Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and other Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, occasional forays into southern Italy, Spain or eastern Europe, minorities, the nation-state, and nationalism — and whatever other quirks or obsessions lurking in my head, queer or not
Yesterday was “The International Day of Persons with Disabilities”. Soon it’s going to be like the Orthodox Church calendar and there’ll be a long list of “International” days on each and every one of the year’s 365, all commemorating identity till the point where all identity just “melts into air”.
I’ve been unfriendly to Basques in the past, not for any reason particular to Basques but because I’m against the wild reification of any social or cultural group’s self-perception (“identity”) and the pointless violence and other costs that leads to.
These are some of my money quotes:
And then there are the Basques.Ā Do you know how many inhabitants of the Basque regions of Spain who identify as Basque actually speak the language?Ā Some 18%!Ā And yet, this practically identity-less identity has been the motivation for decades of violence and terror.Ā Thereās no more twisted example of post-modern identity foolishness than I can think of.Ā A violent political struggle to save a museum culture.Ā When 50% of you have bothered to actually learn the devilishly difficult language youāre so proud of, then go ahead and engage in any kind of separatist resistance ā violent or non ā that you feel like.
Andā¦
There are more dangerous and toxic manifestations of that kind of localized-identity nationalism as well, most noticeably the Basques.Ā Less than 25% of the people who claim that they are Basques ethnically in Spain can actually speak the language at all ā at all.Ā I once caught a hysterical comedy skit on Spanish television where a man in San Sebastian was trying to pull off a bank robbery in Basque ā on principle.Ā And it wasnāt working because the teller couldnāt understand him.Ā Then the neighboring teller chimes in about the robberās grammar and that itās incorrect according to the teacher at the night-school Basque classes she goes to and the other customers on line start arguing with him and the tellers about noun declensions and whether his use of the subjunctive is correct or not.Ā And the robber starts to scream, frustrated: āIām in Donostia (San Sebastian in Basque) goddammit!Ā Not Burgos!Ā And I canāt even hold up a bank in my own language!āĀ Finally, the cops arrive and instead of apprehending him, they get caught up in the one-upmanship of the group of barely Basque-speaking Basquesā grammar arguments and the robber, frustrated, makes his escape.Ā It was hilarious and it was on YouTube for a while but I havenāt been able to find it again.Ā But thatās not all a joke.Ā People killed each other in the hundreds for decades for an identity with only the most fragile of real footing and a language that none of them spoke; and in post-Franco Spain, one of the most liberal, progressive on social issues nations in Europe, where youāre free to learn any language you want and maintain any kind of culture you like.Ā So, at the risk of sounding glib, make the effort toĀ learn the language first ā BE a Basque first āĀ before you start killing people.
And a quote where I lump Basques and Catalan together with the twentieth century’s most vicious and destructive separatists, Croatians; I’ve often referred to Croats as Balkan Catalans, and referred to Catalans as Iberian Croatians:
I have a serious repellent reflex towards Catalans. This is largely because I love Spain so much, and their anti-Spanishness really gets my goat. I find their Gallic delusions that theyāre so much more European and Mediterranean and civilized than the rest of Spain to be insufferable. (And some day Iāll get around to dismantling the cult of āMediterranean-nessā itself thatās grown since the 1980s and that I find a completely false and fabricated pop-multi-culti identity that grew out of tourist literature, the public relations campaigns of olive oil companies and a popular sprinkling of Braudel, and nothing else. When even Turks start acting and feeling like theyāre āMediterraneans,ā you know that a discourse is b.s. and needs to be taken apart; the extremeness of the hype surrounding Barcelona is part of this, and is why I love the gravitas and even crudeness of Madrid and Castille so much more deeply.)Ā I find Catalansā ānoli me tangereā squeamishness about how they shouldnāt have to suffer by being a part of this barbaric country of monarcho-fascists and Catholics and gypsies and bull-torturers to be racist pure and simple. Theyāre Iberian Croatians, in short. There are plenty out there who will get the analogy, I believe.
And more:
All of us on the periphery, and yes you can include Spain, struggle to define ourselves and maintain an identity against the enormous centripetal power of the center.Ā So when one of us ā Catalans, Croatians, Neo-Greeks ā latches onto something ā usually some totally imaginary construct ā that they think puts them a notch above their neighbors on the periphery and will get them a privileged relationship to the center, I find it pandering and irritating and in many cases, āracist pure and simple.āĀ Itās a kind of Uncle-Tom-ism that damages the rest of us: damages our chances to define ourselves independent of the center, and damages a healthy, balanced understanding of our self culturally and historically and ideologically and spiritually…
Spain ā in part because itās felt it had to compensate for the darker elements of its past ā has transformed itself in just a few decades, and in a way I find extremely moving and mature, into perhaps one of the most progressive countries in Europe on a whole range of moral and social issues and especially in being open to regional autonomy and regional, cultural rights.Ā There is no way you canāt be happily and solidly Catalan, and maintain your culture and language to the fullest degree, within the Spanish state.Ā Objections are nonsense.
But they had already lost me when they banned bullfighting.
It could have been very different. But the 2017 declaration of independence threw away the campaignās moral advantage.
Giles Tremlett
āThose now in jail will be hailed as martyrs to their cause and become an inspiration for future generations of separatists.ā Pro-independence protesters hold Catalan flags in Barcelona. Photograph: Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images
–
[My emphases throughout]
Some things are impossible. Catalan independence is currently one of them. The stiff jail sentences handed down to the leaders of the separatist campaign that peaked in 2017 with a banned referendum, police violence and a fudged declaration of independence make that clearer than ever.
There are huge practical obstacles to independence, starting with the many hurdles written into Spainās constitution. Overcoming these requires massive support in Catalonia itself; but the separatist leaders who orchestrated a head-on collision with the law never had anything like that. The jail sentences are for sedition, but their real problem is hubris.
