My latest commentary piece for RT (I have my own page there now, you should check it out) tries to explain why the rift between Poland and Russia over recent history is insurmountable. It's not about the history itself, but how the two countries approach it - from two completely different perspectives that are mutually exclusive.

‘While Russia has chosen to regard its #WWII experience in the traditional terms of heroism and sacrifice, Poland has opted for a very postmodern angle of victimhood’

- Nebojsa Malic (@NebojsaMalic)https://t.co/vSjcWu2JSE

— RT (@RT_com) May 23, 2020

I'd like to add some context to what I said there, not because it's necessary for the argument I made - because it stands just fine on its own - but because I know it will reflexively be denounced as "Russian propaganda" because of where it was published.

My own people, the Serbs, have grappled with both sides of this discussion. For instance, the argument how "May 1945 wasn't liberation but the beginning of Communist occupation" has been persuasively made by many a Serb. I explored the reasoning behind it here, back in 2012. But there are important distinctions to be made here.

First of all, the only people in Eastern Europe who can plausibly make the claim that they did not deserve "Communist occupation" are those who did not join the Axis or contribute volunteers to the SS - so basically, Czechs, Poles and Serbs. That said, those three may want to reassess to which extent their plight resulted from trusting Britain, and maybe readjust their blame scale accordingly.

Even the rabidly anti-Communist Serbs don't have the kind of visceral hostility towards Russia displayed today in Czechia or Poland, because they understand that a) Russia is not the Soviet Union, b) ethnic Russians were among the most numerous victims of Communism and c) the USSR had at best a marginal role in bringing Communists to power in Yugoslavia. That last point is obviously not applicable to Czechs and Poles, but it matters.

Much is being made of Soviet "brutality" during the Cold War. Tell me, however, did the Czechs or Poles end up converting the script in which they write, or butchering their languages? Were they partitioned into new and hostile nations, with cultures and values intrinsically opposite to their own? Because that's literally what happened to the Serbs. Did the Soviets cover up the Nazi atrocities against Poles or Czechs, the way Tito minimized the Croatian genocide of Serbs? Even Katyn, the mass execution of captured Polish officers by Stalin's secret police, is nowhere close to the absolute or relative numbers of Serbs killed in the process of imposing Communism on them.

As I hope I've made clear, we'd have a quite a bit of "victim points" in the metaphorical bank. But the postmodern Western narrative in which being a victim is the fountainhead of virtue is alien to us, so we haven't rewritten our history around it.

Meanwhile, the Czechs and Poles were so eager for "freedom" that they rushed into the arms of the EU and NATO. That's not freedom or independence, that's just switching masters. The great irony is that the EU and NATO actually practice nation-destroying cultural, societal and linguistic engineering, the scale and scope of which would make the Soviets blush.

Let's not even get into the sheer hypocrisy of joining NATO in March 1999, even as it had the Luftwaffe launch its first bombing raids since WW2. You really don't want to have that discussion with me.

As for the Russians, I keep hearing from them the same kind of talk that has bedeviled the Serbs for decades, which can be best summed up as "What do we need to do for Them to stop hating us?" To which I try to explain that there is no right answer to what amounts to being the wrong question.

Even if it were somehow conceivable for a self-respecting Russian state to renounces the Soviet heroes of WW2 - which it absolutely should not - it will gain nothing by doing so. The "West" has a problem not with Communism or the Soviet Union, but with Russia itself.

Oh sure, Washington and Brussels talk about democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press, human rights, etc. But one, they don't actually practice any of that at home (and that's an argument I'd enjoy explaining in detail), and two, none of those existed in Russia of the 1990s, when President Boris Yeltsin literally sent tanks to bomb the parliament. Yet Yeltsin was beloved in the West, as was the weak, lawless, subservient Russia of his time. If that doesn't tell you something, I'll just be wasting time drawing you a picture. 

Ghosts of 1939

Seventy years ago today, German armies crossed into Poland, introducing the world to "Blitzkrieg." The British and French declarations of war turned a local conflict into a continental one. Soon another war was on in the Pacific, and by 1941 both the USSR and the U.S. had become involved as well.

