Category Archives: Modern History

Peculiar Nationalism: A New World Disorder

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Modern History

 

I have already mentioned that the entities that broke out of the disintegrating Yugoslavia were not nations. They were something less than that. Yet, the people in those states were infused with nationalism for their little states.

 

Many outsiders assume that all Balkan peoples are inevitably nationalistic, but that is not true.  Many of them lamented the loss of the old Yugoslavia with its federal state where all ethnic differences were suppressed in favor of the unity of brotherhood. Many of them liked Coca Cola Communism.

 

Too many people around the world thought that the collapse of Communist states would bring a “new world order.”  Remember that quaint expression of George H.W. Bush?  What a foolish expectation!  What we got was a new world disorder. Most of us, around the world,  believed that the fall of communism would lead inevitably to a new order of nation states, hopefully free and democratic, when they were released from what Ignatieff called the “senile grip of Soviets.” Naively people assumed that self-determination meant peace and freedom.  Instead, in Yugoslavia at least, it meant savagery and nation destroying.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“We assumed that national self-determination had to mean freedom and that nationalism meant nation building.  As usual, we were wrong.  We hoped for order.  We got pandemonium. In the name of nationalism, dozens of viable nation-states have been shattered beyond repair.  In the name of state building, we have returned large portions of Europe to the pre-political chaos prior to the emergence of the modern state.

 

Large portions of the former Yugoslavia are now ruled by figures that have not been seen in Europe since late medieval times; the warlords.  They appear wherever nation states disintegrate: in Lebanon, Somalia, northern India, Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia. With their car phones, faxes, and exquisite personal weaponry, they look postmodern, but the reality is pure medieval…”

 

Of course, since Michael Ignatieff wrote that in 1994 the same thing has happened in many other places around the world and is threatening again to happen in many more. Even countries we long thought of as solemn and steady have shown uncomfortable wobbliness.

We seem headed for dangerous times. No that’s wrong; we are in dangerous times.

Brothers at Each Other’s Throats

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Democracy, Extremism, Fear, Hate, Modern History, Pluralism, Polarization, Populism

 

The problem in the north of Yugoslavia was not so much resurfacing of ancient hatreds, or religious or linguistic differences, as it was economic nationalism. The northerners were producing most of the wealth of the country and felt that much of this wealth was being siphoned off by their poorer southern cousins. They were starting to believe in the north that they would all be better off as independent countries. Sounds a lot like Alberta doesn’t it? Resentment is often fuel of strife.

 

The Communist leader, Tito, had managed to suppress such serious criticisms during his life time, but as soon as he was gone such critiques flourished.

The economy of Yugoslavia had seriously unraveled during the 1980s.  The country moved into hyperinflation.  By 1989 the inflation rate was 1,240 % and rising.  These were conditions in which tensions were incubated into vigorously nasty animosities. As Tony Judt another brilliant historian said, in his book about Europe after the Second World War, “the growing distaste for feckless southerners was ethnically indiscriminate and based not on nationality but on economics.”

 

The ruling centres of former communist enclaves in Belgrade, Serbia, were also spectacularly corrupt. When these led to financial ruin, the people were ready to revolt.  These feelings were intensified by fears that a small group of former Communist apparatchiks coalescing around the brute Slobodan Milošević were planning to make a bid for power in the political vacuum that followed Tito’s death.  That is exactly what happened. He gained power by arousing and manipulating Serb national emotions.  Like Trump decades later, he was a master of that. Many Communist leaders had tried similar tactics in other countries.  As Judt said, “In the era of Gorbachev, with the ideological legitimacy of Communism and its ruling party waning fast, patriotism offered an alternative way of securing a hold on power.” Or as Samuel Johnson said, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

 

In Yugoslavia however, Milošević and his cronies encouraged nationalist meetings at which the insignia of wartime Chetniks were on public display and this aroused deep disquiet among those groups that had been abused by the Chetniks during the war. The Chetniks were the Serbs who had fought on the side of Hitler during the war, using that opportunity to commit mayhem and destruction. Riding a wave of Serbian nationalism, Milošević was confirmed in power as the President of the Serbian republic in 1989.

Milošević wanted to forge a more unitary Serbian state. No more wimpy federalism. Like so many autocrats before and after him, he used nationalism as an instrument to cement his power. After all, he told his fellow Serbs, we are just taking what is rightly ours.  He could have said, I just want to make Serbia great again.

