Old Serbia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

Posted on February 10, 2022 by James Thomas Snyder

I saw before me what an empire which spreads beyond its legitimate boundaries must do to its subjects. It cannot spread its own life over the conquered areas, for life cannot travel too far from its sources, and it blights the life that is native to those parts.

OLD SERBIA IS what we now call Kosovo, a partially recognized sovereign state that emerged following the 1999 NATO war with the federal Yugoslavia over ethnic cleaning in the formerly autonomous province. Kosovo is a toponym derived from the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. The battle figures prominently in West’s narrative as well as the history of Serbia and Yugoslavia. In the Kosovo Polje, or Field of Blackbirds, the Ottoman army destroyed the Serbian defense, solidifying Turkish control over the Balkans for the next 500 years. The blackbirds described are the carrion birds that descended on the dead. Later, in a foreshadowing of Flanders Fields, legend tells that the field erupted in red peonies the following spring, the blood of the Serbian martyrs.

Gračanica (Kosovski božuri) (1913) by Nadežda Petrović; (Wikipedia)

In the early 16^th century Muslim Albanians began to migrate to Kosovo. Today, Albanians almost entirely populate this cradle of the Serbian nation. In 1989, on the six hundredth anniversary of the battle, communist apparatchik Slobodan Milošević gave his infamous speech inciting the Serbian audience. Standing at the rebuilt monument of Gazimestan, which West also visited, he used the heroic narrative to define his nationalist agenda that perpetuated war, massacre, and genocide across the former Yugoslavia for the next 20 years.

West tours the field, which like a medieval Gettysburg is scattered with various semi-monuments erected in memory of the dead. Close by is a genuine treasure: the frescoes of Gračanica, the first Serbian Orthodox monastery she visits in Kosovo. The Serbian monasteries West visits at Peć and Dečani are rightfully famous landmarks. Most of them today are restored and preserved under the UN’s designation as World Heritage Sites.

West is genuinely enraptured by the devotional art here and she takes time to examine, deconstruct, and contextualize the frescoes painted centuries earlier. She finds here a more experiential piety, immediate and deeply felt. She intuits an uncanny communication between centuries: the expressionism on display in Gračanica from 1325 is painted in the same authentic, almost naive style as William Blake hones in the 1800s. The similarities are indeed so striking it is easy to confuse the two. There is no indication that Blake visited, saw, or even studied these obscure frescoes. The fact that they both seem to express in the same way suggests they have tapped into a deep and universal experience.

For West, that universal trait is a mysticism that separates east and west. “This is a study of what our people alone know,” Constantine observes. “This is mysticism without suffering.” West finds this refreshing. Instead of the half-mad mystic hermit of the Western church, who starves and thirsts himself in the desert for a chance at a vision of the truth, these Orthodox mystics are ascetic because what they think requires much more room than civilization can provide. “Life is not long enough for these men to enjoy the richness of their own perceptions, to transmute them into wisdom,” she concludes.

God Blessing the 7th Day, William Blake, 1805

West revisits the Kosovo legend, about which the less said the better. She quotes extensively, and has been extensively quoted as quoting, the poem that forms the Serbian national ur-narrative. It describes the choice made by Prince Lazar as he assembled his forces against the invading Ottomans. The angel Elijah, in form of a grey falcon, visits Lazar on the eve of battle. The angel offers the prince a choice between the kingdom of heaven and a kingdom on earth. He chooses the former, after which his army is cut to pieces on Kosovo field. It is an ages-old example of the noble Lost Cause (in which case St. Jude should have appeared before Lazar), which is purer in defeat than in victory. Ignominy and slaughter are redeemed. From the defeat of the Confederacy to Germany’s stab in the back, from Custer’s Last Stand to the Mother of All Battles, stories of nobility and self-sacrifice redress ancient carnage and catastrophe. It is hard to imagine the grip of a 600 year-old legend on people in the 21^st century, but there is much to echo William Faulkner here (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”).

For West, Kosovo is even more sickening than her experience at the Sheep’s Field. Here the grey falcon is the bridgehead to the black lamb. It connects animal ritual sacrifice to actual human sacrifice. It is the terminus for humanity’s unconscious death wish. With a sardonic cut she writes, “So that was what happened, Lazar was a member of the Peace Pledge Union.” This pro-appeasement organization, as with its fellow neutralist, nativist, and fascist parties and clubs across North America and Europe between the world wars, is conveniently forgotten today.

“[W]hat the pacifist really wants is to be defeated,” West writes. She continues:

If it be a law that those who are born into the world with a preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable are born also with an impulse towards defeat, then the whole world is a vast Kosovo, an abominable blood-logged plain, where people who love go out to fight people who hate, and betray their cause to their enemies, so that loving is persecuted for immense tracts of history, far longer than its little periods of victory.