The physical consequences of the war were horrific: up to seventy million dead; Europe, China and Japan in ruins; many Jewish communities completely extinct as a result of Nazi genocide (a word coined after the war to describe the systematic murder of an entire people); atomic weapons unleashed.

I would argue the ideological consequences were just as bad. On one hand, there is no denying that national-socialism was evil; it was oppressive at home and aggressive abroad. On the other hand, the war against Nazism was a shot in the arm for both Communism and "progressivism."

By 1939, Lenin and Stalin's revolutionary executioners had already killed far more people than Hitler, with a song in their hearts. Stalin ignored the warnings of the impending Nazi invasion, and when it finally came bungled the war so badly that millions of people died as a result. Faced with a life-and-death struggle, a "holy war" against an enemy bent on their annihilation, the Soviet people (Russians as well as others, it needs be said) put in a superhuman effort to win the war. And what thanks did they get? None. Stalin took all the credit for victory, and none of the blame for the mistakes. Victorious generals were sacked or purged. POWs liberated from German camps were sent to the Gulag, to cover up the embarrassing fact that they got captured thanks to Stalin's own orders. And the people in what was once Russia got to "enjoy" another 45 years of Workers' Paradise. Only this time they "shared" their "joy" with the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, the Baltic nations, and even some Germans.

Something similar happened in the West. For all the talk of "democracy" triumphing over "fascism", the war cemented FDR's social revolution that created an American brand of fascism in all but name. Big government, business cartels, a military-industrial complex, income tax withholding - all these are legacies of the war. The British fought to save their Empire, and ended up losing it. They also turned to "war socialism" that became socialism in peacetime as well. Politicians who brought about these changes have resisted criticism because hey, they "defeated Hitler and freed the world," right? Britain today is a surveillance state to a degree worse than anything Orwell imagined in 1984, while Americans shout that they are "free" but have no idea what freedom means anymore.

My own country was occupied by the Nazis and their allies, partitioned, and subjected to terror and genocide. Resistance drew brutal reprisals (100 civilians shot for every German soldier killed, 50 for every injured). The royalist resistance trusted the Western Allies, only to be betrayed and sold out to the Communists. The Yugoslavia established in 1945 was free of Nazi occupation (and ethnically cleansed of Germans, I might add), but all it had in common with its predecessor was the name. And for the next 45 years, we all had to share the "joy" of Communism as well.

None of this is to dispute the evil of national-socialism, or excuse anything the Nazis and their servants have done. But I'm sick of the whole "We defeated Hitler, therefore everything we do, everything we've done, and everything we intend to do still is right and beyond reproach" nonsense. This kind of "logic" is at the root of modern morality: when we do it, that's heroic, but when they do it, it's reprehensible. Let me point out the inconvenient fact that this is precisely the way the Nazis used to "reason"!

Since 1945, both the American and the Soviet empires used this "mythic authority" of war victors to do as they pleased around the globe. In the 1990s, when Communism collapsed and Yugoslavia imploded in a series of ethnic wars, the Western interventionists invoked the imagery of WW2 and imagined new Hitlers that had to be defeated at all costs. Hitler was invoked both times the Americans invaded Iraq. The disingenuous "war on terror" was helped along by the invocation of "Islamofascism."

Yet the map of Europe today looks suspiciously like the one from 1942, and it is Hitler's former allies that are the staunchest supporters of the American Empire. German troops are back in the Balkans (to show that they've gotten over the original Hitler, right?) and the Luftwaffe has bombed civilians again. The world whose foundations were laid down in the Atlantic Charter, and at the conferences in Bretton Woods, Tehran and Yalta, is no more. That order was ultimately dismantled by its own creators and guardians, who found it too inconvenient and restrictive. So, continuing to invoke Hitler as a justification is cynical at best.

It is time to give up the myth of the Great Good War and let it become proper history, in which defeating the Nazis did not give the victors the right to act like them, or be exempt from rules of civilization. Only then will Hitler truly be defeated.

