European Nationalism

“It takes a Village on July 27”: Srb, Yugoslav Antifa, and Croatia’s Bare Bones

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The common antifascist narrative in the media and academia consists in a frequent reversal of World War II victimhood—a procedure once tested by communist commissars in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The label of communism, once proudly sported by a large number of intellectuals and journalists, has come out of fashion today. A more generic trademark, such as a neutral sounding word ‘antifascism’, had to be called to the rescue. For the recycled former Yugoslav historians and journalists residing in Serbia and Croatia, the term ‘antifascism’ offers the safest way to cover up their own murky and often hagiographic past. In addition, the word’antifascism’ serves today as a decent camouflage for shrugging off crimes committed during and after World War II by Yugoslav communists. In regard to the reversal of the antifascist victimhood narrative, a Soviet killing field, the Katyn Forest, comes first to mind. For a long time, communist-friendly historians managed to switch the role of the victim with that of the perpetrator, thereby successfully imprinting onto public consciousness the Katyn location as the locution for a  “Nazi-perpetrated crime.”

Similar scenarios of the narrative reversal are being observed in regard to the Croatia’s village of “Srb” (i.e., Serb), a small community situated in the southeastern part of Croatia and largely populated by ethnic Serbs. In communist Yugoslavia this high profile three-consonant eponymous village, in addition to being a crucial part of ex-Yugoslavia’s communist founding myth and a mandatory part of the school curriculum, also served as a place of pilgrimage for the Party. Every July 27 high-ranking Yugoslav communists commemorated the anniversary of their “Armed Uprising against Fascism” there. Read more

A Smear Campaign against Croatia

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Dr. Zlatko Hasanbegović, Culture Minister of Croatia                                                                 

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic. Note from the translator:

There has been uproar in the mainstream media all over the EU about the appointment of Dr. Zlatko Hasanbegović to the position of Culture Minister of Croatia. Since his appointment in January this year, Croatia’s highly popular Hasanbegović has been accused by prominent international left-leaning scholars, various Jewish agencies, and LGBT advocates of Holocaust revisionism, racism, and of pandering to right-wing and neo-fascist groups in Europe. What follows is my English translation of a commentary on the controversy written by Christophe Dolbeau.

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Since January of this year a massive international campaign of defamation and disinformation has been under way against the newly elected government of Croatia and its culture minister Zlatko Hasanbegović. In view of the fact that these assaults are well-organized and neatly synchronized, one could almost imagine being transported back to the agitprop times of the late Soviet comrade Vladimir Ilich Stepakov. By all accounts the leftist intelligentsia does not like to see Eastern Europe, and certainly not Croatia, elect rightwing leaders having zero tolerance for mismanagement and the current climate of social decay. Read more

The Simon Wiesenthal Center Trump Card in the Serb-Croat War of Memories

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Ephraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, pictured in Croatia, 2007, at the main square in Zagreb

The Jewish and Serbian communities in Croatia have decided to boycott the official commemoration of their World War II dead, which is scheduled to take place in Croatia from April 15 to April 22 of this year. Their boycott was expectable. Over the last twenty years there has been an increasing effort among Croat historians and an array of nationalist politicians to downplay Croatia’s involvement in crimes with their National Socialist allies during World War II, while significantly increasing the numbers of casualties incurred by disarmed Croat NS-allied soldiers and civilians who were victims of Yugoslav Communist partisans after WWII.

Predictably, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its chief moral admonisher for  East  European governments, Ephraim Zuroff, are now playing an important role in reprimanding the Croat government and public for not emphasizing the primacy of Jewish victimhood — never mentioning massive post-war crimes committed by early Communist governments in Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. With his frequent criticism of East Europeans, who had allegedly failed to come to the rescue of persecuted Jews in war-torn Europe, Zuroff has managed to pit diverse nationalist narratives in East Europe against each other. The simmering conflict of World War II memories between Croatia and Serbia has again reached a boiling point with insults of “Fascists”, “Communists”, “anti-Semites” flowing around on both sides. From the point of view of international security, the relationship between Serbia and Croatia does not look good. It is at its lowest point since their bloody divorce following the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991. Read more

Feckless European Leaders

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It is impossible to exaggerate the complacency and irresponsibility of the ruling class in Europe today.

