You have seen them on the evening news, the long weary lines of Christian refugees: Serbs streaming from the Krajina, Bosnia, Kosovo; Russians from Chechnya, Dagestan, and Kazakhstan. These are not the victims of some short and bitter war that strews exiles across the map of Europe for several years until they can make their way back home. Many are the symptoms of wholesale transmigrations and displacements, visible auguries of the bumpy slide from one era to another.

The Dark Ages have returned, in fact; though not the brilliant period of medieval civilization, but the earlier centuries of mass dislocations and depopulations, when the old Roman roads from Constantinople to Sardika (Sofija) to Naissus (Nis) were so deserted that the bandits patrolling them might have starved for lack of business.

As Roman power collapsed in Europe, tribes of barbarians swept through the once-civilized provinces, enslaving the citizens they could catch and driving the rest into exile. Over here, we know best the stories of the Franks, Lombards, and Anglo- Saxons who terrorized the western side of the Roman world, but farther east the Greeks and the Romanized Dacians and Illyrians suffered the onslaught of the Mongol and Turkish peoples who drove the Slavic tribes before them like so many deer running from a forest fire. The Bulgars and Avars, Patzinaks and Cumans were a more terrible and enduring scourge of the East Roman (and later the Slavic) populations than Attila had been to Gaul and Italy.

In the Balkans, the land-hungry and disorderly Slavs settled down to farming, and the Bulgars. who adopted Slavic language and customs and the religion of Constantinople, succeeded in forming a state that rivaled East Rome. But the Byzantine, Bulgar, and Serb states were all prey to the hordes of savage invaders from the steppes until the most savage of them all, the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, finally destroyed the Christian civilization of the East and subjugated the Balkans.

Like the Celts in the West, Slavs were difficult to organize. The East Roman Emperor Maurice described them as incapable of accepting a unifying authority. Apart from religious differences—Moravians and Croats were “Latin,” while Serbs, Bulgars, and Russians were “Greek”—the unity of the Slavs was made impossible by the Magyar wedge driven into their heart, and although the Hungarians, drawing upon all the cultural influences of the region, became one of the great European peoples, they effectively blocked the emergence of a larger Slavic kingdom that might have resisted the savage invaders who, in adopting Islam, added a religious dimension to their pillaging.

Enduring misery and servitude that was scarcely less disgusting than the dominion of the Turks to which their Balkan cousins were subjected, Russians and Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Poles were attacked periodically by slave-raiding Tartars who clogged the old roads with mile after brutal mile of Christian slaves. All these Eastern peoples and states —Byzantine, Serb, Hungarian, Polish, Russian—received the brunt of the Turk and Tartar invasions, protecting the ungrateful West. We no longer even remember their names—Emperor Leo III, King John Sobieski, the royal humanist Mathias Corvinus, Prince Lazar Hrebljanovic —or when we do, in the ease of the Transylvanian Vlad or Russian Ivan, we transform them into nightmare demons, Dracula and Ivan the Terrible.

The Russian saga is a story so filled with miraculous reversals of fortune that it might have been scripted by Euripides in a perversely optimistic mood. In one generation, they are being oppressed and brutalized by Tartars, and in the next dicy are reemerging as a world power. By the time simpleminded American power brokers are finished counting the Russians out, it will be time for them to go back to warning the world against the menace of the next Russian empire.

Tocqueville’s comparison of Russia with the United States has passed through so many hands that the details have been rubbed off along with the shine. There is one important difference, however. While the Russians were content, for the most part, with subduing the Tartars and limiting their capacity for violence, we short-tempered Anglo-Saxons thoroughly and permanently eliminated the national existence of most of our own “native American” Mongols. The Russians cracked down hard in the Caucasus, but no harder than we did in the once-Mexican Southwest, and whatever else can be said of American Manifest Destiny, it left comparatively few Indians or Mexicans behind to take revenge. Chechens are still causing trouble today, and not simply because they can mobilize the most violent criminal mob operating in and out of the former Soviet Union.