That was already obvious on the streets of Barcelona and elsewhere when a unilateral proclamation of independence in the Catalan parliament on 27 October 2017 changed exactly nothing. It was, indeed, the day that an otherwise peaceful and often remarkable separatist campaign derailed itself.
A decision by the separatist Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, to flee the country only served to underline that. Now living in Belgium, he was not among those sentenced on Monday, though an international arrest warrant has now been issued. The independence campaign embraced the tactics of civil disobedience, where people who deliberately flout the law know they may go to jail. This is often a key part of the process, since it provokes the outrage that brings change. The nine men and women sentenced to between nine and 13 years of prison have stuck honourably to that tradition. Puigdemont clearly has not.
Those now in jail will be hailed as martyrs to their cause and become an inspiration for future generations of separatists. In court, they were unrepentant. āI would do it all again,ā said Jordi Cuixart [ok…], who received a nine-year sentence. As protesters reacted to the sentences by blockading Barcelonaās airport, it was not clear whether calls to avoid violence would be respected. After the events of 2017, the police response will be watched closely.
Yet the fury felt today by Catalan separatists is not shared in the rest of Spain, nor, more crucially, does it extend very far in the rest of Europe ā where they had hoped to provoke a sudden flowering of sympathy. Their campaign, in other words, has failed. The only visible result is a divided Catalan society where explicit support for independence remains below 50%.
It could all have ended very differently. Separatists do best when, like the Brexiters who they sometimes resemble, they can claim to be victims of the status quo. In that sense, the police charges during the banned referendum of 1 October 2017 were a gift. The sight of helmeted, baton-wielding officers beating up peaceful voters played directly into their hands. The Spanish state looked, and behaved, like an ogre.
Separatism could have built on that. Instead, it threw its moral advantage away with the independence declaration.
The court sentences concentrate on the referendum and are harsher than expected, and some will argue about the definition of āseditionā, but there is no doubt that the law was deliberately broken. The Catalan parliament does not have the power to declare independence. Nor can it unilaterally call a binding referendum on the subject. In that sense, it is no different to, say, the Scottish parliament. When politicians break the law and cross lines set by the constitution, the courts tell them so. Just as Boris Johnson cannot arbitrarily suspend the Westminster parliament, so Puigdemont could not hold a referendum. And unlike Johnson (so far), his government ignored court rulings ā and went ahead with the vote anyway.
Declaring independence ramped up the level of defiance. It was also dishonest, since it was based on a referendum in which only one side campaigned. āRemain in Spainā voters mostly boycotted the illegal vote and, inevitably, the āleaveā side won. That is not a solid basis on which to announce an epoch-defining, existential change to the lives of all 7.6 million Catalans.
āWhen politicians break the law and cross lines set by the constitution, the courts tell them.ā Carles Puigdemont. Photograph: FranƧois Lenoir/Reuters
Spanish right-wingers are today gloating over the courtās sentencing. Yet they are part of the problem. The anti-Catalan rhetoric that has accompanied their periods in power has only served to boost separatism. And even the socialist left, which talks up the idea of a āpluri-nationalā Spain, has done little to make Spaniards in other parts of the country proud of the languages and cultures that coexist within it.
Paradoxically, an obvious solution is to hold a proper referendum. This would force Catalan voters to face reality. Just the idea of being expelled from the EU would probably be enough to secure a resounding victory for remain. So why wonāt Spain do that? The countryās written constitution makes both a referendum and independence theoretically possible, in a process controlled from Madrid. In practical terms, however, it hands a blocking vote to 40% of the senate. Even when the left is in government, the right normally commands that. It will never permit a separate Catalonia.
Since independence is possible in theory, but currently impossible in practice, some separatists may conclude that only violence will achieve their aims. Police last month arrested a group that was allegedly planning to mark this decision with bomb attacks. That is the worst mistake separatists could make. At the first sight of bloodshed, support would likely shrink so far that their cause could take decades to recover.
Their only hope is to keep following the advice of the jailed regional MP and ex-president of the grassroots Catalan National Assembly, Jordi SĆ nchez. āLetās express ourselves without fear and move forward, nonviolently, towards freedom,ā he said. That is a very long journey.
⢠Giles Tremlett is a journalist and author based in Madrid
My government will act with restraint and moderation to defend peaceful coexistence in our country
⢠Pedro SÔnchez is prime minister of Spain
Demonstrators march in support of Catalonia remaining part of Spain, Barcelona, 27 October 2019. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP
[my emphases throughout]
Europe, above all, is about freedom, peace and progress. We must move forward with these values and make it the leading model of integration and social justice, one that protects its citizens. The Europe that we aspire to, the Europe that we need, the Europe we are building is based on democratic stability within our states and cannot accept the unilateral breach of its integrity. The Europe we admire has been built on the principle of overlapping identities and equality for all citizens, and on the rejection of nationalist ideologies and extremism.
For this reason, the challenge of separatism in Catalonia, devised against and outside Spainās constitutional framework ā and silencing the majority of Catalans who are against independence ā is a challenge for Europe and Europeans. Preserving these values in Catalonia today means protecting the open and democratic Europe for which we stand.
In 1978, Spain adopted a fully democratic constitution, thus escaping the long and dark shadow of dictatorship. That historic document was endorsed by almost 88% of voters in a referendum. In Catalonia, support and turnout were even higher: 90.5% of Catalans backed the new constitution. Today, the Democracy Index, published by the Economist, rates Spain as one of the worldās 20 full democracies.
Contemporary Spain is Europeās second most decentralised country, and Catalonia enjoys some of the highest levels of regional self-governance on the continent, with wide-ranging devolved powers over crucial sectors such as media and public communication, health, education and prisons.
