Basically, the Yugoslav problem is simple: it is a war of vanities, of various ethnic and religious groups vying for supremacy. If this sounds familiar to American and other Western readers, the parallel is intentional: after all, it was Tito, the arch-communist, who first implemented the New World Order of former President George Bush, of Henry Kissinger and the Trilateral Commission, and of the vintage Council on Foreign Relations. All the necessary components were there, in the Yugoslavia of 1945 to 1991; socialism (communism), obligatory internationalism (the “Salad Bowl” concept), a bureaucratic structure to keep the balance between the warring factions (a huge federal, state, and municipal administration), phony humanism and fake “democracy” (Hp service to the various liberal holy causes, such as “sharing and caring,” “compassion,” “ecumenism,” etc.), with—to top it all off—an actual if informal aristocracy to oversee the whole works.

Serbs are being crucified today because they will not submit themselves to the New World Order, which they barely survived the first time around, hi 1914, there were over eight million Serbs in the Balkans—they were, by far, the largest and the most important nation in the region. Today, after two successful genocides—the Austro-Hungarian in World War I and the Croat and Muslim in World War II—the current one is proving too much for the remaining ten million Serbs: their archenemies, the Albanians, the Muslims, the Croats, the Bulgars, the Magyars, have, in some cases, doubled or tripled their populations and are being egged on by the several-times-defeated Germans, Austrians, and Turks.

On July 22, 1941, before a cheering Croat crowd, Mile Budak, a novelist and the Croat Minister of Cults and Faiths, publicly said that the Independent State of Croatia was, as a matter of state policy, going to “kill one third of [its] Serbs, convert a third to Roman Catholicism, and expel the remaining third into Serbia.” Dobroslav Paraga—once an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, today the head of HOS, a militant Croat organization—is calling for a Croat invasion of Belgrade, of the kind that made some German cities in the Thirty Years War beg for deliverance from “the Croats, the fire, and the pest.”

Apparently, the Croats, still only a third as numerous as the Serbs, are willing to ignite a world war in order to prove their eminence to themselves. For a nation that was, for almost a thousand years, the subject of Hungary, which in turn became the subject of Austria, the Croats’ claims to fame are curious. According to their own centuries-old propaganda, they are one of the foremost nations of the world and have contributed mightily to the pool of the world’s knowledge and artistic accomplishment. Instrumentalized by pan-German imperialism (during World War II, some Croat historians sought their national origins among the Goths), as well as by expansionist Roman Catholicism, the Croats have so far committed unpardonable crimes against their neighbors, the Serbs. During the last 150 years, under Austro-Hungarian aegis, they have converted over a million Serbs to Roman Catholicism, renaming them “Croats” in the process. (Croat national doctrine does not recognize the existence of Roman Catholic Serbs, as, for instance, the inhabitants of Dubrovnik and some other coastal cities, until quite recently, used to call themselves.)

To facilitate the transmutation of their Slavic neighbors into “Croats,” they also took a Herzegovinian Serb dialect for their literary language, though very few Croats spoke it as their own. (Native Croat dialects are the Slovene-like Kajkavski, spoken around Zagreb, and Ikavski and Cakavski, spoken on the Adriatic Coast, while Stekavski—today’s official Croatian—is an eminently Serb language, spoken by at least three-quarters of all Serbs.) Worst of all, from the Serb point of view, the Croats have transferred their sins upon us, blaming us for what they did—and are still doing—to us, making use of an opportune crack in the fabric of this planet’s sanity and misperceived self-interest.

The Serbs were the first—and the only —Balkan people to free themselves from the Ottomans through their own efforts (the Greeks and the Bulgarians achieved their liberation with British and Russian aid). In fact, the Serbs threw off the Turkish yoke despite long-standing British, French, and Austrian support of their Asiatic occupiers. Such historical tenacity should, in the case of normal reasoning, give pause to those who have written the Serbs off so easily because of their recent stumbling through the bog of communist insanity, foisted upon them—at Teheran and Yalta—by Joseph Stalin and a compliant West. There would have been no World War I had legitimate Serb claims to Serb Bosnia been taken into account. Gavrilo Princip, then, would not have felt forced to fire his bullet into Franz Ferdinand, and there would have been no Russian Revolution, no World War II, no Cold War, none of all this that’s killing us today.

