Nations, Not Projects: A Response to Keith Woods

3,488 words

Imagine drinking beer with your neighbor. Imagine your families having a barbecue. Imagine helping your neighbor fix his vehicle, which is notorious for breaking down at inopportune moments. Imagine your neighbor picking your kids up from school because you can’t get out of work.

Then imagine that the next day, you’re shooting your neighbor, burning his house down, killing his sons, and raping his daughters. Oh, and you appropriate his car for your use afterward. Tough to imagine. But it happened. We called it the Yugoslav wars.

While they’re nowhere near the scale and scope of other conflicts, I maintain that the Yugoslav wars remain the most intensely brutal of white-on-white conflicts due to the sheer mutual hatred of its participants, doubly underscored by their previously pacific and even bucolic coexistence in a common state. When I say no more brother wars, I do not think of faraway Kursk or Somme, but of things that happened to men I know. Peaceful and normal men, with large pot-bellies in their middle and old age, but capable of unimaginable brutality, just like Colonel Kurtz’s VC who “hacked off every inoculated arm.”

When I discuss war and brutality, I always harken back to Chesterton’s fence. Madmen did not wander off from the asylum to build this fence in the night. Reasonable, rational men constructed this fence for reasons which appeared sound to them. If you’re asking me, Chesterton’s fence is just a special case of Hegel’s “If it exists, it is reasonable.” When we say reasonable, we don’t mean good, but we mean that the men doing it have good reasons for doing it, i. e. they are not doing it to their detriment as they understand it. So, why did Yugoslavia erupt into violence, death, and destruction in the 90s? Keith Woods has an idea. 

If you want my take on why Yugoslavia went the way of the dinosaur, you can peruse any of my articles on the subject. From its charlatanic intellectual class, of which the most famous is Slavoj Žižek, to the hilarious attempts to foster civic camaraderie through national military service. And of course, there’s my three-part vision of a future for whites which attempts to learn from the lessons of the Yugoslav disaster, of which the first part tries to dissect the problem of forcing people to live together. I take a stand against petty nationalism, but also against racial imperialism. The consequence of the first is weakness. The consequence of the second is Bosnia, followed by weakness.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here

I’ll also add that Yugoslavia, in its initial form, was a thoroughly globalist project, initiated by Woodrow Willson in the wake of the Great War. It was seen throughout its existence as a model multiethnic, multicultural state; a state of the future that would transcend ethnic and religious boundaries. It was a creature of Versailles and of Yalta, beginning as a Serbian imperialist project, but ultimately ending as an anti-Serb project, while remaining anti-Croat, anti-Slovenian, anti-Bosniak, and anti-Macedonian to the bitter end. Any attempts by the rulers to reform the country into something more manageable, such as Prince-Regent Pavle Karadjordjević’s attempts to give each constitutive nation home rule and achieve neutrality during the Second World War were cruelly subverted, usually by either English, Soviet, or American intelligence services stoking Serbian imperialist fantasies. I want to add a disclaimer here that I do not blame Serbs for Yugoslavia and their breakup. They were taken for a ride and lied to, probably more than any other of the constitutive nations. They were given cheap and mostly symbolic privileges over the other nations, but in the end, paid the heaviest of prices with the bombardment of 1999 and the loss of Kosovo.

Keith contends that Yugoslavia fell apart as a result of American intelligence pressure. Reality, however, shows us that Yugoslavia was — for all 70 years of its existence — propped up by either Britain or America. While the common people of Serbia and Macedonia felt a kinship with their fellow Orthodox in Russia, and Croats and Slovenes preferred closer relations with Germany and Austria, Yugoslavia consistently acted against the interests of those countries and for the interests of the two Anglophone thalassocracies, even when it had to be nudged into it by their intelligence arms, such as in the March putsch of 1941 which dragged the Kingdom of Yugoslavia into an unnecessary war with the Axis powers. During the Cold War, the country’s failing socialist economy was endlessly propped up by both Americans and Soviets, each fearful that Yugoslavia would turn to the other in the event of economic hardship. You can read about this and much more in Dr. Tomislav Sunić’s phenomenal Woodrow Wilson’s Defeat in Yugoslavia: The End of a Multicultural Utopia. This work was written in 1994, so it’s about as fresh as it gets. Here’s a quote which I believe greatly encapsulates the state of affairs immediately following the Yugoslav wars:

The results of the war in the former Yugoslavia will certainly lead to an unparalleled historical revisionism regarding two world wars in Europe. Some German observers have pointed out that the Croatian fight for independence indirectly challenged the legacy of Versailles and one of its crucial pillars, Serb-controlled Yugoslavia. Should Serbia lose in the Balkans, then the real winner of World War II, in a retroactive way, becomes Germany.