Today, however, Catalonia is associated with a profound crisis, caused by the unilateral breach of Spainās constitutional order brought about by the regionās separatist leaders in the autumn of 2017. Cataloniaās leaders reneged on all the resolutions set out by the constitutional court, passed unconstitutional ādisconnectionā laws from the Spanish state, held an illegal referendum and declared a purported Catalan republic.
No state would ever allow the unilateral secession of a territory that forms part of its constitutional order. And no democrat should support the path taken by the separatist leaders, who won less than 48% of the votes cast in regional elections.
My government has promoted the expansion of rights and liberties and would never agree to even the smallest restriction of freedom of expression. The president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Cataloniaās regional government), Quim Torra, is a radical separatist, but he is not prevented from expressing his views freely, despite the pain and damage they cause to peaceful coexistence in Catalonia. In Spain, everyone may express their opinions as they wish, provided that they do not promote and encourage criminal acts.
The supreme court recently ruled against nine separatist leaders charged for the illegal acts they carried out in the autumn of 2017. The court acted with the greatest transparency: the entire proceedings were televised live.
I fully respect those Catalan citizens who have peacefully exercised fundamental rights to protest and to strike against the ruling. But the organised and intentional acts of violence that have occurred across Catalonia in recent weeks are something else altogether and in no way represent the regionās tolerance and welcoming spirit.
A burning barricade in Barcelona, on 19 October 2019. Photograph: Manu FernƔndez/AP
The illegal effort to bring about Cataloniaās independence has followed a roadmap that is all too familiar in todayās Europe. It has used a web of lies, spun by fake news and viral messaging, to divide societies by exploiting the rhetoric of reaction to encourage polarisation and confrontation.
Recently, the president of the main pro-separatist association, Elisenda Paluzie, stated that images of violent clashes between protesters and police officers had āpositive and negative effectsā as they ālent visibility to the conflictā and ākeep us in the international pressā. But if we have learned anything from Europeās painful and bloody history, it is that no political ambition can ever justify resorting to violence, much less the normalisation of violence as a political tool.
My government has responded with speed and proportion to restore peace and stability to Cataloniaās citizens, a majority of whom reject the current unstable impasse.
I call on the president of the Generalitat to condemn the violence fully and clearly, and to act as president of all Catalans, not only those who share his political beliefs.
I will not allow another extreme nationalist outbreak to undermine the success of Spanish democracy. In the discussion about the future of Catalonia, only the healing and coexistence of the Catalan people and society, not independence, is on the agenda. This is our main challenge: to ensure that all understand and accept that a unilateral path toward independence constitutes a direct affront to fundamental democratic principles.
At this moment, restraint and moderation are imperative. We will act with all the firmness needed to defend peaceful coexistence, all the while recognising that we have an opportunity to start a new chapter.
I know that there are open wounds, pain and frustration. But, despite this, there is an opportunity for dialogue and hope, recognising what we have achieved together and thinking about what we can do, together. I will never turn away from dialogue, but for this to happen the separatist leaders must abide by the constitution and respect the rule of law.
My government has positioned Spain at the forefront of the project of European integration and the fight against our greatest global challenges. These objectives transcend a nationalist vision, and we need Catalonia and Catalan society to help achieve them.
Pedro SƔnchez is prime minister of Spain. This article was originally published by Project Syndicate
As the standoff drags on, and polarization increases, people find it harder to envisage Northern Ireland as an autonomous entity. āWeāre back to this binary situation where people either see it as a problematic part of the U.K. or as a part of united Ireland,ā said Graham Walker, a politics professor at Queenās University, Belfast.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at a summit of the EU, Brussels, June 2017
And itās The New York Review of Booksā excellent piece by Fintan OāToole, āBrexitās Irish Questionā, that made me think a little more carefully about the whole issue.
I suggest everybody read the whole article since itās open to the public, but I think even it pulls its punches a bit too much and doesnāt realize the degree of danger this āquestionā poses.Ā This is not āBrexitās Irish Question.āĀ This is Englandās Ireland Problem.Ā AGAIN.Ā STILL.Ā A reversion to form.Ā Before 1999.Ā Before 1921.Ā So all parties, but especially England, not Britain, should tread very carefully.
A good if rather lengthy summary/call out are the following three paragraphs from the piece:
āThe Republic of Ireland was one of the most ethnically and religiously monolithic societies in the developed world. Its official ideology was a fusion of Catholicism and nationalism. The anti-homosexuality laws reflected the dominance of the Catholic Church, which was also manifest in extreme restrictions on contraception, divorce, and abortion. While the vast majority of its population was repelled by the savage violence of the Irish Republican Armyās armed campaign against British rule across the border in Northern Ireland, most agreed with the IRAās basic aim of ending the partition of the island and bringing about what the Irish constitution called āthe reintegration of the national territory.ā
āBut the Irish radically revised their nationalism. Three big things changed. The power of the Catholic Church collapsed in the 1990s, partly because of its dreadful response to revelations of its facilitation of sexual abuse of children by clergy. The Irish economy, home to the European headquarters of many of the major multinational IT and pharmaceutical corporations, became a poster child for globalization. And the search for peace in Northern Ireland forced a dramatic rethinking of ideas about identity, sovereignty, and nationality.
āThese very questions had tormented Ireland for centuries and were at the heart of the vicious, low-level, but apparently interminable conflict that reignited in Northern Ireland in 1968 and wound down thirty years later. If that conflict was to be resolved, there was no choice but to be radical. Things that nation-states do not likeāambiguity, contingency, multiplicityāwould have to be lived with and perhaps even embraced. Irish people, for the most part, have come to terms with this necessity. The English, as the Brexit referendum suggested, have not. This is why the Irish border has such profound implications for Brexitāit is a physical token of a mental frontier that divides not just territories but ideas of what a national identity means in the twenty-first century.āĀ [My emphases]
The passageās conclusion pretty much says it all.Ā As the second decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, and as Ireland approaches 100 years of freedom from almost 800 years of English rule, Ireland will enter the historical record as having taken a step forward and England as having taken a step backwards.Ā Good riddance, to be frank, as I have to say so against some pretty deep Anglophile sentiments.Ā It took me till much too late in life to realize that the best thing to do to an irate lover who loudly announces heās not talking to you anymore is to ignore him, but that is what the European Union is rightly and justly doing to Britain.Ā And Britain is doing exactly what the āirate loverā always does when you call his no-talking bluff: trying to somehow work his way back into the position where he can regain at least some of the power that he forfeited with his drama so that he can manoeuver a bit.Ā But itās not going to work.Ā Europe is genuinely tired of the drama.
