4. The Nationalities Question

THE NATIONALITIES QUESTION

THE NATIONALITIES QUESTION

August 1990

Upon the collapse of centralizing totalitarian Communism in Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union, long suppressed ethnic and nationality questions and conflicts have come rapidly to the fore. The crack-up of central control has revealed the hidden but still vibrant “deep structures” of ethnicity and nationality.

To those of us who glory in ethnic diversity and yearn for national justice, all this is a wondrous development of what has previously lived only in fantasy or longing: it is a chance in Europe at long last, to begin to reverse the monstrous twin injustices of Sarajevo and Versailles. It is like being back in 1914 or 1919 again, with a chance for the map of Europe and near Asia to be righted and redrawn.

For the first time since the end of World War II, or arguably since Versailles, the world is in a “revolutionary situation.” There are many problems and costs to such a revolutionary situation, costs that are well-known and need not be repeated here; but there are also many benefits: currently, not only the collapse of Socialism-Communism, but the sense that all things are possible, and that justice may come at last to a long-suffering area of the world.

Most Americans, however, are puzzled and disturbed rather than delighted at the re-emergence of the nationalities question. We can separate the worried or hostile reactions into four groups: (a) the average American; (b) Marxist–Leninists; (c) global democrats, which include the liberal and neoconservative wing of the ruling American Establishment; and (d) modal libertarians.

HOSTILES: THE AVERAGE AMERICAN

First, the average American is uncomprehending of the very problem. Why can’t all these groups live-and-let-live, and join peacefully together as has the United States in its “melting pot” of varied immigrant groups? In the first place, this Pollyanna view of America overlooks the black question, which has scarcely settled into any melting pot, and is more mired in deep conflict now than at any time since the late nineteenth century. But even setting that aside no peaceful “melting pot” existed in the nineteenth century. From the 1830s until after World War I, northern, “Yankee,” mainstream Protestants (with the exception of old-style Calvinists and high-church Lutherans) were captured by an aggressive and militant post-millennial pietism whose objective was to use government to stamp out “sin” (especially liquor and the Catholic Church), and who made the lives of Catholic and German Lutheran immigrants miserable and put them under constant attack for nearly a century. Finally, the pietists succeeded in imposing immigration restrictions and national origin quotas after World War I.

But even setting all that aside, the United States of America was a unique development in the modern world: a roughly “empty” land (with the notable exception of American Indians), peopled by a large number of mainly European religious, ethnic, and national immigrant groups, within the framework of a mainly free, constitutional Republic under the rubric of English as the common, public language.

Other nations in Europe and Asia developed very differently, often with native nationalities conquered and dominated by “imperial” nations. Instead of one public language, the oppressor nationalities invariably tried to obliterate the languages and even the names of conquered nationalities. One of the most moving cries during last year’s implosion of Communism came from the suppressed Turkish minority in Bulgaria and the conquered “Moldavians” (i.e., Romanians) in Soviet Moldavia, grabbed from Romania after World War II: “give us our names back!”

The Moldavians want to shed the hated Russian names imposed by the Soviet state, as well as the even more hated Cyrillic forced upon them in place of their Latin alphabet. And this national obliteration is not just a product of Communism. It is an age-old practice: “imperial” France still forbids the Celts of Brittany to name their children according to Celtic nomenclature; and the Turks, still not admitting their genocidal massacre of the Armenian minority during World War I, also refuse to acknowledge the very existence of their Kurdish minority, referring to them contemptuously as “mountain Turks.”

HOSTILES: THE MARXIST-LENINISTS

The Marxist–Leninists are a dying breed, but it is fascinating to consider their now vanishing role on this issue. Their reputation as “anti-imperialists” has nothing to do with classical Marxism. In fact, Marx and Engels, consistent with their pro-modernizing approach, aggressively favored Western imperialism (especially that of the Prussians as against the hated Slavs). This stance accorded with their view that the faster capitalism and “modernization” advance, the sooner the “inevitable final stage” of history, the proletarian communist revolution, will take place.

Lenin, however, pragmatically junked Marxism to side with the Third World and other peasantry, which he saw perceptively as far riper for revolution than the advanced capitalist nations. In practice, however, Leninism, while giving lip-service to the right of national self-determination (enshrined on paper in the Soviet Constitution but always ignored in practice), was a centralizing universalist creed transcending nationalities. More important, the actual Leninist cadre in every country were deracinated intellectuals (often colonials educated by Marxist–Leninist professors in the imperial centers of London, Paris, and Lisbon), who were generally ignorant of, and contemptuous or hostile toward, ethnicity, religion, and culture. The official compulsory atheism of Marxist–Leninists was only the most overt example of this hostility.

This riding roughshod over national cultures in the name of universalist Leninist ideology is most starkly evident in the regimes of Africa. The Marxist centralizing governments of Africa are descendants of the regimes of Western imperialism established in the late nineteenth century.

Britain, France, and Portugal marched into Africa and carved it up into provinces totally heedless and uncaring of the realities of the varied and highly diverse tribes which constituted the African polity. Many tribes, most of which hated each other’s guts, and had nothing—neither culture, language, customs, nor tradition—in common, were coercively incorporated into “colonies” with arbitrary borders imposed by the imperial Western powers. In addition to this forced marriage, many of the artificial borders split tribal regions into two or more parts, so that tribesmen seasonally migrating into age-old occupied regions, found themselves stopped at the border and accused of being “illegal immigrants” or “aggressors.”

The tragedy of modern Africa is that the imperial powers did not simply withdraw and allow the natural tribal formation to resume their original occupation of the continent. Instead, the coercive centralizing regimes of these so-called “nations” were turned over to the deracinated Marxist intellectuals educated in the imperial capitals, who soon became a parasitic bureaucratic class taxing and oppressing the peaceful peasantry who constitute the bulk of the actual producers in Africa.

HOSTILES: THE GLOBAL DEMOCRATS

The most significant negative reaction to the recent eruption of the nationalities question is that of our “global democracy” Establishment. Theirs is the most significant because they constitute the dominant opinion-molding force in American life. Essentially theirs is a far more sophisticated version of the reaction of the average American. The concerns and demands of nationalities are dismissed as narrow, selfish, parochial, and even dangerously hostile per se and aggressive toward other nationalities. Above all, they interfere with the most sanctified value in the global-democratic canon: “the democratic process,” which inherently means “majority rule,” albeit sometimes limited by the restraints of “human” or “minority” rights. Therefore, the ultimate curse leveled against nationalities and their demands is that they are perforce “undemocratic” and hence not suitable for the modern world.

Thus, there is a deeper reason than realpolitik for the seemingly strange coolness of the Bush administration toward the heroic national independence movement of the Lithuanians and the other Baltic nations. It’s not just that the United States is supposed to sacrifice them on the altar of “saving Gorby.” For there was unalloyed joy at the liberating of Officially Accredited Nations, such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, from Soviet and Communist yokes. But the Baltic nations, after all, are different: they are “part” of the Soviet Union, and therefore their unilateral secession, against the will of the majority of the USSR, becomes an affront to “democracy,” to “majority rule,” and, last but far from least, to the unitary, centralizing nation-state that allegedly embodies the democratic ideal.

The fact that the United States had never recognized the forcible incorporation of the Baltic nations into the USSR in 1940, is now demonstrated to be a Cold War sham to win the votes of East European ethnics living in the United States. For when push comes to shove, how can little parts of a great nation be permitted to secede in opposition to the “democratic will” of the larger nation? Not only the Bush and Establishment coolness toward the Baltics, but also their palpable relief when Gorby sent troops in to Azerbaijan, allegedly to stop Azeris and Armenians from killing each other, shows that far more is at stake here than helping Gorby against the Stalinists.

For the U.S. global democrats had gotten worried that Gorby might fail to carry out the alleged fundamental responsibility of a great modernizing nation: to use force and violence to settle disputes among its various regions and nationalities. That is, in fact, to maintain the unitary force of the central “imperial” power against the nationalities within its periphery.