European leaders are not stupid, nor are they unaware. Consider the following speech from October of last year by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker:

I do not often cry, but when I look evening after evening at this long procession of refugees which remind me of those black-and-white images at the end of the Second World War which I saw when I was young, I sometimes almost cry. I do not like this Europe — this navel-gazing Europe, this Europe which is closing itself to the hopes and expectations of others. I love the Europe where hundreds of thousands of volunteers come to help, to support the refugees. Me, I know full well that we cannot welcome on our territories all the misery of the world, but we need to at least look at the misery of the world before acting.

We were able to end the Cold War. We were, and I am proud of it, able to fuse nineteen national currencies into a single currency. In fact, I am the only politician in Europe left who is among the signatories of the Maastricht Treaty which created the European Union and the euro. . . . We must relearn how to be proud of Europe. We were able to end this tragedy where Europe was a continent of wars. We have peace. The entire planet admires us for this. Except sometimes, and more and more often, the Europeans.

We very often forget, my dear friends, that Europe is the smallest continent. The European Union is a territory of 5.5 million square kilometers. Russia, a European country, represents 17.5 million square kilometers. Our relative share of global gross domestic product is shrinking. Within a few years Europe will represent 15 percent of global gross domestic product. Already 80 percent of growth is taking place in countries outside the European Union. And we are already demographically very weak. We were at the beginning of the twentieth century, us Europeans, we represented 20 percent of the world population. Today, 7 percent and at the end of century among 10 billion men, women, and children, Europe will represent 4 percent. Therefore we are the smallest continent. We are demographically weakened and will remain so. . . . Therefore, the moment has not come for us to divide ourselves into leagues and national categories, the moment has to come to ensure that the European Union remains together, that it emerges strengthened from events and from crisis events. . . . And therefore, we must be careful to respect the nations. The nations who incidentally must remain internally united. There are too many divisions in Europe. No more must be added. Therefore, I would like that the whole of Europe remain coherent and remain consequential in its actions and not merely in its ambitions. [My emphasis.]

Read more

On Herder, Human Nature, and the Antifa

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Portrait of a loser antifa: “He that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole world about himself.” — Johann Gottfried von Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 1772. 

In his Essay on the Origin of Language, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) undertook a marked departure from earlier ruminations on human nature. Like Plato’s account of the soul, the majority of Enlightenment philosophers tended to see human nature in universal terms, assuming both that rationality was its most significant aspect, and that this rationality was evenly distributed throughout the human population. Man, they argued, was essentially the same creature wherever he was found. Adopting a very different approach, Herder argued that since peoples from different historical periods and cultures varied so much in their concepts, beliefs and abilities, human nature must also be radically different in different cultures. Writing before the discovery of racial and genetic science, Herder argued that broad differences between cultures could be partly explained by two basic observations. The first was that man was indisputably a creature of his herd, society. Or to express is another way, man was, whether he liked it or not, bound to the group from which he was begotten. Secondly, and relatedly, man’s values and sense of himself were shaped by this surrounding society and culture, especially its language.

This notion of the ‘shaping’ of man by his surrounding tribe and its culture led to a further, connected idea of Herder’s — that man was not born ‘complete.’ As Herder expressed it, “a bee was a bee as soon as it built its first cell, but a person was not human until he had achieved completeness. People continued to grow as long as they lived …. We are always in process, unsettled, unsatiated. The essence of our life is never satisfaction, rather always progression, and we have never been human until we have lived to the end.” At the risk of misinterpretation, it is worth stressing that Herder was no existentialist. He did not suggest that we can never be satisfied and therefore that we should each seek to fulfil our own hyper-individual destiny. Rather, Herder argued that this movement towards becoming who we are, our identity, is determined to a great extent by how effectively we fulfil our destiny as part of our group. We can achieve completeness, and that completeness is fulfilled when we become part of our tribe, and play our role in the tribe by passing on its attributes to a new generation. Therefore, our identity, while certainly involving being true to ourselves, has an inescapable national and collectivist dimension to it. This part of our personal identity is handed down to us, and a significant part of who we are is therefore simply not a matter of choice. Read more