The issue here is that itās unconscionable that Englandās drama should again be made Irelandās.Ā Hereās a political map of the past two decades of Northern Irish life:
But thatās exactly what London has to do.Ā England left Ireland in 1921 with a sizeable chunk stuck between its teeth that, like a pitbull, it would not let go of and which is why we find ourselves where we are today.Ā It left Indiain 1947 like a teenager who sheepishly goes off to sleep at his girlās after his friends have trashed his parentsā place while they were away.Ā It left Cyprus in 1960 exactly the same, a time bomb ready to go off ā which did.Ā Under no condition shouldĀ England be allowed to leave a similar mess this time.Ā Time for the international community to make theĀ English clean up after themselves.
The international community and NATO more specifically did not support Portugal in its attempt to hold on to Goa after Indian independence.Ā That means the UK neither, obviously.Ā Itās now time for the world to tell the UK to entirely and finally Quit Ireland, its closest and perhaps most deeply brutalized colony.Ā Iām usually not so intransigent on these issues, but the historical record calls for a complete rejection of any attempts by Irish Protestants to keep England involved in Irish affairs by āprotectingā them or their rights; complicated compromises only kick the can down the road.Ā The historical record calls for a complete rejection of even a syllable of their āposition.āĀ The historical record calls for a referendum, which Unionists will lose, and calls for London to make it clear to them that they are being cut loose.Ā Let them keep British citizenship if they want.Ā Come up with a resettlement scheme for them if thatās what they want, immigrants that the English can live with since they canāt tolerate detestable, lazy, dirty Poles.Ā Otherwise, bye-bye guysā¦
But if Theresa May and her government of buffoni were ethical enough or had the balls to do something like that, they would have started that process already, instead of still talking gibberish about everything like they are.
I was once dragged by force into a corner by a Lebanese friend at a party in Cambridge and told to never ask anyone Lebanese their religious affiliation, I guess because I probably just had done.Ā Of course, I still ask. Like I implied in my Turkish post a few days ago, pretend unity (that youāre a passionate ErdoÄan supporter and Iām not, or if youāre Maronite and Iām third-generation Palestinian doesnāt mean that we canāt still be āunifiedā), can only become real unity if differences are acknowledged. (*1)
Iāve had not dissimilar experiences with Irish folks if Iāve ever tried to talk about religion orUlster or āthe Troubles.āĀ I once asked a guy at an Irish bar in Queens who was from Northern Ireland if he was Catholic, and I got a blank and frankly angry stare in response, and with so much alcohol and testosterone in the mix, realized quickly I should shut up and look the other way or change the topic.Ā A female bartender who heard the one-sided exchange said to me softly: ānot a good idea to ask people those thingsā¦āĀ Ok.
Map of Northern Ireland with distribution of Protestants (red) and Catholics (green) according to age group, showing a clear demographic decline of Protestants.
I also hear Irish anger at what they think is an out of touch diaspora that funded continuing IRA violence when the Irish themselves on both sides were starting to get tired of the violence and the fences were starting to come down ā though thatās slightly disingenuous ā in the early days these diaspora funders were heroes ā and, as a non-metropolitan Greek, immediately assuming that the ādiasporaā is āout of touchā or stuck in a time warp is a seriously irritating train of thought; thereās lotsa ways weāre more in touch than you lot.
So Iām really setting myself up as an easy target since Iām not even Irish or Irish-American.Ā But I feel I canāt be silent as the English decide the future of any part of Ireland again.
I know that the Brexit vote came as a shock to a lot of Americans, as we were forced to confront the fact that the English are not all that smart, and can be as jingoistic, xenophobic, ignorant and proudly āknow-nothingā as Americans can be.Ā And I say the English because Scotland and Northern Ireland voted against leaving the European Union ā in Northern Ireland, particularly, in percentages that would indicate a large number of Protestants voted to stay as well ā and they should now be free to decide their own fates free of London.
Sometimes I feel that my views on the ethnic nation-state and minorities come across as selective and sort of random to readers, so let me take this moment to clarify a bit.Ā I am, of course, against the brutal assimilationist policies of the nation-state and a supporter of minority language and cultural rights.Ā On the other hand, Iām also against a minority holding an entirely polity hostage because it refuses to conform with the conditions of living in a state where they donāt hold numerical superiority.
Thereās a great and frustrating passage in Rebecca Westās beautiful Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, where her Serbian (and half-Jewish) tour-guide is arguing with a Croatian intellectual in Zagreb; ābut you are not loyalā says the Serb:
Croat: You treat us badly.Ā How can we be loyal?
Serb:Ā Youāre treated badly because youāre not loyal.
Croat:Ā How can we be loyal if we are treated badly?
Serb:Ā If you were loyal, you wouldnāt be treated badly.
Croat:Ā When you treat us better, weāll be loyal.
Serb:Ā As long as youāre not loyal you canāt expect to be treated better.
And on and on and onā¦
(Rebecca West, who along with disconcertingly smart and honest, was clearly a real babe as well ā broke a lot of hearts and refused to forgive when hers wasā¦cool.Ā As Lauren Cooper would say: āForgiving is for l-o-o-o-o-z-u-u-h-h-z-z!!!ā)
Of course, we saw, during WWII, just after Westās second trip, and then again by the end of the last century, that Croatians had no intention of being loyal to Yugoslavia no matter how much bending-over-backwards to ātreat them betterā Belgrade did.