Tito, Mihailovic and the British

Reader "Suvorov" was curious:

How many Chetniks were there under Mihajlovic's command? How many were there in other factions? How many people were in Nedic's guard and other similar "German-inspired" formations? How many Partizans were there and what percent of them were Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, (of course there were also Bosniaks, Albanians, and other small numbers of ethnic groups living in Yugoslavia)?

[...] By the way, is there any book in English about Balkans during WWII which you would recommend? Thanks again.

The numbers varied throughout the war. The leading authority on the WW2 Royalists in Serbia, Miloslav Samardžić, says that in the spring of 1944 there were "over 100,000" Chetniks* under Mihailović's command. Nedić's gendarmerie numbered around 20,000, and there were about 8,000 or so men loyal to Dimitrije Ljotić, a fascist who eagerly collaborated with the Germans.

Samardžić also says that Serbs made up the vast majority of the Partisans. When you hear about "Croatian" partisans and "Croatian" brigades, he says, those were actually Serbs from territories called Croatia, not necessarily Croats.

The most commonly used figure for Partisan numbers is 800,000. It comes from official Communist history. Even if we assume its accuracy, the figure comes from late 1944, when many Chetniks as well as Domobrani (Croatian regulars called up by the Pavelić regime) and Italians had joined up. (According to the same source, the partisans had suffered over 300,000 casualties during the war, mostly in the open battles of late 1944 and early 1945.)

I have heard good things about Michael Lees' "The Rape of Serbia" (subtitled "The British Role in Tito's Grab for Power 1943-1944"), published in 1990. I haven't actually managed to obtain a copy, but I've been following a lot of work in Serbia about the intrigue and power games involving the British, Tito, Mihailović and the royal government in exile. The picture that emerges is that the Brits sidelined the royal government, cherry-picked one of its members (Ivan Šubašić, the pre-war ban of Croatia) to sign a treaty with Tito, then bullied the young king into issuing a radio endorsement of Tito as the supreme commander of the resistance.

It wasn't just the Serbs who were used then abandoned by the British. The Poles and Czechs who escaped to the West were similarly betrayed when all of Easter Europe was given to Stalin. And then there was Operation Keelhaul...

(* The proper name for this force was the "Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland")

Archive: Serbia's Missionary Intellectuals

(originally published on Balkanalysis.com, 3/16/2004)

Serbia's Missionary Intellectuals

A guest article on Serbia’s politico-intellectual heritage from Nebojsa Malic.

Alter the victory of the Radicals in the December elections, a chorus of condemnations arose from Western governments, press and think-tanks. Serbia was going “fascist,” they said; the Radicals’ strong showing was a “return to nationalism” and a “turning back the tide” of progress achieved under the ever-so-pure DOS. Reality, of course, was nothing of the sort. Certainly, organizations and governments with vested interest in perpetuating certain policies in Serbia might have been expected to react this way. But such proclamations also came from people who fashion themselves Serbia’s “intellectual elite” � the self-proclaimed activists for democracy, human rights, and peace who happen to be just the opposite. Similar groups exist in most post-Communist societies, composed of people who replaced their erstwhile Marxist zealotry with similar fervor in propagating “open society” and other dogmas of the modern managerial state. This phenomenon, like many others, is simply more pronounced in Serbia.

Extremists in Defense of “Virtue”

Prominent sociologist Slobodan Antonic wrote about a year ago [Serbian original here] about the phenomenon of “Missionary intellectuals,” which he described as “a group that perceives itself as missionaries of the Atlantic world and its values in Serbia.” He offers examples, among which are - unsurprisingly - people such as Sonja Biserko and her entourage (Teofil Pancic, Latinka Perovic, Nebojsa Popov, etc.) known for almost pathological disdain for Serbian ethnicity, tradition, history and culture.