Rebecca West’s travels in Old Serbia (Kosovo). (Google Maps)

The rest of the trip alternates between mystical revery and pure annoyance. She makes an eccentric visit to the Stan Trg (an English typographical corruption of Stari Trg, “Old Mine”) mines at Trepča. These pits have been continuously mined for more than 2,000 years and today remain the largest producer of lead-zinc and silver ore in Europe. There she finds a Scotsman whom she calls Gospodin Mac, the mine’s general manager. The author Ian Hamilton has identified the Mac as A.S. Howie, a career employee of the Selection Trust, who died not long after the meeting West records. Not much more information is available about him, but West enjoys the company of her fellow countryman and his wife immeasurably.

The pitiful Constantine retreats into himself, hovering on the verge of nervous collapse as he tries to reconcile his wife’s animus toward him and his English friends. He comes off as brusque and smug, but West sympathetically sees right through him. “I paused, at a loss for words,” she writes. “I did not know how to say that he was dying of being a Jew in a world where there were certain ideas to which some new star was lending a strange strength.” This is both a terrifying portent of the Holocaust and the most succinct summary of dual consciousness that I have ever read.

There are two other long shadows of the war to come. First West and her husband encounter a strange man in a provincial café. The man approaches them speaking German while claiming to be Danish. But hearing the man speak Henry Andrews immediately determines, “That man has spoken Berliner German from his infancy.” Constantine concedes the fake Dane is likely a German agent, but they remain confused why he would be here, so far from any large city or capital.

Later, in Dečani, they are accosted by an irritating blond monk who brags he soon “will have the great honour of entertaining at Dečani Herr Hitler and Herr Göring!” (Hitler later pressured the Regent Prince Paul of Yugoslavia to join the Tripartite Pact. When Serbian officers ousted Paul in a coup and installed Peter II in 1941, Hitler declared Yugoslavia an enemy state and invaded. Nevertheless, I can find no indication that Hitler visited Yugoslavia prior to the occupation. Göring visited Ragusa, Croatia, in 1935.)

West laboriously relates the descent and fall of the Serbian empire and Byzantium to the Ottomans. A civil war among the descendants of King Milutin in the 1320s stalled Serbian plans to take Byzantium at Constantinople. An internecine power struggle between Milutin’s grandson Stefan Dušan and his father resulted in the father’s imprisonment and Dušan being crowned emperor. He proved an able leader and commander, initially offering his armies to Cantacuzenus, ruler of Byzantium, to fight his civil war. That offer just as quickly reversed and Dušan went on a campaign of conquest throughout the Balkans.

As a result of this reversal, Byzantium was suddenly extremely vulnerable. To shore up its defenses, Cantacuzenus allied with the Turks and ceded territory in Europe to them to repay debts. This placed the Ottomans in an opportune position to capitalize on Byzantium’s weakness coming out of its civil war. When Dušan suddenly died, he left a leadership vacuum and vast imperial possessions without defenses. The Ottomans then embarked on their conquest of the Balkans that included the Battle of Kosovo and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Ottoman Turkey soon consolidated rule over an empire spanning from Baku to Algiers and from Budapest to Aden.

This is an extensive narrative backdrop to the situation West finds in Old Serbia in the late 1930s. Dušan’s turn on Byzantium, she argues, sealed the fate of the Eastern Church and opened the door to 500 years of Turkish domination in southeastern Europe. West sees the lasting result in Old Serbia, which serves her argument about the destructive nature of empires. She sees in real time the consequences of centuries of conquest and subjugation. Her argument isn’t that the Ottomans Turkified or Islamized Kosovo so much as do almost the opposite: there is almost nothing left. In the place of what should be the Serbian national heartland, she sees instead an absence, a cultural void that follows colonization.

Battle of Kosovo, Adam Stefanović, 1870. (Wikipedia)

“Yet people here had once known all that we know, and more,” she writes, “but the knowledge had died after the death of Stephen Dušan, it had been slain on the field of Kosovo.”

NOTE: This article has been corrected to indicate that Hermann Göring visited Yugoslavia in 1935.

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Serbia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

Posted on November 7, 2021 by James Thomas Snyder

“In the colourless light descending its vaults there waited Constantine’s wife, Gerda, a stout middle-aged woman, typically German in appearance, with fair hair abundant but formless, and grey eyes so light and clear that they looked almost blind, vacant niches made to house enthusiasms.”

I VISITED BELGRADE in 2009, just a few years after Serbia had again reverted to its own republic following the independence of Montenegro. Joined until 2006, the two entities had made up what was left of Yugoslavia following the wars of succession in the 1990s and the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 following the NATO air campaign against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The evidence of that war was still manifest as I walked past mangled ministry buildings on the city’s main thoroughfare.