Americans can afford to lecture the Russians on the treatment of their conquered minorities because we have, for the most part, eliminated ours. The Russians, however, are less interested in our conquest of the North American continent events of long ago and far away, so far as they are concerned — than they are with our recent conquest of Kosovo. The Russians are very clear on American aims in Eastern Europe. Paranoid or not, they can trace the probable trajectory of the scimitar that NATO has aimed at the Russian heart: from Kosovo to Sanjak to Bosnia to Chechnya. The NATO border now reaches to Poland and Hungary, and it is no accident that NATO jets are now skimming along Russia’s western frontier. According to an Itar-Tass report, the Baltic Fleet’s anti-aircraft defense service in Kaliningrad has “detected 1100 foreign aircraft flying in the vicinity of this northwestern part of the Russian state border.”

NATO leaders are reluctant to give overt support to the Chechen rebels, though Bill Clinton has said that the Chechen people should not have to suffer simply because their leaders have staged a rebellion. President Clinton has apparently quit gloating over the photographs of dead and maimed civilians in Serbia long enough to distinguish people from their governments. Representatives of this humanitarian administration say they want to help the Chechen people without supporting their bid for independence.

To determine how far the President is willing to go, some crusading member of the Washington press corps ought to ask Mr. Clinton about the 15 tons of NATO uniforms seized by Russian customs. Labeled “men’s suits,” the uniforms were supposedly going to the U.S. military attache in Georgia—an operation with 15 employees. At 3,000 uniforms, that would mean 200 uniforms per person. Either Georgia’s winters are colder than we have been led to believe, or the uniforms were meant for the Chechen rebels who have been photographed (according to a story on www.Russian-life.com) wearing identical outfits.

The Russians have only one recourse, and that is to construct an anti-NATO alliance with China and perhaps even India. Boris Yeltsin, in a drunken fit of candor this past December, warned Bill Clinton that Russia was still a nuclear power, suggesting tactlessly that he and his Chinese friends were able to handle their part of the planet without the help of the world’s only remaining superpower. Mr. Clinton had been sounding off on one of the topics—the list is endless—about which he knows next to nothing, namely the Russian army’s campaign to suppress the rebellion in Chechnya.

According to Clinton, and to other leaders of the humane and democratic NATO alliance, the Russians are guilty of using excessive force against the Chechens. Most conservatives, as usual, agree with Clinton, and Sen. John McCain is only repeating the conventional wisdom of the past 20 years when he calls for a pro-Islamic strategy to undermine the Russian federation and prevent it from recovering its status as a world power.

The American strategy, however, is as naive as it is immoral. Forever fighting the last war, the American leaders are determined to use Islamic insurgencies against Russia the way we used Muslims in Bosnia and Albanians in Kosovo. The precedent is Afghanistan, and the terrifying consequences of our Afghan policy—which installed a green version of the Khmer Rouge in a strategically important region—are lost upon the State Department planners and intelligence experts. “What else were we supposed to do?” is their plaintive response to civilians who have the bad taste to introduce the subject.

Many Europeans know the score by now. Pretending to be shocked by the evidence that there was no genocide in Kosovo and no mass graves, journalists and politicians have denounced Clinton and Blair for their duplicity and recklessness. E.U. leaders have finally followed through on their threat to establish a separate defense force, independent of NATO, and they did not cave in to American pressure to grant NATO a sort of primae noctis right of first refusal on the use of force in Europe.

Here is the box score on the Clinton-Weekly Standard foreign policy pursued by the United States throughout the 90’s;

  • Israelis—angry at American pressure to trade land for peace.
  • Arabs—angry over America’s support for Israel and the continued air attacks and embargo that have killed over a million Iraqi civilians since the end of the Gulf War.
  • United Europe —determined to shake off the American military yoke and protect the last shreds of European economic independence.
  • India—leaders openly saying they need nuclear weapons to protect their people from American attack.
  • China—justifiably furious with what it knows (if only from the British press) to be the deliberate bombing of its embassy in Belgrade.
  • Russia—grimly determined to upgrade its armed forces and to rebuild an empire that includes Belarus and probably Ukraine.

