The Wages of "Settlers" is Srebrenica Part I: The Balkans

The Balkan peninsula is the first fucked-up patriotism area we'll be discussing. It's been a place of conflict for millennia, a place where the frontiers of Real Civilization™ met the Godless Barbarian Hordes™ in one way or another since the first Greek ever shit-talked the Celts.

The Real Civilization™ in question isn't always defended from the same direction, either, and occasionally both directions imagined themselves to be the Real Civilization™.

Sometimes the barbarians came from the north: the Celts attacking the Greeks; the Greeks themselves when they moved into the ruins of the just-collapsed Minoan civilization; the Goths, Germans, and Huns invading the Roman Empire; the Bulgarians, Magyars, and Slavs invading the Byzantine Empire; and when the Turks took Constantinople, they took it from the north. And of course, to the sultans of the Sublime Porte, they were the defenders of Real Civilization™ from the unwashed Firangi infidels in Austria, Hungary, and Serbia. And let us not forget the Greek bootlicker coupfash defending international capital from the righteous fury of godless communism during the Cold War.

Sometimes the Godless Barbarian Hordes™ came from the south: first Serbia and then the various Habsburg polities imagined themselves as the last best defense Europe had against the domination of The Kebab™, and Serbia in particular has been vigorous in reestablishing its national identity around this garbage since they stopped pretending to be communist.

You may be wondering why I keep throwing around the trademark symbol after describing serious nationalist ideologies. It seems like it's of a piece with radical shitlibbery, so much saying "Cheeto Benito" with extra steps. But I have a good reason. It's because, like anything else a capitalist creates, I'm sure they want to protect their intellectual property in nationalist genocide. The corporate public relations departments and the imperialist regimes propping them up wouldn't want to admit to it, which is precisely why I insist on tediously attributing the intellectual property to its true owners in my writing.

Interestingly enough, the only empire that ever emerged from this region to conquer anything significant was preposterously nazbol to the point that even Alex the Pretty Good's own troops were ready to mutiny against him if he marched them any further. And as would-be bourgeois nazbols are wont to be, they were led by a liberal so utopian that after vanquishing the hated Persian Empire and all it stood for, Alexander actually expected his troops to worship him as a god in the Persian style, only backing down at the implicit threat of a coup if he persisted. And as nazbol-led regimes are wont to do, it splintered apart immediately after Xander the Okay kicked the bucket. The Seleucids tried to emulate the empire they literally just overthrew for a few centuries, the Ptolemies fucked their own sisters for four centuries and got the Habsburgs breathing heavily, and most of you couldn't even name the other two generals, because in grand historical terms they amounted to fuckall.

And for all of that, Alexander's empire literally still had its original Balkan-facing borders unchanged; it was itself still an empire with a border in the Balkans.

So we have a millennia-long succession of empires that established borders here. Why? Simply put, it's the mountains, and the rivers flowing through them. Both are excellent places, at any technological level, to anchor one flank of an army.

Putin's Russia has a geostrategic need to anchor itself in the Caucasus mountains to secure itself from invasion from the south, so it will fight off or buy off as many Chechens as necessary to do so, as one illustration of this principle. It's also why the recent conflict in Artsakh occurred: Russia had allied itself with Armenia after the Soviet collapse to help anchor itself in the Caucasus. But Armenia had a successful CIA "color revolution," while Azerbaijan was willing to serve the role of Russian ally in the Caucasus that Armenia had until then. So Russia stood by and let Azerbaijan take Artsakh, promising to uphold its treaty with Armenia only if Azerbaijan invaded internationally undisputed Armenian land.

There are two other well-known instances of mountainous regions being only partially conquerable by outside empires besides the Balkans, Indochina, and the Caucasus, but they are usually (mostly) under a united government recognized by the majority of the world. I of course refer to Ethiopia and Afghanistan. But long-running guerrilla movements sure do resemble legitimate governments in significant stretches of each country. In Ethiopia first it was the Tigre region under Haile Selassie, then the Oromo region under the Derg, and now again the Tigre region, and amid those conflicts Eritrea secured its own independence. In Afghanistan first the Soviet occupation couldn't eliminate the mujahideen, then the Taliban couldn't eliminate the Northern Alliance, then the American occupation couldn't eliminate the Taliban, and now it's an open question whether the Taliban can eliminate the Panjshir Resistance. And though both Afghanistan and Ethiopia are sovereign nations, regional powers have backed their own factions in each country for their own reasons. It's almost as if imperialism adapted to the material conditions of wars of conquest being technically illegal now, or something.