West does not spend much time describing the place. But she is evocative when she does. Initially Belgrade depresses her. “I felt a sudden abatement of my infatuation for Yugoslavia,” she writes. But her spirits are rescued by an extraordinary scene she witnesses in the hotel bar.

“[I]n none of those great cities have I seen hotel doors slowly swing open to admit, unhurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms….He was a well-built young man with straight fair hair, high cheekbones, and a look of clear sight.”

This is the first reference to a black lamb in the book and while West here alludes to this encounter the titular animal actually follows later in the book. In the meantime, she marvels:

“He stood still as a Byzantine king in a fresco, while the black lamb twisted and writhed in the firm cradle of his arms, its eyes sometimes catching the light as it turned and shining like small luminous places.”

I strolled Kalemegdan park covering the historic battlements and a commanding promontory over the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. “Kalemegdan…is the special glory of Belgrade and indeed one of the most beautiful parks in the world,” West writes, accurately. She enjoys a stroll in the park, separated from the city bustle, passing “busts of the departed nearly great” as children play among the lilacs.

The fortress at Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade. Photo by the author.

There is one peculiarity in the park, a sculpture by Ivan Meštrović whom West otherwise extols throughout her travels: the “Victor” war memorial. It is a statue of a naked male figure mounted high on a column at the prow facing the delta. West relates this is an awkward display. Too accurately male, Belgrade authorities felt its display would offend women if placed prominently at street level within the city. So it was located here in Kalemegdan where it is only slightly more appropriate, as the figure faces the direction from which so many have attempted to sack Belgrade over centuries. But that means the main public view of the statue from the park is the Victor’s ass.

West uses this view as a point of departure to explain, in often overpowering detail, the history of 19^th Century Serbia. She illustrates this through the personal stories of two noble houses, cutthroat rivals for the crown of Serbia. For an observer from the 21^st Century, these machinations of royal politics in the Balkans can appear tedious. And they are, at least in comparison to the sexualized violence of Game of Thrones or the exotic prize of Arrakis in Dune.

The Obrenović Dynasty ruled Serbia for most of the 19^th century. Supported by the hated Austro-Hungarians, their rule came to an extremely violent end when Serbian nationalist officers, part of the secret Black Hand organization (led by Dragutin Dimitrijević, who would figure later in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand), murdered King Alexander I and his wife Queen Draga in her bedroom. They were shot and their bodies stripped, mutilated, and disemboweled before the conspirators threw them off a second-floor balcony. West recalls this horror early in the book as part of her early assessment of prior understanding of Yugoslavia.

Alexander was only 26 years when murdered. Draga had been his mother’s lady-in-waiting, 12 years his senior. Their marriage caused a scandal. Draga was widely hated. West documents ample fuel for the fire of public opinion, all of them quite beyond Draga’s control: she was older, a divorcée, sexually experienced, unattractive, and incapable of having children (likely because her groom was infertile).

This last fact is crucial to understanding their assassination. Because Draga had no children, Alexander had no heir to the throne. This set up a succession crisis with Alexander maneuvering his brother to assume power while the Serbian parliament positioned the Russian-backed House of Karađorđević to succeed the reviled Obrenovićs. Which is exactly what they did after the assassination, returning Peter Karađorđević to the throne 45 years after being deposed.

This history reads as a much more intimate and bloody history than anything shown in The Crown. Indeed, it makes for much more vivid storytelling than even the 1936 abdication crisis West had just observed. And the geopolitical stakes could not be higher, with every empire and major power in the region facing a loss or gain depending on the succession. More importantly, it positioned Serbia even more strongly against Austria-Hungary in the years leading to World War I.

Rebecca West’s travels through Serbia. (Google Maps)

History aside, in this chapter West introduces a character who will play foil to her Balkan reveries. As she arrives in Belgrade, in passing West introduces us to the antipole character in her narrative, the wife of Constantine, whom she calls Gerda. Their first meeting sets the tone for the rest of the narrative. West has a book under her arm that Gerda has no trouble judging by its cover. West finds this rejection out of hand to be baffling; Gerda doesn’t appear to evince even modest curiosity. She is too happily and self-righteously ensconced in the citadel of bourgeois ignorance. Gerda proves later to be a terrible traveling companion. Although West does capture Gerda in moments of content repose, a sliver of her humanity shining through dark clouds of prejudice and resentment, the overwhelming impression of Gerda is of a spiteful, sociopathic racialist and shrew. (Ironically, in response to her editor’s concern that Gerda is treated too harshly, West argued if anything else she had “toned down” her nemesis’ character.)