Naturally the other 4 republics were not so keen on Serbian domination. In Slovenia and Croatia, they saw only one way out from such domination, secession. Unlike other Communist countries where the former powerful Communists had no internal ethnic divisions on which to prey when their political power waned, in Serbia those divisions were exploited for the personal gain of the former Communist power brokers. As Judt said, “The country offered fertile opportunities for demagogues like Milošević, or Franjo Tudjman, his Croat counterpart.”  The problem as Judt saw it was that, “in Yugoslavia, the break-up of the federation into its constituent republics would in every case except Slovenia leave a significant minority or group of minorities stranded in someone else’s country.”  Then when one republic declared itself independent its neighbours quickly fell like dominoes.

 

Milošević was the first Yugoslav politician to break Tito’s ban on the mobilization of ethnic consciousness.’  He liked to portray himself as the defender of Yugoslavia against the secessionist longings of Croatia and Slovenia, and, ominously, as the avenger of old wrongs done to Serbs. He wanted to build a greater Serbia on the ruins of old Yugoslavia, but with Serb domination. Milošević was quite capable of inciting Serb minorities in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Kosovo to rise up and demand Serb protection.  In fact, that was his favoured technique.  The Serbs in these other republics to a large extent merely served as Milošević’s pretext for his expansionary designs.

 

Although most Serbs at the time displayed little nationalistic paranoia, and even less interest in distant Serbs, Milošević transformed their vague memories into rabid fears and paranoia that Serbs spread around the old Yugoslavia were about to be annihilated by the majority in their republics. Milošević, in other words, used these fears to further his demagogic purposes. He used the oldest trick in the playbook of wanna be autocrats–manufactured fear. Trump does it all the time.

 

Milošević did not invent the fears.  They grew up naturally when Yugoslavia disintegrated, as every national group feared they were endangered as a minority in some republic. So, for example, the Serbs, as the largest minority group in Croatia, they felt particularly vulnerable. He did not make up the fears, but he sure knew how to exploit them.

 

In the Slovene election in April of 1990 a government was elected that was still pro-Yugoslavia, but also highly critical of the Serbian government in Belgrade. In the following month of May a new nationalist party under its leader Tudjman came to power in Croatia. In December of that year Milošević seized, without authorization, 50% of the entire drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation in order to pay back pay and bonuses for federal employees. Again economics, as always, was a crucial factor in developments that often wore an ethnic or religious disguise. In January of 1991 the Slovenia government declared independence.   Within a month the Croats did the same thing. Soon the Parliament of Macedonia did the same thing.

 

The hasty recognition of the independent states by Europe, especially, Germany, perhaps were not helpful. When an independent Croatia was formed, political leaders in the Serbian capital of Belgrade began to play on the fears of Serbians with outrageous propaganda on radio and television.  This helped to invoke in the Serbs memories of massacres in World War II and prompted those Serbs to rise up in revolt against their ‘Ustache’ neighbours. The Ustache had been seen as traitors in the Second World War who supported the Nazis and did their best to exterminate the Serbs, so now the Serb minorities feared, a repeat, not entirely without  justification.

The Serb minorities in these states were deeply worried.  Clashes with authorities followed. They called upon Belgrade to help them against their ‘Ustache’ oppressors.

When Serbs were dismissed from their positions in the police force, judiciary, and military, many thought the Croats might be setting the table for another massacre. They believed they might be seeing the return of a an ethnic state with a genocidal past. Croats denied that this was the case, but there were some reasons for this angst. When Serb police were fired, Serbs armed themselves as militia. When the Croats were unable to maintain order, the Yugoslav national army, under the direction of Serbs from Belgrade stepped in at first to restore order, and later to obliterate Croatian independence. As Michael Ignatieff said, , “War was the result of an interacting spiral of Serbian expansionism, Croat independence, and Serbian ethnic paranoia in Croatia.”

 

Even though the Americans claimed to support a democratic and unified Yugoslavia, as Judt said, by then “a ‘democratic and unified Yugoslavia was an oxymoron.’” There really was no room for democracy.  Slovenia and Croatia took active measures to implement their independence by actually unilaterally seceding from the federation.  They enjoyed the tacit support of a number of European leaders.  The Serbs responded by moving the national Yugoslav army to the borders.

Although the Serbs and their army, the Yugoslav National Army bear the primary responsibility for what happened, since they hurled 150,000 shells into Croatia from the surrounding hills, but Croats were not without blame. They dynamited parts of the great city as they left so there would be nothing left for their Serb brothers. These are the type of things you can expect when all sides seem to be represented by their loudest and most extreme voices.

