The Balkans: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Rebecca West, writing just before the Second World War, on her travels in the Balkans. I have done my own little bit of that travel, which is why this book took my interest. This edition, too, is introduced by Christopher Hitchens, but despite that I still think West is dodgy politically, and possibly intellectually too. However, this is the best travelogue I have ever read, by quite a long way. Studded with gems, such as this on the divide between peasants and bourgeois (which still meant something in the 1930s) "there is no man in the world, not even Stalin, who would claim to be able to correct in our own time the insane dispensation which pays the food-producer worst of all workers". She's right about the last bit, but - Stalin, the peasant's friend? In 1937?
On the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which then existed in living memory: "Such a terrible complexity has been left by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which some desire to restore; such a complexity, in which nobody can be right and nobody can be wrong, and the future cannot be fortunate". Look forward to the 1990s and that is true, but I do not think I blame the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the Yugoslav wars of that time.
A little politically incorrect by the standards of the left of today, I am glad to see: "the people of Dalmatia gave the bread out of their mouths to save us of Western Europe from Islam; and it is ironical that so successfully did they protect us that those among us who would be broad-minded ... would blithely tell us that perhaps the Dalmatians need not have gone to that trouble, that an Islamized West could not have been worse than what we are today."
Things not a lot of people know: Robert Adam was inspired by the Roman Emperor Diocletian's palace at Split: "When we look at a facade in Portman Square or a doorway in Portland Place, we are looking at Roman Dalmatia."
She talks to a Dalmatian professor in Split who had been a friend of Admiral Lord Fisher, about whom I learned, as often in my young days, from an Al Stewart song: "Admiral Lord Fisher is writing to Churchill, calling for more dreadnoughts; the houses in Hackney are all falling down."
She's a bit odd on sexuality; perhaps because she was a renowned feminist she felt the need to keep putting things in about it. But they are strange (to our ears now) sweeping statements, such as "But of course in a country where there is very little homosexuality it is easy for girls to grow up into womanhood."
On the culture and religions of the Balkans the book goes from marvel to marvel. In Kotor, where suddenly there are Orthodox churches, in contrast with most of Catholic Croatia, she notes "the dark, hugged mystery of the Eastern Church and the bold explanation proffered by the lit altars of the Western Church".
She is totally pro-Slav and pro-Serb, and sees Gavrilo Princip as a kind of hero. Those killers could not be sentenced to death, because they were all under twenty-one. But 13 conspirators were sent to Austrian prisons, and by the end of the war, three years later, nine of them had died in their cells. The three young men who were convicted of the killing are buried in Sarajevo. Are their graves still there? Are they still marked? West and her husband went to see them. I wish I had.
She is impressed, as most are, by the relentless, almost hilarious good looks of the people. "... one of those pale women with dark hair who even in daylight look as if one were seeing them by moonlight".
Elsie Inglis's Scottish Women's Hospital was in Serbia in 1914-15. Who knew?And what courage those women had. I'm glad she mentioned it.
Boy is this a long book. Knocks Patrick Leigh Fermor into a cocked hat though, and that's not something I thought I would say. "If Protestantism has done much harm by making religion identical with ethical effort of a limited kind it has done a great deal of good by putting down in black and white the ideas of Christianity, and showing us what life will lose if we abandon them."
Social history in the small mentions. She travels with a work-basket with silks in it. Did they have huge trunks and an army of bearers? Perhaps they did.
She describes the blood sacrifice of lambs and cockerels on a particular rock in Macedonia on St. George's Day, for women's fertility, in fairly nauseating detail. She is utterly disgusted by it, and says, rather oddly, that she has been living in the shadow of that rock all her life.
Byzantine titles are just wonderful. Sebastocrator and Grand Logothete, Grand Domestic and Sacellary.
The old Serbian poem about the battle of Kosovo Polye in 1389 (that battle was treated as a recent memory when I first went to Kosovo in 2001) tells West that "what the pacifist really wants is to be defeated". Not to avoid war, not to prevent bloodshed, but to be defeated. "Kill us, we deserve it."
And then "We said goodnight and stood in the porch under the Dorothy Perkins roses." How does she even know a Dorothy Perkins rose to look at? And why are they called that? And what do they  have to do with the shop?
This is a wonderful book. There is much more in it than I have been able to describe. The lives of the bloody and not so bloody Serbian kings, especially; the Austrians and Germans who treat the Balkans as their colony (she is not very pro-German), the architecture, peasant and bourgeois life, the Jewish and Greek minorities, and much much more..