So we don't have Roman legions patrolling the imperial frontier in the Balkans anymore, although I'd rather not give Frontex any ideas. But what we do have is a collection of different countries as the detritus of all these various historical empires and invasions; each one's hold over the rest of the Balkans collapsed whenever the empire that introduced them did, but they each live in some highly defensible river valley flanked by high rugged mountains that makes it nearly impossible to conquer, unify, and/or dispossess them all at once. The only truly vulnerable people in the Balkans are the ones who, for whatever reason, live in someone else's valley, and who therefore are suffered to live at the whims of the angriest local kebab remover. While this relative safety of most of the population might seem like a good thing, what it really does is remove the consequences for utter brutality against one's neighbors. Go ahead and stick 40,000 surrendered Ottoman soldiers on pikes, Vlad: if they could really do anything about it, they wouldn't have spent your whole life trying to install various Christian puppet kings in Wallachia. It makes the price and consequences for "kebab removal," which is just a cutesy Serbian euphemism for the genocide of Muslims that I'm applying more generally to all the stupid and self-defeating ethnic hatreds endemic to these regions, shockingly small.

Although outside imperialism is the cause of all the woes of the workers there, it's the solution to all the problems of each of these squabbling countries' bourgeoisie. With outside guns, outside troops, any pitifully weak country is STRONK and can make their historical oppressors GIB CLAY NAO. So any invading empire, no matter how brutal and despicable, will inevitably have comprador bourgeoisie among the locals supporting it. And those comprador bourgeoisie will pay off the workers of their nation and nazbol-ize their proletariat into a labor aristocracy, giving the imperialists an entire damn local comprador nation willing to help them beat the snot out of everyone else. And then those atrocities are remembered by the victim nations, who then use them as a pretext later on to bring in a different outside empire and continue the cycle of violence.

To illustrate that last paragraph, let's look at the Serbians some more. Serbian irredentist Gavrilio Prinzip began World War I by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Gavrilio and pals were pissy about the Habsburg annexation of land where a Serbian minority was living among non-Serbian majorities. So when a Habsburg royal visited the biggest city in Muslim-majority Bosnia, the only answer for the crime of breathing Serbian air on Serbian clay without Serbian authorization was death. It's obvious, really, and I'm glad we let such rational individuals send off a generation of Europe's workers to their certain deaths. Well done there, everyone.

But regardless of the avatar of bumbling ultraradical stupidity named Gavrilio Prinzip, after the assassination, Austria-Hungary provided unreasonable terms to Serbia meant to incite war, and then when Serbia's government of responsible adults agreed to all but the most unreasonable term, they went to war anyway.

Fortunately for Serbia, the fire and fury of late-stage Habsburgry was akin to being slapped by one of those blowy guys every auto dealership is convinced drives sales. The Habsburgs had spent so long getting Ptolemaic on their close relations that they were flaccid in every other theatre. Their last major successful conflict, the one where they mugged the sick man of Europe for his spare Bosnia, might have disguised the rot. But almost immediately after the war began, the Austrians were pushed back on all fronts. They did successfully capture Belgrade a couple times, but the roving Habsburg death squads did little to endear them to the locals, or to help them keep it. Serbian troops kept driving them out of the country. It was so bad for Vienna that even Tsar Nicky the Deuce, the drooling incompetent who'd lose World War I to his own people, was able to dunk on them until the Germans showed up.

After the war, Serbia was as bloodthirsty for vengeance at Versailles as any Allied power, having lost civilians to Austro-Hungarian war crimes. So the Treaty of Trianon was the result, a horsewhipping of Hungary that they're still mad about to this day. Together with Romania and Poland, they all seized majority-Hungarian areas for themselves, and when the Hungarians asked the Western powers "what about all that national self-determination shit?" the reply they got was essentially "you're too far away for us to really care lol gfy." The Catholic parts of what became Yugoslavia, that is Slovenia and Croatia, were taken from Hungary in this manner. It was to the Hungarians what the loss of Kosovo had been to the Serbs themselves: a major blow that left them landlocked and had to be avenged, nevermind how the locals in the regions in question felt.

So the Hungarians got radical, in an attempt to draw in an outside power that would make them STRONK again. First they tried having a Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was a really good idea except for the fact that the Bolsheviks couldn't yet mow through enough Polish fash to reach them and be useful. After that was overthrown by panicking shitlibs, the Hungarians were drawn to fascism. And sure enough, in World War II, the Nazis would be the outside power that Hungary's fascist regime was hoping for, vindicating it against any local power that wouldn't sign up to the Axis. Unfortunately for the Hungarian fash, the only nearby powers that didn't sign up to the Axis were Yugoslavia (formerly Serbia), Greece (already claimed by Mussolini), and the Soviet Union - the powers that would be protected from a revision of the Treaty of Trianon by ultimately winning. Everyone else was protected from any real revision of the treaty by being good buds with Hitler too.

And even in Croatia, despite the fact that their language is mutually intelligible with Serbian, the fact that it's written in a Latin alphabet and they're Catholic instead of Orthodox was apparently enough for Croatia to organize the fascist Ustace, declare their independence from Yugoslavia with Nazi help, and then be Nazi imperialism's little helpers against Tito. I critically support Tito's murdering every last Ustace he could. Those people were fascists turbocharged with all the beastliness the mountainous geography could encourage; they earned their fates.

