The Balkanization of the United States

Mention Rebecca West — an influential writer in the first half of the 20th century — and you will most likely draw a blank today. But she is worth reading. Her 1,000-page book on a trip through Yugoslavia in 1937, when viewed in light of Yugoslavia’s collapse in 1991, throws light upon our own disUnited States.

Yugoslavia (Land of the Southern Slavs) was thrown together after World War I, from elements of the kingdoms of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Included in the mix were parts of the kingdoms, or lands, of Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Dalmatians, Macedonians, Kosovars and Montenegrins.

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires helped propel this medley of countries to unite — sort of — though none of them ever sang quite the same tune — just as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 facilitated the never-really-united kingdom of Yugoslavia to collapse.

What lessons does this hold for the state of our own union today? Stick with me a minute. This gets easier as it goes on.

West’s book, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia,” (Viking Press, New York, 1941) recounts thousands of years of history. In its slackest moments it’s a tour book. Its strength is that it’s told through straight reporting and interviews with real people, as war built in Europe, and Hitler and Mussolini prepared to carve up the lands they regarded as their soon-to-be inferior provinces.

We call this region the Balkans today. Its land area of 181,000 square miles (including Greece) is a bit larger than California. West reported that Germans and Austrians used “Balkan” as a slur against natives of that region — we might call it “the B word.”

Our word “Balkanization” means the fragmentation of a region or state into smaller regions or states. But that definition is recent: my 4,000-page Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971) does not include the word “Balkan” or “Balkanization.”

Understood in “Balkanization” is that the regions might be hostile and uncooperative, for ethnic, cultural, religious and other grievances — real or imagined.

Here we come close to the situation in the United States today — too close for my comfort.

Here’s why:

In the Balkans, the citizens and governments of those dozen-odd quasi-countries and kingdoms had reasons to hate one another:  reasons of history, emanating, perhaps, from their grandma’s stories, or of what they saw happen yesterday. And, as West ably demonstrates, the Southern Slavs’ foreign overlords — ranging from the Ottoman Turks and Austro-Hungarians all the way back to pre-Italy Venice — ruled the region by keeping those ethnic hatreds alive, and stoking them, by fair means or foul.

So long as Venice, or Turkey, or Austria-Hungary could keep Croats and Serbs at one another’s throats, there was slim chance they would unite against Venice, or Turkey, or Austria-Hungary. Throw in provocations to the Macedonians, Bosnians and Kosovars, and the Balkans could be held in thrall, in pieces, powerless outside their own borders: forever and ever amen.

Now let’s look at the United States today.

Why is it that governors, members of Congress and aspirants for higher political office are seizing upon, stirring up, inflaming, and rhetorically beating to death picayune disagreements of opinion, about subjects of limited interest?

How many trans people live in the United States today? How important is that? In what way, if any, does it endanger anyone?

How does it endanger anyone if consenting adults love one another, in their own way, in their own home, behind closed doors? (Here I had a question for Ron DeSantis, but my boss made me cut it out.)

How does it endanger schoolchildren — or anyone — to include slavery, Jim Crow laws and 5,000-plus lynchings of Black men in U.S. history classes?

Waddaya gonna do next, Massa, strip jazz from music education?

To whose benefit, if anyone’s, is it to sack school and city libraries of books by Nobel Laureate authors?

The answers are obvious.

Right-wing Republicans are using the old, effective tactic of divide et impera  — divide and conquer — stirring up feuds against and among “minorities,” so that they will not unite: never realize that they are not minorities at all.

Right-wing Republicans stir up imagined grievances, invent phony ones, and do not care that they are tearing the country apart.

These White Christian nationalists — or, as they might describe themselves, “people of faith” — use their cramped version of God as a club to beat people to death — not yet as violently and often, but with the same intent, as the Taliban and Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

As if God presided over a gated community, with armed guards, and only Republicans hold the key.

Anti-white discrimination? Getoutahere. Read the Scriptures.

Republicans have turned the Sermon on the Mount into a Sermon from the Pit. *

Several Republican lawmakers have suggested that it might be better for all of us if the United States broke up again — as during the Civil War.

Do you believe it?

I don’t.

I think that right-wing Republicans, at every level, from school boards right on down to Congress, are acting as snipers, and enacting laws to help them do it: Picking off their “enemies” one by one.

Who’s next?

*Excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount (King James version):

I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment …

If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. …

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you …

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. .. .

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. …

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 

For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. **

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 

How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. …

Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them.