When in 1991, exactly 50 years after the first Jasenovac death camp, the Croats began brandishing their World War II checkerboard flags and singing songs like “Who needs the dark red wine / When Serb blood is just as fine!” the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia—a quarter of all the existing Serbs—had little choice but to prepare for the worst. The war itself, however, was started by Croat President Franjo Tudjman, who in a recent public speech stated that “Croatia could have accepted the reordering of the Yugoslav Federation, but, without war, we would not have got our independence.”

As for the Jasenovac Memorial Museum itself, it has been sacked by the Croat Army, and all its exhibits of the Serb, the Jewish, and the Gypsy holocausts have been obliterated. Unfortunately for the Ustashi, a substantial Jasenovac archive still exists in Banja Luka, a Bosnian city under Serb control. Franjo Tudjman had plans to remake the museum into a “memorial for all the dead in World War II” (for the Ustashi and their victims or, more explicitly, for the Ustashi headsman, Pero Brzica, and the 1,350 Serbs he had butchered in a single night, to set a record and win a wager he had made with his pals). It would be interesting to speculate how Jews would have reacted had someone suggested, say, that Auschwitz be refashioned into a monument to the murdered Jews and their SS executioners, but such an idea is still to be tested, as the whole episode with Jasenovac is vet to be reported by the Western media.

In their cover-up of their World War II magnum crimen against humanity (or, at least, its Serb component), the Croats have taken the tack chosen only by the Turks in their denial of the Armenian genocide. Three million Armenian men, women, and children were massacred by the Turkish Army, Turkish authorities, and Kurdish irregulars in 1915, while the West kept silent (except for a few isolated voices, such as Theodore Roosevelt’s). Eighty years after this extensively—and intensively—documented event, the Turkish government, as well as Turkish public figures, men of learning, historians, and poets, all deny that it took place at all. This denial has caused an endemic Armenian terrorism whose sole aim is to force the Turks—a nation whose historic record in the countries it has occupied is notorious—to admit their deed. For those in the West who lecture the Armenians, and the Serbs, on the pastness of history while at the same time airing daily newscasts reminiscing about the Battle of Britain, or the victory at el-Alamein, or, still more indicatively, carefully refraining from even suggesting to Jews that their past has no bearing on the present, the Serb and Armenian plight should give some food for thought.

Would I—a 47-year-old with back trouble and a record of pulmonary TB—have taken a rifle and gone, bundled up in a Yugoslav Army standard-issue field jacket, to defend Serb Kraina had no history taken place? Would I, instead of completing my short stories and novels, piled up two feet thick on my desk after a 20-year communist ban on my writing, have taken the pen to write this account, about something almost banal to my people but (intentionally, it seems) unknown to the “Free World,” had no “history” occurred?

In Kraina, and in Bosnia, I have seen the best of my nation live—and die—to keep vigorous the spirit of what has made Europe, and the West in general, great. Gentle of bearing but ferocious in battle, the Kraina soldiers who helped me clean and assemble my automatic rifle on a position overlooking the blue Adriatic Sea are an assurance—to me and to the West—that in the next war between us and them who would disinherit us—all those racially, socially, religiously, ethnically, and economically overconscious masses of what is euphemistically called the Third and Fourth World—there will stand a dam, a pale, a manned bastion whose guard never sleeps nor sinks into frivolous complacency.

So far, Serbs have held back from becoming an imperial people. Like the Armenians, their greatest shortcoming seems to be the misfortune to live athwart important strategic communications, an involuntary obstacle to the imperial expansion of others: Germans, in the case of the Serbs, and Turks, in the case of the Armenians. But all this may change: those like the Croats and the Albanians who have let the genie out of the bottle may yet prod the Serbs—a nation that, in the time of the Black Prince of England, numbered, like the English, 4 million souls—to turn protectively imperialist and to claim for themselves the whole territory of the former Yugoslavia, without ever again sharing it with anyone.

