The Wages of "Settlers" is Srebrenica Part IV: Communist Friends With Death Camps

The Killing Fields were where 2-3 million people met their end. A couple of them were bourgeois exploiters who probably had it coming. Most of them were not.

Although the whole principle animating the Killing Fields was "Land Back™," it was Land Back™ for the Khmer alone. Land Back™ for the other groups sent to the Killing Fields was besides the point. It could not have been otherwise. Ethnic grievances, identity politics, and culture wars more generally cannot be universalized. Land Back™ cannot ever be an organizing principle for an exploited class of people the world 'round, but a recipe for every exploited nationality to first kill everyone in the exploiter nationality and then to start killing one another. What is black pain compared to Hispanic pain? How dare you say that. What is Hispanic pain compared to Native pain? Cancel the yob that said that. This train of thought cannot help but lead to an Oppression Olympics that only the bourgeoisie will ever medal in.

In Land Back, Khmer Edition™, Chams who had fled the nam tiến into Cambodia were also sent to the Killing Fields. The Khmer Rouge never intended to end cultural oppression, merely to replace perceived Vietnamese cultural oppression with their own. What's more, there was no such. Cultural oppression from Vietnam had ended with the feudal regimes, and the Vietnamese were working overtime to liberate the entire Indochinese peninsula from the clutches of international capital as an act of comradely solidarity. The Khmer Rouge went through millions of corpses to try to put socialism in the ground in Cambodia, and to prop up a nazbol order meant to serve the Khmer ethnicity alone.

In this, the Khmer Rouge had the explicit backing of the Chinese government. Be it headed by Mao, the Gang of Four, or Deng, China never wavered in propping up the most wicked, repugnant murderers to ever wear a hammer and sickle. And they did it at the behest of American imperialism, which needed its "communist" friends supplied and propped up but couldn't be seen to get its hands dirty.

In a similar fashion, because of similarly nazbol-inducing geography, Tito's Yugoslavia wound up becoming imperialism's communist friend, and suffering the genocidal results closer to home. At first it seemed innocent enough. Stalin, whose Red Army had not liberated Yugoslavia from the Nazis, was offering strict warnings to Tito regarding his approach to theory. The minutiae of that debate isn't terribly important, but what is important is that Tito and Stalin grew estranged over this. Tito decided to escalate this personal feud into a feud between nations, and socialist Yugoslavia made overtures with the West.

It was this that caused Yugoslavia to ask to participate in the Marshall Plan.

The Americans were surprised by this request, and at first didn't know what to make of it. Secretary of State Dean Acheson talked the skeptical deep state into supporting Titoism. As the main opponent of American imperialism was Stalin's USSR, finding an alternate strain of communism with which to concern troll Stalin on theory now that Trotsky was dead would be a great way to divide and therefore weaken the communist bloc. He decided it was imperative that Tito's five year plan succeed, and so American aid was released. The less nuanced reactionaries kept it out of the Marshall Plan, but aid nonetheless came.

What were the results of this?

First off, despite poor harvests in Yugoslavia in 1948, 1949, and 1950, no memes about zomg helladumbor 20 bazillion kulaks emerged from this time and place. Yugoslavia simply bought extra food on the global market with its imperialist Yankeebux. Tito's regime would be spared the famine concern trolling that professionally wrong synthetic leftists would visit upon anti-imperialist countries.

Second off, Yugoslavia immediately ended one of the activities that brought about the split with Stalin. They didn't do so when Stalin asked, but when America did. That, of course, was provisioning and sheltering the Greek communist guerrillas. Communists everywhere were sympathetic to their Greek comrades, but the division of the world that was agreed to between the victorious Allies relegated Greece to the capitalist West. Any attempt to revisit that would call into question the relegation of eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere. This obviously didn't bother Tito, who had no interests there but might have interests in a communist Greece that owed its liberation to his help. But as it endangered Soviet interests, Stalin kindly asked Tito to cut it out to preserve socialism in the countries where it was already establishing itself. Tito refused, but then complied when America asked it to stop attacking its revanchist puppet.

Third off, this aid basically meant that Yugoslavian foreign policy was for sale to the highest bidder, and that bidder was America. Yugoslavia opposed the DPRK in the Korean War, as discussed previously.

Of course, these were all prices being paid abroad to develop socialism at home. Because of all the moral compromises Tito made, no country had an easier time developing socialism than Yugoslavia. Despite this, only middling progress was made, at best. Yugoslavia's Western backstop to its socialist model developed into actual debt trap diplomacy, and the Yugoslav economy was hamstrung in the 80s. Half of all export income simply went to servicing the national debt, and unemployment in this "socialist" economy surged.

It was this debt peonage that dismantled Yugoslavian socialism from the inside in the end. Hat in hand, Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Marković went to Washington in 1989, before the Berlin Wall even fell, to ask for another loan. He got it, but had to end social ownership and worker management of the economy.

Unemployment was already at 17%, underemployment was at 20%, and then they got Washington Consensus-style privatization and austerity thrown at them. Where was the Communist Party that had delivered them from the Nazis to save them from this Western domination? It was negotiating this and pushing it through the legislature, hypocrites they were.

So where did the downtrodden workers of the mountainous Balkans turn to, when they could no longer turn to communism to deliver them? They turned to fascists. Internal Yugoslav politics by that point had devolved into two camps: a liberal-fascist alliance promoting decentralization along ethnic lines, and a conservative-socialist alliance promoting democratic centralism. The liberal-fascist alliance defined Yugoslavs along ethnic lines, as a given local ethnicity that wasn't Serbian, in opposition to the central and numerous Serbs.

In response to this ethnic identity politics, and increasing demands for Land Back™ for new tiny squabbling ethnostates, the Serbs that were the cornerstone of the conservative-socialist alliance too turned towards ethnic identity politics. Unfortunately, their socialists weren't really socialists anymore, but rapidly becoming nazbol. So the conservative-socialist alliance ruling in Belgrade became a conservative-nazbol alliance, and regional Land Back™ sentiment was met by Serbian Land Back™ sentiment.

As always happens when identity politicians fight identity politicians, the more numerous side won, and the less numerous side filled unmarked graves. So the Serbian Settlers kids won the day. Whole cities built by socialism were now levelled by fascism and nazbollery. Muslims and Catholics needed to GIB CLAY NAO, this was Serb land, it was always Serb land, and there were brutal men with Kalashnikovs who would have a word with anyone who disagreed.

In the case of the former Yugoslavian states, these ethnic tensions were paradoxically made worse by the smallness of them. Serbian and Croatian are, to anyone who isn't personally involved in the conflict, clearly the same language written with different alphabets. Taking that logic from alphabets to religions, the Muslim Bosniaks were then assumed to be Serbs or Croats who had apostasized themselves during the Ottoman era, and who could be re-folded into the "correct" ethnicity by force, if only enough of them were killed.

So the same logic that animates Land Back™ led to largely ethnically similar population, socialized as communists for a generation, divided only by alphabets and religion, to kill one another in the most brutal, genocidal, monstrous ways. The wages of Settlers is Srebrenica.

Onwards to the conclusion: Never Again, and How!