For America, Yugoslavia was a model multi-ethnic state, which aside from being a buffer zone in the East-West condominium, had also had a duty to weaken the natural German glans in Central and Eastern Europe. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Woodrow Wilson suffered a serious defeat in Croatia.

An important takeaway from Dr. Sunić’s assessment was that the crisis arising out of the Slovenian and Croatian declarations of independence were ultimately solved by Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Berlin. Data that became available after the publication of that article revealed that Belgrade was likewise involved in the de-escalation of the crisis. All the while, Washington and Brussels dithered. A silver lining of that whole sad historical episode gives us an important lesson: sovereign nations working together in concert can find solutions, whereas large supranational entities mostly get in the way. I can see many parallels between the way my own homeland of Macedonia and our dear neighbor Greece gradually learned to grudgingly work together between 1991 and 2018, only to see the old wounds reopened in a violent fashion by globohomo’s supranationalist structures. Nations work together when given space to breathe. But force them together and the urge to murder, burn, pillage, and rape arises in the featherless biped’s simian hindbrain.

A note on “divide and conquer.” Keith makes the point that Yugoslavia had to be divided in order to be conquered by international capital. However, a casual look at the economies of the post-Yugoslav nations indicates a lower presence of international capital than in many other countries, certainly when compared to old Yugoslavia, when one adjusts for the rate of internationalization of capital which has certainly increased since the 1980s. Of course, Yugoslavia wasn’t “divided” in the 90s. Rather, it was a divided, unstable, and ungovernable entity between 1918 and 1991 which fragmented into six relatively homogenous, stable, and safe entities. All six of the republics weathered the 2008 crises far better than their Western counterparts, not only because of their lower levels of internationalization, but also due to the simple fact that it is far more natural to take one for the team if you have genetic similarity with everyone on the team.

As to the claim that six republics are easier to manage than a single federation, I’ll point out US influence has waned in the region, with the exceptions of Albania and Kosovo, and since the illegal, Albanian-backed seizure of power in 2017, Macedonia. Serbia is quite successfully triangulating between China and Russia, with Croatia closely cooperating with its historic German ally. Compared to the direct lines of coordination that existed between Washington and Belgrade during the Cold War, this is a remarkable retreat. And indeed, anyone who has been in a fight will testify that in many ways, it is easier to handle one big man than it is to contend with six smaller ones, especially if they’re not chained together at the ankles.

What’s that about a failing economy? Wasn’t Yugoslavia a socialist nation? That’s supposed to protect from a failure of the economy, right? Unfortunately, a lot of people in the Dissident Right have taken the repudiation of the markets-and-GDP cult practiced by Conservative Inc. to mean a full endorsement of socialism. When I say I’m a third positionist, it means that I refuse to worship markets and efficiency. I assert that the state is sovereign, and this sovereignty applies to economic matters as well. I am willing to take on any and all economic measures for the good of the state and people, without being beholden to either free markets or command economies. Socialism, much like neoliberalism, means becoming beholden to such ideologies. If an economic sector is best run by the state, let the state run it. But if it’s best run by the market, let the market run it. Usually, whenever we want efficiency (and we do want efficiency), we delegate to the markets, understanding that this comes at a cost of security. Wherever security is needed, the state steps in, understanding that this comes at a cost in efficiency. However, Yugoslavia’s economic system wasn’t the kind of socialism you saw in the Soviet Union, nor was it the kind of socialism you see in the Scandinavian countries. It was the kind of socialism you could see in 19th-century Britain, or 20th-century America, which is to say socialism for the ruling class.