Or take Catalans again, in a state where as a minority they are treated exceptionally well.Ā Still, with full language and cultural rights, they feel Madrid is oppressing them and they want full independence, threatening to rip apart the fabric of a country that has made impressive democratic achievements over the past few decades.Ā And those of you who bought the public relations crap about how āhip, cool and Mediterraneanā Catalonia is, and who spend your tourist money in Barcelona and the Balearics have only contributed to the discriminatory tendencies of Catalan chauvinism and the worsening crisis of Catalan separatism.Ā Try Galicia or the Basque Country if you want to see parts of Spain that are not part of the Castilian center, but where ethno-linguistic difference has made its peace with the Spanish state and society has agreed to co-existence.Ā Or if theyāre too rainy and un-Mediterranean for you, go to Córdoba and Granada (skip Seville, too Catholic and bull-obsessed), poorer parts of the country that need your money and where you can buy the public relations spin of Edward Said instead, who once outrageously made the claim that 60% of Spanish vocabulary is of Arabic origin, (or maybe the spin of Al Qaeda and ISIS) and wallow in Al-Andalus nostalgia.
Even more and very closer to home: my fatherās Greek minority village of DerviƧiani in southern Albania.Ā My early-days romance with the village is kinna over and I feel free to express things that Iām angry at myself for not saying to the faces of people there earlier.
Iād love to ask: what the f*ck do you want exactly?Ā They have Greek primary and secondary education; they have Greek churches (a Church about which few of them know anything or take seriously in any way, or have bothered to learn about in order to address the consequences of four decades of enforced atheism, but they have them); the Albanian Orthodox Church itself ā meaning not just Greek minority churches, but the Church of Orthodox Albanians ā in fact, is headed, run and staffed by Greeks, (extremely enlightened ones, I have to admit), the way the Arab Orthodox Churches of the Levant were for so many centuries; they have, I believe, two political parties that have members who sit in the Albanian parliament.Ā If their villages are experiencing slow to rapid depopulation, itās not the fault of Albanians or TiranĆ«; they were simply trapped ā Greeks and Albanians together ā in a Stalinist cage for fifty years and now are free to leave: the villages of Greek Epiros started hemorrhaging inhabitants soon after WWII, and neighboring Albanian villages, both Christian and Muslim, are also emptying of young people.Ā Still, theyāre hostile to neighboring Albanians; still, they want autonomy for āNorthern Epiros,ā which for some of them stretches half-way up to the middle of Albania (I donāt care if āthe stones speak Greek all the way to Dyrracheio/DurrĆ«sā ā The. People. Who. Live. There. Now. Donāt. And donāt want to be part of a Greek autonomous region. 2**); still, they make Muslim girls get baptized if they want to marry any of their precious boys, μη ĻĪĻĻ (thank God Albanians still wear their Islam kind of lightly or these poor girls would be in serious trouble) and will ostracize any Christian daughter or sister who falls in love with and marries a Muslim; still, they get offended, even a hip, British-educated nephew does, if you visit the pleasant, well-watered, historical Muslim village of Libohovo ā Albanian LibohovĆ« ā across the valley and you come back and say it was very nice and that the young people there donāt seem much different than ours.Ā Of course, this attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the conversation from Black Lamb⦠above indicates, so that when you put up the flag of Autonomous Northern Epiros 1914 on August 15th and the Albanian police has to come and take it down, then youāll just end up on the bad side of the Albanian authorities and ordinary Albaniansā retaliatory instinct and the vicious cycle will just keep going.
A flag of the Youth of DerviƧiani, which, just by wild and completely invented coincidence, happens to have been āfoundedā in 1914, the year there was a short-lived experiment in Northern Epiroteautonomy, which was squashed by Italian objections, because Italy considered Albania within its sphere of influence.Ā Obviously not a sign of just the āyouthā of the village ā there was no Youth of DerviƧani in 1914.Ā And if there are still any doubts, the Palaelogan double-headed eagle lays them to rest.
(Really, is there anything as idiotic as a flag?)
But back to Ireland.Ā I think Ulster Protestants caused enough ātroublesā by acting ā with the hypocritical support of England ā like they were a besieged minority that couldnāt be part of the Irish Republic.Ā So if a majority of Northern Irish voters chose to exit the Brexit, thatās a golden opportunity just dropped out of the heavens into our laps to correct an egregious historical wrong.Ā The invasion and conquest of Ireland, its depopulation and the ripping to shreds of its society, culture and language did not start with the Potato Famine of the nineteenth century.Ā It started with the Normans and the Plantagenets, and then the Tudors and the Stuarts and, finally, Cromwelland his Taliban, and it was a grueling, vicious, murderous process, as violent, or more, as any of Britainās other colonial wars and right on Europeās front door, and the Plantation of Ulster itself and the rest of Ireland was a conscious colonial policy of appropriating land and settling poor Protestant Scots and northern Englishmen in the country in order to ācivilizeā it and break Irish resistance to English hegemony.
If the above maps seem to indicate that a large number of Protestants left the Irish Republic in the twentieth century because they didnāt feel comfortable without the English crownās protection, thatās unfortunate (it was not so unfortunate in cases where the Anglo-Irish elite felt they had to flee when their expropriated land was re-expropriated) but that canāt be a justification for the continued amputation of the country.
Itās a classic strategic move, though.Ā Ulster Protestants are not a socioeconomic group comparable to the Anglo-Irish landowners; they were always as squire-ridden as their Catholic neighbors and are still pretty much on equal footing in that sense.