Antonic underscores several character traits of the Missionaries. Their dogmatism produces “intolerance towards criticism, and even any disagreement, however reasoned… all those who exhibit even the slightest differenceof opinion are politically demonized, while the debate about ideas is replaced by name-calling denunciations.” Their “cognitive exclusivism” takes after Marxism, so “their epistemology is so epistemologically superior it is beyond criticism… They are immune to criticism because they have defined all other positions as nationalist [and therefore evil] by definition.” And their language is that of intolerance (surprise!), exemplified by streams of invective aimed at political opponents (i.e. just about everybody who is not “worthy” of their elevated wisdom), e.g. “selfish, fucked-up bastards in the Silent Majority”, “feeble-minded advocates of anti-democracy, nationalism and chauvinism,” etc. The last, but not least, is their call for increased repression, such as banning books, political parties, music and organizations whose authors and ideas they disapprove of. Obviously, here’s a group that believes extremism in the quest for “Atlantic values” (whatever they may be) is no vice, but the highest virtue.

Antonic’s analysis is the best explanation yet of this particular movement in Serbian society (which is also present in other countries in the Balkans, and generally anywhere the Empire has promoted “civil society”). It does suffer from one serious flaw, which is that Antonic shares the missionaries’ values, and objects only to their methods. He describes them as people who “truly want the best for their environment, and desire to share the best values with their community.” Yet they have a mighty strange concept of “sharing,” as Antonic notes just a little further down in the text:

“Their lives end up being spent in constant, tedious and fruitless denunciation of their own people (town, or province), or even in openly calling for occupation by ‘civilized foreigners.’ Unfortunately, if such occupation does come, and they get a chance to participate in the government, their zealotry in violence, prohibitions, impositions, persecution and exclusion is matched by no one…”

Reading between the lines is not necessary here: Antonic clearly believes that the DOS regime was the equivalent of foreign occupation, where the Missionaries ran amok with overt support of the authorities (and in some instances, they were the authorities).

The “Mondialist Pasdarans”

It is worth noting that the article originally appeared on the pages of Vreme (Time) weekly, a paper known for its backing of the very globalist “liberals” that Antonic criticized. In fact, this was a public manifestation of the conflict between the zealous liberals (e.g. Biserko, Kandic, et al.) and their more “moderate” brethren, who felt uncomfortable with their violent and hateful rhetoric. While the “moderates” are still the majority of Serbia’s globalists, the West continues to pay attention to the fringe - but oh so very loud - proclamations of the “Mondialist Pasdarans” (as Antonic dubs them, referring to the fanatical Iranian Revolutionary Guards).

Antonic’s critique of Missionaries appeared in February 2003, in the midst of a clash between these extremists and the mainstream Serbian “liberals” (counterparts to American and British parties of that persuasion, not the true, classical liberals of the XIX century or today’s libertarians). Just over a month later, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated, and the Missionaries took over the helm of government. But while they seemed triumphant in the debate (which, of course, was nothing of the sort) the repression and naked power grab they indulged in over the next nine months demonstrated to Serbians the true colors of their would-be “saviors.” Those who called most loudly for “de-Nazification” of Serbia turned out - unsurprisingly, if one may note - to be most like the Nazis in their thoughts and deeds.

Unfortunately, such is the delusional character of their fanatical dogmatism that they absolutely did not understand the message Serbian voters intended to send them, when they threw out the DOS regime in the December elections. Instead, the crushing defeat of the Missionaries’ nine-month dictatorship was condemned as the “return of fascism.” Today, the missionaries spout identical nonsense as they did a year ago. Entrenched in their contempt of reason and dialogue, they seem to be completely beyond persuasion.

A Communist Origin

While similar groups can be found throughout the former Communist bloc, the “missionaries” in Serbia have a peculiar distinction in their overt hatred of their own ethnic identity. They explain it in terms of shame over the atrocities allegedly committed in the wars of the 1990s, but that does not explain why they choose to believe the foulest atrocity stories even after they’ve been proven false. Antonic’s explanation, linking their dogmatism to Marxism helps clarify things a bit. Having come from that system, most of these “intellectuals” have never abandoned Communism except in name. Latinka Perovic, for example, was a major figure in Serbian party leadership in the 1970s, when she was purged for ostensibly “liberal” tendencies (which bore little resemblance to actual, classical liberalism). Other major figures in the missionary movement are all scholars of social sciences who were educated by the Communists, and retained Marxist methods of thinking and even many Marxist beliefs, albeit under different names nowadays.