The first thing that was done was the nationalization of farmland, much of which was held by small and medium-sized farmers, as well as some estates held by large landowners where individual farmers held parcels of land in perpetuity and paid percentages of their crop profit to the landowner. This land was taken from all the owners — large, small, and medium — and then given over to a local party potentate to manage, who’d employ only fractions of the population as farmhands (it was more “efficient”, see), forcing the bulk of the people to move to the cities.

Something far more sinister was done in the mountainous areas where the primary method of agriculture was animal husbandry. It involved the wholesale massacre of farm animals, sometimes for ridiculously stupid reasons. Macedonia’s first communist president of government, Lazar Koliševski, infamously instituted a (I hope you’re sitting down) goat genocide, killing almost every goat in the country with the rationale that goats eat shrubbery on which soldiers depend for concealment, therefore threatening national defense. In practice, this meant that entire families which had depended on goatherding as their source of sustenance and employment now had to move to the cities.

Once they were corralled into the cities, the people’s labor was exploited to construct and later work in the factories managed by the communist party. Many of these factories were placed with zero regard to public health, pollution, or environmental issues. I give you the most flagrantly stupid example: the Veles lead and zinc smelter. The smelter closed in 2003, but to this day, the ground and groundwater are so imbued with lead particles that children in Veles are more often than not born with growth deformities. Veles, as some of you may know, is also the name of the Slavic god of the underground, herders, music, trade, and wine. He is a serpent living in the roots of the world-tree, struck at by mighty Perun’s thunderbolts. Pollution of his city and criminal negligence for public health have angered this cunning god and we are now paying the price.

Having grown fat on the labor of their fellow man, the communist managerial class came to be known as the “red bourgeoisie.” The jig was up, however, and the common folk were rapidly re-learning the old arts of dolce far niente, of pretending to work, of “boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, and so I shit on company time” which they’d practiced for so long during the 500 years under the Ottoman empire. Whether the production capacity is owned by the bey, or by the state, it makes very little difference to the man who toils. All he knows is that someone else — someone of a different ethnic and religious group — is getting rich off the sweat of his brow. And so he ceases to sweat. And so he re-appropriates some of his labor from the company’s inventory. And so he neglects to show up for work, falls asleep on the job, or sneaks out to play hide the ćevapčić with the bossman’s wife.

How do we get one over him? Well, enter self-governing socialism, where the productive capacity is not state-owned, as with the Russians, nor are they privately-owned, but directed by the state, as in most third-positionist regimes, but “commonly owned,” which is to say “everyone’s and no-one’s.”

It makes as much sense to me, friends.

In practice, workers were often issued shares and were required to participate in self-governing councils, but this went the same way as every other experiment in democracy did. A managerial class arose to wield power and extract value from the labor of these workers, and whenever they were called out on their abuses, they could always very credibly claim that they were just another worker, just another voice in the multitude, certainly not the owner or the boss. When control and ownership are unclear, the controllers and owners cannot be held to account. And so it went, for many long years, until “democracy” came, and the managerial red bourgeoisie privatized the companies which they’d run for 40 years, profiting once again from the labor of the much-exploited workers. These people and their descendants form the bulk of globohomo’s creatures, NGO grifters, nation-wreckers, and government-academia-business-media apparatchiks in the post-communist era. Many of the people whose fathers and grandfathers sang the glories of self-governing socialism now extol the virtues of homosexualism and globalism.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here

Where I will agree with Keith is his treatment of Kosovo and the Kosovar Albanians. I don’t have much to add to that section of his video, except to say that I believe that present-day Kosovo is the end-stage of demographic replacement. First, it’s Western Europe, with 10% minorities causing a ruckus. Then it’s the USA, with 40-something percent minorities waging low-level civil war. Then it’s Brazil, with a mostly white ruling class trying to keep an unraveling nation together, then South Africa with a nonwhite ruling class plotting to eradicate white minorities, and then Kosovo, when the nonwhites (I do not consider Albanians to be white) have proliferated to such an extent that they form a supermajority; the final stage. Whatever’s left of the white population is at the mercy of a regime and a populace which hates it, and all memory of it ever having existed will probably be erased from the territory.

