164. Still "killing his own people."

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If I hear "killing his own people" one more time I'm going to scream.  Who else, if you're an embattled ruler, are you going to kill?  That's what all embattled rulers do.  That's battle.  Civil war.  Find a civil war in which somebody isn't killing his own people.  In the latest New Yorker piece on Syria (8-27-12) Assad has "bombed his own cities."  Should he have bombed somebody else's cities?  Should Muammar Gadhafi have killed somebody else's people?  The fact is, Gadhafi was killing people who took up arms against him.  Were they still his people?  They didn't want to be.  Who were his people?

"OK, but whoever they were, did he have to kill them?"

Of course.  They forced him to.  Citizens who won't stop short in their defiance of the government ("Give me liberty or give me death!") force the government to kill them.  It's either that or turn the government over to them.  How well the Chinese government knew that at the time of Tiananmen Square.

"So Gadhafi's actions are justified?  As would be Bashar al-Assad's and Saddam Hussein's?"

In what those autocrats share with all rulers, yes, though I'd use the words "logical" and "understandable."    They are exercising the "monopoly on violence" granted every government by a horde of philosophers and acknowledged by our own president (see YouTube clip www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3r0akZgvIA).   The grant comes easily once you feel the pain of the alternative, unrestrained private violence.  "Will you unleash private contractors, like Blackwater, in Iraq?", that was the question President Obama had to face.  It's the same question rulers needing to control warlords face, "Will you leash them?", where "leash" requires killing and the answer, by the law of forced response (above), has to be "Yes."  Behind everything granted to Obama by fixed institutions and long custom, what he is saying to Blackwater is what Mao Zedong said to the warlords he took sovereignty from: If you kill I'll kill you. 

"I see.  It's what Roman emperors said to all the nations they took dominion over. "

Yes.  You can't have an empire if the parts war with each other.  So you enforce peace and the bigger the empire the more peace you have.  Do it long enough and your period gets a good name, like Pax Romana.  Most peace, least killing.  Because everybody knows that if they kill they'll get killed.

"Kill.  Kill.  Why are you always talking about killing?  There are so many other ways to get control and have peace.  And so much more talk about them, so much diplomacy, so much done by negotiation and compromise.  You don't hear anybody saying, 'Back off or I'll kill you.'"

No, that's ugly talk.  We prefer nice talk.  "Back off or I'll send a peacekeeping force."  That's OK as long as we don't take nice for real.  We did that in Lebanon and got our nice peacekeeping force blown sky high by the ugly realists.  Might not have happened if we'd had somebody saying, "This force, to get peace, will kill and get killed.  Fix on that word 'kill.' The reality.  Kill, kill, kill."

"The Middle East autocrats certainly don't need any instruction in that."

No, because they have been so thoroughly taught by their past.  To win a contest for power you have to kill, kill, kill.  That's the lesson of our past, too — up to a certain point.

"Up to what point?"

The point where rulers had to take into account the feelings of large numbers of their people.  Rulers of democracies.  People who had been affected by Enlightened ideals, Christian revivals, Romantic illusions, who knows.  In any case, humane feelings.  Something that kept a ruler from saying "kill, kill, kill" in front of his people.  Probably have to fix that point of ruler-influence sometime in the 18th century.  About the same time, I'd say, that people started to have guilty feelings about slavery.

"Interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with the expression 'killing his own people'?"

Well, maybe not much, and certainly not very directly, but it does have a connection.  If you think you are different from those who play the old power game, if you think you are more humane, more enlightened, more Christian, you have lost your grip on reality — the grip your own larger history could have given you.  The only difference between you and the Middle Eastern (or Asian or Balkan) ruler you face across the table is that you play the power game more guiltily.

"Guilt?  Where do you see that?"

In the reproach game, the natural sequel to the humanitarian game.  "That candidate showed little feeling for those poor victims."  "This leader tolerated torturers."  "That nation looked on as thousands died." "He kills his own people.  We Americans don't do that." 

No, we don't have to any more.  We won our Civil War a long time ago.

153. Balkans: Checking for Cool.

You don't want to know what the professors are saying in their books and lectures.  You don't want to know what the pundits are saying in their columns.  You want to know what the students are saying in their drinking places.

That's what will determine the future.  Politicians and wise men can talk up something all they want but if the next generation of college students doesn't think it's cool it's dead.  A zero in the historical force column. 