Unfortunately, all around us today this seems to be happening.  We had best be alert.

 

Blood and Belonging

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Modern History, Pluralism

 

This is now a quiet business street. Not long ago, it was hell on earth. It has been completely rebuilt.

The Balkans is one of the most interesting areas on the globe.  Michael Ignatieff wrote a series of excellent books that focuses a lot of attention the region, and were supplemented by some documentary films. Michael Ignatieff was a much better writer and thinker than he was a political leader. As he said in one of the series of books I mentioned, Blood and Belonging,

 

“…huge sections of the world’s population have won the ‘right-of-self-determination’ on the cruelest possible terms:  they have been simply left to fend for themselves.  Not surprisingly their nation states are collapsing… In critical zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire—notably the Balkans—populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to.  Small wonder then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.”

 

It is not good enough to blame the melee on the assertion that this area of the world was filled with sub-rational intractable fanatics.  Though it was more than its fair share of those. We have to think more deeply than that.  We have to ask why people who had lived together for decades were transformed from neighbours into enemies?  That was the crucial question that has to be answered.

 

It was that great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote about the war of all against all that occurs in the state of nature (when there is no state) and requires the creation of a state to protect all and to provide a platform for morality when all give up the means of violence in favor of the sovereign. As Ignatieff said,

 

“Thomas Hobbes would have understood Yugoslavia.  What Hobbes would say, having lived through religious civil war himself, is that when people are sufficiently afraid, they will do anything. There is one type of fear more devastating in its impact than any other: the systemic fear that arises when a state begins to collapse.  Ethnic hatred is the result of terror that arises when legitimate authority disintegrates.“

 

This was the basis of the film Civil War shown a couple of years ago, speculating what might happen in the United States if their state broke down. Not at all an impossibility. It was brutal.

 

Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, with his brand of Coca Cola Communism,  had realized that the unification of each of the 6 major Slav peoples required a strong federal state to keep it together.  Like Canada.  Who knows what would happen in Canada if the state collapsed as it did in Yugoslavia? If later any group wanted to secede it would have to deal with the minorities within in its own territory. After all, people don’t live in neatly separated enclaves.  In the case of Yugoslavia, in too many cases, this led to the forcible expulsion of whole populations.  They called it ethnic cleansing, an expression now known around the world, thanks to Yugoslavia. Remember that as much as 25% of both Croat and Serb populations have always lived outside the borders of their own republics.

 

The big mistake that Tito and the Communists had made was to fail to provide for divorce or succession. They failed to provide for the eventual emergence of civic, rather than ethnic based multi-party competition.   His doctrine of socialist rhetoric had lauded, not without some moral attraction, the “brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslavs.” This was a lofty goal, but it provided no mechanism for that to be accomplished when the state disintegrated.  That idea swiftly melted in the face of the profound hatreds that were released between the combatants. As Ignatieff said,

 

By failing to allow a plural political culture to mature, Tito ensured that the fall of his regime turned into the collapse of the entire state structure. In the ruins, his heirs and successor turned to the most atavistic principles of political mobilization in order to survive.

 

If Yugoslavia no longer protected you, perhaps your fellow Croats, Serbs, or Slovenes might.  Fear, more than conviction, made unwilling nationalists of ordinary people. …

 

Ethnic difference per se was not responsible for the nationalistic politics that emerged in the Yugoslavia of the 1980s.  Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalistic hatred only when the surviving Communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.

 

That is precisely the issue; people have to learn to live in plural cultures.  If difference leads to hate, as it often does, bloodshed soon follows when the dogs of hell are let loosed. No one should insist on my way or the highway, but many do. Who doesn’t like variety? Who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth? Many conservatives in the US now want a country without those nasty liberals. Of course, many liberals would like to get rid of the conservatives too. How could that happen peacefully?

 

Well, the extremists think they have a lock on the truth. Sometimes they even come to believe their own lies. This can even happen in modern countries such as the United States. Or Canada.

 

We all need to learn to live in pluralistic societies. If we can’t look out for those hounds. That is why Yugoslavia is so important. Even in Canada.

Dark Tourism: History is Never Dead

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, History, Modern History

 

This is a photograph I took of a house in Vukovar Croatia that was riddled with bullet holes. The owner could not get a permit to fix it up, even though town was eager to clean it up after the Croatian War of Independence in 1992, so in a huff he decided to leave it, bullet holes and all, but now surrounded by flower pots. You can read about war, but seeing the bullet holes makes it real.

