I have only now gotten around to reading Amy Chua’s “World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.” In my own book, I merely referenced a secondary source on World On Fire. So far, I have found Chua to have an original, creative mind, a rare thing these days. Hers is truly an original thesis. But she goes wrong in many ways—not least in her error-filled, left-leaning, biased analysis of the history of South Africa’s “market-dominant minority” (chinglese for market-dominating minority). In World On Fire, Chua also claims that Croatians were a “market-dominant minority” that infuriated the less able Serbians, hence their so-called “aggression” against the Croats. Our friend Nebojsa Malic has something to say about that:

AMY CHUA’S SERBIAN SLANT

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Examples proving this old adage are legion. On this occasion, I’d like to mention two.

First, an ad-hoc group of European lawyers (the Badinter Commission) up and decided to wipe a country out of existence. Just like that, they declared the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia “in dissolution” – a concept reminiscent of what happened to the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, on whose ashes Yugoslavia was first established. Next, in January 1992, the Commission decided that only Yugoslavia’s “republics” – administrative subdivisions created by the Communist government and given state-like powers had the right to seek recognition as independent states. It was this ruling that made the bloody Wars of Yugoslav Succession inevitable.

This decision is hardly mentioned in the mainstream narrative created subsequently in the West. According to the official story of Yugoslavia’s “dissolution” (rather, dismemberment), the evil nationalist Serbs suddenly decided to attack everyone else, motivated solely by bloodlust and bigotry, and it was only the belated intervention of the white-knighting “international community” that brought peace and justice to all.

Ten years after the Yugoslav tragedy began, Yale scholar Amy Chua published a book called “The World on Fire,” in which she argued that democratization and marketization brought resentment of majority populations against “market-dominant minorities” such as the Chinese or Jews. That ought to have been an easy argument to make. But Chua then reached to Yugoslavia for confirmation of her thesis, and made a mess.

Relying on the official narrative, she argued that Croats were the “market-dominant minority” resented by the Serbs, who went on a killing spree out of sheer frustration (see p. 172-75). Granted, Chua used all sorts of caveats, but her example was still completely and entirely wrong.

Here is the problem. Slovenians and Croats, whose separatism ignited the Succession Wars, were not “market-dominant minorities” at all. There was an economic imbalance between their republics and the rest of the country, but that was the result of the political arrangement created by the Communist regime of Josip Broz, a.k.a. Tito, rather than any inherent proclivity towards business or finance.

Resentment between Croats and Serbs was first nurtured by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose plans for expanding into the Balkans were thwarted by the emergence of an independent Serbian state in the 19th century. While Austria-Hungary was still feudal, Serbia was a free principality of yeomen farmers and merchants. Furthermore, Serbs living in Austrian territories had been granted yeoman status in exchange for Military Frontier service as early as the 17th century. They were also Orthodox Christians, which annoyed the staunchly Catholic empire. Moreover, Croats’ national identity came to be defined entirely by Catholicism, and marked by vicious bigotry directed against the Serbs. Economics really didn’t figure much into it.

In 1914, given a pretext by the assassination of its heir by Bosnian revolutionaries, Austria-Hungary launched a war to obliterate Serbia. It failed. In 1918, having returned from the brink of extinction, the Serbs were determined to secure their freedom from Austria once and for all; their regent saw the solution in a union with “brotherly” Catholic and Muslim Slavs. He either did not know or chose not to care that Catholics and Muslims might have harbored a grudge against the Serbs for ousting the empires – Ottoman or Austrian – in which they had enjoyed privileges.

Yugoslavia never got a chance. In 1941, it was invaded and dismembered by the Axis. Within weeks of its establishment, the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia launched a program of mass murder against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies – in that order. The Serb-led Royalist resistance was eventually betrayed by London. The US and UK instead recognized the Communist resistance, led by Josip Broz Tito, as the new government.

Croat-Slovene in origin, Tito reordered the country according to a 1928 Communist platform, which eerily echoed the Nazi partition. No wonder: both sought to keep the Serbs (or “Greater Serbian bourgeois imperialists”) in check. Tito did it by creating “republics”: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia. He also further divided Serbia, establishing two provinces, Vojvodina in the north, and the Albanian-dominated Kosovo in the south. Kosovo was initially supposed to be ceded to Albania, but the feud between Tito and Stalin (and Albania’s Enver Hoxha) interfered.