Elsa Vinaver with her husband Stanislav (right) and son Konstantin, date unknown but following World War II. From Gojko Tešić, editor, Citat Vinaver, 2007, and used with permission of the Stantislav Vinaver Facebook group

There was a larger personal dynamic at work in this awkward square dance. Constantine was indispensable to West as a guide, but given her experience with him (see Croatia, above) she deliberately traveled with her husband Henry Andrews to protect against Constantine’s predations. Constantine for himself appeared sincere in his affection, writing West a love letter in exquisite French. Every biographer of West writes that Gerda knew all too well her husband’s obsession for West and very likely elbowed her way into the traveling party to check him too. (West herself recalls their first meeting when Constantine calls home from his office: “Tell your mother that I will not be home to lunch because I have run away with an Englishwoman.”)

Elsa Vinaver, age two, second from left, 1899. Brother Karl is second from right. Used with permission of the Silex Family.

Gerda was Elsa Vinaver, born Elizabeta Silex in 1897 in Stettin, at the time a major port city for the German Empire, but today is now Szczecin in western Poland, on the Baltic Sea about two hours from Berlin. Her father was a Lutheran rector. She had a sister and two brothers, one of whom was named Karl Silex. West describes Karl in passing in her Collected Letters as a “Nazi journalist”. This is true as far as it goes. Karl Silex was indeed a journalist and the editor of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung during the peak years of Nazi control (1933-1943) and after the war edited the Tagespiegel. He was a Rhodes Scholar, wrote in English, and while living abroad briefly married an Englishwoman. He wrote several books, including his memoirs.

He also served in both world wars with the Imperial German Navy and later the Kriegsmarine. During the waning days of World War II, he commanded a mine-laying ship attached to an unconventional “small unit” that fought in the North Sea. His ship appears to have participated in Operation Hannibal, the evacuation of German civilians and soldiers from East Prussia ahead of the Soviet Army advance in early 1945. He documented several attacks and sinkings of his flotilla but Silex himself survived the war.

This relationship provides some potential insight into Elsa’s character. West is unstinting in her disgust for her in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and that hatred is carried over in her letters. She describes Elsa as “mad,” having attempted suicide and infanticide and reports that she had been committed to asylum at least twice. “The Nazi business has made her madder,” West writes her husband. Elsa is horrified that she had married a Jew and had “polluted the sacred Nordic blood” by having two sons with Vinaver (the youngest of whom is named, not coincidentally, Konstantin).

While publicly available information suggests Silex resisted Nazi propaganda during the war — he was a member of the Fuhrer Council of the German Press but never joined the party — the truth is he served the regime both in and out of uniform. Knowing that her more prominent brother was serving the Fatherland may have been an aggravating factor in Elsa’s state of mind.

There is an extraordinary story buried below the few details about Elsa that we have. West and her husband offered asylum to Vinaver during the war but as a Yugoslav patriot he remained and served in the army opposing the German invasion in 1941. He was almost immediately captured and spent the remainder of the occupation in a prisoner of war camp. He managed to hide his Jewish origins which very likely saved his life. That was not the fate of his mother, who perished in the notorious Banjica concentration camp near Belgrade. It is all the more moving knowing her fate today, information that wasn’t available to West when she recorded their meeting.

Stanislav Vinaver, fourth from the left, with Yugoslav Royal Army prisoners of war, Osnabrueck, Germany 1941. Used with permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which holds this image in their archives as part of the private collection of Miriam Spitzer Onel.

It is impossible to ignore the contradictions involved in this family. Elsa apparently remained in Yugoslavia during the war even while her husband was imprisoned and her mother-in-law was murdered. It is not known what she thought of the German occupation. Information in English is scarce but it appears that the Vinaver marriage survived the war, as evidenced by a picture of Elsa and Stanislav taken with their youngest son soon afterwards (see above).

Stanislav died in 1955. Elsa outlived her husband by nearly 25 years. It appears she never left Yugoslavia and died in Belgrade in 1979. Perhaps the most extraordinary result of this union is the family burial of the Jewish Vinavers, Stanislav and Elsa, and their son Konstantin, who died in 2000, together in a Christian grave in the cemetery of Serbian heroes in Belgrade.

The extended family of the Silexes and Vinavers spanned the extreme experience of the war, from the Holocaust and occupation to national service, resistance and imprisonment. It remains an untold story of epic proportions.

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Remembering Yugoslavia Meets Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Posted on October 10, 2021 by James Thomas Snyder

With many thanks to the Remembering Yugoslavia podcast and Peter Korchnak!

