Tuesday 19 April 2011

Yugoslavia Still Exists

Those who adhere to the schismatic Ustasha-Medjugorje synthesis are clearly as convinced as Irish Republicans that their entirely secular, and indeed violently anticlerical, political ideology is precisely identical with the Catholic Faith. They have never come across anyone who did not think like that, and they are reduced to hysterical jabbering, at best interspersed with saloon bar history, if anyone confronts them with the historical facts of the matter, which, and this very much applies in the Irish case, have always been taken as read by all serious scholars in the field, whether or not they have therefore been unable to obtain suitable employment in the country under study. (The level of rage is even greater when the Church's total condemnation of Medjugorje is calmly presented to them.)

But just as the old Catholic Ireland still exists within the United Kingdom, even if nowhere else these days, so the old Yugoslavia still exists in the place where they fought hardest to preserve it after, for the most obvious and most sinister of reasons, Germany had unilaterally recognised the entirely unlawful Unilateral Declarations of Independence by Slovenia and Croatia, lifting the lid on all manner of Nazis, Islamists, and combinations of the two, with Maoist and other ingredients thrown into the mix in certain places.

When another UDI was issued, this time by Kosovo, then the condemnations came thick and fast. From an Archdiocese serving those who continue to adhere to Roman Orthodoxy rather than to the Ustasha-Medjugorje cult, making them the true heirs of Croat resistance to Nazism. From the Islamic and Albanian leaders of communities that insist on continuing to practise traditional Balkan Islam rather than Wahhabism with, as in the 1940s, Nazi tendencies, and who refuse to define their Albanian identity in those terms. From the Jewish and Gypsy leaders whose people fancy living neither in a state whose Holocaust-denying founder announced that he would never allow them to marry into his family, nor in a state the Constitution of which, as befits an entity created by an old recruiter for the SS, bars them from the Presidency and from the Senate.

So, if much reduced in size, and thus hampered in bearing witness both against neoliberal economics and against any nostalgia for the Soviet Bloc in the wider region, multiethnic Yugoslavia still exists, those who benefit from that state of affairs are passionately committed to resisting its further reduction, and the place ought to be called by its proper name: Yugoslavia, proudly pluralist, anti-Nazi and anti-Stalinist, once and future.

One of many reasons why history will be an awful lot kinder to John Major than to the intellectually and morally subnormal Tony Blair, who found his moral match in Bill Clinton before going on to find his intellectual match in George W Bush.

12 comments:

  1. That last sentence is brilliant. The whole thing is.

    When the Republika Srpska decides that sauce for the Kosovar goose is sauce for the Bosnian Serb gander, and when the forlorn Croats of Hercog-Bosnia follow suit, I hope the world will realise that the sensible, historically literate solution is a federation of the Serbo-Croat speaking areas at least and also of those historically connected to them. You know, the South Slavs.

    So they could call it 'Yugoslavia'. The model for it already exists in a majority Serb country with loyal, flourishing minorities of Croat Catholics faithful to Rome, both Serbo-Croat and Albanian practitioners of old fashioned Balkan Islam, Jews, Gypsies and so forth.

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  2. Like the ongoing reunion of the British Isles, now well on the way.

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  3. But will we be a bastion against neoliberalism, as a continuing Yugoslavia would have been after the end of the Cold War, which was why it could not have been allowed to happen?

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  4. What a lot of political, theological and historical illiterate bile.

    We know you are a supporter of the Karageorvic clan. Probably because they are related to your Queen and because its head is a former British army officer.

    A clan who founded by a man who killed his own mother by shoving her head in a beehive and who hanged his own father-in-law outside his house. A clan who murdered its way to power by killing the rival Serb dynasty and then having the heir to Habsburg throne murdered.

    And then their tacit approval of the murder of Stjepan Radic during a parliamentary debate. The murderer was given house arrest on his estate rather than prison or the gallows.

    David Lindsay - apologist for butchers.