I mentioned how much I disagreed with my friend who told me he did not want to learn anything about old European wars. He had no interest in that. To him it was boring history. I wondered why he would bother travelling to Europe in that case.

 

I was lucky in my journey. In each country on our trip through the Balkans we had a local guide who gave us the local slant on its history.

 

Secondly, I had the benefit of being informed by 3 brilliant historians of European history:  Eric Hobsbawm, Tony Judt, and Michael Ignatieff. The three of them transformed my view of European history. I can’t thank them enough.

 

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“.  Winston Churchill said something very similar, in a speech he gave in 1948: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.

 

And it is true that much of European history is brutal. That is a sad fact, but that makes it ever more important to make sure that we do all we can to make sure we don’t repeat the brutality. Much of the important history of this region of European is fairly recent, 30 years ago, when I was already the father of 3 young boys, makes it vitally important to know this history. This is not ancient history,  I do not require any insisting to heed the warnings of the past of this region.

 

I know what happened here could happen again much closer to home.  I know enough to know that I don’t want my country to go there and there are many similarities to this region and my country and our closest neighbour. There is no comfort in thinking falsely that we are an exceptional nation. We are not. We have had our national crimes already and don’t need more of them.

 

The night before we arrived in Vukovar, where much of this brutality occurred, our cruise director warned us that here we would be learning some uncomfortable truths, but he felt that it was important for us to learn. I agreed completely with that sentiment.

 

Our guide for this region was a young woman by the name of Marda. She apologized when she brought up that history as we were standing in the public square. I think she thought we could not handle too much of such history. She might be right, but I was glad she did.

 

Was this so-called dark tourism? Dark tourism refers to traveling to sites associated with death, tragedy, the uncomfortable, and the macabre, such as concentration camps, disaster areas, and battlefields. The phenomenon, also called thanatourism, can be motivated by a desire for education, historical connection, emotional experience, or a morbid fascination with death. It can be morbid, but it can also be a respectful engagement with difficult history. I think that is important. We should know that. If we don’t the bad parts of our country’s history, we don’t know our country. Unlike so many conservatives today, I don’t want to keep our “sacred ignorance” as James Baldwin called it. I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

 

Probably one of the most popular dark tourism sites would be the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland which I would like to visit but have not had the honour. Another would be the catacombs of Paris. Or the colosseum of Rome. Although I have not seen those, I have seen the well-preserved Roman colosseum in Split Croatia in 2008. Not far from here. I have already talked about the first settled city of Europe that we saw this trip. Lepenski Vir. Very interesting.

 

A more modern site would be the World Trade Center site in New York which I have not seen. I have seen slave quarters in New Orleans, and I think I learned things of value there. I don’t think it is only people who hate their country who go to such places as the Trumpsters wrongly suggest.

 

Closer to home it might mean visiting a former Residential School. Or the scene of the Battle at Batoche. Or Little Bighorn. I know people who don’t want to know anything about places like that.  They want to go to beaches, or shopping malls, or wineries. Nothing wrong with going to such places, I like to go to such places too, but I think interesting travel can be more than that.

 

I always remember the advice I got from my great uncle, Peter Vogt when he heard I was going to the pub in LaBroquerie: “If you would have been through the Russian Revolution you wouldn’t bother with that.” I think that was going a bit far, but I know what he means. It was shallow entertainment, but there is nothing wrong with socializing with friends and having some fun too.

 

I know I wished on this trip that we would have visited Belene island in the Danube River where there the largest Bulgarian concentration camp is located.  Or even any of the other ones. But they are not high on most tourist agendas.

 

In any event I wanted to learn about the history of this region of the world. And I was glad I had learned a lot. So that I could bore you about it when I got back.

 

 

 

From Coca Cola Communism to Anarchy

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, History, Modern History, Pluralism

 

A Proud Croatian in Vukovar

At the end of World War II, communism was ushered in to Yugoslavia by the Russians. This was no favor.  Josip Broz Tito, commonly called Tito led the country as a communist prime minister from 1944 to 1963, and as president from1953 until his death in 1980. Of all the countries under the Soviet umbrella his regime was by far the least intrusive and most gentle. Some called his type of communism Coca Cola Communism.

 

To the amazement of many, Tito boldly declared Yugoslavia independent from the Soviet Union.  The people of Yugoslavia loved it. People around the world loved it, Celebrities from around the world, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton came to visit him. Russia was not so keen, but to the surprise of many, it tolerated Tito.