But Tito himself, or his party, wasn't the answer in the long run, and it all has to do with the geography of imperialism interacting with the Balkans. Just as the Bolsheviks couldn't reinforce the Hungarian Soviet Republic in time, they were also too preoccupied with waging their own desperate guerrilla liberation struggle against the Nazis to help Tito very much with his own.

The only military powers in range were Britain and the US. The arch-reactionary Churchill couldn't countenance aiding communists if there was any other way, and technically the Chetniks existed, a guerrilla formation endorsed by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's government-in-exile in London, which Churchill naturally felt he could influence more than communists not headquartered in London. But the Chetniks began to quietly go over to the Nazi side to fight Tito's communists, and FDR hated Nazis far more than he hated communists. So the US began airdropping war materiel to Tito. So many of these airdrops happened that his fighters began wondering why they were allied with the Soviets if it was America helping them; Tito lied and said that the "U.S." on the side of the planes stood for "Unione Sovetica" to keep them onside.

Tito has been described as "the last Habsburg" in the sense that he tried to establish a multi-ethnic state in the Balkans. But socialist Yugoslavia didn't outlive Tito because Tito was forced into the same empire-and-comprador path as his bourgeois antecedents.

Because his help had come from America, and because Yugoslavia wasn't liberated by the Red Army but by their own, Tito owed nothing to Stalin but much to America. He took the Marshall Plan money America offered. He built the most economically unequal socialist system of the period. He voted for the United Nations operations against the DPRK. The first is naivety, the second might be excusable as an innocent mistake compounding over time if it were the only one on this list, but the third is literally knowing support for imperialism, and therefore inexcusable.

Even though they had pretended otherwise at first, there was a frontier between powers once again in the Balkans, and this time it was between Tito and Stalin, with Stalin protecting the thorn in Tito's side named Enver Hoxha, and Tito bringing America into the region to compensate.

Albania would be the last country in Europe to uphold Stalin in earnest, but it did this for the same fundamental reason that Yugoslavia played footsie with America. Stalin was King Communist as far as Albania's leader Enver Hoxha could tell, and so he understood the letter of Stalin's teachings better than any other European leader, because it was in Albania's interest to be Stalin's best pupil, a curious case of trying to substitute an anti-imperialist power for the traditional role of imperial power in the region. Especially after Stalin fell out with Tito over his American sympathies, Hoxha's Albania was forever loyal to the man. After Khrushchev gave the secret speech, Hoxha changed his anti-imperialist patron to China, the first time since the Mongol Empire that China ever had a satellite state in Europe. But what was easily won to Maoism was just as easily lost when the Gang of Four met their fate, but by then both Tito and Hoxha were dying, as well as the states that were essentially extensions of their personalities.

Hoxha was super eager to accuse his fellow communists of the misdeeds of which they were indeed guilty, but it was a sort of performative ultraradicalism in the end that isolated socialist Albania from any real international solidarity. To get a feel for the technical accuracy yet obscurantist pedantry that made up his typical analysis, here's one example of the stuff. He criticized the DPRK for following a "centrist" course between China and the Soviets, as if a country still legally at war with American imperialism could afford to start alienating nuclear umbrellas. Why wasn't he adopting a strongly pro-DPRK line instead? With Tito's abject tummyrubbing of American imperialism on the issue of the DPRK's very existence, Hoxha clearly had a diplomatic opening on the Korean peninsula that he could have exploited for Albania's benefit, but he wanted to win an argument instead. Granted, the DPRK couldn't have played the outside anti-imperialist power role that China or the USSR could, but all the same, they surely would have both benefitted from closer cooperation. Shit like this is why the DPRK still exists, while the dream of socialist Albania got locked in a bunker like a particularly annoying chihuahua.

There were similarities to Hoxha's behavior among the capitalist Albanian regimes before and after his too. Albania between the world wars made a calculated bet that inviting Mussolini in would help develop the country; it got counter-invaded by Greece instead. And after Hoxha's death, his ultraradical communist cadres became ultraradical CIA-backed nationalist militias without skipping a beat, almost as if Hoxha's legalistically-flawless Marxism-Leninism had just been a comprador's appeal to an outside military power the whole time. The way that Albania swapped outside imperial benefactors with Serbia in the 90s and nobody blinked at all the hypocrisy suggests that the real struggle the whole time for both was not capitalism versus communism, not orthodox Marxism-Leninism versus revisionist squishes, but Serbia and their friends versus Albania and their friends, with all the rest being little more than Exhibit A for the prosecution.

To get a feel for the sheer amount of bootlicker nonsense offered by Albania's bourgeois compradors, think back to Dubya's invasion of Iraq. Every other Muslim country on Earth was rightly furious with us. But Albania? There was literally an attempt at holding a referendum in 1991 that would have made Albania our 51st state. An Albanian paper begged for American forces to occupy the country. Albania's rulers would eat bacon-wrapped shellfish served on a shoe atop a Qu'ran for a pat on the head from the American ambassador.

Even communists cannot easily overthrow the iron reich of geography.

Continue reading Part II: Indochina