The clinching argument of the global democrats in all this may be summed up as “after all, didn’t Lincoln?” The most sanctified figure in American historiography is, by no accident, the Great Saint of centralizing “democracy” and the strong unitary nation-state: Abraham Lincoln. It is fascinating and no accident, and reveals the vital importance of history and of historical myth even in as amnesiac a nation as the United States, that a major reason that the neocons and their stooges have tried to read such paleocons as Mel Bradford and Tom Fleming out of the conservative movement is that they are highly critical of “honest Abe.”

And so didn’t Lincoln use force and violence, and on a massive scale, on behalf of the mystique of the sacred “Union,” to prevent the South from seceding? Indeed he did, and on the foundation of mass murder and oppression, Lincoln crushed the South and outlawed the very notion of secession (based on the highly plausible ground that since the separate states voluntarily entered the Union they should be allowed to leave).

But not only that: for Lincoln created the monstrous unitary nation-state from which individual and local liberties have never recovered: e.g., the triumph of an all-powerful federal judiciary, Supreme Court, and national army; the overriding of the ancient Anglo-Saxon and libertarian right of habeas corpus by jailing dissidents against the war without trial; the establishment of martial rule; the suppression of freedom of the press; and the largely permanent establishment of conscription, the income tax, the pietist “sin” taxes against liquor and tobacco, the corrupt and cartelizing “partnership of government and industry” constituting massive subsidies to transcontinental railroads, and the protective tariff; the establishment of fiat money inflation through the greenbacks and getting off the gold standard; and the nationalization of the banking system through the national Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864.

It is particularly fascinating that many conservative defenders of Lithuania and die other Baltic nations, try themselves to preserve the Lincoln myth and the general U.S. hostility to secession. They argue that since the Baltic states were forcibly incorporated by Stalin in 1940, they at least should be allowed to secede without the punishment of Lincoln-style repression!

Let us set aside the fact that most of the other incorporations of nations into the Soviet Union were just as compulsory albeit more venerable: e.g., the Ukraine, Armenia, or Georgia in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution. Let us instead cut to the heart of the democratic political theory that is involved in the pervasive hostility to secession. For democratic theory, including the theory of most “minarchist” laissez-faire libertarians, holds that government, whether broadly social-democratic or confined to police, defense and the judiciary, should be chosen by majority rule in free elections. Minority secession movements are accused of violating democratic majority rule. But the crucial and always unanswered question is: democratic rule over what geographical area?

Let us put the problem another way: minarchist or democratic theory says that the State should have a monopoly of force in its territorial area. Let us agree for the sake of argument. But then the big unasked, and unanswered, question arises: what should be the territorial area? To paraphrase a favorite gambit of Ayn Rand’s, the near-universal response is: Blankout!

Nationalities secessionists are implicitly challenging this pervasive blankout as a serious response to their concerns. So far, whether under Lincoln or, to a much lesser extent under Gorby, their crucial question has been met only by violence and force majeure: by the unquestioned mystique of might-makes-right and the coercive unitary nation-state. But the inner logic of that mystique, and the basic logic of minarchist political theory, is at once simple and terrifying: unitary world “democratic” government. The minarchist argument against anarcho-capitalist libertarians is that there must be a single, overriding government agency with a monopoly force to settle disputes by coercion. OK, but in that case and by the very same logic shouldn’t nation-tates be replaced by a one-world monopoly government? Shouldn’t unitary world government replace what has been properly termed our existing “international anarchy?”

Minarchist libertarians and conservatives balk at the inner logic of world government for obvious reasons: for they fear correctly that world taxation and world socialization would totally and irreversibly suppress the liberty and property of Americans. But they remain trapped in the logic of their own position. Left-liberals, on the other hand, are happy to embrace this logic precisely because of this expected outcome. Even the democratic Establishment, however, hesitates at embracing the ultimate logical end of a single world democratic state, at least until they can be assured of controlling that monstrous entity.

Short of the world State of their dreams, how does our global democratic Establishment deal with the crucial problem of where State boundaries should be? By sanctifying whatever State boundaries happen to exist at the time. Sanctifying status quo boundaries has been the axiom of the foreign policy of every U.S. administration since Woodrow Wilson, and of the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations, all based on the incoherent and disastrous concept of “collective security against aggression.” It was that concept that underlay U.S. intervention in World Wars I and II, and in the Korean War: first we determine (often incorrectly) which is the “aggressor state,” and then all nation-states are supposed to band together to combat, repel, and punish that aggression.

The theoretical analogue of such a concert against “aggression” is held to be combating criminal action against individuals. A robs or murders B; the local police, appointed defenders of the right of person and property, leap to the defense of B and act to apprehend and punish A. In the same way, “peace-loving” nations are supposed to band together against “aggressor” nations or states. Hence, Harry Truman’s otherwise mystifying insistence that the U.S. war against North Korea was not a war at all but a “police action.”

The deep flaw in all this is that when A robs or murders B, there is a general agreement that A is in the wrong, and that he has indeed aggressed against the person and just property rights of B. But when State A aggresses against the border of State B, often claiming that the border is unjust and the result of a previous aggression against country A decades before, how can we say a priori that State A is the aggressor and that we must dismiss its defense out of hand? Who says, and on what principle, that State B has the same moral right to all of its existing territory as individual B has to his life and property? And how can the two aggressions be equated when our global democrats refuse to come up with any principles or criteria whatsoever: except the unsatisfactory and absurd call for a world State or blind reliance upon the boundary status quo at any given moment?

JUST BOUNDARIES AND NATIONAL
SELF-DETERMINATION

What, then, is the answer? What national boundaries can be considered as just? In the first place, it must be recognized that there are no just national boundaries per se; that real justice can only be founded on the property rights of individuals. If fifty people decided voluntarily to set up an organization for common services or self-defense of their persons and properties in a certain geographical area, then the boundaries of that association, based on the just property rights of the members, will also be just.

National boundaries are only just insofar as they are based on voluntary consent and the property rights of their members or citizens. Just national boundaries are, then, at best derivative and not primary. How much more is this true of existing State boundaries which are, in greater or lesser degree, based on coercive expropriation of private property, or on a mixture of that with voluntary consent! In practice, the way to have such national boundaries as just as possible is to preserve and cherish the right of secession, the right of different regions, groups, or ethnic nationalities to get the blazes out of the larger entity, to set up their own independent nation. Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.

But wasn’t the Wilsonian attempt to impose national self-determination and draw the map of Europe a disaster? And how! But the disaster was inevitable even assuming (incorrectly) good will on the part of Wilson and the Allies and ignoring the fact that national self-determination was a mask for their imperial ambitions. For by its nature, national self-determination cannot be imposed from without, by a foreign government entity, be it the United States or some world League.

The whole point of national self-determination is to get top-down coercive power out of the picture and, for the use of force to devolve from the larger entity to more genuine natural and voluntary national entities. In short, to devolve power from the top downward. Imposing national self-determination from the outside makes matters worse and more coercive than ever. Moreover, getting the U.S. or other governments involved in every ethnic conflict throughout the globe maximizes, rather than minimizes, coercion, conflict, war, and mass murder. It drags the United States, as the great isolationist scholar Charles A. Beard once put it, into “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

Referring back to political theory, since the nation-state has a monopoly of force in its territorial area, the one thing it must not do is ever try to exercise its force beyond its area, where it has no monopoly, because then a relatively peaceful “international anarchy” (where each State confines its power to its own geographical boundary) is replaced by an international Hobbesian chaos of war of all (governments) against all. In short, given the existence of nation-states, they should (a) never exercise their power beyond their territorial area (a foreign policy of “isolationism”), and (b) maintain the right of secession of groups or entities within their territorial area.

The right of secession, if fearlessly upheld, implies also the right of one or more villages to secede even from its own ethnic nation, or, even, as Ludwig von Mises affirmed in his Nation, State, and Economy, the right of secession by each individual.

If one deep flaw in the Wilsonian enterprise was its imposition of national self-determination from the outside, another was his total botch of redrawing the European map. It is difficult to believe that they could have done a worse job if the Versailles rulers had blindfolded themselves and put pins arbitrarily in a map of Europe to create new nations.