Under Tito, Slovenia and Croatia (not even all of it, but the area around Zagreb) treated the rest of the country as little more than the source of raw materials and cheap labor. While the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, one of Tito’s closest henchmen, ran experiments like “socialist self-management” on the rest of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was untouched. Though Yugoslavia was allegedly “Serb-dominated,” the majority of cabinet posts in the federal government were held by non-Serbs, as late as 1990.

The reform drive initiated in the 1980s by the Serbian Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic became popular not because of “nationalism”, but because it sought to reverse this colonial relationship within Yugoslavia. Milosevic, a banker with Western experience, clashed with the Slovenian leadership over the mercantilist set-up of the Yugoslav federation.

At that point, however, the Berlin Wall came down. That had two consequences: the collapse of Communism all over Europe (and eventually the breakup of the USSR), and the rise of Germany as an actual European power. Without the Soviet Union to keep them in check, and Yugoslavia’s neutrality no longer important, the American and European powers were free to interfere in Yugoslav affairs – and they chose to back the separatists.

Cut off from their resource base, however, both Slovenia and Croatia eventually withered on the vine. Slovenia initially managed to preserve its capital by rejecting the “shock therapy” transition strategies implemented elsewhere, but after joining the EU in 2004, their reserves ran dry. Croatia racked up $60 billion in foreign debt, and sold off most of its tourist capacities and agriculture to foreigners. Just last weekend, Croatians voted to join the EU, in desperation seeing the listing Brussels Titanic as a lifeboat.

Twenty years ago, the Badinter Commission’s decision made Yugoslav bloodshed inevitable. Ten years later, Chua’s reliance on official accounts merely undermined her thesis. In both cases, the problem arose from preferring the conjured narrative over actual facts.

****

Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE: Chua has serious lacunae in her analysis of the “whites” of South Africa. She seems proud of the Chinese edge, though. Writing provocatively and intelligently as she does, and getting away with it to become a mainstream sensation—this demands certain obedience to what Nebojsa Malic calls the accepted narrative.

The following is excerpted from “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein,“ my new weekly column:

In Obama’s simplistic scheme of things—as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level”—to recreate the glory of America, it is thus essential to continue to reinvent the state. …

In the spirit of brute-force statism, the POTUS promised a Trade Enforcement Unit to police “unfair trading practices,” and a “Financial Crimes Unit to “crack down on large-scale fraud.” …

Il Duce’s next derring-do? Send him the bill, and the Divine One will even instruct the provinces to incarcerate local kids in high school “until they graduate or turn 18.”

Having used the military to great political effect, Obama now intends to deploy the Department of Defense, no less, in the “clean energy business.” In Obama’s very elementary thinking, the DOD is bound to do a bang-up job.

… From financial aid (for foreign students, no less) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of the state’s creation. If not for government, Obama would have never managed to write himself into history. As a product of the state, Barry Soetoro sees it as the source of all possibilities. …”

Read the complete column, Barry Soetoro Frankenstein, now on WND.com,

My book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help this cause.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher.

As measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s State of the Union message was written at an eighth-grade level.”

I’ve long maintained—and explained in “‘You Can’t Fix Stupid’”—that Barry Soetoro is simple. Read more about the “Smart Politics” study that would seem to back that up.

I was going to say that the study deconstructs the president’s use of language. However, that structure was so basic that there was little to dismantle.

Today, once again, the lights went out in my neighborhood, just as I was preparing to file my weekly column and meet my deadline. The outage was protracted, so the generator needed to be rolled out and powered up. Those of you who’re fortunate enough to be able to remain in the dark about generators—that was me back in South Africa, ironically—should know this: Until such time when you wire up your home (as one ought to do in Third World WA), there are lots of things to do, not least of them lugging extension cords upstairs and unpacking heaters again.

Down the hill, the crew from Puget Sound Energy was visible as the men worked to pry electricity cables from the thicket of trees and branches. As I said before, the grid and power lines suffered mostly tree damage. In this part of the world, the trees are everywhere intertwined with the cable. Why? Why isn’t a wide, tree-free swath maintained around these vital structures? Why are trees not chopped back, in the name of civilization and the sanctity of property, pets and human life?

Here’s why—in all likelihood—we suffer the same severity of damage, year-in and year-out, when snow, ice and wind arrive: the self-defeating dementia of tree fetishists and “Watermelon” legislators — green on the outside; red on the inside.

For one, your property is not your own. You are prohibited from felling unsafe trees. Each request must be backed by a letter from an arborist and a hefty shakedown “baksheesh,” exacted by the goons at the municipality. Such regulation is probably responsible for loss of life, as most people cannot afford to pay the hundreds charged for a permit to chop down an unstable tree on their nominally owned property.