Yugoslavia under the communist regime had been a federal regime, like Canada. It was designed to allow different groups from different regions to live together in relative harmony.  While he was alive it worked quite well. After Tito died things fell apart and as the poet W.B. Yeats said, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” That is exactly what happened.

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, (under its first President Franjo Tudjman) and Macedonia were persuaded that they should annul their federal ties and instead each declared independence after a referendum that clearly indicated the people favored separation. The same thing of course, could happen in Canada or the United States, and in fact, there have been some recent rumblings of discontent with the federal system in both countries.  That is why for Canada and the US Yugoslavia is so important.  We should learn from it, but so far there are few signs that we will do that, or even try to do that.

Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991. The Croatian Parliament officially announced the separation, following a referendum held in May 1991 where over 90% of voters favored independence. That should have been simple right? Wrong! It was actually very complicated by the awkward fact that Croatia had large ethnic minorities of Serbians who feared that they would be forever after dominated by the Croats. And the neighboring Serbian state who was dominating Yugoslavia after Tito died, saw themselves as the saviors of their fellow Serbs in Croatia.

 

The Serbs did not take kindly to this rejection of the state they dominated, citing traditional ties and the need to protect Serb minorities in these states. As a result, not just war, but wars, broke out.

 

One might have thought that in modern times with the advent of civilization, things would be more civilized and less bloody.  If one thought that one would be wrong.

 

Tito was a powerful and charismatic leader who amazingly managed to weld together the various ethnic groups of the country that otherwise found it all too easy to attack each other. However, as soon as he died in 1980, the ties that bound these ethnic groups began to fray. As Adam Michnik once said, “the worst thing about Communism is what comes after.”  There is at least a sad grain of truth in this remark.

 

With the collapse of the communist state of Yugoslavia, a number of states that had been held together by the iron fist and charisma of its long standing-leader, Tito, broke off like pieces of glass from a broken window.  With that breakdown the rule of law, such as it was under Tito, evaporated.  Anarchy soon prevailed. When states collapse, they rarely do that in an orderly fashion.

 

This is even more remarkable because Yugoslavia was generally considered the most liberal of all of the Communist regimes. Why did it collapse into such bloody anarchy while Czechoslovakia did not in 1989?

 

No treaty, no law governed what would happen when Yugoslavia broke apart.  It was thus even more fractious than the splintering of Mennonite churches, if that is possible. The basic problem was that the Imperial power, Soviet Russia disappeared, leaving a terrible vacuum behind.

As usually happens, the void was filled by the worst.

Uncovering the Buried Truth

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Bulgaria, Modern History

 

Josh Arthurs in the Department of History at the University of Toronto worked together collaboratively with Lilia Topouzova on their project of bringing to light what happened in the concentration camps of Bulgaria during the years of Russian dominance.

 

Their project was to recreate the life and experience and memories of people who lived through the Bulgarian Gulag. After the collapse of communism in the late 80s and early 90s the records of the camp quickly disappeared.

 

Professor Josh Arthurs explained how that happened:

 

“It took them about several months to do so, and about 40 percent of the operational archive of the Ministry of the Interior was purged. What’s really amazing, though, is that together with colleagues, I found the order that set the purge. So, in fact, we have the kind of transcripts and the order by the Minister of the Interior then that set the purge in motion.

And here’s what we know. Very clearly, the Minister said, “Belene, the name of the camp, should vanish as a system, as a symbol of the repressive system. Belene, the main forced labor camp, should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system.”

So we know that information on the camps was a priority. We can never know for certain what documents were purged. It’s very hard to know that.

 

But we know that they wanted to get rid of evidence.”

 

 

Even after the communist regime collapsed the officials left behind, wanted to hide what happened there. They did not want the truth to come out. Arthurs said that he  and  Lilia Topouzova wanted to “unvanish, undisappear the records of the lives of people who suffered through the Gulag”

 

Topouzova was a graduate student at the time at the University of Toronto, working in England when she noticed a black and white photograph in the Robert Library there. It was a photograph of a labour camp guard.  She was able to read it because she was born in Bulgaria and of course learned the language. The first 11 years of her life had been spent there while she was a member of communist Lenin Youth. She was proud of her position until her world collapsed with the collapse of the communist regime. Years later when she saw that photograph, she decided she had to go back to Bulgaria to find out what happened to that guard.

 

When she got back to Bulgaria she went to the University of Sofia and was browsing through the book store. She did not find any obvious books about the camps so asked a clerk in the store where she might find them. Amazingly, the clerk asked her “What camps?” And this was in a university book store, where one think they knew.

