Posted on 05/25/2006 5:06:50 AM PDT by FerdieMurphy
Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history.
Sunday's vote in Montenegro, a tiny land of fewer people than the Washington, D.C., this writer grew up in, voted Sunday to secede from Belgrade, establish a nation and seek entry into the European Union.
In 1991, Macedonia peacefully seceded. Slovenia and Croatia fought their way out, and Bosnia broke free after a war marked by the massacre at Srbenica and NATO intervention. Bosnia is itself subdivided into a Serb and a Croat-Muslim sector.
After the 78-day U.S. bombing of Serbia by the United States and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the province in the wake of the NATO war, Kosovo is 90 percent Muslim and Albanian. Loss of this land that was the cradle of the Serb nation seems an inevitability.
The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations – many of which had never before existed – seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written.
The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory.
Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished. The British and French, greatest of the Western empires, are long gone. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the Irish, though its sons had fought to erect and maintain the Victorian "empire on which the sun never set" – and defend it in World War I – fought relentlessly to be free of it. They wanted, and in 1921 won, a small nation of their own, on their own small island.
The Irish preferred it to being part of the British Empire.
The call of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, faith and history pulled apart the greatest of all the ideological empires, the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union, that "prison house of nations."
Transnational institutions, the embryonic institutions of a new world government to which the elites of the West and Third World are transferring allegiance and power, include the United Nations, the EU, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Seabed Authority, the Kyoto Protocol, the IMF and the World Bank.
The sub-nations, or ex-nations, struggling to be born or break free include Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain, Corsica, northern Italy and Quebec in the West. Iraq, as we have seen, is a composite of peoples divided by tribe, ethnicity and faith – as are Iran, Pakistan and India. Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs, with a minority of Bedouins.
Lind argues that not only are nations subdividing, losing their monopolies on the love and loyalty of their peoples, but they are being superseded by "non-state actors" that are challenging the monopoly on warfare enjoyed by the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War.
Among the more familiar non-state actors are the Crips and Bloods, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the racial nationalists of MEChA, the white supremacists of Aryan Nations, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Maoists of Nepal and the Tamil Tigers.
Among the central questions of our time is a central question of any time: Who owns the future?
Of late, the transnational vision has lost its allure. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and most of Latin America reject the NAFTA vision of Bush and Vicente Fox. The French and Dutch voted down the EU Constitution, which now appears dead. The Doha round of world trade negotiations is headed for the rocks. Hostility is rising to bringing Turkey into the EU.
Arabs and Turks in Europe identify more and more with the Islamic faith they have in common and the countries whence they came, not the one in which they live and work.
So, too, do millions of illegal aliens in the United States. They march defiantly under Mexican flags in American streets demanding the rights of U.S. citizens – while an intimidated political class rushes to accommodate and appease them, assuring itself this is but the latest reincarnation of Ellis Island.
As the Old Republic trudges to its death, less and less do we hear that incessant blather about the American Empire, "the world's last superpower" and "our unipolar moment."
FYI
"Turks in Europe identify more and more with the Islamic faith"
Is that really true?
Let me pose this question: if the red states were to write a constitution and the blue states were to write a constitution, how much similarity would their be?
I suggest it is time that we think about departing ourselves from those peoples and ideas that have turned the blue states into charnel houses run by the slave masters of the urban elites and the governmental bureaucracies.
I am quite willing to see our erring sisters go.
McVey
Pat Buchanan BUMP.
Indeed.
Yes, if this is a real question. The Turks have elected an islamist government, although, with the way the Turkish government is structured, it may not effect Turkish foreign policy as much as it does domestic policy.
The Turkish government has banned the veil (at work anyway) for its Civil Service employees since the days of Ataturk. That policy is now under review and I suspect it will be overturned.
McVey
Reach out.
Heal.
or is it heel?
Years down the road we will either be fighting the Chinese under a Muslim flag or fighting the Muslims under a Chinese flag.