But everybody has to be better than somebody, or else youāre nobody.Ā So, just like Catalans have to think theyāre really Mare-Nostrum-ProvenƧal Iberians (3 ***) and not part of reactionary Black Legend Spain; or Neo-Greeks have to think that theyāre better than their Balkan neighbors (especially Albanian āTurksā) because they think theyāre the descendants of those Greeks; or the largely lower-middle class, Low Church Anglican or Presbyterian or Methodist Brits who fled their socioeconomic status back home and went out to India in the nineteenth century in order to be somebody, had to destroy the socially laissez-faire modus vivendi that had existed there between Company white-folk and Indians, creating an apartheid and religiously intolerant, aggressively evangelizing, social system that laid the groundwork for the unbelievable blood-letting of the Indian Rebellion of 1857; or, perhaps historyās greatest example, poor whites in the American South(many, ironically, of Northern Irish Protestant origin) that had to terrorize Black freedmen back into their āplaceā because the one thing they had over them in the old Southās socioeconomic order, that they werenāt slaves, had been snatched away (and one swift look at the c-ontemporary American political scene shows clear as day indications that theyāre, essentially, STILL angry at that demotion in status); or French Algerians couldnāt stomach the idea of living in an independent Algeria where they would be on equal footing with Arab or Berber Algerians.Ā So Protestant Ulstermen couldnāt tolerate being part of an independent state with these Catholic savages.
A Bureau agent stands between armed groups of whites and Freedmen in this 1868 sketch from Harperās Weekly.
Recent White supremacist rally at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville ā thanks to @JuliusGoat: āImagine if these people ever faced actual oppression.ā
The colonial power ā or just the colonized mind ā then disingenuously but actively seeks to right these wrongs and protect the embattled minority.Ā The results?Ā A Lebanon torn apart by Maronite phobias and Palestinian victim-entitlement; the greatest threat to Spanish democracy since Franco; a Greece completely isolated from its nearest and closest ā in every sense ā neighbors; an India where British response to the Rebellion effectively disenfranchised Indian Muslims (4 ****) ā Dalrymple shrewdly locates one of the beginnings of modern Islamic fundamentalism in that disenfranchisement and the Deobandi Islam it created 5 *****; the Ku Klux Clan and the murder of Emmett Till and Donald Trump; the vicious Algerian War of Independence, which resulted in French Algerians having to flee the country entirely to a France where theyāre still a bulwark of reaction and racism, and the still bad blood between Algerian immigrants and natives in that country.
(I thought about adding Cyprus to that list, thatās going on forty-some years of division after the 1974 Turkish invasion, but didnāt, because Turkish Cypriots actually were an embattled minority, and Greek Cypriots have to do some moral self-searching about their terrorizing, or passively supporting the terrorizing, of their Turkish neighbors, before they blame either Turkey or the Greek junta for f*cking things up for them.)
I was against the Scottish independence referendum of a few years ago because Iām against separation and the putting up of borders generally.Ā But then the apparently stoned British electorate went and separated itself from the rest of Europe, and if Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales even, or Cornwall or the Isle of Manx or Jersey and Guernsey for that matter, want independence from England now, England will have only brought that down on its own head.Ā If Northern Ireland votes to stay in the European Union then de facto reunion with the Republic will have occurred; I would just like de jure recognition of that facto too, so that thereās no more excuse for meddling in Irish affairs.Ā Irishmen have done a lot of genuinely hard work confronting the demons of their own past in recent years; todayās Ireland is a democratic, pluralist, morally progressive society where the Catholic Churchās death-grip has been broken.Ā That Ulster Protestants canāt live there in peace and security and without English protection is a ludicrous idea.
So let it happen, and if Ulstermen donāt like it ā sorry to sound like a reactionary nativist ā but theyāre free to go back to Scotland where they came from.Ā Or if they want they can come here and join their distant cousins in Kentucky and the Ozarks.Ā Iām sure President Trump will consider them the ārightā kind of immigrants.
1 * Itās a little reductive, but I think itās not outrageously so to see the Lebanese Civil War as essentially, or initially,Ā a conflict between Maronite demographic panic and paranoia (not entirely unjustified) and Palestinian entitlementof the oppressed (even more justified); every other group seems to then have had no choice but to choose sides.Ā Then add Israel ā which arguably started the whole problem ā and Syria to the mix, και γάμηĻĪ Ļα.
2 ** Of course, Northern Epirote Greeksā Γήθεν innocent desire for autonomy is completely disingenuous ā though weāre supposed to think that Albanians are too stupid to get that ā and is really just a prelude and first step to independence and union with Greece, though theyāre a demographically fast-dwindling percentage of the population of the region they lay claim to.Ā Thatās not a deterrent, however; all you have to do is believe that all Orthodox Albanians are reeeeeeeally Greek and youāve solved your demographic issue, since Muslim Albanians are just turncoat intruders in the region as far as Northern Epirotes are concerned.
The only obstacle that would then be left is to get Albanians to forget what happened to the Muslim Albanian Ćams of western Greek Epiros (Albanian: ĆamĆ«ria, Greek: ΤĻĪ±Ī¼ĪæĻ ĻιάTsamouriĆ”) during WWII, when they were subjected to massacre and expulsion in a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Greek right-wing resistance and had to flee to Albania.
I still havenāt figured out how, as Muslims, they escaped the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of the 1920s; it wouldāve been a more merciful fate.Ā I also havenāt figured out how the tsamiko, a dance of central and southern Greece, got its name.Ā Or else, what clues to a forgotten past the fact that my grandmotherās maiden name was Ćames provides; almost all our last names are Albanian ā with the Greek male nominative -s ending added to them ā as in Bako-s ā but as far as I know thereās no clan in our villages whose last name is actually the name of an Albanian sub-ethnic group.Ā See: (āEaster eggs: a grandmother and aĀ grandfatherā.