Where is Prince Eugene? Multicultural Madness and the End of Europe

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Below is my text-speech translated from the German original into English, delivered on February 20, 2016 in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, at a rally against non-European migration. The anti-immigrant demonstration was organized by “the Identitarians” (IB) (Identitäre Bewegung), a rapidly growing cultural-political movement in Austria  The IB rally was attended by approximately 700 people from all walks of life and all ages, including groups of younger people from Croatia and Slovenia. Approximately 100 police cordoned off the IB rally to keep them apart from the approximately 150 antifascist (“Antifa”) demonstrators marching several hundred yards away. My speech in the German language was held on the steps of the entrance to the city hall and lasted 30 minutes. The Antifa protesters, who could neither be seen nor heard from where I stood, were holding some posters including the one with the Yugoslav communist flag which read “Tito proved how to take out the Nazis” — a vicious threat indeed. Next day I emailed a letter to the mayor of Klagenfurt and to the Austrian federal police with the copies sent to hundreds of different media outlets and politicians in Austria, complaining about the Antifa deaths threats against the IB rally participants. However, during the IB rally no incidents were reported. The Austrian mainstream media, other than the Antifa websites, reported relatively objectively about the entire affair.

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Ladies and gentlemen:

Everything always turns around the correct or incorrect definition of political concepts. We call ourselves freedom-loving people concerned about the future of our European identity. Our opponents, however, call us Nazis, racists and xenophobes. From our experience, from my own experience in the former Yugoslavia and in multicultural America, as well as my reading of the research of many sociologists, multicultural states tend to survive for only a short while. Sooner or later they end up in civil wars. My reference point is the artificially cobbled together state of Yugoslavia which ended up in shatters — despite its many academic well-wishers and all the eulogies written on behalf of its constituent peoples.

Today’s migration chaos has officially been given the false name of “the refugee crisis.” Out of thousands and hundreds of thousands of migrants flocking to Austria, most are not refugees at all. They are “refugees” only in so far as were labelled as such in advance by the Austrian ruling class and media. Oddly enough, these migrants do not apply for asylum in Turkey or elsewhere on the proverbial route through the Balkans. All are eager to come to Germany. They imagine Austria, Germany and Sweden as La-La lands (“Schlaraffenland”) where they can live well and have their way with beautiful girls at will. But, hold it ladies and gentlemen! These migrants must not be blamed for their false perceptions; it is our politicians with their self-deceptive illusions who trigger such wishful thinking among the migrants. Read more

Standard and Poor’s carries out German and EU policy on migrants by downgrading Polish bonds

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As a footnote to Guillaume Durocher’s “Poland Rearms in the Demographic & Cultural War (as EU and Germany Impotently Protest),” Zerohedge has a nice blog reporting on the downgrade in Polish government bonds as a result of Poland standing up to the EU and Germany.

Over the past week, Poland’s relations with Europe have gone from cordial to abysmal, when first Poland’s new Eurosceptic government compared the EU and Merkel to Nazis, with Polish weekly Wprost releasing the following cover saying “they want to supervise Poland again”…

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… only for Brussels to retaliate and launch an “unprecedented” review of Polish media laws, a move which Poland angrily responded is far beyond the EU’s domain.

Well, as so often happens, whenever there is a political spat in Europe, the rating agencies are quickly involved (think S&P and Moody’s downgrades and upgrades of Greece depending on how well the vassal nation is “behaving”), and moments ago S&P downgraded Poland from A- to BBB+ outlook negative, precisely due to Poland’s new media law which has been the topic of so much consternation over the past week.

In other words, S&P is now nothing more than a lackey for Brussels, threatening to send Polish yields higher if Poland does not fall in line.

The report notes, “The government’s new media law, as another example [threatening Poland’s credit worthiness], gives the government extensive powers to appoint and control the directors and supervisory boards of public broadcasters.” One wonders exactly how such powers are supposed to affect the Polish economy in a way that would warrant the  downgrade. It’s never made clear. One could only wish that a populist US government would clean house of the multicultural lefties at NPR and PBS, and I rather doubt it would hurt the economy.

The report also states, “Pronouncements about … the refugee crisis,  may heighten tensions between Poland and many Western-European EU states.” The logic seems to be that a sound economy absolutely requires knuckling under to the EU and Germany on refugees. Because, as we all know, refugees are enormously beneficial to the economy and more than pay for themselves. Oh wait, refugees cost Germany along at least 17 billion euros ($18.6 billion) (another  estimate, 21 billion euros ($22.6 billion)). So why not downgrade Germany because of their added debt — and the increasing tensions with the far saner countries of Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, et al.?

Of course, Standard and Poor’s has nothing but the highest ethical standards and would certainly not let its politics affect its ratings. Well, maybe not. In February of last year they paid $1.5 billion in fines for their behavior during the mortgage meltdown.