Not too late to seek a newer world (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

Posted on March 28, 2021 by James Thomas Snyder

“My dear, I know I have inconvenienced you terribly by making you take your holiday now, and I know you did not really want to come to Yugoslavia at all. But when you get there you will see why it was so important that we should make this journey, and that we should make it now, at Easter. It will all be quite clear once we are in Yugoslavia.” (Prologue)

The journeys of Rebecca West in Yugoslavia, 1936-1938. From the front leaf of the 1st US Edition.

REBECCA WEST MADE three trips to Yugoslavia in the late 1930s but never again visited the country, even after the end of World War II. The single volume treats these three journeys as one long meditation. She first visited for a lecture tour organized by the British Council in the spring of 1936, which explains in part her delight in Orthodox Easter while she visited Skopje and Ohrid in Macedonia and Belgrade in Serbia. She was seriously ill in Yugoslavia and sought treatment outside the country. It was during this travel to and from Yugoslavia through Central Europe that she witnessed the cultural shift and aggressive preparation in Germany in particular that presaged World War II.

West made her second visit, this time with husband Henry Andrews accompanying her, in spring of 1937, returning that May. He is not named but provides quiet observation and mordant commentary throughout the narrative. Under deadline pressure for an opus that was ballooning into two volumes, West returned a third time in 1938. The book was published shortly after the Battle of Britain during World War II, the result of five years’ writing and research.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has always been classified as a travel book or travelogue since it describes itself as “a journey through Yugoslavia.” As I and other authors have noted, it remains indispensable as an accompaniment to visiting the region because it describes with such clarity what still remains there. But it is evident from the start that the story is not really about a journey, country, or even history. She is working on something much larger. The place in time and the journey through it are framing devices for expansive interrogations of politics, identity, gender, historiography, religion, the nature of good and evil, empire, life, pleasure, pain, liberty, and death. These were all topics West spent much of her life thinking and writing about, and they all came together in this book. “It was much more than a travel book,” writes biographer Victoria Glendenning. “It turned out to be the central book of her life.”

Nevertheless, without recourse to an established genre it is difficult to explain the book at all. I borrowed prosopography as the closest, if unfamiliar, descriptor: a history of a people as a collective, particularly in contrast to other groups. In any event, the term helps explain how West categorizes people according to (currently outdated) notions of race or nation. In West’s Europe there are Germans and Austrians, Hungarians and Russians, Jews and Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics, Turks and Macedonians, Serbs and Croats, and so on. Using this sorting tool, she draws lessons from the experiences of individual nations, for this is how millennia of conquerors, colonizers and empires viewed them. It is also how they saw themselves.

Yugoslavia was at the time of her first visit not even 20 years old. The idea of a federated polity of Slavic-language speakers in Southern Europe dates to the late 17^th century, but it was created only in 1918 from the possessions of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire and included the independent Serbia in the aftermath of World War I. The ethnic, religious, and linguistic regions had existed for centuries and throughout its tortured history regional and global powers exploited those fractures. Over time the area late known as Yugoslavia was occupied, annexed, colonized, or conquered by Romans, Byzantines, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Austrians, Germans, Italians, and Turks. This explains in part the Yugoslav experiment: a modern federation was stronger than any of its individual member republics against the predations of its more powerful neighbors.

Historical Yugoslavia from the back leaf 1st US Edition.

Some of those constituent republics West visited don’t really exist. At least one country she didn’t visit at all. In the book’s table of contents West lists, in order, Croatia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Old Serbia and Montenegro. Today Macedonia is officially North Macedonia. Herzegovina is an historic region of Bosnia but has never been geographically defined and serves no administrative purpose. The Croatian peninsula of Dalmatia is similarly an undefined historical region and former kingdom.

Old Serbia is Kosovo, which for most of its modern history was part of Serbia. It was an eyalet, or province, under Ottoman rule. Socialist Yugoslavia declared Kosovo an autonomous area, a status that was revoked after 1989. Following the federal campaign against Kosovo in 1999, NATO secured the territory, which declared itself an independent state in 2008. West visited Kosovo but not Albania, which while not part of Yugoslavia shared the language and religion, Islam, of the majority of Kosovars then as now.

But as we will soon see, West’s omnivorous appetite for detail provides her a critical tool that even many academics and certainly most journalists do not possess. From this book, West is often quoted that she “had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.” That serves certain easily digested narratives. Her real agenda is more comprehensively summarized by a story she recounts in the prologue. She discovers to her horror and despair that a Viennese laundry has completely destroyed the Macedonian peasant dresses she had brought with her. This acts as a parable about how the West broadly and imperialism in particular devalue and degrade small vibrant cultures and communities. Oppressive reign ruins those it rules. West’s husband does not understand her emotional reaction and wonders what Macedonia could possibly have that could upset her so much. “Well, there is everything there,” she says. “Except what we have. But that seems very little.” This is a powerful display of empathy that is the root and branch of all great writing.

