The Balkans Bespeak Us

Some of us don't know much about the former Yugoslavia, but then again many of us do not know much about ourselves, each other, or our own individual nature.

So it is worth investigating and analyzing a little, yes?

Human nature, Balkan nature.

 

The Balkans by definition in English and the greater world in the 20th and 21st centuries means "divided", "broken apart", "not getting along", and "fractured". A sad state of former unified states. In my youth of the 1970s and 1980s, Yugoslavia was a strong European nation of 7 (some would argue 6) former nations, and then with the fall of the Communist Iron Curtain lands in the 1990s came the eventual break up as we know them today: Slovenia (small country of the second lady, Melania, the third wife of Donald Trump), Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia. Each one independent and sovereign, each one with its own culture and flavor.

Thus are we, the human peoples of the earth.

Sometimes we are formed up in strong kinships or clans, families or tribes, while other times we drift apart or separate to our respective autonomous fiefdoms.

Serbia with its old city Belgrade was the capital for generations after World War II, and then the circumspect nations along the coast learned and dared to break off. Some of it included violence and tragedy, some of the newly found older/new nations came about peacefully.

Thus are we, human beings of the terrestrial planes.

Within the seven states, that go back ethnically for  there are Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Muslims, and plenty of agnostics and atheists. 

Thus we the family is: divided in our passions and beliefs and practices.

Dad is big and loud and hairy, mom is demure and stalwart, self-effacing, the oldest daughter is a rebel and a sneak, breaking away whenever she can, the next daughter is more loyal and steady, doing all things to please her parents. The third born, a son, is an amiable fellow who is nice but too gullible, the second son is aggressive and mean at times, a firebrand, and seems to want to conquer the world. The children and personalities vary greatly

All the types and attributes that you wish to see, we them in the former Yugoslavia, in their governments and peoples, now in 2020, or back then in 1984 when the Soviets ruled by tank and missile, symbolized in the hammer and cycle, two tools of oppression more than any type of liberating labor. Marx and Trotsky and dozens of other so-called human rights activists and revolutionaries from the early 20th , led to the current miasma of Maduro and the Xi, Hu, Jiang and Deng, and a guy who succeeded the very Mao, who I do not recall from my early years, Hua (Guofeng) in the late 1970s.

Such buffoons. They made nice with the smaller neighbor of the greater unified Balkans in Europe, Albania, trying to make some opening into the West where some type of solidarity could be established with the social and economic plans of the so-called heroes of the people (Communist thinkers and revolutionaries), the ones that starved millions of their fellow citizens to death, while then later accusing each other of sedition and deadly tom-foolery that cost millions of more would-be free people to die ignominiously and awfully, tell me where communism or its incestuous cousin uber government socialism has helped the people arise from the depths of poverty... This was China specifically, but plays out in each Communist attempted country, like Cuba or Vietnam, Cambodia or North Korea...

I understand governments do protect and help the people, in general, yes, but not through the heavy handed, oppressive, godless machinations and demonically self-proscribing, top down dictatorial screeds and illogical 5 year and other inane plans of alleged masters of all things socially right and economical, based on the principles and deadly dogma of Karl Marx and his acolytes.

What a sad, long, hard, tragic, joke. Jokes and satire to the tune of millions of lost lives. Enough of the Far East Communist ideologues in this, my foray; let us alight back to the closer Eurasian continent, where the Muslim east interfaces with the Western and Christianized edges of Eastern Europe.

Europe, the modern cradle of civilizations.

The Yugoslavs stayed independent of the Soviets and the Chinese, and now they have gotten past their genocides and wars and seem to be on the up and up, the mend from decades of totalitarianism.

Albania and nearby Greece have their own economic woes, which influence the modern Balkans.

Religion has its part if the strife, between the Orthodox of Serbia, more tilted toward Putin's Russia than any of the others leaning toward the West, and NATO... with traditional Catholic loyalties. And the third wheel, that of Islam, extant here in the corner of Europe of many centuries.

NATO rhymes with Montenegro, which broke off from Greater Serbia to establish their own identity and take solace in the allies of neighbor Italy, and greater powers France, Germany, and Britain, still somewhat the "Great". Backed of course by the United States and Canada. No small potatoes in the world of geo-politics.

Ask anyone: Israel, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, or a dozen other countries seeking their own place on the earth. To be a player and an interlocutor, like Saudi Arabia hosting the G-20 summit this late weekend in November, at the end of the Trump years.

What does former Yugoslavia teach us? Many things.

1. No nation is an island to itself; within the island of a nation are many more granular nuances. Conflicts, opportunities, trials, inter-marriages, movements, money markets, labor, investments, political parties, causes, family intrigues. Power is played out, always.

2. The bigger powers of the world have their profound influences, upon each society down to the street level.

3. There is much rich and also dark history among these peoples.

I watched Force 10 from Navarone excitedly as a child. It had the Partisans and chetniks of the old wiles of Bosnia, in the mountains close to Sarajevo where the '84 Winter Olympics were held, where a few short years later they butchered each other.

In Fitzroy MacLean's epic novel or biographical story Eastern Approaches this English diplomat and dilettante works with Comrade Tito himself, to carve out the Balkans from the German Nationalists of Hitler and eventually the tyrant of the North, none other than Joseph Stalin.

Yugoslavia came together when it needed to historically, it seems, and in the absence of tyranny (thank you Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika, and Thatcher and Reagan, and million foot soldiers and sailors), and in freer times split into its present iterations of separate entities.

Long live Kosovo, as it were, the Green Line of greater Albania.

The Chinese bucks may or may not have stopped here.

The political and economic tides of the earth's powers will continue to wage on and through your soils, and you are with us all along.

Humanity and history progress on through the coasts and mountains of these hinterlands, the corner stuck between Asia Minor and the rest of the fulcrum of humanity.

The central European theory, from the UCLA professor, Mr. Miller from England? Yes, there will be other days to discuss that phenomena...