Instead of self-determination for each nation, three officially designated Good Guy peoples (Poles, Czechs, and Serbs) were made masters over other nationalities who had hated their guts for centuries, often with good reason. That is, these three favored nationalities were not simply given ethnic national independence; instead, their boundaries were arbitrarily swollen so as to dominate other peoples officially designated as Bad Guys (or at best Who Cares Guys): the Poles ruling over Germans, Lithuanians (in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius/Vilna), Byelorussians, and Ukrainians; the Czechs ruling over Slovaks and Ukrainians (called “Carpatho-Ruthenians”); and the Serbs tyrannizing over Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Hungarians, and Macedonians, in a geographical abortion called “Yugoslavia” (now at least in the process of falling apart).

In addition, the Romanians were aggrandized at the expense of the Hungarians and Bulgarians. These three (or four if we include Romania) lopsided countries were also given the absurd and impossible task by the U.S. and the Western allies of keeping down permanently the two neighboring great “revisionist” powers and losers at Versailles: Germany and Russia. This imposed task led straight to World War II.

In short, national self-determination must remain a moral principle and a beacon-light for all nations, and not be something to be imposed by outside governmental coercion.

PARTITION AND REFERENDUM

One practical way of implementing self-determination and the right of secession is the concept of a partition referendum in which each village or parish votes to decide whether to remain inside the existing national entity or to secede or join another such nation. The much disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh, for example, would undoubtedly vote overwhelmingly to leave the hated Azerbaijan Republic and join Armenia. But what of the fact that Nagorno-Karabakh is not contiguous with greater Armenia, that there is a sliver of ethnically Azeri land inbetween? But surely good will on both sides (which of course is obviously non-existent at this point) could permit a free zone or free entry across that zone. Not only an airpath, but also a road corridor proved to be viable for decades after the explosive Berlin crisis.

Partition referenda were used fitfully after World War I; the most renowned case was the separation of Northern Ireland from the rest of the country. Unfortunately, the British deliberately promised referendum for a second partition was never carried out by the British government. As a result, a large amount of Catholic territory in the north was forcibly incorporated into the Protestant state, and the existence of that Catholic minority, which undoubtedly would vote to join the South, has been responsible for the tragic and unending violence and bloodshed ever since. In short, a genuine partition based on referenda, would probably lop off from Northern Ireland the territories of counties Tyrone and Fermanagh (including the city of Derry) and South Down. Essentially, Northern Ireland would be much reduced in land area, and left with a belt around Belfast and county Antrim. The only substantial Catholic minority would then be in the Catholic section of Belfast.

One criticism of partition by referendum is that parishes and villages are often mixed, so that there could not be a precise separation of the nationalities. In the vexed region of Transylvania, for example, Hungarian and Romanian villages are intermixed in the same region. No doubt; no one ever said that such referenda would provide a panacea. But the point is that at least the degree of voluntary choice would be enlarged and the amount of social and ethnic conflict minimized, and not much more can be achieved. (Transylvania, by the way, is largely Hungarian, especially the northern part, and the wrong done to Hungary after World War I should be rectified.)

There is one criticism of the referendum approach that is far more cogent and troublesome. The Azeri claim to Nagorno-Karabakh rests on the thesis that, while the Armenians are now admittedly in the overwhelming majority, the region was, centuries ago, a center of Azeri culture. This claim from history may properly be dismissed as the dead hand of the past ruling the living, perhaps with the proviso that ancient Azeri shrines be protected under Azeri care.

But more troubling is, say, the current situation in Estonia and Latvia, where the Soviets deliberately tried to swamp and destroy native culture and ethnic nationalism by shipping in a large number of Russians after World War II to work in the factories. In Latvia, the Russian minority is only slightly under 50 percent. Here, I believe the recency of this migration and its political nature tip the scales in favor of maintaining native nationalism. In fact, libertarians believe that everyone has the natural right to self-ownership and ownership of property, but that there is no such thing as a natural “right” to vote. Here, it would make sense not to allow Russians to vote in Latvia and Estonia, to treat them as guests or immigrants of indefinite duration, but not with the voting privileges of citizenship.

THE HOSTTLES:
THE LIBERTARIANS

Libertarians are, by and large, as fiercely opposed to ethnic nationalism as the global democrats, but for very different reasons. Libertarians are generally what might be called simplistic and “vulgar” individualists. A typical critique would run as follows: “There is no nation; there are only individuals. The nation is a collectivist and therefore pernicious concept. The concept of ‘national self-determination’ is fallacious, since only the individual has a ‘self.’ Since the nation and the State are both collective concepts, both are pernicious and should be combated.”

The linguistic complaint may be dismissed quickly. Yes, of course, there is no national “self,” we are using “self-determination” as a metaphor, and no one really thinks of a nation as an actual living entity with its own “self.”

More seriously, we must not fall into a nihilist trap. While only individuals exist individuals do not exist as isolated and hermetically sealed atoms. Statists traditionally charge libertarians and individualists with being “atomistic individualists,” and the charge, one hopes, has always been incorrect and misconceived. Individuals may be the only reality, but they influence each other, past and present, and all individuals grow up in a common culture and language. (This does not imply that they may not, as adults, rebel and challenge and exchange that culture for another.)

While the State is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the “nation” may be and generally is voluntary. The nation properly refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised. It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious. Let us never forget the great libertarian Randolph Bourne’s analysis of the crucial distinction between “the nation” (the land, the culture, the terrain, the people) and “the State” (the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians), and of his important conclusion that one may be a true patriot of one’s nation or country while—and even for that very reason—opposing the State that rules over it.

In addition, the libertarian, especially of the anarcho-capitalist wing, asserts that it makes no difference where the boundaries are, since in a perfect world all institutions and land areas would be private and there would be no national boundaries. Fine, but in the meantime, in the real world, in which language should the government courts hold their proceedings? What should be the language of signs on the government streets? Or the language of the government schools? In the real world, then, national self-determination is a vitally important matter in which libertarians should properly take sides.

Finally, nationalism has its disadvantages for liberty, but also has its strengths, and libertarians should try to help tip it in the latter direction. If we were residents of Yugoslavia, for example, we should be agitating in favor of the right to secede from that swollen and misbegotten State of Croatia and Slovenia (that is, favoring their current nationalist movements), while opposing the desire of the Serb demagogue Slobodan Milosevic to cling to Serb domination over the Albanians in Kosovo or over the Hungarians in the Vojvodina (that is, opposing Great Serbian nationalism). There is, in short national liberation (good) versus national “imperialism” over other peoples (bad). Once we get over simplistic individualism, and this distinction should not be difficult to grasp.

YUGOSLAVIAN BREAKUP

June 1991

Yugoslavia is at the point of civil war, but before anyone starts blubbering about what in the world can have gotten into this “proud nation,” be assured that there ain’t no such animal. There is no such nation nor is there such a thing as a “Yugoslav people.” Yugoslavia is not a nation but a geographical abortion, a monstrosity that ensued from the chaos, the vengeance, and the cabals of World War I and its sorry aftermath. The victorious allies split apart and fractured the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. This sundering was performed not in the name of “national self-determination,” but in the equality of this process some nations were destined to be far more equal than others. Particularly privileged was Serbia, a nation on Austria-Hungary’s southern border, which had set off World War I by contriving to assassinate Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Out of the tragedy and ferment of that war, Serbia managed to carve a new Greater Serbia out of parts of the defeated Empire, particularly by suckering the intellectual leaders of the Croats and the Slovenes into adopting a phony and artificial “South Slav” (Yugoslav) ideology and then forming a new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. When the Croats found that this kingdom, instead of a fraternity of “south Slavs,” was merely a mechanism for Serb hegemony, they grew restless and began to move for greater Croat freedom. When the Serbs assassinated the great Croat peasant leader Stefan Radic in 1928, the Croats moved to form a separate Croatia, whereupon the Serb King Alexander established a unitary royal dictatorship and called it “Yugoslavia.”

