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.