Only about twenty per cent of the Southern Sudanese are Christians, and the separatist fighters there are no slouches when it comes to recruiting child soldiers, or to attacking African Union peacekeepers.
However, they have become celebrity culture's favourites, aided and abetted by the lazy use of "Arab" and "Muslim" as synonyms, as well as by the failure to comprehend the basic fact that an Arab is anyone whose first language is Arabic: Semitic, Caucasian, or black African; Muslim, Christian, or Jewish; and so on. Arabic used to be a very successful lingua franca in that sense, above all in Mesopotamia and in the old Levant of Muslims, Christians, Jews and Druze, with its de facto capital at Damascus. But a grievous wound was inflicted on the latter in 1948, while the former has been utterly devastated since 2003.
From coast to coast, from Nigeria to Kenya, that band of Africa is becoming evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, as Lebanon used to be. But as the Levantine and Iraqi models have been ruined by ignorant clod-hopping, Zionist and neoconservative, so the examples of co-existence and co-operation are either gone or, at best, not a patch on what they once were. Syria and Lebanon still hold out hope, as does the Iranian model and example, which also has reserved parliamentary representation for Jews as surely as Hezbollah is backing the restoration of Beirut's historic synagogue. But those are now only lakes where once there was an ocean.
The neocon-backed Islamist dismemberment of Yugoslavia has not helped, either. Nor has the neocon-backed, including Islamist, dismemberment of what had been the Soviet Union. And nor is any help being provided by the neocon-backed Islamist dismemberment of the Russian Federation, or by what is at least putatively the neocon-backed, including Islamist, dismemberment of China.
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In addition to the neocons and others, I suspect global capital is quite happy with the trend of nation-states breaking up or being dissolved into free trade zones. The old moderate nationalism of the post-war years often brought with it pro-development, pro-protectionist policies in the Third World and global capital can have none of that.
ReplyDeleteImagine, all those African nations using their resources to develop and benefit their own populations, just like today's industrialized states did when they were developing! The horror!
"neocon-backed Islamist dismemberment of Yugoslavia"
ReplyDeleteLast time I checked Slovenia, the first republic to go, was overwhelmingly Catholic. Ditto Croatia.
That does not fit your agenda of hate though does it not?
Until the destruction of Yugoslavia, the only independent Croat state, ever, was the Nazis' Ustasha puppet one during the War.
ReplyDeleteThe 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. 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?
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 the historic mission of the Slavs, just as much as is the lived-out identity of Russia or Serbia. 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.
They 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 might 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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Croatia etc but what about Slovenia? They were the first to pull out and declare independence.
ReplyDeleteCroatia never a country? That was the sort of Serb-supremist dribble sponsored by Budapest to break up the Yugoslav nationalist (small n) movement set up by Strossmeyer. Just as Vienna sponsored that Automnasa movement on the Italian parts of Croatia.
But behind the Goebbels-like polemic that you have just written you still reflect a hate of something different that JG would have been proud of.
Croatia never was an independent state except nominally during the Nazi period. That is just a fact. Bosnia, meanwhile, never was one at all; no one on earth could now be more rueful than the Croats there.
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
Look just admit you hate all Muslims, particularly the Sunni variety and want some sort of conflict with them.
ReplyDeleteConcerning Croatia, considering the Vatican recognised a Kingdom of Croatia before the union with Hungary, what are you on about?
Oh, that. It 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.
ReplyDeleteI note that you are not actually moving to the land that Izetbegovic built, there increasingly to be prevented from keeping Christmas and so on. Perhaps you are a Jew or a Gypsy, with no desire to be barred from the Presidency and the Senate? If you are either, or if you are a Serb, then Franjo Tudjman, re-creator in Europe of the full panoply of Fascism, would never have allowed you to marry into his family. We know this, because he said so.
I am about to do a full post on this.