Working Titles (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

Posted on March 12, 2021 by James Thomas Snyder

“I write books to find out about things.” (Paris Review, 1981)

FOR THIS PROJECT I have four individual editions of Black Lamb separated in publication by 80 years. More than 25 years ago I started reading the 1994 Penguin Books single-volume paperback. It was published without an introduction. I don’t recall purchasing this book, but I had likely read Balkan Ghosts (1993) around this time. This was author Robert Kaplan’s paean to “Dame Rebecca” and her life-defining tome, which he considered more valuable than his passport. That same year my first article for the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student paper, was about European attempts to end the war in the former Yugoslavia.

My working volume published by Penguin in 1994.

I started reading this edition in 1997 with my coffee at five o’clock in the morning. I got about 300 pages into it (according to the book darts I left in the pages, I appear to have gotten as far as Sarajevo) before abandoning the effort. I really was not equipped to make sense of the book. A mere undergraduate education (more than what Dame Rebecca managed, which is all the more telling) and an undisciplined interest in Yugoslavia were insufficient. I knew none of the region’s histories, languages, or literature. I didn’t even know anyone from Yugoslavia. Consequently, each page I turned was an isometric effort: laborious but unproductive.

After graduate school – where I watched Allied aircraft pummel Serbia in 1999, televised havoc I would later see with my own eyes visiting Belgrade as a NATO official – I moved to Europe and eventually to Brussels and the North Atlantic Alliance itself. When I joined in 2005, Kosovo was NATO’s largest out-of-area deployment with about 15,000 troops. Catching up on this important Allied theater of operations, I schooled myself on the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia and began visiting the region as the new republics aligned themselves with NATO and the European Union. As a result, I met people across the region trying to build a new regional politics, liberal, internationalist, and Western-leaning.

My Penguin paperback with a homemade cardstock cover protecting it accompanied me during my trips. I found it easier to approach the book by sections that corresponded to where I was visiting. West described places and history I could visit and see and touch. The more I read, and the more I traveled, the more I could connect the parts of the books into a coherent regional narrative. It was a productive re-introduction to the book.

That led to criticism and commentary of West, including Geoff Dyer, Brian Hall, and Larry Wolff. Richard Holbrooke and Lord David Owen, policy-makers, followed. Holbrooke coined the pejorative “bad history, or the Rebecca West Factor” – a line Christopher Hitchens would parrot – and piled on Hall’s allegations that West was a pro-Serb crypto-nationalist and Islamophobe. That verdict perfectly but inaccurately explained what had just happened in Bosnia as Serb-dominated Yugoslav federal forces reinforcing Bosnian Serb irregulars “cleansed” Muslim-majority cities through siege and massacre. Never mind that West’s intended destination was Macedonia, not Serbia, and she visited Montenegro, Croatia, Dalmatia, and Herzegovina as part of her research. Only in retrospect – actually a narrative heuristic similar to post hoc fallacy – does Kaplan and, by extension, West appear to be prophetic. Robert Kaplan felt the need to defend himself and his West-derived “bad history” in later editions of Balkan Ghosts (in Yugoslavia, he visited only Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia and spent the other three-quarters of his book in Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania). His main thesis was the best way to understand contemporary politics is through history, which Rebecca West well understood. The past is prologue to what follows but it is not necessarily the provocateur.

There began my initial intuition that these critics, writers and statesmen (they were all men), with the exception of Kaplan, had got something fundamentally wrong about Dame Rebecca. My sporadic reading of Black Lamb, while incomplete, did not fit the accusation of an ethnic polemic. Racist screeds usually burn themselves out well before 1,100 pages. So I returned to the book looking for bias with an eye toward writing an apologia in the old style.

That opportunity came in 2016 as the 75^th anniversary of the publication approached. West originally serialized what became the book in The Atlantic and Harper’s Bazaar in early 1941. The first two-volume editions were published by The Viking Press in the United States and Macmillan in the United Kingdom later that same year. To my surprise nobody noted the anniversary date given how much-discussed the book had been just 20 years earlier. NATO was still on the ground in Kosovo and so was a European Union peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.

The 2007 Kindle edition with Christopher Hitchens’ emetic foreword

Augmenting my research was a Kindle version of the Penguin 2007 edition published with Christopher Hitchens’ introduction, which he unsurprisingly handled like an dull mattock. Irritation aside, the Kindle edition features searchable text, bookmarking, highlighting, and a dictionary. This facilitated certain research. For example, the easy exenteration of Hitchens’ claim that “the most repeatedly pejorative word in [West’s] lexicon is ‘impotent’”—a word that appears just six times in the entire book. Likewise “Greater Serbia”—which, like Hall, Hitchens uses to bind West in a chain of causality leading to Serb ethnic cleansing of Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina and specifically the Srebrenica genocide in 1995—West mentions twice. (More Hitchens gralloch in a future post.)