What’s important to note at this point is to which extent Yugoslav Communism was anti-Serb in nature, ever since the Yugoslav Communist Party emerged in the 1920s under Moscow’s aegis. Soviets hated Yugoslavia - and its Serbian monarchy - for the support and refuge it offered the Tsarist “Whites.” They resurrected the Austrian bogeyman of “Greater Serbian hegemony” in an effort to destroy the country and the Serbian monarchy in particular, in order to re-create a miniature Soviet Union on its ashes. To that purpose, the Communists backed Croat fascist separatists (Ustashe) and Kosovo Albanian irredentists, and even applauded the Nazi invasion of 1941, which resulted in Yugoslavia’s dismemberment (it helped that Hitler and Stalin were still allies, too). The Communists’ virulent Serbophobia was somewhat tempered by Tito, who needed Serb support to fight the Germans, but he nonetheless proceeded to re-create Yugoslavia precisely along the pre-war lines of Sovietization. One important difference was that Stalin and is successors sought to Russify the USSR and crush individual ethnic identities in an effort to stamp out regional resistance and head off Russian opposition, while in Yugoslavia the drive was in the opposite direction, encouraging ethnic nationalism of others at the expense of Serbian identity, which was perceived as the primary peril. Slobodan Milosevic was vilified by leaders of other ethnic Communist parties precisely because he dared question the sacred precept of Tito’s Yugoslavia that everything was somehow always the Serbs’ fault. The accusation that he was a “nationalist” originated not with Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic, actual nationalist leaders of Croats and Bosnian Muslims, but with their Communist predecessors!

Therefore, when Serbia’s missionary intellectuals violently loathe the Serbian ethnicity, culture, tradition, history and faith, they are drawing on almost eight decades of Serbophobia nurtured by their ideological forefathers. Back then, they invoked it in the name of Socialist Revolution; today, they use it in the name of “democracy” and “Euro-Atlantic integration,” but the change is purely cosmetic.

Decline and Fall of Conservatism

Apologies for the lack of posts. Between certain personal obligations and the blistering heatwave rolling across the United States, it's been very hard to think, let alone make coherent comments about anything.

Butler Shaffer of LewRockwell.com doesn't have that problem . Indeed, he continues to write amazing philosophical essays. His latest, "The Decline and Fall of Conservatism," explains how a once-great philosophy of individual liberty, property rights and society-over-state degenerated into a totalitarian institution that tramples liberty, destroys property and elevates state above all.

I really shouldn't quote from the article, as taking anything out of context would be doing it injury; but there is a metaphor I cannot resist mentioning:

"...when the Soviet Union collapsed, conservatives were left without a raison d’être. Their very existence, as a political movement, ceased to be. They had accumulated weapons and powers – along with an army of defense contractors eager to keep the game going – but no "enemy." Conservatives – and, I should add, so-called "liberals" – were like a man with a leash, desperately in search of a dog."

Simply brilliant.

Who won the Cold War?

Karen Kwiatkowski at LRC has a new theory:

"The Soviet Union won when they threw off the yoke, and began to expose and destroy seventy years of lies on top of depraved lies piled on top of mendacity of which even the most cynical Russian didn’t believe their government was capable."

Meanwhile, in the United States:

"The liberal pillars of America’s wealth, productivity, and freedom have been gnawed and hacked away in the dark damp cellar of too much government, yet we continue the party upstairs. Our republican values that would condemn the diddling desire of despots have already evaporated, and the new drink is intoxicating."

Some people are nostalgic for the old USSR - not all of them are in the USA, either - because they were part of the ancien regime so much that everything they had vanished after its collapse. For that matter, there are still plenty of people in the former Yugoslavia - which was economically far more liberal - all too accustomed to sucking on government teat, and unable to adapt to the post-Communist world. I'm beginning to think a major reason former Communist countries haven't done better economically and socially is that too many of their residents haven't mentally said farewell to Communism.

All of which makes me wonder what will happen when the U.S. Imperium eventually fails, as it is bound to do. I'm not talking some Marxist "dialectic" here, just the basic laws of entropy, which can only be defied for so long...