The Albanians have had the full support of America and her deep state, and their mafia now threatens the great cities of Western Europe as well. This is only to be expected. America is a bioleninist empire and its foreign policy is likewise bioleninist. It will intentionally seek alliances with the weak in order to ensure their undying loyalty, using them as excuses to get involved in various areas of the world.

Keith then overcompensates in the other direction and tries to whitewash Serbian atrocities during the Croatian and Bosnian wars. I’ll reiterate my reluctance to pass blame around and my willingness to heal the very deep wounds caused by these brother wars, but the artillery shells which fell on Dubrovnik were very real, and they came out of Serbian guns. You can still see the shrapnel pockmarks on historic buildings in Dubrovnik. Every local seems to have a horror story, and then a tale of heroism and togetherness in the war. We’ll get nowhere by denying that monstrous things were done. What must be understood is that these monstrous things were the natural response to people being forced to share living space.

Yugoslavia failed because it was an insane and stupid project. It was an attempt to force people to live together while they had irreconcilable differences. People naturally respond violently to such pressures, and when they are forced by authoritarian states to live together, those violent instincts go to ground and are unleashed all at once at the first opportunity. This makes the state insanely fragile. If foreign intelligence services exploited ethnic fault lines, it was because these fault lines existed and were handily exploitable. Naive Westerners will often deride our conflicts as the narcissism of small differences, but when you live here, when it’s your skin in the game, these differences do not appear at all small. In fact, they are life and death differences, often with significant implications for reproductive success, material well-being, or even just pure honor and prestige as understood in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic.

What right has any Westerner to tell me that I am basically the same thing as a Serb, with minor linguistic differences? What right has any outsider to tell a Croat that he must pay homage to a federal presidency in Belgrade? What right has any outsider to ask a Serb to sacrifice himself for the security of some Slovene who considers him half-Turk? That’s not even getting into the fact of the far greater genetic diversity which the Balkan peninsula has compared to Western Europe. If genetic similarity theory is anything to go by, no wonder we can’t stand each other. But provide us with spaces which are for us alone, and suddenly we’re friendly and can even work together on common projects.

Keith’s a good kid. I’ve followed him for a while now. He’s a bright fellow, although he has that tendency to overcompensate in the other direction. Like all young people, like myself when I was his age, he has no patience for the middle ground. Like others of a philosophical disposition, he can’t brook the open contradictions and even hypocrisies necessary to get things done in real life. In fact, whenever I find myself disagreeing with Keith, I find that the voice is Keith’s, but the words might as well be a demented rant about octaroon midget kikes, professions of love for a good burger with caramelized onions, or mad visions of racial imperium. It’d appear that the PR department at NPI/Radix has decided that Spencerism sounds less inauthentic and insane if said in an earthy Hibernian baritone, rather than a flinty, smarmy twang.

Keith, buddy, if you’re reading this, understand that you’re better than that. I understand your frustration with petty nationalists in Ireland — Lord knows I have very little patience for my own kinsmen who lack racial consciousness. I can’t really fault them for that, though. Racial consciousness, and taking part in an international racialist movement, are an elite phenomenon. The Dissident Right is itself an elite phenomenon, formed by the disaffected sons of the first and second echelons of power in the West, the men who would have been potentates if not for their unusual attachment to their people and unwillingness to consume them for profit. I can no more expect the common Irish or Macedonian man to think of himself as a white European than I can expect him to understand Heidegger’s object-act of consciousness distinction. And furthermore, the existence of race as a category and layer of identity does not invalidate the existence of the nation as a category and layer of identity, nor need the nation be the enemy of the race, as the region isn’t the enemy of the nation, the town isn’t the enemy of the region, and the family isn’t the enemy of the town. I understand, likewise, your desire to curb international capital and restore the dignity of your people. The answer does not lie in embracing socialism, or looking among the failed and discredited economic theories of the past for solutions to such problems, and certainly not to nations which produced astounding inequalities and exploitation even during their socialist period. I’d also caution you not to consort with has-beens who’d mud-wrestle their own mother for a moment in the limelight, or at the very least, re-examine their ideas in the context of the ideas here discussed.

Only when each brother has a house of his own will we see an end to brother wars.

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