So far, Serbs have restrained themselves from assimilating, annihilating, or banishing others on their territory: Greeks, Bulgars, Magyars, Croats, Muslims, and Albanians have, until the time of this writing, lived side by side with Serbs, never having to suffer for it. So far, others have taken from the Serb national being to augment their numbers and importance (north Albanian genealogies, for example, invariably mention their Rascian, Serb origin; Croats have, with Austro-Hungarian help, Croatized large segments of Dalmatian and Herzegovinian Serbs; Magyars have Magyarized Voivodina Serbs; Muslims still bear their Serb ancestors’ surnames; Macedonians have only decades ago, by Tito government edict, Bulgarized their Serb family names, etc.), but all this might change; never, since Ottoman times, have the Serbs been so backed up to a wall, and they don’t like it one whit.

In 1922, Lloyd George suggested that Serbian troops take Constantinople, as a move against Mustafa Atatürk. Then, Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic declined, saying that the Serb’s 1912 victory over the Turks at Kumanovo in Macedonia was ample revenge for the 1389 Kosovo defeat. Now, however, judging by the mood of the Serb fighters I have seen on the various battlegrounds of the latest pan-Serb War for Survival, our enemies—and their protectors and tutors—might come to rue the day when Serb contemplativeness and leisure of spirit were mistaken for weakness and servility.

Kraina Serbs—part of the great Dinaric Serb population—are, according to anthropological, ethnological, and historical evidence, as Welsh (Vlach) as the men of the hills around Cardiff. The Dinaric Alps population has not—physically, mentally, or otherwise—changed much from the time of the legend of the dragon-spawned warriors of Cadmus. Montenegrin and Herzegovinian Serbs are still the tallest and the toughest people of Europe, and among the foremost military nations of the world. Their Slavic (i.e., Serb) overcoat only complements their great Celtic Voloch core: the Highland Fling is a Montenegrin dance as well, the bagpipes a Dalmatian Serb instrument too, heroic folk poetry singing of border feuds and cattle raids their staff of life still, all in a region boasting such place names as Tara (a mountain and a river), Boan (a town named after BoAn, the Celtic goddess of waters), Bojana River (from the Boyne), Bribir, Skradin, Krk, Kupa, and others. Called the Mauro Vlachs by the Byzantines and the Venetians, or just (contemptuously) Vlachs by the Croats and the Muslims, the Moriochs of Kraina so mesmerized H.G. Wells that he named a future race of cannibalistic troglodytes after them. This reputation the Kraina Serbs certainly did not deserve: H.G. Wells’s unwed wife Rebecca West correctly saw the historical, maligned Uskoks as victims of the Great Powers’ machinations, much as today.

A measure of the Serb spirit may he gathered from the fact that the Balkan Volochs chose to become Serb, instead of Croat or Muslim. Among the Slavs—and their ancient Iranian aristocracy (the original Serbs of Pliny)—they saw a kindred, aristocratic people, interested in honor much more than profit. The free herders of the carst thus turned Serb, while the Romance population of the coastal towns became both Croat and Serb: Croat for those who found consolation in belonging to the Universal Church and a Universal Empire and Serb for those who rejoiced in being just as God had created them.

The few Volochs—and many more Slavs—who accepted Islam sought, in all probability, merely a respite from the impalements, the beheadings, the house and village burnings, the eternal rapes and pillages that marked Ottoman rule. Turkic terror, refined over the millennia, has sometimes mistakenly impressed even American servicemen, who have interpreted it as a sign of military valor, not of what it really signified—an Oriental desperation, desponding of any sense to life, except for the mad, heedless dash toward might, glory, and power.

To search for a regional, even a European, solution to the Balkans’ ethnic, religious, and other conflicts, without taking into account their genesis, and their historical justice, is insane. Only a Doomsday “International Community,” run by people unwilling to concede that “bygones” are an inescapable part of the “present” as well as of the “future,” could have committed such an array of sins and crimes as inform the present Western policy toward Yugoslavia.

Moreover, to seek solutions that ride roughshod over Serb national interests— as the West does today—is to court at least failure, if not outright disaster. (The Austrians, among others, tried that twice—in World War I and II.) For any calculations about “containing” the Serbs by using their ancient enemies—the Austrian Germans, the Hungarians, the Croats, the renegade Muslims, the Bulgarians, the Turks, and the Albanians—are a tally without the final word of the innkeeper—in this case, the Serb nation.