This kind of issue always reminds me of the Puerto Rican expression from a song of I dunno what period: āĀæY tu abuela donde estĆ”?ā orĀ āĀæY tu agüela, aonde ejtĆ”?ā āAnd whereās your grandmother?ā i.e., before you get all high and mighty and Whitey on us, show us the Black grandmother youāve got hidden in the kitchen.
3 *** This fetishizing of the Mediterranean as a region, a lost paradise of cosmopolitanism and healthy diets, drives me nuts.Ā Everyone is suddenly āMediterranean.āĀ The big laugh, of course, is that Turks are Mediterranean.Ā Then comes the less funny one about Croatians being Mediterranean, whereas Serbs are clearly not ā Croats wanting to have it both ways, and be Mediterranean and Mitteleuropean at the same time ā even if theyāre from neolithic Herzegovina and about as neanderthal themselves as their Serbian and Muslim neanderthal neighbors; Istrians have sealed their Mediterranean-ness by buying every Italian restaurant in New York Cityās boroughs, and of course the largely Italianate Dalmatian coast seals in most Europeansā minds the idea of Croatia as a country on the f*cking M-E-D-I-T-E-R-R-A-N-E-A-N.Ā Actually, the closest example to Croatiansā appropriation of a largely Venetian Adriatic is the Turkish appropriation of Greek Aegean imagery, in tourist and p.r. language, on both the Anatolian coast and in Imbros and Tenedos.
Just as nicely condescending is the saying from some-where in the Iberian periphery that āde Madrid no se ve el mar,ā āyou canāt see the sea from Madrid.āĀ Supposedly a jab at Castillian casticismo, and inward-looking provincialness.Ā No, you canāt see the sea.Ā Thatās why Castille is such a beautiful, high plateau, dry and bright and chilly and Romanesque and stunning in its emptiness and vastness.
A White Turk friend once dragged me to Sorrento on our trip to Naples and Campania, which I knew would be a mistake, because it would be and turned out to be a tourist-swamped, hellish Thomas Cook holiday trap because it was āon the sea.āĀ (but one makes concessions to oneās travelling partnerās fantasies.)Ā We cut out as soon as we could and headed to Ravello, up in the mountains away from the sea and she was blown away by how beautiful it was.
And what happens to Greeks like me? who are from a part of the Greek world that is clearly more Balkan in every way than it is Mediterranean?Ā What do we have to do to join the club?
4 **** William Dalrymple is a great historical writer who does what professional academics canāt do because theyāre so specialized that they can easily say: āSorry, I donāt work on that periodā when you ask them anything they donāt know.Ā The breadth and depth of his knowledge on South Asia is truly amazing and he makes it all interesting and stimulating for the layman without dumbing it down.Ā When I first started this blog I wrote to him asking to reproduce some of the passages on the British destruction of Mughal Delhi contained in his book, The Last Mughal, and he immediately and generously shot back with an email that said: āGo for it.āĀ Thanks again.
āFollowing the crushing of the Uprising, and the uprooting and slaughter of the Delhi court, the Indian Muslims themselves also divided into two opposing paths: one, championed by the great Anglophile Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, looked to West, and believed that Indian Muslims could revive their fortunes only by embracing Western learning.Ā With this in mind, Sir Sayyid founded his Aligarh Mohamedan Anglo-Oriental College (later Aligarh Muslim University) and tied to recreate Oxbridge in the plains of Hndustan.
āThe other approach, taken by survivors of the old Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, was to reject the West in toto and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots.Ā For this reason, disillusioned pupils of the school of Shah Waliullah, such as Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi ā who in 1857 had briefly established an independent Islamic state north of Meerut at Shamli, in the Doab ā founded an influential but depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, one-hundred miles north of the former Mughal capital.Ā With their backs to the wall, they reacted against what the founders saw as the degenerate and rotten ways of the old Mughal elite.Ā The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.*
*(It was by no means a total divide: religious education at Aligarh, for example, was in the hands of the Deobandis.)
āOne hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical and powerful fundamentalist Islamic counter-attack the modern West has yet encountered.ā
See also his magisterial The Return of a Kingon nineteenth-century Afghanistan, which I have a few issues with, particularly his conclusions, but which was a couldnāt-put-it-down one for me.
Then came the counterattack. King Felipe VI led the charge. He stated that neither the government in Madrid nor the monarchy would negotiate with the pro-independence Catalan leaders.
But it was the joint offensive between the Spanish state and major Catalan corporations that really did the trick. On Oct. 4, the government issued a decree that would help businesses relocate from Catalonia to Spain. In the days after, the headquarters of the major Catalonian banks ā Caixa and Sabadell ā and the water and gas companies announced they would leave the region. Democracy also works this way: Millions of voters cast only one vote, while a few use their millions to weigh in as if they were millions…
The banks’ departure felt like a cold shower for independence supporters, willing to give it all for their motherland ā except their savings accounts and their European lifestyles. For Mr. Puidgemont and his party, historically tied to those same banks, it was more like an ice-cold tsunami. [my emphasis].
It’s really tiring — and tiring, especially, is feeling the constant scathing condescension towards these idiots — to see what a playground for the puerile identity politics are.Ā Caparrós continues:
With the economy in danger among the waving flags and patriotic chants, it became increasingly evident that independence was more a desire than a project. For years, there has been talk about creating a new country but little discussion of its economic and social structure, which is why it was never clear how much actual social energy ā how much struggle, how much sacrifice ā was necessary to achieve it.
Creating a country is a complex, expensive process: To take such a step you need a huge amount of support. Usually, independence is achieved after a long war, or the fall of a colonial power. At the least, it requires the gathering of an overwhelming majority. In Catalonia, Iām glad to say, the first two options seem impossible. The third one is not in place. To start as a new but divided country would be a recipe for disaster.
Like the make-you-wanna-pull-your-hair-out Brexit: it seems — what? — nobody thought of these things?