In either case I don't think the Libs will be too happy when all the people are rounded up and used as human waves to take the edge off the other side.
But they are happy now as they take us down that path.
Heel, I think.
There is no compromise left in the system. I appreciate the fact that a few deluded Senators and Representatives fight on to hold us to gether. It is a noble undertaking. But the coastal elites disdain us and the urban elites mock us and the media elites lie about us.
One side or the other will triumph or we will separate.
McVey
That's a very good point, but it's also something that has been a fact of life in this country since its founding. In fact, I would make the case that the United States of America as envisioned by its founders really only lasted a few years before it began its inevitable decline. The official "demise" of the nation occurred with the events leading up to the Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s, when a bunch of settlers living on the frontier recognized this and did exactly what you suggested.
So let's get this straight Pat.
We should welcome the passing of our own soveriegnty to the new transnational organizations?
OK Pat. We heard it from you first.
What a visionary.
So let's get this straight Pat.
We should welcome the passing of our own soveriegnty to the new transnational organizations?
OK Pat. We heard it from you first.
What a visionary.
The point is taken the liberals' constitution would be a disaster and the conservatives would look like the one we have now.
If we were to depart ourselves it would not work out on a per state basis.
This article reminded me somewhat of the free state project.
I am gravely concerned about the non-state actors, the ms 13, and all the rest, and knowing the reconquista is the goal of the illegals flooding in. This will be the demise of the US if allowed to continue.
Pat Buchannan is a smart guy, with a classical education, who understands how the west works, and what is going wrong with it now. He would have made a good President. I'd take him over the current one any day. Unfortunately, he lacks tact, which gives anyone who is predisposed to disagree with him an opening to shut down debate by hurling ad hominems and brand him, in this PC environment, a racist or anti-semite, or a nut.
There was a post a while back that revealed that blue states were blue because of giant blue cities, and red states were red because of small blue cities. Hence, the problem is in the cities, loaded with liberals, whereas the countryside has the republicans.
Vermont is just about the most rural state in the country, but it is also one of the most socialist leaning states in the country. We need a different theory.
Jason:
I couldn't agree more on the need for conservatives to behave with the utmost tact since every little thing we do is scrutinized with the utmost care.
I well remember that the knock on Goldwater was that he was not smart enough.
And then the knock on Reagan was that he was not smart enough.
And then the knock on the present Bush is that he is not smart enough.
Hmmmm, there could be a pattern here.
I know the countryside, if you include the exurbs, is conservative. The problem is that the cities include the headquaters for everything from insurance companies to manufacturing to the MSM to the textbook publishers. Unless we are able to get by the media and educate the public, we will get squeezed to death. We may have nothing to do but try to depart. I would at least like to have the threat on the table so that we could push for the revival of the 10th Amendment and the original limits of the 14th revived.
I am really not being radical here. I do believe in victory even if it involves brinkmanship.
McVey
AC:
That period is my primary era of concentration. The Whiskey Rebellers were neither united nor focused. They were just angry and reactive.
The conservative areas of the country need to put the possibility of secession on the table as part of our bargaining with the coastal elites.
But I am not going to disavow the option of departure.
McVey
Yes, but they were "angry and reactive" for some very specific reasons that related directly to what perceived as steps back toward British rule on the part of the new Federal government in Washington.
The last ruler of independent Montenegro was King Nicholas I (ruled 1860 to 1918, died 1921). As of the 1940s his grandson Mirko, born in 1908, was the claimant to the throne...I don't know if he has any descendants interested in being a constitutional monarch. Another grandson of Nicholas I was the last king of Italy, Umberto II.
Montenegro has more people than Luxembourg or Iceland. It's about 2/3 the size of Slovenia.
Famous Montenegrins include Milovan Djilas, Radovan Karadzic, and Nero Wolfe (the last reputedly fictitious).
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