I had heard this said but was suspicious until I heard a man, a successful modern poet, tell of his literature classes at Vanderbilt in the twenties.  The Mighty Romantics and the Great Victorians were still all the rage then with the profs, but the students, even as the room resounded with Tennyson's mighty lines, were passing around mimeographed copies of "The Waste Land."

Can you feel that, the cool of it?  If you can't, picture one of those graduate seminars in Southern universities attended after the war by second-tier New York intellectuals squeezed south by the GI competition for Eastern schools.  CCNY types.  Deliver your opinion and they say, "You sure of that?"  Then they're there with the goods.  Out of Morris Cohen (Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method), who taught at Columbia.  Those guys are cool.  Over beer afterward one of them, about to say the word "God," pauses and says, "if you'll pardon the expression."   Atheism becomes cool.  Marxism and Freudianism follow.

That's what I mean by cool and that's what it was in 1947 Louisiana.  It doesn't have to be subversive and it doesn't have to be outside the curriculum.  When Cleanth Brooks arrived at Yale with the New Criticism the students greeted him warmly ("Mistah Brooks, he come" headlined the student newspaper) and ate up his teaching.

What's the equivalent of that now in Ljubljana and Zagreb and Belgrade?  Sean O'Hagan says that Slavoj Zizek is now "the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  Is that true?  Could I confirm it by listening in on student talk?  I, a two-week tourist?  Not a chance.

But I know what I'd be looking for.  First, the student who says what students (or anybody, really) can say in a hundred different ways in a time of crisis: "Are you with us in the movement?"  Second, the student who says, "Are you sure of that?"  I'd look at the listening students.  If they think the first one is cool they (and their country) face one kind of future; if they think the second one is cool they face an entirely different kind.

It's not obvious which one is better.  Everything depends on where you are, when.  You're marching for civil rights in '63 (or for independence in '76) you want to know who's with you and who isn't.  You want them charged up.  You're sword-fighting in a phalanx you want your buddy on your left to be super-charged.  That's your unprotected side and your life depends on it.

Those who have been in those situations will tell you: you're not going to do a Ph.D. oral on what did the charging.  The British spin experts doctor a picture of Hitler to make him more hateful.  It fires us up and we fight harder to defeat his armies.  Anything that gets us home quicker is cool.

Academic cool can be ugly.  Picture the places where it's most easily maintained: in America with 3,000 miles of ocean on each side and 1500 missiles securely in their silos; in Scandinavia, with all that water around and a homogeneous population. It's easy to look at the Balkans and forget the mixed-up population and close, over-the-mountain borders — with wall-mounted rifles on the other side of them.

What kind of cool is the right kind is always going to be a close call there.  Times and situations change so.  Outsiders, even when they're willing to risk ugliness, can hardly ever speak positively.  "Let's just quit talking about cool.  We'll never be able to say anything helpful.  Forget the whole category."

At this point I hear one of my profs breaking in.  Sam Monk.  "You think there's no cool any more.  You want to know cool?  I'll show you cool.  My period.  Early 18th century.  England is looking back at a bad religious war.  The Western continent is looking back at worse ones.  The Holy Roman Empire, with its little states, has torn itself into Protestant-Catholic shreds.  Here's Jonathan Swift's Gulliver explaining it to the leader of the Houyhnhnms:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, whether black, red, white, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference of opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

That's cool.  Enlightenment cool."

Is it always and everywhere cool?  It doesn't have to be, not for anybody who feels sorry for the sweet people locked into those Balkan situations.  If it's occasionally helpful that's enough.

142. Balkan Story (8, addition)

8. Add to Belgrade, Novi Sad

Hilde Jauch, maybe you remember, is one of two sisters whose family moved into northern Serbia with the Austrians in the 19th century.  Not expecting the advancing Russian army to make fine distinctions among Germans they feared for their lives.

The end of her story, at dinner tonight:  The retreating German army took over their farmhouse (not far from Novi Sad) as their headquarters and commandeered their horses.  When her grandmother decided to flee before the advancing Russians she asked the German commanding officer for help.  He gave them back the two worst horses and told them to join, if they could, the column of German refugees coming from the east (the hated occupiers of the Ukraine, etc., that the Russians were killing).  "We will try to keep the army between them and the Russians," he told her.   So she and her two daughters hitched two wagons behind the two horses and, with their total of six children, joined the column and made it to Germany, where residents of the area they went to were told, "Each family take two refugee families into your house."  Eventually the men, in the German Army someplace, joined them.  It's part of a story we don't hear or, being about the aggressors (getting their just desserts), have much sympathy with, but from Hilde's mouth it was quite touching.   We found ourselves saying, "Poor Germans.  Nice German officer, trying to take care of his own."