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  5. "They have never come across anyone who did not think like that, and they are reduced to hysterical jabbering, at best interspersed with saloon bar history, if anyone confronts them with the historical facts of the matter"

    But your point about betrayal of Britain's old allies is an important one. It has appeared in, among many other (often very Catholic) organs, the Catholic Herald. When conservative opinion also comes to that realisation about the Arabs, as a section of it has always understood, then the dominoes really will start to fall.

    You really are on your own, you know. You no longer even have the ICTY under your thumb, wretched body though it is in principle. When Daniel Korski tried to post something in your vein over on Coffee House a couple of days ago, the previously neocon or fellow-travelling readers howled him down and righly, squarely placed the blame on German recognition of the Croatian and Slovenian UDIs.

    The world has woken up to what happened in Yugoslavia, and to the precedents that it set. Perhaps 9/11 really did "change everything" after all.

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  6. Extraordinary, isn't it? All the most Catholic Catholics in the world, up to and including the Pope, have always told them that they were wrong about both Yugoslavia and Medjugorje. But still they insist that they are right.

    Truly the heirs of Strossmayer but unmoved by his surname, pointing to the simple fact that Croats have always been part of something larger, that is their vocation among the nations. You might know this, how did Strossmayer never become an Old Catholic?

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  7. I don't know. But then, why didn't Döllinger?

    In Strossmayer's case, perhaps if a hyper-Ultramontane zeal against the celebration of the Roman Rite in Slavonic had ever made any real progress, then he might have seceded.

    But the tendency is a recurring theme among the Croats, as among various other peoples. Just look at them on here.

    Various German, Magyar and Slavic surnames are still found throughout the former Austria-Hungary.

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  8. This is what one of your hero's thinks of what you believe in:

    http://news.scotsman.com/geraldwarner/European-wrong-is-put-right.2779175.jp

    Quite mild for some of his columns. He has called Serbia Europe's terrorist state more than a few times in his column.

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  9. Oh, here are some more from Gerald:

    http://news.scotsman.com/geraldwarner/Callaghan-doctrine-cant-cope-with.3586315.jp

    And one of your mates who is mad at him. Note that he swears to carry out an assassination:

    http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/comment/Serbs-paid-dearly-for-their.2555014.jp

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  10. I dare you to tell him that I am in any sense under his influence. If my stuff on Jacobitism ever does appear in print, then he might very well have a fit. But then, Carlism also had, and has, a left as well as a right. Anyway, of that if and when it ever happens.

    I am not not pro-Serbian, I am against the false demonisation of Serbia and the Serbs. I do not deny Serb, and possibly Serbian, atrocities during the Yugoslav Wars. I just don't deny everyone else's, either. (In Scottish terms, my view of the bombardment of Belgrade is that of Alex Salmond; the SNP has let itself down by failing to oppose the war in Afghanistan, and like Plaid Cymru has also done so over Libya.)

    And I greatly regret the loss of multiethnic, never Soviet-dominated, potentially anti-neoliberal Yugoslavia. I am not the only one. You could probably ask the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina these days. And you could certainly ask the Serbo-Croat Catholics (in a word, Croats), the Serbo-Croat Muslims, the Albanians, the Jews and the Roma who issued furious denunciations of the Kosovar UDI from their offices in Belgrade.

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  11. Gerald Warner, another one who took the trad Catholicism a bit too seriously and was axed.

    Hannan has a post today restating the Whig case in relation to the proposed changes to male primogeniture. Warner would have been able to answer him and you would have been able to say something interestingly left-field about it as you have done on here. Is Hannan not an Irish Catholic if you go back beyond Peru?

    By the way, I am linking to the http://mabelgraph blog but it is not mine.

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  12. Not all Catholics were Jacobites, and especially in England those who were, were generally rather lukewarm, especially compared to Anglicans (as they were not then called) and Quakers, as well as to many Congregationalists, Baptists and others. But we really are properly off topic now.

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