The Wages of "Settlers" is Srebrenica: Introduction

Yes friends, this is one of those posts of mine that compare different countries or regions with some similarities, and try to figure out what common geography shaped common institutions to make them that way. I'm sure it feels like, if I've got nada for ideas and I need to satiate the content gods (praise be, go forth and like and subscribe my children), I just throw two darts at a map and start nattering on.

I realize it could come off that way. But I have a good reason for mining this inexhaustible content. First off, I've been given a professional education in how to do so in order to draw lessons from history, and such practical knowledge should be spread far and wide in the name of democracy. Second, and more importantly, classes are institutions, and seeing practical examples of how different classes in wildly different cultures reacted to similar material conditions allows us to draw the lessons about class ethics, ideologies, and interests that I believe we rightly can.

It is legitimate to analyze movements that didn't call themselves socialists but had the same class base, ethics, and interests as socialists as if they were socialists anyway. History is just a collection of unrepeatable natural experiments, so increasing the number of those natural experiments we can draw lessons from improves the validity of the data we can then apply to our immortal science.

It is for these important immortal science reasons that I'm about to compare two different regions of hypernationalistic jingo states: the Balkan peninsula, and the Indochinese peninsula. These fucked up patriotism areas are collectively all the proof anyone needs that the wages of Settlers is Srebrenica.

Let me elaborate.

First off, let me address the fuming nazbols prepared to tell me that Falklands is Srpija or whatever. I don't care. Your nationalism is a poison to be managed for the good of society, tamed by turning it into a national day with fireworks, maybe a remembrance of national war dead if there's anything like that in the history of the given nation, but doing it in a way that doesn't stoke animosity to anyone living but the rich. If your nationalism goes much beyond hotdogs and barbecue (or the local equivalent), I'm not interested. It's probably just fascists or nazbols in disguise, not the innocent conservative workers such try to fool with these bourgeois lines.

It's in the name of those workers that I'll even play this game at all. The workers have so few opportunities where they're encouraged to feel pride about themselves, to lift their chins above the grind of their oppression. To the extent that they have been permitted to learn solidarity, it's usually been with a flag attached. So to tap into that native solidarity, to make common cause with them, I am a patriot; but it is the weal and good of workers everywhere that I am after, not anything as base as a flag in clay.

Because the workers have been indoctrinated with these nationalistic identities since birth, we have no choice but to be patriots ourselves, and to make these national identities all stand for good things. But this is taming a bear, at best. One day, if communists of today do their jobs remotely competently, nationalism will be as relevant a detail as hair color. Everyone will have theirs, but it will be a bit like knowing I'm a Leo when I don't care about astrology.

So I don't care which one of your ancestors smacked which in the name of what god, and why that justifies the mass graves your dad helped fill. I don't care who started it. Ultimately, the rich started it. The rich always start it. Watch your Scooby-Doo, fam. The rich are the people you should be raising your kids to hate from birth, not the ethnic weirds in the next valley over.

Now that we've established that any and all Khmer Rouge-adjacent kebab removers can die mad about it, let's get to the real lessons of history.

Proceed to Part I: The Balkans