Another hapless people forcibly incorporated into Yugoslavia were the Macedonians, on the southern border of Serbia, another people seeking restoration of their ancient independence. The results of the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire and of World War I, however, were the carving up of Macedonia among the Greeks and the Serbs. Bulgaria, arrogantly claiming that the Macedonians are only “western Bulgars,” was aced out by unfortunately picking the losing side of the last Balkan War and of World War I.

Macedonians forced into Yugoslavia formed the militant revolutionary organization, IMRO (International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), which assassinated the tyrant King Alexander in 1934. After that the Yuglosav Regent Prince Paul, particularly after 1939, moved toward devolution of power toward the nationalities, actually bringing Croat ministers into the Cabinet. Paul also followed a neutral policy in World War II. British intelligence therefore engineered a military coup on March 27, 1941, installing a hard-line Serb military dictatorship in Yugoslavia. This pro-British government quickly moved to sign a Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union on April 5.

Mussolini, boobishly trying to revive and expand the Italian Empire, had invaded Greece at the end of October, 1940, but his war of conquest was going badly, and the Greeks were counterattacking successfully. Hitler was preparing to mobilize the countries of Eastern Europe for his mighty assault against the U.S.S.R., but he was obliged to delay this strike to bail out his Axis partner in Greece. Hitler’s offer to mediate the Italy-Greece dispute was rebuffed by a Greece prodded by Great Britain, and so Hitler determined to launch his conquest of Greece before mounting an invasion of Russia. The sudden British coup in Yugoslavia in March 1941 induced Hitler to include that country in his Greek campaign (“Operation Maritsa”), which he began on April 6. The Yugoslav campaign was successfully concluded in eleven days, and Greece was mopped up two weeks later.

Ever indulgent to his unreliable Axis partner, Hitler allowed Italian troops to help invade Croatia, while German forces invaded Serbia. Serbia was, understandably enough, treated as hostile, and subjected to permanent German military occupation, whereas the Germans and Italians treated the Croats as fellow enemies of the Serbian Yugoslav regime. Croatia was allowed to form a separate national state, naming the Italian Duke of Spoleto as its king.

The new Croat kingdom was run by Ante Pavelic and his Ustasha movement. Every time any newspaper account speaks of Croat nationalism or Croat-Serb rivalry nowadays, the writer invariably raises the spectre of Croatia’s “pro-Nazi” regime. But it should be clear that the Croats were not pro-Nazi; they were, simply, anti-Serb, while neutral in more remote European affairs, and the genesis of this attitude should now be clear. It is true that during the war, the Croat Ustasha killed a lot of Serbs, but so too did Serb forces kill a great many Croats. The feelings were all too mutual.

Because the Croats had their own state during World War II, there was no need for them to engage in partisan activities. The Serbs, on the other hand, were impelled to resist the direct military rule of the Germans. A Serb guerrilla force, the Chetniks, arose under Draza Milhailovic, paying more attention to the killing of Croats than of Germans. A Communist partisan force also arose, under Josip Tito. Although a Communist, Tito was able to win out over a Milhailovic because Tito, being a Croat, was able to appeal far more strongly to all the non-Serb groups in Yugoslavia. None of them would any longer trust a Serb.

Tito’s remarkable shift away from Stalinism and central planning, beginning about 1950, took a decisive turn in the mid-1960s, with the institution of market reforms, and the ousting from office of the Serb Alexander Rankovic, vice-president and head of the secret police. It became clear that, even among Communist intellectuals and economists, the major drive for freedom and market economy was among the Croats and Slovenes, whereas the Serbs were the most devoted to Communism and central planning. Writing in Foreign Affairs in July 1966, the distinguished Croat economist Rudolf Bicanic noted, too, that the Serbs were dominant in central institutions—the army, the secret police, central administration—even during Tito’s Yugoslavia, and he postulated that perhaps the Serbs had learned the ways of statism during generations of independent statehood, whereas die Croats and Slovenes, under Austro-Hungarian rule, had never learned bad statist habits. Perhaps. But perhaps, too, one answer lies in the Croat and Slovene devotion to western institutions, including a transnational Catholic Church. In contrast, the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox, and hence are used to a tradition of a State-ruled Church.

Ethnic devolution proceeded side by side with market reform until the early 1970s, when an evident desire for Croat independence drove Marshal Tito into a counterrevolutionary crackdown and a blockage of further ethnic and economic reform.

Tito’s death in 1980 led to the current Yugoslavian polity: headed by a rotating collective presidency, consisting of one representative from each of six republics, and of two “autonomous” provinces, of Serbia.

In the current situation, it is, again, no accident that the increasingly independent Croat, Slovene, and Macedonian republics have elected non-Communist regimes, and that Croada and Slovenia have been pushing for independence, whereas the Serbs, headed by their Communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, have been strong for both unitary centralism and a communist command economy. At a recent climactic vote, Milosevic tried to stampede the eight-man presidency into a central troop crack-down on breakaway Croatia. He was voted down by 5-to-3, and the regional votes are instructive. Voting for the crackdown were Serbia, Montenegro, and Serbia’s autonomous province of Voivodina. Voivodina, a northern Serb province acquired from Hungary, has only about 10 percent Hungarians; the rest are Serbs.

That leaves Montenegro, like the Serbs ruled by a one-party Communist regime. Does the stand of Montenegro vitiate our analysis of Serb hegemony? No, because there are no such people as “Montenegrins.” Montenegro (“Black Mountain”) is simply Western Serbia, and is the mountainous area where Serbs were able to hole up indefinitely and maintain their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Because of this history, Montenegro was also an independent kingdom outside Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans, but it is ethnically simply Serb.

On the other hand, the five presidents voting against the Serb-Milosevic grab for power hailed from Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the southern Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a mixed region, consisting of Serbs, Croats and a plurality of Bosnian Muslims, who became Muslims under the Ottoman Empire. Kosovo, which has been much in the news lately, is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, and is trying to get out from under Serb rule and achieve republic status. The stubborn Serb attempt to keep an iron grip on Kosovo is grounded in history: in the fact that centuries ago, Kosovo was the very heartland of the Serbs.

Why not allow each of these nationalities to go free, to recognize each others’ independence, and then hope for peaceful relations and a free-trade zone among the nationalities of what used to be called Yugoslavia? That would surely be the libertarian aspiration. The major stumbling block is Serb imperialism and statism, although in all fairness a welcome sign was the recent mass demonstrations in Belgrade (capital of Serbia) against Milosevic-Communist rule. But, in addition, those of us who consider ourselves Croats-in-spirit have to acknowledge the beam in our own eye. For just as Serbs call Croats “traitor to Yugoslavia” and threaten to send in the national army (the officer corps are two-thirds Serb), so does the new, national anti-Communist Croat republic consider the Serbs living in Serb areas in southern Croatia “traitors” to Croatia. If each nationality is to be independent, these Serbs, rather than live under Croat rule, have proclaimed themselves citizens of the new republic of Krajina, in the southern border regions of Croatia. Well, why not? And if they wish, why shouldn’t the Krajinans be able to merge with their brethren in Serbia proper?

Even if there is peace and a free-trade zone, it is important to ground them upon firm recognition of independence for each of these nationalities. And if this should mean, after the anti-Communist revolution in Albania proceeds further, that the Kosovo Albanians wish to merge with their brethren in Albania proper, why shouldn’t they? And perhaps even the Macedonians will be able to find their place in the sun once more. Watch out, Greece! Border rectification is the need of the hour, and all we need ask is that the United States no longer stand in the way, prating about a New World Order grounded on a so-called “territorial integrity” that exists only in the minds of fanatics like Woodrow Wilson and his plague of successors.

WELCOME, SLOVENIA!

