Category Archives: Modern History

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.

 

Confederates

American Fascism, Death of Truth, Modern History, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Although the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 like the second in 2022, was advertised by the Russians to be  a battle against fascism, as everyone outside of Russia understood, it is interesting how many fascists from the around the world support the Russian fascists. In 2014 The American white supremacists Richard Spencer, Matthew Heimbach, and David Duke celebrated Putin and defended his war. In fact, Russia, borrowed the Confederate battle flag as the basis for their new flag over the occupied territories in Ukraine. The Polish fascist Konrad Rekas also endorsed Putin. The European far right also demonstrated approval of Russia’s actions. Many of these supporters also expressed anti-Semitic tropes. The neo-Nazis of Greece praised Russia for fighting the international Jewish conspiracy. Hungary’s leader, Jobbik invited Dugin to Moscow while he praised Eurasia. The Italian fascist party lauded Putin’s “courageous position against the powerful gay lobby.”

 

In 2022 Russians were supported by Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump who both voiced sympathy or admiration for Putin.

 

In 2014 the array of fascists helped Putin to achieve his goal of dismembering in part Ukraine. As Timothy Snyder said,

“The schizofascist lies displaced the events in Ukraine and the experiences of Ukrainians. Under the weight of all the contradictory concepts and hallucinatory visons of spring 2014, who would see or remember the individual on the Maidan, with his or her facts and passions, his or her desire to be in history and make history.”

 

The lies were meant to spread confusion and they did exactly that. The lies were not expected to convince people, just create enough doubt to give them cover. That’s all fascists need. Confusion is the fertile soil of fascism.

 

Vladimir Putin, Alexander Dugin, & Alexander Prokhanov: Political Fiction

American Fascism, Modern History, Politics & Religion, racism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Alexander Prokhanov was Putin’s companion in a radio program in 2011 where Putin had cited Ivan Ilyin. Prokhanov and also Alexander Dugin enlisted the idea of Eurasia as an alternative to the despised liberal west.  Both used this idea to try to bring back Soviet fascism. Like Hitler, Prokhanov blamed international Jewry (the typical fascist scapegoat) for inventing ideas of an enslaved homeland. As Timothy Snyder said, “Like Dugin, Prokhanov openly embraced political fiction, seeking to create images that would exude meaning before people had a chance to think for themselves.” People who think for themselves are the greatest enemy of fascism.

 

Like Putin and Ilyin, Prokhanov found an enemy in sexual perversion.  All them of them agreed that perverts were the enemy of Christian fascists although Putin of course never called himself a fascist. He considered himself an enemy of fascism, but he was a fascist. They all argued in favour of traditional values that were opposed to liberal perversion.  A good example of this was Prokhanov’s statement after a meeting with Barack Obama, for the Russians “it was if they had all been given a black teat, and they all suck at it with lust and mammalian smacking…In the end I was humiliated by this.” Blacks of course are the other standard enemy of fascists.

 

As Timothy  Snyder said,

“Prokhanov’s next move was to claim that factuality was hypocrisy: “Europe is vermin that has learned to call heinous and disgusting things beautiful.” Whatever Europeans might seem to be doing or saying, “you don’t see their faces under the mask.” In any event, Europe was dying: “The white race is perishing: gay marriages, pederasts, rule the cities, women can’t find men.”  And Europe was killing Russia: “didn’t get infected with AIDS, they deliberately infected us.”

Notice that  Russian white supremacists, like their American counterparts, try to stoke fears that the white race is perishing and needs to be saved. Just like the young American domestic terrorists in Buffalo last week who walked in to a supermarket with a gun to kill blacks and prevent blacks from replacing whites.  Fascism is similar the world over.

It seems strange that so often for fascists, a fundamental problem for them were the Jews and blacks Jews rattle the fascist cage and paid a heavy price for that in so many fascist states.

 

Timothy Snyder described the situation with Prokhanov this way:

“The fundamental problem, said Prokhanov in this interview (with the Izborsk) was the Jews.  “Antisemitism,” he said, is not a result of the fact that Jews have crooked noses or cannot correctly pronounce the letter ‘r.’ It is a result of the fact that Jews took over the world, and are using their power for evil.”  In a move that was typical of Russian fascists, Prokhanov deployed the symbolism of the Holocaust to describe world Jewry as a collective perpetrator and everyone else as the victims: “Jews, united humanity in order to throw humanity into the furnace of the liberal order, which is now a catastrophe.” The only defense against the international Jewish conspiracy was a Russian redeemer. Eurasianism was Russia’s messianic mission to redeem mankind. It “has to encompass the entire world.”

 

Prokhanov thought this would happen when Russia, Ukraine and Belarus merge. That is exactly Putin’s goal.  That is what he meant by Eurasia and Prokhanov acknowledged that Putin had declared this.

And of course, Putin saw himself as the Russian redeemer against the perversions of the west. And like so many redeemers, he brought ruin,  not paradise. Just like the young killer in Buffalo. And so many others.