 

Topouzova did not give up after that rebuff. She knew the clerk was wrong. Either lying or in denial or ignorant. There was no evidence even though everyone had been aware of the camps. There was no evidence of the camps in the Bulgarian museums. It was as if none of it had ever happened.

 

It took 20 years but Lilia Topouzova and her partners did not give up. They found the truth and to the extent the survivors have consented to its display, they have revealed the truth to the world. The evil is no longer hidden.

 

I am grateful for the work Lilia Topouzova, Julian Shehirian and Krasmira Butsova have done to prevent that truth from not being told.  I thank the CBC for telling this story. I hope that in time, despite efforts by people like Donald Trump to hide such truths, other brave and diligent people will appear to uncover such truths to the extent they are covered up.

 

In conclusion this brings me back to the current movement in the United States, though we feel reverberations of it here in Canada, that American children and even adults for that matter, should not be taught things that might make them feel uncomfortable about things their ancestors did in America. Such people think that avoiding discomfort for people today should have priority over uncovering the truth. Better to let the truth rot under the ground than cause any modern American to feel anything less than enthusiastic support for anything people in their country have done. Forget about injustice. Move on to sunny days. Be happy. And how different is it here in Canada?

 

So instead, people are encouraged to forget about truths. This is particularly true when people try to hide truths that reflect poorly on current society and its people in power.  Let the Trumpsters be happy at all costs.  Ignorant but happy. That is what Bulgaria did, even after the communist regime collapsed and that is what Americans are encouraged to do today. They think silence is golden. It’s not.

 

Silence is not Golden

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Modern History, Truth Seeking

 

 

This island in the Danube River was benign. Other islands were not that.

Right in the middle of the Danube River, on an idyllic island the main Bulgarian concentration camp was located. That island was called Belene  and it was the main forced labour camp of  a network of concentration camps in Bulgaria  that now is largely ignored by the current government, even though it is no longer a communist government. That struck me as odd. Why the silence?

 

No one mentioned it to me on our cruise either. No one mentioned it on any of our excursions. It was as if it never happened.

 

According to Lillia Topouzova, “Very clearly the [Bulgarian Interior ] minister said, Belene should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system.”

 

No one wanted to be reminded what happened there. Even the victims were not keen on bringing up painful memories. At least, at first. Topouzova on the other hand, was very interested in the silence of both oppressors and oppressed and everyone else in between. She respected the silence of the victims. And she was very patient. As she said,

 

“There was no language. There were no words. I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn’t express. And the silence of those who lived near the camps, but learned to never acknowledge their existence. They didn’t want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada. I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence. Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So I’ve had conversations with people about ordinary things, like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance.”

 

It was hardly surprising that I had never heard of the Bulgarian Gulag. It was no accident. It was deliberately kept a secret supposedly to protect the Bulgarian society’s reputation, but really to protect the reputations of the powerful. Now I really want to see them. I knew we would sail very close to the island where one of the main camps was located.

 

But Lilia Topouzova, and her two fellow researchers, were determined to ferret out the truth and bring what really happened into the light of day, but only if that met with the approval of the victims she interviewed. She worked very hard to respect their wishes.

 

It took her 20 years to amass the story. That was the sound of silence. And it was not golden, but it was fruitful.

 

The Brazilian Trump

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Extremism, Modern History, Populism, Trump, Trumpism

 

 

We were in Arizona on the anniversary of the Trump insurrection on January 6th.  Watching the news of the election in Brazil it really seemed like deja vu all over again.

Rumours were spreading not just faster than the truth but even faster than lies. In Brazil, on January 8, 2023 there were furious, and in some cases, violent protests after Lula defeated Bolsonaro, aptly called “the Brazilian Trump.” Like Donald Trump’s supporters, Bolsonaro’s supporters believed that the election was stolen from their boy and they were “as mad as hell and were not going to take it anymore,” to copy what was said in the movie Network.

As Mac Margolis, Washington Post commentator said, “this was carbon copy and paste Donald Trump.” This is the same thing Anne Applebaum, a columnist for The Atlantic said when she pointed out how populist political leaders around the world were learning a lot from each other. Populist leaders around the world are being encouraged by each other and the rest of us had better taken notice. As Margolis pointed out, in Brazil rumours spread quickly on social media and since they were lies, they spread at the speed of light. Truth is much slower. Margolis called it “anti-incumbent fury.” This is now happening across South America. Actually, it is happening around the world.