One important thing that may have come out of, as I wrote, rethinking Yugoslavia, and the thing that Catalans and Basques, Croatians and Slovenians, and Lombards and Romagnolos, and self-righteous Brits and Germans bitching about Greek irresponsibility, should really rethink is how their supposedly parasitic South is also their major market.Ā See the dim shape Croatia seems to be unable to pull itself out of since independence, I’m happy to report with just a touch of schadenfreude; Croatia, which a New York Times editorial in 1992 gallingly called to be accepted “…into the West, in which it always belonged”, (see Bugarian historian Maria Todorova‘s enraged reaction in her Imagining the Balkans)…Croatia has now fallen behind the poorest countries in the EU, Romania and Bulgaria, on many indicators.
Puigdemont and Spanish King Felipe VI at recent press conferences.
The Spanish — and/or/together, autonomously together, autonomously independent but dialectically related — Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, one of my highest-ranking intellectual heroes, wrote in 1905:
“The essays that make up my book Regarding Casticismo […] are an attempt at a study of the Castillian soul, essays I felt obligated to write due to the profound disparity between my own soul and that of Castille.Ā Yet this disparity is what mediates between the spirit of the Basque people, into which I was born and raised, and that of Castille, in which, since my twenty-six years of age, my own spirit began to mature.Ā At the time I believed, as do not a few of my compatriots and many Catalans, that these disparities were irreducible and irreconcilable: today I no longer believe so.” [my translation]
I’ve chosen to leave “casticismo” untranslated, and not take Amazon’s suggestion that it means “purity”, precisely because it means so much more than that and has a much more complex, nearly untranslatable meaning.Ā I mean, it’s explainable, just not with one word.Ā But a good explanation, to the best of my instinct, since I’m not Basque or Castillian or Spanish at all, is what I need to give readers.
I have to go back to Unamuno’s essays, which are unfortunately not available in English, to do so, however.Ā Just posting this as a coming attraction and to get my own head working on the issue.
We can go on about projection, or Jung and the Shadow, but I really can’t be bothered to say anything else right now.Ā Check Catalonia on my tags, or go to my one post that sort of says it all re: Vargas Llosa piece in Times:Ā Catalonia: āNationalism effaces the individualā¦āĀ I’ll re-post it.
But for all you millenial nitwits whose hearts are now bleeding for poor Catalonia, this is the end-game of the identity politics that have become your playground.Ā When you “stop taking pictures of your food” as Fran Lebowitz said, or gushing about an Emmy because it’s gone to an African-American or a South Asian and not to a great actor, or worrying about stupid Confederate monuments and instead try real, organized, intelligent political action, you’ll see the difference.
“…and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natureās God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Are Catalan nationalists like Carles Puigdemont Founding Fathers or Confederate separatists?
I’m not convinced by the “causes which impel” Catalans to separation.Ā Are you?
I’m hoping Catalans don’t goad Madrid and Rajoy into doing something stupid.
Read Puigdemont‘s irritating “Spain’s attempt to block Catalonia’s referendum is a violation of our basic rights“ in the Guardian.Ā But especially scroll through the comments; the scariest ones that should give you more pause and where the dangers of Catalan separatism become clearest should jump out at you.Ā There you’ll see the racist self-righteousness of “little nation” nationalism in all its smug, bourgeois glory.
Whenever a Catalan uses or writes “Castille” that means reactionary, Catholic, Black Legend Spain where — as one comment gallingly states — “things haven’t changed much since Franco.”Ā AndalucĆa is cool and Moorish.Ā The Basque Country is wealthy, enterprising and progressive like us, even if they’re a little too Catholic for our tastes.Ā Galicia is the sweet, melancholy home of Celtic troubadours.Ā It’s Castille and Aragon — oh, and Asturias, which gave birth to the ugly ideology of the Reconquista — the kingdoms of the barbarous “Reyes Católicos”, that are oppressing us.
Substitute “Serbia” for “Castille” and you’ll get an amazing repro of Croatian gripes.Ā We’re European and forward-looking — even if kinna the kings of post-Hapsburg noxious fascism; don’t leave us to the mercy of obscurantist, Orthodox, Serb savages.
Where’s Almodóvar, the face of the MadrileƱa “movida” from La Mancha, where “nothing has changed much since Franco” to give us his opinion?Ā I’m sure he has one.
That’s the title of a book by Antoine Leiris written when he lost his wife in the Bataclan attack in Paris.
No, sorry.Ā Youāll have my hate and my rage.Ā What you wonāt have is my fear.Ā And you wonāt make me support asinine policies or animosity against ordinary, innocent Muslims (if only so that I donāt have to hear mega-jerkMehdi Hassan screaming ad angry nauseam: āAll 1.6 biilion of us?!Ā All 1.6 billion of us?!Ā All 1.6 billion of us?!ā)
ā
But rage chanelled into intelligent action against these ƧoÄlania, both in Europe and back in their homes, Iāll support fully.Ā And Iām willing to give up a few things too.Ā So far Spanish police have said the men who planned this attack had connections to a French terrorist cell.Ā And as in the Paris attacks that were planned in Brussels, they take care to conduct their attacks in a neighboring country where theyāre not under the policeās radar, so that the Barcelona and Cambrils attack were due to similar failure in information sharing.
Ā ā
Sorry to all Schengen idealists, but itās ok with me to show my passport if Iām entering Spain from France or when Iām crossing any border.Ā If these bums canāt take advantage of no border controls then more of their plans will be foiled earlier.
Ā ā
Good for King Felipe VI and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy (not my man politically, butā¦) to have shown up in Barcelona immediately.Ā And maybe Catalans will understand that whether or not they want to be part of Spain, for Al Qaeda and ISIS, theyāre still a part of the Muslim irredenta territory of Al Andalus, since thatās terrorist raison de faire behind these actions, as ISIS clearly explained to us when it took responsibility for the Spanish attacks.
Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and rest of ME, Iran, South Asia
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.