September 1991

At the time of writing, it looks very much as if those wonderful, truly heroic Slovenes are going to Make It. Against all odds, against the determined opposition of the United States, the Soviet Union, and all the other European states—all devoted to the common State interest of preserving whatever State status quo happens to exist—it looks as if Slovenia, after a thousand years of subjection, is going to be allowed to become free and independent. If so, this will be the first new nation in Europe since the aftermath of World War I, and unlike those besotted countries, Slovenia is indeed a genuine nation in every sense, with a common religion, language, and culture. Unlike post-Versailles nations, Slovenia does not contain one ethnic group lording it over another. Slovenia is almost totally ethnically Slovene, a marvelous productive group of two million in the extreme northwest of Yugoslavia, on the border between Austria and Italy.

The Slovenes, unlike the Croats, have never been independent. For centuries before World War I, the Slovenes existed under the comparatively mild rule of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, why did the Slovenes join newly-created Yugoslavia? Unlike the Croat leadership, which was tragically sucked in by the honeyed and mendacious Serb rhetoric about a new “south Slav” people to be forged out of many different and clashing nationalities, the Slovenes joined up for more practical and rational reasons. As staunch defenders of Austria-Hungary against Italian aggression during World War I, the Slovenes were afraid, and for good reason, that Italy, puffed up by being on the winning side during the war, would take the occasion to punish the Slovenes and annex Slovenia to the wannabee Italian Empire. Hence, the Slovenes joined Yugoslavia in self-defense, and were rewarded by managing to keep their territory against the Italian threat.

The Slovenes, however, had even less in common with the Serbs than the latter’s ancient enemies, their fellow westerners, the Croats. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, Slovenia proved to be more Western, thriftier, more bourgeois and more progressive than even the Croats, let alone the rest of benighted Yugoslavia. Like the Croats, Catholic in a sea of Eastern Orthodoxy, the Slovenes have a separate language, and have the highest income in Yugoslavia, many times that of the rest of the country. The land is industrialized, the streets neat and clean in the Austrian and Swiss manner. Even more than the Croat “Communist” economists, the Slovene economists led the country as early as the 1960s, in calling for free markets and privatization. I well remember meeting, long ago, the cheery Slovene economist Alexander Bajt, I suppose nominally Communist, at the University of Virginia campus, who was even then writing on behalf of capitalism and free markets.

And so the Slovenes, like the Croats, wanted out of Yugoslavia, and particularly wanted out from under the domination of the imperialist, and still strongly Communist, Serbs. And the Slovenes, while much smaller in number than the Croats, did not have the embarrassment of a large Serb minority within their mountainous borders. And yet of course the Serbs were not about to let go. How, then, have the Slovenes come to achieve their independence, despite the U.S. and other powers moaning about the “territorial integrity of Yugoslavia?”

Unfortunately, the agent of triumph was not devotion to abstract justice. What did it was the force of Slovenian arms. In the latter two weeks of June, the Yugoslav army, dominated by Serb officers and a devotion to Communist rule bolstered by being a highly paid elite within the country, determined to bring Slovenia to heel, and to capture its frontier posts. The federal Yugoslav army bent on taming the Slovenes was headed by two Serb fanatics: General Bogojc Adzic, the chief of staff, and tank commander General Zivota Avaramovic, fresh from crushing the overwhelmingly Albanian-Serb-run region of Kosovo. And yet the haughty Yugoslav army, one of the most powerful in Eastern Europe, and its mighty tank corps was fought to a standstill by the heroic Slovene guerrillas, who beat back the Yugoslav army and inflicted unacceptable losses. Once again, as in all guerrilla victories, the key was ardent, virtual unanimous support by the Slovene people in defense of their freedom against a hated external force, as well as intimate knowledge of the terrain by the guerrillas. Moreover, the conscripted Yugoslav soldiers, generally not Serbs, deserted in droves, or surrendered under fire.

By early July, the more moderate Serb who is defense minister of Yugoslavia, Veljko Kadijevic, threw in the towel, and admitted that the operation against Slovenia had been a big mistake. Assessing the situation in mid-July, the Yugoslav military came to the conclusion that it faced only two choices: either occupying every inch of Slovenia and preparing to massacre the entire population, or withdrawing totally and allowing the Slovenes to decide their own fate. Almost unanimously, they decided that withdrawal was the only way; even the Serb fanatics concluded that letting the Slovenes go would allow them to concentrate more closely on the even more hated Croats. And the Slovenes, who before the battle had been willing to settle for sovereignty within a loose Yugoslav confederation, were now both embittered by the Serb aggression and emboldened by their heroic victory against far superior numbers and firepower. A free Slovenia had been baptized in blood, and the die appeared to be cast.

During the 1980s, and long before the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, I had the occasion to visit Slovenia, and fell in love with the land and its people. I was able to stay in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in a Holiday Inn, unique in the then-Communist bloc. Holiday Inn enjoyed a strange co-ownership arrangement with an old “people’s owned” Communist hotel, which literally surrounded the Holiday Inn. While eating dinner in a Ljubljana restaurant, I was surrounded by charming young people who saw that I was western, and peppered me with questions about life in the United States. (Needless to say, we spoke in English, since I knew no Slovenian.) I tried to tell them that they were better off than the Soviet-dominated countries, but they were hearing none of it. They all found life in Communist Yugoslavia “boring,” and they longed to get out to the West.

Welcome, Slovenia, and bless you. You are now part of the West, and no thanks to George Bush et al. You won your freedom, like the American revolutionaries, both with ideology and with the sword.

THE CYPRUS QUESTION

November 1991

Now that George Bush has offered to help solve the long-standing Cyprus Question, it is high time to review what this problem is all abort. In the first place, even though there are now two Cyprus Republics, there is no such thing as a Cypriot nation or language or culture. Whether there are one or two Cyprus Republics, they are still only artificial creations.

In the first place, Cyprus is one of the numerous, mainly Greek-populated, islands that dot the eastern Mediterranean. However, since the island of Cyprus is only 44 miles from Turkey, the island is 80 percent Greek (in the southern and central part of the island) but 18 percent Turk (in the north). The island of Cyprus had long been occupied by British imperialism. When Britain decided to divest itself of the island in 1960, it created as a replacement an independent Republic of Cyprus. Now, the point is that neither the Greeks nor the Turks thought of or think of themselves as “Cypriot” in nationality or culture, or in anything except mere geography. The Greek Cypriots had only one thought on their minds: the age-old desire for enosis (union) with the Greek motherland. Unfortunately, the Brits (backed by the U.S.) had other objectives, such as an elusive balance of power, in mind. The British installed as head of the Cypriot Republic Archbishop Makarios, formerly a beloved spokesman for enosis, but now widely regarded as a sellout of the cause. General George Grivas took to the hills to engage in pro-enosis guerrilla warfare. Finally, in 1974, the pro-Greek guerrillas (backed by the Greek government) were able to throw out Makarios and to seize power. But immediately, the Turkish government, fearing for its Turkish brethren at the hands of a militant Greek government, invaded Cyprus, and occupied the northern 40 percent of the island.

Since 1974, the forces on Cyprus have existed in uneasy stasis. The Cypriot Republic backed off from enosis, while the Turks established a Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983. But the Northern Cyprus Republic is only recognized by Turkey, and it subsists by the backing of 29,000 Turkish troops remaining in northern Cyprus.

Undoubtedly, Bush’s instincts would be to impose a unitary Cyprus Republic, with guarantees for the Turkish minority, but that was precisely the failed plan imposed by the outgoing British in 1960. Greeks and Turks have hated each other with a purple passion for centuries, and it is absurd to believe that the Turks will ever again fall for being a minority within a unitary Greek state. Actually, ratifying the status quo would not be a bad solution, while also allowing the Greek Cypriots their cherished dream of enosis with Greece. Why not have a separate Northern Cyprus Republic for the Turks? The Turkish zone now is almost totally Turk, and likewise for the Greek zone. The big problem, however, is that when the Turks invaded Cyprus in 1974 they were, as usually happens in these matters, interested less in ethnic justice than in helping out their own ethnic comrades. As a result, they grabbed far too much territory, ensuring that the excess land would be Greek-free by forcibly ejecting 200,000 Greeks from their northern zone. Justice would require the Turks allowing the Greek expellees back into their homes, compensating them for their losses and even reducing the extent of Northern Republic territory and transferring the excess land into the Greek zone. The chances of the Turks agreeing to any such plan—they who are deeply convinced that the only good Greek is a dead Greek—are of course minimal.