The recent anti-Clinton riots in Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria may be just the beginning, because the “Clinton Doctrine,” as our foreign affairs editor has dubbed it, has inflicted far more damage to American prestige than to the Yugoslav military.

Less than ten years after winning the Cold War, the United States is dreaded in Europe as a kind of overgrown village idiot who takes delight in smashing up the porcelain at the vicar’s tea party: Our leaders in both parties are incapable of finding European capitals on a map; they speak no foreign languages, and their knowledge of history is even less substantial than the erudition displayed by CNN talking-heads (say, Al Hunt or Eleanor Clift) when their staff has failed to check out the Groliers online encyclopedia.

However, the greatest blow has been to America’s moral reputation. Bubbling over with the platitudes of democracy and human rights, our political leaders rain death on the innocent peoples of Iraq and Serbia; repeating by rote the slogans of international free trade, they impose criminal embargoes upon Libya, Iraq, Cuba, and Yugoslavia, when everybody knows that the only effect of such embargoes is to deprive simple people of the necessities of life. And if anyone does speak out in lawful protest, he is immediately labeled an anti-American leftist. When Pat Buchanan finally came out against economic sanctions as acts of war, he was denounced as a friend of dictators by longtime Republican operative (and current Donald Trump advisor) Roger Stone. My people, my people, as Zora Neale Hurston used to say.

Even the American clergy have lost their humanity. When I was quoted recently in the Nation to the effect that the United States was becoming an evil empire, a liberal cleric who has displayed no serious interest in foreign policy denounced the statement as “repugnant.” In fact, there is a swelling chorus of bloodthirsty cheers for NATO chanted by the very leftists who took part in illegal demonstrations against the Vietnam War. They were delighted when Martin Luther King, Jr., told African-American soldiers not to fight the white man’s war against a colored nation in Asia, but they call for the rack and the iron maiden when conservatives appeal to the conscience of their fellow citizens.

There is no paradox: These people supported international socialism in the 1960’s, when it was espoused by the Soviet Union, but now that the U.S.S.R. has disintegrated and Clinton’s emerging U.S.S.A. has taken up the Brezhnev mantel, leftwing globalists (many of whom prefer to be called conservatives) have discovered that aerial bombardment of civilians is a virtuous display of patriotism.

Meanwhile, the refugees from NATO continue on their weary way. Belgrade is overflowing with the victims of the American attack on Kosovo and the American-Croat expulsion of the Krajina Serbs. Western relief experts estimate that as much as ten percent of the Serbian population is literally starving to death. Refugees from U.S./NATO policies are bringing killer strains of TB and even the Black Death into the American heartland.

The Dark Ages are back, and the Eastern parts of Christendom are being overrun by barbarian invasions. This time, however, the invaders are sent and paid for by a country that used to be both Christian and republican. If we have any power as citizens over American foreign policy, it is not through marches and demonstrations but through our votes; every two years for a congressman, every four years for the president, every six for a senator. It is time to retire the Democrats and to send every Republican collaborator back home where he can find out what his votes in Congress are doing to his constituents.

What is a practical litmus test for Christians? Most might say abortion, but whatever they do, presidents and congressmen will never be able to prevent an evil woman from killing her baby; they can, however, refuse to murder European Christians. If George Bush will promise to bring home the boys and girls and to give up this foolish and evil dream of world empire, go ahead and vote for him, even if you think he may be lying. If, on the other hand, he will promise only to be Clinton-and-a-half—a Rehoboam to Clinton’s Solomon—then Christians who can think for themselves are free to answer: “Every man to your tents, O Israel,” and to find new leaders and new parties that will call a halt from this insane march to our destruction.