Tuesday 11 January 2011

Antemurale Christianitatis

Arising out of comments on a previous post.

The Kingdom of Croatia was not formally abolished until 1918. Within Austria-Hungary. "Kingdom" does not necessarily imply a sovereign state. Some kingdoms are, many in Africa are not, and many in Europe have not been. Until the destruction of Yugoslavia, the only independent Croat state, ever, was the Nazis' Ustasha puppet one during the War. Bosnia, meanwhile, never was one at all.

The German recognition of Slovenian independence because, as a former part of Austria-Hungary (not an independent state, but a part of Austrian-Hungary), Slovenia fell within the historic German sphere of influence: you really want to defend that, with everything that lay and lies behind it? Yet that was the beginning of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, featuring a Holocaust denier at the head of Croatia, an SS recruitment sergeant at the head of the Bosniaks, and men in black shirts in deference to their fathers and grandfathers in Kosovo to this day.

The disastrous UDI of Franjo Tudjman's neo-Ustasha state in Croatia led to that state's war of Ustasha re-enactment (then, as in the Forties, on the same side as the jihadi) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as its removal of the constitutional recognition of the Serbs as one of Croatia's two founding peoples, leading to the largest ethnic cleansing in the entire break-up of Yugoslavia. Tudjman denied the Holocaust, re-created in Europe the full panoply of Fascism, and publicly declared that he would never allow a Serb, Jew or Gypsy to marry into his family. We used to ignore all of this, and much more, instead simply branding the Serbs as the villains, the Croats as sort of all right, and the Muslims as whiter than white.

Increasingly, however, "Serbia and Croatia" are treated as the bad guys from the Yugoslav War. Both of them. Together. Well, they belong together. They are brothers. Each other's. And ours. It is not even clear exactly when the Serbs went into schism from Rome: their second King, Stephen II, brother of Saint Sava himself, received in 1195 both his royal crown and the title prvovenčani, or primus coronatus, from Pope Honorius III.

What is clear, however, is that the Serbs and the Croats both share in the historic mission of all the Slavs, naturally led by Russia and in the exercise of which the Serbs are particularly distinguished, as the gatekeepers of the Biblical-Classical synthesis in Christ and His Church. That synthesis is the true West, whereas the closely interconnected forces of European federalism, globalisation, and American military-industrial hegemony constitute the pseudo-West, in unsurprisingly close alliance with Islam, not least in the former Yugoslavia.

I do have to wonder how differently people might react, not least in post-9/11 America, if someone tried to set up a Wahhabi state in Europe these days, as was done by Izetbegovic in the 1990s. Except, of course, that someone has recently done exactly that, with full American and British backing. Do we never learn? Or rather, why do we never learn? I note that my interlocutors are not actually moving to the land that Izetbegovic built, there increasingly to be prevented from keeping Christmas and so on. Perhaps they are Jews or Gypsies, with no desire to be barred from the Presidency and the Senate?

It gives me no pleasure to have to point out that the Croats backed the wrong side, and were thus derelict in their historic duty as a people, both in the Forties and in the Nineties. I believe passionately, as any orthodox Catholic must, in the historic mission of the Croats as Antemurale Christianitatis, the Ramparts of Christendom, a vitally important manifestation of the historic mission of the Slavs, just as much as is the lived-out identity of Russia or Serbia, and all the more so because manifest in perfect unity with the See of Peter.

But the Croats have been derelict in that duty twice in the last seventy years, and Christian charity includes the obligation to reproach the brethren when and where necessary. Not they are necessarily now failing to reproach themselves: the Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina have become a thoroughly rueful lot, and are more so almost by the day. At Medjugorje, whatever else may be said about it, the Bosnian flag is very conspicuous by its absence, whereas the Croatian flag is simply very conspicuous.

The Croats should have remained Antemurale Christianitatis within a multi-ethnic, post-Communist Yugoslavia, witnessing to Catholic Social Teaching both against nostalgia for the Communist past and against neoliberalism. Only ever having been a state as Hitler's plaything, and with no history of it, that is the Croats' true historic mission, as lived out within several preceding multi-ethnic entities. That a people exists does not necessarily mean that it needs a state. On the contrary, that may very well be the last thing that it needs and, which is just as important, that others need of it. Inhabitants of this island, of Belgium, of the north of Spain, and elsewhere, take note.

But the Croats failed to bear witness. They must repent of the Ustasha from whom they took their inspiration, of their pro-jihadi war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of the denial and attempted destruction of their Serbian compatriots (or, as Jesus would have put it, neighbours), because every Western forum is crying out for the witness of Antemurale Christianitatis. Christendom needs Her Ramparts now, as ever.

2 comments:

  1. David, there was an independent kingdom of Croatia from the 10th till the early 12th centuries. After that it was the union with Hungary - with most of the coastal parts being gradually annexed by the Republic of Venice.

    Serbia was another independent kingdom.

    And of course later Hungary, Bohemia and Poland were in union for a while before Mohacs. Where's your history man?

    And Bosnia was a kingdom before the Turks turned up.

    We all know you hate Muslims. You are just scared of the DUIS.

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  2. We are going as far back as that, are we? Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex, anyone? Another full post coming up.

    One of my Muslim freshers gave me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label King George V Edition, £367.66 online. This university's Muslims suit me down to the ground.

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