The chances, indeed, are not good that George Bush will somehow blunder into a solution to the Cyprus problem. Already the New York Times reports that “Mr. Bush seemed taken aback when he was asked by a Greek reporter why he did not ‘liberate’ Cyprus from the Turkish troops, as he ‘liberated’ Kuwait.” But while the Cyprus Question might not get closer to a solution, we can be assured that before this episode is over a lot of U.S. taxpayer money is going to get funneled into all countries involved.

EX-CZECHOSLOVAKIA

September 1992

We at Triple R were among the first to hail the breakup of that misbegotten whelp of Versailles: the “country” called Yugoslavia. The inherent lie of such a country is now exposed to all the world, and the phony “nation” of Yugoslavia is gone forevermore. Now we must add another hosanna: the impending collapse of the other grotesque product of Versailles tyranny: the “nation” called Czechoslovakia.

How beloved that “nation” always was, in respectable circles, in the New York Times, the Council of Foreign Relations, among all the right-thinkers and uplifters, all the certified experts that float back and forth from the CFR to the state department to various foreign policy think-tanks! At Versailles, the English, the French, and the Wilson administration set up the phony “nation” of Czechoslovakia, carved out of the beaten Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I. And just as Yugoslavia was a mask for Serb tyranny over other ethnic nationalities, so Czechoslovakia was a cover for despotism of the Czechs over other nationalities in the area: specifically, over the Sudeten Germans, Poles in the Teschen area, Hungarians in Southern Slovakia, the “Carpatho-Ruthenians” in the eastern tail (actually western Ukrainians), and in particular, the Slovaks in the eastern part of the country, west of the Carpatho-Ruthenian tail.

The difference is that the Serbs were never as incredibly beloved in the New York Times, CFR et al., as were the Czechs, and their virtually canonized leader, Dr. Tomas Mazaryk. And just as the Croat desire for independence and freedom from Serb oppression was (and still is) denounced in the Western Establishment press as “Nazi,” so too the Slovak desire for independence and getting out from under the Czechs was attacked similarly.

There were other similarities. Whereas the Czechs are part Protestant, part Catholic, and secularist in their old ruling elite, the Slovaks were solidly Catholic—as are the Croats. And when Germany occupied these countries during World War II, it granted independence to Slovakia, under Monsignor Tito, as they did to the Croat Ustashi government. Both small countries were quasi-puppets of the Germans, although Tito was far more independent of the Nazis. In both cases, the Germans trusted neither the Serbs nor the Czechs, and hence kept them under protectorates or under direct occupation.

After World War II, Soviet occupation drove out the Sudeten Germans, in quasi-genocidal fashion; Poland kept Teschen; and Carpatho-Ruthenia was, sensibly, incorporated into Ukraine. This left the Czechs, Slovaks, and some Hungarians, with the Czechs continuing to dominate under Communism.

But now, with the collapse of Communism and the advent of national freedom, the Slovaks, at long last, are demanding their freedom from Czech rule; such trivia as changing the name to include a hyphen; “Czechoslovakia,” proved scarcely enough to satisfy Slovak demands.

The difference is that the Czechs are not Serbs, and also that the Czechs now have probably the most genuinely free-market government in all of Eastern Europe; hence, the Czechs are setting an example for all such ethnic struggles by having the sense of justice, and the simple magnanimity, to take national self-determination seriously, and to agree, ruefully but respecting the Slovaks’ wishes, to let the Slovaks go. Let secessionists depart: would that all attempts at secession, including that of the South in 1861, been treated the same way!

So, farewell Czechoslovakia, what took you so long? And welcome to the family of nations, Slovakia and Czechia!

THE NEW YORK TIMES COMMUNISM, AND SOUTH AFRICA

November 1992

It would of course, be absurd to call the New York Times in any sense pro-Communist. Absurd. Ridiculous. Daft. Surely not the Field Marshal of Establishment Left-Liberalism. And yet, and yet...

Take the recent thinkpiece in the Sunday New York Times (the day for thinkpieces) by top Timesman Bill Keller, “South Africa’s Communists Navigate a New Politics” (Sept. 20). The entire article is devoted to praising the merits, the intelligence, the downright lovability, of the Communist Party of South Africa, a possibly guiding powerhouse within the leftist African National Congress that is poised to take over the Republic of South Africa.

The article features the greatness of one Chris Hani, General Secretary of the South African CP, who, unlike most Communist leaders in our “post-Soviet world” is “not geriatric, irrelevant or former.” Hani, whose picture is featured in the article—looking suitably young and thoughtful—has won an “enthusiastic young following” among blacks. Keller admits that the Communist Party exerts disproportionate influence within the ANC. Even though the CP has a membership of only 35,000 out of a million members in the ANC, somehow it has managed to acquire “at least” 10 of the 26 seats on the ANC’s national working committee, its main policy body. But Keller tries hard to trivialize this disproportion, attributing it to the nobility, the heroism of the CP leaders as individuals. The Timesman quotes a South African political scientist that “the reason so many (Communists) have risen to leadership positions, is that they’ve done the fighting and dying. It’s not necessarily their credentials as socialists.” Well, whew! That’s a relief!

Besides, reports Keller, the CP has really been agood influence within the black movement in South Africa. “The Communists,” Keller notes, “are generally credited with persuading the African National Congress to adopt a nonracial policy in the 1950s.” Keller then quotes “Mr. Hani”: “We contributed to the elimination of narrow nationalism, of South Africa for the blacks only,” adding that “we also brought into the ANC the culture of militancy, of sacrifice.”

Well, gee, those Commies are really wonderful, harmonious, noble, multiracial idealists, aren’t they? What a lovable bunch! It’s also remarkable how, under the Times gende aegis, seventy-five years of butchery, of despotism, of enslavement, of mass murder of scores of millions on an unprecedented scale, all this monstrous record of world Communism, just simply washes away. History and memory disappear, and we are back in the most naive fantasies of the Western fellow travelers of the 1930s, those fools and liars who whitewashed the Communists’ black record. More than a half-century after the lies of New York Times Soviet “expert” Walter Duranty about the Soviet Union lies, for which the Times has never deigned to apologize, all this guff that we had thought was gone is back—at least when the Commies possess a color that is politically correct.

Another piece of Keller naiveté is his excited discovery that the CP of South Africa admits its past error, one of its top ideologists admitting that the Party had been too reflexive in supporting the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. “We are living down a sort of ignoble recent past,” said this theoretician. Darn nice of him to rethink his “sort of ignoble” past, isn’t it? Keller also notes that there are many factions within this small but highly influential CP, ranging from “neo-Stalinists” to “moderates” akin to the British Labor Party. Keller doesn’t seem to realize that CPs almost always have many factions within them, especially when they are not in power.

And yet, despite this manifest moderation and lovability of the CP, the Timesman laments that President de Klerk, from whom so much has been expected in his drive to divest the white regime of power, has, in recent weeks, gone back on this policy and has “hammered with rising fury at the theme of Communist influence.” Why has de Klerk suddenly started worrying about Commies? This harks back to the September march of the ANC upon the autonomous black republic of Ciskei. The ANC, angry at the rule over Ciskei by the conservative black Brigadier Gqozo, has voted to overthrow Gqozo, and organized the march on Ciskei’s borders to step up the pressure and to threaten an invasion. President de Klerk is exercised by the fact that the march, which led Gqozo’s troops to shoot and kill two dozen marchers in defense of their country, was led by the notorious militant Ronnie Kasrils, member of the governing committees of both the ANC and the Communist Party.

One would think that de Klerk had a point in worrying about Kasrils and the Communist influence. But not to Mr. Keller, who regards de Klerk’s warnings as merely a cynical way to “sow division in the black alliance and frighten voters” away from supporting the ANC. And, of course, we wouldn’t want any of that, would we?