Again, the “Watermelon” worldview creates more havoc than it prevents, and results in loss of life and livelihoods. For instance, because of wood fires, the usually pristine air in our part of the world resembled, at one stage, the air above the shanty town of Soweto. The resources and energy spent–and the lives lost–because of this mess are many times the cost or worth of a few thousand trees.

Alas, one look at Puget Sound Energy’s Facebook Page tells you that the average customer is unquestioning in his supine gratitude to the utility for merely wiring him up again—some after a week. He or she thinks like subjects, not customers.

As long as I’ve lived in WA, PSE has been ill-prepared for our weather. And unless it is beavering away behind the scenes, the utility has been, seemingly, unwilling to lobby the gang of greens in Olympia on behalf of its long-suffering customers; lobby to let it, PSE, maintain a tree-free grid. Puget Sound Energy should petition the gangsters in the Capital on behalf of its customers, who, due to regulation, are catapulted back to the Dark Ages almost every other winter.

And yes, privatization and private property rights that allow all the above would be just swell.

UPDATE I: Welcome to new reader Orin Blomberg. Here on BAB, we all huddle around the epistolary fires of freedom.

UPDATE II: We all love and respect the natural world. Let us look after it as private property owners. Any resources that fall to state control suffer the tragedy of the common. As was explained in this article:

Regulation is always the culmination of agreements between the regulated and the regulators, to the detriment of those left out of the political loop. The state and its corporate donors will invariably come to a consensus as to what constitutes reasonable damages to them, not to the aggrieved. Thus regulation always works to the advantage of the offenders. …
The root of environmental despoliation is the tragedy of the commons, i.e., the absence of property rights in the resource. One of my favorite running routes wends along miles of lakeside property, all privately owned, and ever so pristine. Where visitors dirty the trail that cleaves to the majestic homes; fastidious owners are quick to pick up after them.
In the absence of private ownership in the means of production, government-controlled resources go to seed. There is simply no one with strong enough a stake in the landmass or waterway to police it before disaster strikes. …
Entrusted with the management and regulation of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of millions of people you don’t know , only pretend to care about, are unaccountable to, and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your performance plummets?

Moreover, in case newcomers to this site doubt this writer’s commitment to the humane treatment and welfare of animals, please read posts like “Who Own the Food Chain,” “A Halibut’s Heart In A Harpy’s Hand,” as well as the many other articles under the “Environmentalism and Animal Rights” categories.

Mitt Romney is a marked man in socialist-minded America. Over the past two years, he paid a “mere” 15 percent on $42.7 million, “because his income was derived almost entirely from capital gains and dividends from his extensive portfolio of investments.”

Of this $42.5 million fortune made over the past two years, seven million was given to charity. More than Mitt paid in taxes. Of that generosity mainstream morons disapprove because Romney’s charities tend to be Mormon related.

Contrast Mr. and Mrs. Romney to the miserly Joe Biden and his lefty wife. The latter gave between 0.1% and 0.3% of their income to charity. Not exactly the two tithes the Romneys spare for the poor.

There is a lot wrong with Mitt’s political philosophy. There is not a lot wrong with Mitt the Man.

In anticipation of their president’s performance tonight, the pitches for BHO coming from likes of CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux and her colleague Jessica Yellin reached a crescendo today. Yellin was yelling about her man’s achievements, no less. After all, the economy looks good through the eyes of a sinecured CNN, left-liberal correspondent.

Malveaux sought out a professor who was able to smuggle into his conversation about problem solving a word about different presidential cognitive styles. Hint: Obama, aka “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” was “professorial,” deliberate, thoughtful. Bush, an equal-offender moron, was an impetuous Decider.

Malveaux set the scene for questioning a tax expert about Mitt’s money by framing the discussion thus: “He [Romney] hasn’t done anything illegal, has he?”, the link between having money and criminality having been established.

To be charitable, these bimbos are so dim, they operate hormonally, on a subconscious level. They know not what they do, although forgive them you should not.

UPDATE: Just heard Jessica (I don’t watch CNN, John; I listen to it while doing chores). Made a point of not watching her act all in heat. What has excited Yellin so? The president is going to present a “vision” for the nation, she tells us. He will pose a question [to the same stupid people who cannot read his previous, almost-identical SOTU]: What kind of America do you want? One in which rich people [many of whom were once poor] rob the poor, or one in which each has a fair shot? Here Jess cracked a greedy, goulash smile, for (and I’m paraphrasing), as she added, while prez will not point fingers, you will KNOW exactly to whom he is referring.