Hilde, age six then, moved with the family to the Buffalo area and became a nurse (not a schoolteacher); Ingeborg (two then) became a schoolteacher.  The name of the town closest to them was Kljajicevo, and several reunions of refugees, one of which they went to, have been held there.

135. Balkan Tour (2)

Monday, 5-21

2. Bay of Kotor

All-day bus tour around the whole bay.  Beauty and religion, not much politics, same good food.  Breath-taking views.   Great medieval towns, not much different from those in middle Europe.  Pretty much the same sequence of conquerors and semi-conquerors, the worst makers of trouble.  Churches not so fancy, but sweet.

Did chew over something we learned yesterday that, as I remember it, is sort of a commentary on politics.  Branca, our local specialist, told us that after the Herceg Novi high-school graduating ceremony the entire class, robed, marches from the school to a closed iron gate, guarded by two soldiers in medieval costume.  After their leader answers some ritual questions the soldiers open the gate and the students march, past cheering family and friends, to a hotel for a big banquet together.  This has gone on year after year, through all wars, feuds, changes of government, and splits in religion.  So, despite all the internal divisions there's this unity.

Another thing to add from yesterday.  Herceg Novi is as bad as Switzerland for slant.  All mountainside.  Buses restricted.  So at the let-off for Old Town we face a bunch of stairs.  Julia says more than two hundred and looks serious.  We ask Branca how many.  She says she won't tell us till afterward.  Well we climb and climb and some can't make it all the way.  For those that did it was worth it, but we couldn't wait to hear from Branca.  How many? "More than a thousand."  No wonder some of us were stiff in the legs this morning.

We had acquired some tender feelings for Branca, our guide through all the mazes of Montenegrin troubles (occupied by Austria in WWI, by Italy in WWII, and split by near civil-war in between and after) and crimes (joining with the Serbs in their vicious attack on Dubrovnik, having their main general, Pavle Strugar, convicted as a war criminal), and our guide through all the beauty, too.  This was her last day and as we were leaving her I asked the question I am most determined to ask here: What do you consider yourself, a Montenegrin (or Serb, or Croatian, or Bosnian, etc.) or Orthodox (or Muslim), or Slav, or speaker of Serbo-Croatian, or whatever.  Which comes first?  Without hesitation she said, "Montenegrin."  When we parted Mary Anne gave her a big hug, the first time I had ever seen her hug a guide.  When I afterward asked her why she didn't make much of it but thought it might have had something to do with the fact that she "had a sad look on her face."

Note: If you're interested you can Google "Bay of Kotor" and get an idea of some of the beauty we saw.

134. Balkan Tour (1)

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For the next few days I'll be sharing my experiences on a 16-day Road Scholar tour of Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Slovenia by posting this edited and condensed version of reports to my family. 

Sunday, 5-20-12

1. Balkans Start

We (and you) maybe will be able to guess our whole Balkans experience from the way our chief guide explained the fact that she was Hungarian: "It was thought best to have an outsider tell you about this region."  Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) couldn't trust any Montenegrin, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, or Slovenian to talk about the others.  After one day we can well see why.  Montenegro has had an easier time than nearly all the others and still we have gotten from locals seventeen reasons why Montenegrins shouldn't trust anybody.

The bonus has been the beauty of the place.  Herceg Novi lies near the entrance of a big blue bay in front of steep brown mountains backed by giant grey mountains.  As we cruised out this morning bright white clouds were moving against them from the Adriatic.  It dazzled us.  Then the voice of the guide explaining that just past the ridge on the right was Croatia, which wanted the whole ridge.  When we got to the bay entrance we learned that the fortifications at the point where the ridge on the right ended were Croatian while the ones on the point to the left were Montenegrin.  The towns on the bay were Montenegrin.  "It's like buying an apartment where your neighbor owns half the front door." (The boundary is still being negotiated by European courts.)

My space is limited but some things in our guide's presentation were too fascinating to leave out.  Like the slide of the lovely church put up by Serbia to help reconcile its Orthodox and Roman Catholic citizens. It had both a Serbian Orthodox altar and a R. C. altar but by the time they got it up the seceding Montenegrins had formed a Montenegrin Orthodox church and objected to the Serbian connection, maybe in liturgical practice.  Whatever the issue the two sets of priests were now, the lecturer said, "fighting in the streets."