The culmination of Keller’s nonsensical position is to warn that de Klerk’s strategy is “risky,” for de Klerk, by “raising the Communist specter,” will frighten off foreign investment and polarize the country. As if the specter of a leftist government with powerful Communists within it is not enough to scare foreign investors!

Keller concludes by discussing the relationship of ANC President Nelson Mandela, than whom there is no one more beloved in the left-liberal press, with the Communist Party. Mandela, Keller assures us, is not a Communist; in fact, the ANC is getting ever more respectful of private property. (Yeah, sure. Tell us another one, Bill.) But we have to realize that Mandela is “wedded to the Communists by personal and political loyalties” of half a century. Well, sure, of course, good old loyal Nelson. And, in a particularly neat touch by Keller, Mandela’s partnership with the Commies “helps protect (him) against charges...that he is drifting comfortably into compromise, forsaking his roots.” Well, sure, we wouldn’t want Mandela to forsake his militant Commie roots, now would we?

Besides, Keller ends wistfully, an ultimate split between the ANC and CP is inevitable. Communists seem more comfortable as “outsiders” than running the country (wanna bet, Bill?) and besides, the CP’s “ultimate goal” is “an economy dominated by public ownership and large-scale redistribution of wealth.”

An interesting portrayal of Communism’s “ultimate goal.” No mention, of course, of murdering dissenters, totalitarianism, slave labor camps, and all the rest. No: just a little more socialism and redistributionism than Mandela or Keller would want. In short, Communists are wonderful, heroic, self-sacrificing idealists who want a bit more socialism than Mandela or Social Democrats, the Mensheviks or the New York Times. There are several morals to this little tale. One is that, just because Communism disintegrated in the USSR and Eastern Europe does not mean that we should abandon our insights into the evils of Communism. There are still Commies around. In fact, the end of the Cold War makes “red-baiting” less dangerous because it can no longer be used as a cover for a warmongering, interventionist foreign policy, for a foreign policy designed to spread social democracy throughout the globe.

And secondly, Mr. Keller’s piece is testimony to the fact that the illusions about Commies as heroic idealists, which we thought had died along with Duranty and the myth of the Chinese Communists as “agrarian reformers,” are still all too prevalent.

And finally, if we needed yet another demonstration, that there is, down deep, not very much difference, after all, between Communism and Social Democracy, between Bolshevism and Menshevism.

ETHNIC FURY IN THE CAUCASUS:
SORTING IT OUT

February 1993

The Caucasus, as usual, is aflame, and we are in danger of forgetting about this little mountainous region in our absorption with Bosnia and Somalia. I dare say that there are more ethnic nationalities per square inch there than any other place in the world, and, having learned about each other and rubbed elbows for many centuries, they are all out to cut each other’s throats. World peace through understanding? Hah!

We all know about the fierce Armenian-Azeri struggle, with the Armenian stronghold of Nagomo (Mountain)-Karabakh locked as an enclave within Azerbaijan. So let us skip over that one.

Let us start by focusing on the Western Establishment’s favorite Man-in-the-Caucasus, the incredibly beloved (in the U.S., that is) Georgian, Eduard Shevardnadze.

Shevardnadze, once Gorby’s right-hand man as foreign minister, charmed his way into the hearts of the U.S. media and diplomatic corps, his greatest asset being the fact that he had converted from Communism to Social Democracy. How much better could he be? After Gorby was booted out, “Shevy” went back to take control of Georgia, by engineering the ouster of Georgian strongman Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

Gamsakhurdia’s sin was to be elected as head of Georgia as a nationalist, and then to establish a dictatorship of himself and his family (“Gamsakhurdian socialism”) over the country. Shevy then led a “democratic” coup d’ etat that ousted Zviad, who retreated to his homeland and stronghold in the west of Georgia to carry on resistance and guerrilla warfare against the Shevy regime.

Enter the heroic and much-persecuted Abkhazians. Abkhazia is an autonomous republic within the northwest of the republic of Georgia. The Abkhazians are particularly exercised by the fact that they, the Abkhazians, are not masters even in their own republic, where they constitute only 18 percent of the sub-country of Abkhazia, the rest being such foreigners as the Georgians and other ethnic groups in the region.

The Abkhazians took advantage of the turmoil, and rose up against Georgian tyranny, capturing the main Abkhazian city. Shevardnadze typically forgot about his own professed devotion to ethnic national freedom, and sent an army to put down the Abkhazians, under the flimsy pretext that these were only pseudo-Abkhazians fronting for the dread Gamsakhurdia, whose region is only a few miles southward on the west coast of Georgia.

In the meanwhile, the Georgians were also suppressing another sub-nationality on their north-central border, the South Ossetians. The South Ossetians are spending their lives yearning to break away from their Georgian oppressors, and to join their brethren across the border in North Ossetia. The two halves of the Ossetian territory were arbitrarily separated by Stalin and dumped into different republics, in a typical Stalinist ploy to split and wreck peoples who were insufficiently Stalinist.

Meanwhile, on the northern border, the North Ossetians are cheek-by-jowl with another autonomous sub-republic within the Russian Federated Republic, Chechen-Ingushia. In my ignorance I had thought that this had always been the name of the region, but it turns out that Stalin—again!—had punished both the unruly Chechens and the Ingush by forcing them to merge into one sub-republic.

Now it turns out that the Ingush, in the western half of Chechen-In-gushia, had been forced to hand a chunk of their land to North Ossetia, and the Ossetians are showing no signs of giving it up. In the meanwhile, the Chechens complain that they had been shoved under the tyranny of the Ingush by Stalin’s actions.

So: to sum up the goals for ethnic justice in the Caucasus:

Nagorno-Karabakh is Armenian.

Abkhazia for the Abkhazians; Georgians Out!

Ossetia: One Land, One People, One Nation!

But: The North Ossetians must give the Ingush back their land,

And: the Ingushis must allow the Chechens out from under their tyranny.

OK, got it straight? Now all we need is for the United States to send about 500,000 troops to the Caucasus—under UN direction, of course—and in about twenty years we should be able to straighten it all out.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE HUNGARIANS?

March 1993

Since the collapse of the despotic centralizing USSR, we all know that nationality after once-submerged nationality has arisen to seek, and often achieve, ethnic justice at long last. Triple R has been in the forefront of the clamor for ethnic justice and self-government, from the Slovenes to the Abkhazians, from the Chechens to the Croats. We have tried to track all of them, and to sort out their often tangled conflicts. Generally, they have done pretty well; even the most despised and oppressed of all, the Germans, have achieved the unity of West and what was falsely called “East” Germany (actually, it was Middle Germany, and there are the lost lands to the real East, but that’s another and sadder story). But in all this reaching for a place in the sun, one oppressed and despised ethnic group remains immobile, and no one seems to care: I speak of the marvelous and ancient people, the Hungarians. No banners wave for the restoration of justice to the Hungarians; undoubtedly achievement of such justice would be inconvenient to the New World Order, an order that is grounded squarely on the “territorial integrity” of borders as they existed before 1989 or 1991; but heck, the Croats and Slovenes happily got away with such breaches in “territorial integrity,” and there is no reason why the Hungarians cannot do the same.

Just as Germany was shattered and torn apart by the monstrous Treaty of Versailles in 1919, so Hungary, also burdened with phony “war guilt” for World War I by the victorious and vengeful Entente powers (Britain and France), was carved up by the equally monstrous and corollary Treaty of Trianon the following year. In rewriting the map of Europe after World War I, the Wilsonian slogan of “national self-determination” for each ethnic group was used like the Orwellian slogan in Animal Farm: ethnic groups discovered that some were more equal than others; some ethnic groups were set by the post-war order to rule over others. Poor Hungary was shorn of fully one-third of its ethnic and linguistic brethren. And, after all the vicissitudes of the next seventy years, this situation still obtains. Hungary now is Hungary after Trianon; several hundred thousand Hungarians groan under Slovak (instead of Czech) tyranny in southern Slovakia; and the Hungarians who people the northern Vojvodina are now suffering under direct Serb rule, after previously enjoying semi-autonomous status. And most grievous of all is the status of legendary Transylvania, the land of Dracula and other classic vampires. Transylvania was torn from the Hungarian bosom at Trianon and given to “pro-Western” Romania, and Stalin put it back the same way after World War II.