What should the Serbs be “contained” from? Is it from reaching their just goal of living in a single state that ensures their biological survival, as the so readily destroyed Yugoslavia used to be? The “International Community” (a euphemism, mostly, for Germany) has given the Croats a state that includes a million Serbs—a quarter of Croatia’s population—within borders arbitrarily drawn by Tito, while “Bosnians” (only the Roman Catholics and the Muslims) are awarded “sovereignty” over an additional million-and-a-half Serbs—close to 40 percent of that state’s inhabitants. Yet Serbs are not allowed to have what they have already achieved, by their military valor and long-term sacrifice, through two internationally recognized former Yugoslavias. If the hodgepodge of Bosnia can exist as a viable “state,” then, compared to that, a Yugoslavia, any Yugoslavia, is a unified nation. Even the much-maligned “Greater” Serbia would be less multinational, less multiconfessional, less multicultural, than the chaotic Bosnia and Herzegovina of the Champion of Islam, Alija Izetbegovie.

In a sense, Serbs should be eternally grateful to the Croat autocrat, Franjo Tudjman, and to the Slovene demagogue, Milan Kucan—both former top Tito cadres and communist officials of the highest rank—for awakening the Serbs’ nationalism and reinforcing their will to survive. Had not this madness come about, in all likelihood Serb liberal intellectuals and the Serb effete, communist-bred elite, would have emasculated the Serb national spirit, in keeping with the best intentions of the architects of the New World Order. The Serbs, then, would have become just a regional designation, much the same as the Scots, who have ended up a mere name for the inhabitants of a country once as Celtic as Serb Kraina.

The Germans, who call all the Romance peoples “Welsh,” and the Russians, who so call the Poles, settlers of the original European Celtic homeland, certainly know who the Voloch (Volcae) were. As in the ease of the Serbs—the hated Wends of their genocidal past—they would that there were no history, or, at least, that they could rewrite it, more to their present democratic, human-rights-concerned liking.

What the Americans could do is to start thinking at least a few years ahead, instead of jerking their knees according to the political dictates of the moment. Though the world is governed by interest, Americans should strive toward a perception of enlightened self-interest, usually called friendship, among the more traditional peoples and men. Perhaps the reasons that made, say, the French become historic friends of the Americans—as the Serbs and the Greeks are their friends in the Balkans—will again reassert themselves, for the cause of mutual survival. In the cacophony of liberal babble, of endless and proliferating “rights,” false “issues,” and interchangeable media crusades (as unjust as they are foolish, unworthy, and forgettable) friends in certain-to-come need might prove to be a scarce commodity. To search for such “friends” among historically anti-American and anti-Western nations like the Bosnian Muslims, the Muslim Albanians, the Teuton-loving Croats, and the autistic Magyars, not to mention the Oriental Bulgars, is truly a puzzling decision. For war there shall be as long as there are men, and wise nations and people keep that in mind when laying the groundwork for their national well-being, not to say survival.

In Kraina, among the men who love to joke, gamble, sing, fight, or just gab a little, the knowledge of what is and what is not is precise, certain, and well-worn. The Kraina Serbs can hear American cargo planes flying over their stone hamlets, on their way to drop “humanitarian aid” to their ancient foes, the “Turks” of Bosnia. Ljubo Urukalo, a dark-eyed, white-toothed young soldier, whose uncle the present-day Croat Ustashi have cut up into six pieces (the dead man was buried where he was found, so his mother would never learn of how he died), has a one-year-old son. Urukalo’s son is a tiny, dark-eyed baby, crawling over a tended green lawn, in a small village on the carst-plateau. Among them, I smile and feel like a human being: no one asks anything of me, except my presence and my good spirits.

That, it seems, I have given them as an armed volunteer from Serbia. I sit in the enclosed yard and drink brandy with the Frontiersmen, a potent, clear liquid, akin to the Italian grappa. We finger our rifles—everyone carries one, the young and the old, many women as well—and watch the western sky, where the Croat coastal batteries sound off, pounding our villages, our women, and our children.

It will be a long war, because someone in Belgrade has forgotten that Serbs are a warrior people, not a nation of merchants—or negotiators—like the compatriots of Vance and Owen. After all, what is there to negotiate if someone wants to do us in? Let him come and get us, we won’t mind, providing he’s willing to pay the price. So far, no one in this world has been rich enough—in men, money, and hate—to win out over us, no matter how fervent his desire.

 

You can read Part I here.