I published my article in the Los Angeles Review of Books in July 2017. It had an immediate and thoroughly unexpected result: the executor of West’s literary estate read my article and ordered up a new edition in time for the book’s 80^th anniversary. Coincidentally, the global COVID19 pandemic gave claustrophobic adventurers reason to travel virtually the old-fashioned way. So Black Lamb has enjoyed a minor renaissance as more readers with more time rediscover it for an ambitious long read.

With this turn of events, I had to possess the alpha and the omega. Working with Capitol Hill Books in Washington, D.C., I bought the two-volume US first edition. These volumes include photographs and maps. The endleaves feature a visual log of West’s travels. The photos are not terribly good, not even qualifying as postcards. Occasionally, however, they provide insight, such as illustrating West’s astonished description of covered Muslim women’s dress in Mostar “consist[ing] of a man’s coat, made in black or blue cloth, immensely too large for the woman who is going to wear it.” The photo confirms her power of description.

Finally, I ordered the new Canongate edition which at this time is only available for sale from the UK. It was delivered with the satisfaction of seeing my original LARB article prominently blurbed in the front leaf.

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Blogging ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’

Posted on March 6, 2021 by James Thomas Snyder

“What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria? And what has happened there? The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know.” (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

THIS YEAR MARKS the 80th anniversary of the publication of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Written over five years and totaling more than 1,100 pages, it was almost immediately and universally acclaimed as a masterwork of 20th Century English literature—luster dimmed slightly by aspersions cast during the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. After 2000, however, this extraordinary book fell not just from favor but from popular consciousness. So much so that nobody noticed when its 75th anniversary passed in 2016.

Nobody, it seems, but me. In 2017 I wrote about this collective oversight in the Los Angeles Review of Books and defended West against the ludicrous accusation that her 1930s wayfaring prosopography fed Western inaction during the violent, genocidal breakup of the former Yugoslavia. To my surprise, West’s literary estate flagged my article and ordered an 80^th anniversary edition. That edition is now available from Canongate with an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

This moment presents an opportunity to revisit the book in detail and in depth. In the coming weeks and months I will write here about the book as I move through it, region by region. The book is rich and dense with observation and moment so there will be plenty of material for digressions and diversions. I have visited several of the locations covered in the book, including Serbia, Macedonia, and Bosnia in addition to Austria, Greece, Hungary and Bulgaria. My admiration of West and her work grew as I realized what she described in 1941 remained completely true to my own experiences.

I also believe reexamining this book will bring clarity to our own generational inflection point. As several commentators have noted, during her travels in the mid-1930s West saw and anticipated the crest of fascism preparing to crash across Europe. Black Lamb documented the damage of rank nationalism and the imperialism of centuries. West plainly saw the antecedents and historical analogies. “The difference between [Kosovo] in 1389 and England in 1939,” she wrote, “lay in time and place and not in the events experienced.”

Many thought 1989 was the last caesura with that legacy. But history has no end. The apex of post-Cold War democratic advance came in Tunis in 2011. Since then, more than a dozen countries have rallied to the cynical column led by Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran. Freedom House noted of 2020, “[D]emocracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny.” Western democracies themselves have not been immune to this retrogression, as 2021’s capitol insurrection surely demonstrated.

West saw the same thing coming 85 years ago and warned us. We should listen.

I hope you’ll join me on this historiographical odyssey. Please feel free to comment below or e-mail me directly at the address listed under “About James Thomas Snyder”.

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Some Dreamers of the Impossible Dream

Posted on March 1, 2014 by James Thomas Snyder

The Church of St. John, Ohrid, Macedonia (via The Guardian)

With nods to George Kennan, Joan Didion, and Cervantes, enjoy this excerpt from my book, The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy about an extraordinary visit I made to Macedonia in 2006 published in The Foreign Service Journal.

Although I wrote this many months (even years) ago, the article is particularly apropos given very recent events in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It documents the activities many young people in the region are making to turn toward each other and articulate a new future for themselves and their countries.

Once again I send my sincere thanks to the editors of The Foreign Service Journal for agreeing to publish this article.

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An Assault on Joseph Nye, Part Two: “Power and Violence are Opposites”

Posted on May 9, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

“Down with Milosevic!”, Belgrade, 1999 (via BBC)

In a previous discussion, I attacked Joseph Nye’s “soft power/hard power” theory at the level of language, effectively calling his terms unclear and mealy-mouthed substitutes for clearer, more precise terms we can use like force and coercion, sanctions or diplomacy. Nye has made international relations theory less clear and transparent for the application of his two terms and I tried to reverse that trend with my own replacements.