Is Transylvania ethnically Hungarian or Romanian? Both nationalities are in this land, and it is obviously a matter of much dispute. The distinguished historian Bela Kiraly, a top general in Hungary who escaped to the West after the heroic and failed Revolution of 1956, told me, when I asked him about ethnic boundaries in Transylvania: “I hate to say this, but Hitler’s imposed boundary was probably about the best solution.” The point is that, during World War II, both Hungary and Romania had right-wing governments friendly to Germany, so that Hitler could afford to be “objective” and concentrate on ethnic justice between the two. Hitler granted northern Transylvania to Hungary, and southern to Romania. Friends of mine claim, however, that this shortchanged Hungary which should have obtained either the northern two-thirds, or even all, of Transylvania.

And then there is the neglected problem of Carpatho-Ruthenia, the eastern tail grabbed from Hungary by the Czechs after World War I. After World War II, this land was incorporated into the western Ukraine, Ukraine claiming that these were long-lost Ukrainians. I understand that the Ruthenians are beginning to make noises about independence, of wanting out of the Ukraine. In any case, it seems that Hungarian ethnic claims to this small area are fairly weak.

But, in any case, why is nothing more said and done about restoring Hungary? Hungary’s territory should definitely be expanded to include: southern Slovakia, the northern Vojvodina in Serbia, and something like two-thirds of Transylvania. Hungarians arise!

Of course, there are nationalist stirrings in Hungary; technically these are irredentist, dedicated to redeeming unredeemed lands lost to an ethnic nationality. The great playwright Istvan Czurka, leader of a nationalist faction of the ruling party in Hungary, is calling for such a movement. More militantly, agitation is led by the “1956 Anti-Fascist and Anti-Bolshevik Association,” headed by the artist Istvan Porubszky, who had fled to Canada after 1956. The 1956 Association is also organizing teenage youth, called the National Conservative-Thinking Boys, who listen to lectures on Hungarian history, celebrate statues of the turul, a mythological eagle-like bird that symbolizes Hungarian unity, and shout “Down with Trianon!”

Only one guess how these groups and this agitation is regarded by the “pro-Western” (i.e., Social Democrat) Hungarian establishment, plus the Social Democrats of the New York Times and the rest of the U.S. received opinion. Like all Social Democrats, who hate and revile all nationalisms except that of the U.S. and Israel, these groups fear and loathe these nationalists, the youth being denounced as “skinheads” simply because the teenage lads like to wear their hair crew-cut.

It’s clear that Hungarians will never achieve their true place in the sun so long as their rulers are more interested in currying favor with the United States government than they are in justice for themselves.

(Once again, I take the opportunity to declare that I am not a descendent of, related to, or connected in any way, with any of the ethnic groups I have celebrated in Triple R. Except in spirit, I am not Hungarian nor a Croat nor an Abkhazian.)

HUTUS vs. TUTSIS

June 1994

The mass butchery in Rwanda provides several important and instructive lessons to the American people, lessons which—surprise, surprise!—are emphatically not being pointed out by our beloved media.

In the first place, we see starkly revealed the idiocy of the New World Order and the attempt of our global social democrats to impose “democracy,” multiculturalism and multiethnicity on the entire world. The blue-helmeted troops of the United Nations, mainly French and Belgians as a legacy of Belgian imperialism in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi, have had to stand by helplessly while the massacre proceeded, and some of them were even cut down in the crossfire. So, what next, Slick Willie? Shall it be the usual American “solution”: air strikes against Hutu and/or Tutsi, or maybe send in a few hundred thousand ground troops to establish “free elections” and “human rights” in Rwanda and Burundi? Lotsaluck.

In dealing with crime, liberals like to concentrate on “root causes” rather than on crime, whereas conservatives want to zap the criminals. The two concerns are not really mutually exclusive, however; the real problem is that the liberals are concentrating on the wrong “root causes.” That is, on “poverty” or “child abuse” instead of a rotten immoral character and the factors that may give rise to such a character, e.g., lack of respect for private property, unwillingness to work, and emphasis on sort-run “kicks” instead of forethought about the future. In the Rwanda massacres, liberals are again unwilling to face the root causes: clashing tribes in a fairly small territorial area.

Contrary to myth about the “overpopulated” Third World, African density is generally very low compared to the rest of the world. The reasons are not difficult to figure out: if there is little or no capital equipment or economic development, the African land area will only support a small population. Before the European imperialism of the nineteenth century, then, various African tribes had a considerable amount of room to roam around in, without getting in each other’s hair. European imperialism, however,—British, French, German, Belgian, Portuguese—carved out and conquered land areas, creating various phony “countries,” with total disregard for the integrity of the various tribes, most of whom, as in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and nearly everywhere else, have little or nothing in common and hate each other’s guts. European imperialism, however, artificially incorporated various clashing tribes into one “country,” and, on the other hand, split up the same tribes imposing artificial “borders” within their territory. Setting the stage, of course, inevitably, for bitter conflicts and warfare after the imperialists pulled out after World War II. The manner of pulling out made things worse: for the redring European empires turned over these “countries” to Marxoid bureaucratic elites who had been detribalized and had been educated—or better, “trained”—in the Marxist-dominated elite universities of the imperial capitals: London, Paris, Brussels, or Lisbon.

The ethno-racial clashes between African tribes have been particularly murderous in Rwanda and Burundi because these two small areas are the densest in Africa. Rwanda, for example, has about seven million people in an area the size of Vermont—not a alot by Western European standards, but very dense for Africa. In this relatively small area there have lived for centuries, side by side and at each other’s throats, two very different racial tribes: the Hutu and Tutsi. The Tutsi are familiar to all those who saw the grand epic movie, King Solomon’s Mines (the 1950 version with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr); they are a tall, slender, graceful, noble-looking tribe, there called the Watusi. The Tutsi are an Ethiopid, Nilotic people. The Hutu, on the other hand, are short, squat Bantu, a closer approximation to what used to be called “Negro” in America. “Negroes” are now called “black,” but the problem here is that the skin color of both the Tutsi and the Hutu are much the same. The real issue, as in most other cases, is not skin color but various character traits of different population groups.

The crucial point is that, in both Rwanda and Burundi, Hutus and Tutsis have coexisted for centuries; the Tutsi are about 15 percent of the total population, the Hutu about 85 percent. And yet consistently, over the centuries, the Tutsi have totally dominated, and even enserfed, the Hutu. How are we to explain this consistent pattern of domination by a small minority? Could it be—dare I say it—that along with being taller, slimmer, more graceful and noble-looking, the Tutsi are far more i-n-t-e-l-l-i-g-e-n-t than the Hutu? And yet what else explains this overriding fact? Note: as a libertarian, I neither advocate nor condone the centuries-old pattern of domination by Tutsi over Hutu. I would love to see them coexist peacefully, participating in a division of labor joined together by a free market. But there is not a chance of a whoop in Hell for such a coexistence to take place. Or do you think that the UN or the U.S. or NATO or some other super-coercive force, should march into Rwanda and Burundi with millions of highly armed troops to impose a “free market” on these people, or even, God forbid, social democracy? Again, lotsa luck.

Speaking of armies and intelligence, it is a remarkable fact that the current race war was touched off by the assassination of the two Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, who were flying in a plane over the Rwanda capital—and that this assassination was perpetrated by a Tutsi rocket fired from the ground, blowing up the plane. Now here we have a fascinating high-tech innovation in assassination theory and practice.

Usually, heads of state are killed by rifle or revolver; or, sometimes by a bomb placed in a plane. But to assassinate by rocket! Wow! Looking at the recent exploits of our trillion-dollar Pentagon: dropping dud bombs on a Serbian truck, and shooting down our own helicopters over northern Iraq, maybe we should cut the military budget a lot more, and import some Tutsi engineers!