In the Wake of the Surge, and Where the West Ends

by Michael J. Totten, a journalist and writer I discovered through World Affairs Journal.  'In The Wake of the Surge' is a group of dispatches from Iraq following the stroke of strategic genius that was General David Petraeus' decision to create a "surge" of troops in Iraq to finish the job.  It worked.  The dispatches are fascinating.  Most of what is said about Iraq is said by people who have never been there.  Even if they have they do not know the country or many people.  For example, the Kurds.  Who, as I predicted years ago, led the Americans to Saddam Hussein (who, incidentally, had a great death, ranting at the world with a noose round his neck until they led him away to be hanged, unlike Colonel Gaddafy, who was pulled from a hole in the ground and shot like the mad dog he was).  Iraqi Kurds like the Israelis, and the Americans.  They don't like Arabs.  At all.  And no-one is their friend.  The mood in Iraq changed, after 2003, and changed back again more than once.  But Iraq is now one of the more stable countries in the region.   These dispatches are valuable because although every now and again Tony Blair pops up to put the Guardianistas right,he shouldn't have to do it all on his own.

'Where the West Ends', somewhat by contrast, is another series of essays or dispatches, but interestingly is about the notion of "The West", or "us" as the racist Guardian calls it. Where does it end?  How do you know when you are in it?  Because the essays have this theme, they are more than just a road diary.  In Iraqi Kurdistan the writer's companion takes a picture of a laser scanner in a shop, because it is one of the few things there that remind him of home.  "Iraq is the only country in the world where Kurds wield any power".  So it seems.  In the Balkans, where I have travelled too (I have never been to Iraq) he is clear that we are in Europe.  Myself, I thought parts of Serbia seen from the train were not very European at all, but there we are.  He cites Churchill, "The Balkans produce more history than they can consume", which has to be right, and frighteningly, Radovan Karadzic, "Sarajevans will not be counting the dead.  They will be counting the living".  Which is right too.  Readers know the place in my heart occupied by Sarajevo.  His travels in places in Serbia and Bosnia not frequented by tourists, in 2008, produced some ugly anti-American behaviour from Serbs.  Tony Blair was a hero to the non-Serb Kosovars, but although identified as British I received nothing but kindliness and courtesy from Serbs in both those countries in 2009.  Totten also remind us that Arab jihadists, who went to Kosovo to fight against the Serbs, were "tourists with guns" who had no effect on the outcome of the war.

These American travellers did seem a little naive.  They could not read Cyrillic, so got lost in Serbian Bosnia because they could not read the road signs.  They were anglophone and expected others to speak English, as Americans tend to do.  I did not go so far off the beaten track as they did, but I still needed my cod Russian to help me communicate, and my ability to read Cyrillic (which is not hard to do) helped a LOT.  These two went to McDonalds so they could point at pictures of food.  I never had to do that - and in former Yugoslavia you can eat very well.  They were even surprised to find that in Montenegro, where hardly anybody lives, there are not many street lights.  Why would anybody light the roads there?  "When the future of Yugloslavia looked dim and precarious, Slobodan Milosevic looked for a way to rise in [sic] power and keep it.  He found one when he transformed himself from a communist apparatchik to a Serbian nationalist."

Present-day former Yuglosavia (a concept I fear we are stuck with) is more interesting politically than most people think, as Totten shows us.  Macedonia, two-thirds Christian in population, has made common cause with the Wahhabis, mainly so that they can call their Albanian minority, who are hated by the Wahhabis, terrorists.  And remember (most don't), that well after the break-up of the former Yugloslavia, in 2001, there was actually a civil war in Macedonia.

The Caucasus, a trouble spot for centuries: "Russians are as prone to cognitive egocentrism - the projection of one's own psychology on to others - as everyone else", coupled with "Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?  Wherever it wants".  Gallup International, in a 2004 survey, identified Kosovo, Afghanistan, Israel and Georgia as the most pro-American countries in the world.  And this was before the 2008 invasion of Georgia by Russia, which invasion was, mysteriously to me, much applauded by some commenting on this blog at the time.  Totten uses more than once the term "geopolitical spa" about countries where Americans can take a bath in water not tainted with anti-Americanism (this is a metaphor).  He finds some quotes and sources which have led me to take a lot of notes for further reading.  They include Ukrainian emigre Wasyl Hryshko, who describes Soviet collectivisation in Ukraine as "the first instance of peacetime genocide in history".  If Totten wonders where the West really ends, he finds its end very close to the borders of the EU, in western Ukraine, where he was shocked by the decrepitude and lack of hope he found.

Read these.  They might make you think.  And if they don't your mind is probably closed.