At the same time, Nye’s ideas don’t work as theory, either. Nye has offered a Hobson’s Dichotomy, a false choice that doesn’t exist in the real world. A Hobson’s Dichotomy poses us with two falsely opposed choices that may not offer a solution to the problem set. That is what soft and hard power effectively presents us. It is a trick of language that also gives us an untrue sense of mastering reality. The reality of international politics is far too complex for that. To put this simply: as a Hobson’s Dichotomy, Nye’s idea is a narrows that squeezes out rather than includes alternative or opposing means to achieve political change.

In political reality, decision-makers don’t choose from one quiver labeled “soft power” and another labeled “hard power” when taking action. If their judgment is keen, they look for the best tools available to them to achieve the most desirable outcome. If they are lucky, and their country is truly powerful (like ours), they will have a wide variety of means available to apply to what will be a unique, complicated, and dynamically evolving situation and environment.

Nye’s theoretical failure goes beyond the toolkit available to decision-makers. “Soft power” fails to take into account civil society, international movements, and faith groups. For Nye, there is nothing like the Roman Catholic Church, Islam, or Buddhism. For Nye, there is nothing like the Freeze, or the Civil Rights Movement, or the Color Revolutions, or the Arab Spring. Each of these has had profound international political effects – in other words, by his own definition they are powerful — but they simply can’t be accounted for by Nye’s political theory.

What makes these movements all the more interesting – and possible – is the flow of information, inspiration and support across borders. There would have been no revolution against Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia without Solidarity, and there would have been no uprising in Tunisia without Serbia, and no Cairo without Tunisia. To Nye, this does not account for soft power, or any kind of power for that matter, because it is not enabled by a state — even though these movements peacefully changed the means of government and the norms for governing in more than a dozen countries.

Boston, April 15 (via The Telegraph)

Nye’s theory also fails to account for terrorism. He dispenses with terrorism as “depending on soft power” (my emphasis) without defining terrorism per se as either hard (force) or soft (as I have defined it before, power qua power). Reading between the lines, then, Nye’s theory cannot really accommodate terrorism: it simply does not belong in Nye’s universe.

If we take most observers’ understanding that terrorism is a tool of the weak – a meansof the un-powerful – even if they are state-sponsored — then terrorism falls away from this discussion entirely. Nye may get partial credit for recognizing terrorism requires other tools to succeed, but it is not a tool of power or the powerful in and of itself. Nye’s theory of two “buckets” does not have enough room for either political movements or terrorism — which pretty much defines the political dynamism of the previous decade.

An effective theory of power will take into account terrorism and the power wielded by ordinary people through collective action, whether in faith groups, civil society, or international movements. Power, in the end, is mass, and mass can really be found in the minds of millions or billions of individual human beings. Only military theorists really understand the importance of this collective mind in political affairs, and even then the American military tradition has been slow or loath to understand the relationship of the public to the political.

Clausewitz for example wrote about the “moral forces” in war affecting public opinion as “among the most important”. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) wrote about “the crowd in action,” dating the phenomenon back to ancient Greek warfare. David Galula, writing about insurgency, noted that the guerrilla could “still win” with “no positive policy” but “good propaganda” — that is, directly influencing the population. David Petraeus, drawing off all these shrewd observations, argued that military communications could be the “decisive logical line of operation” by communicating directly with the public in counterinsurgency operations.

We still struggle to understand the motivations and goals of terrorism. The attack on the Boston Marathon is the most recent expression of this ambivalence, but almost daily bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan should remind us of the continuing struggle as well. Theoretically we wrestle to understand whether terrorism is an effective political weapon.

Nonetheless as a theoretical matter it should be clear terrorism is violence, not force, and as a practical measure it should be clear that terrorism is a tool of the weak, that it leverages political entities that are not as powerful when measured against the mass movements outlined above. Hannah Arendt has written precisely that “power and violence are opposites”. This is probably the most mordant indictment of Nye’s theory, since it quite simply excludes terrorism from any consideration by Nye. It fully supports my contention that Nye’s theory constitutes not an expansive analysis of power but an exclusive narrows.

The real pain extracted from bombings or mass attacks can mitigate that inherent weakness. Violence can, on a macabre balance sheet, equate to political power but only if state authorities or the public mind are willing to allow it. Still, as violence, terrorism is only relegated to simply another tool – like economic sanctions, or diplomacy – which states or non-state actors use to affect international affairs. This by no means justifies terrorism, but it does account for the practice. So far, that is more than what Joseph Nye can do.

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