A memo for the Western elites regarding Macedonia
MEMORANDUM
TO: The Western elites who think they know what is best for Macedonia – elected and unelected officials in the US State Department, the halls of NATO, EU institutions, EU member states, as well as those in academia, think tanks, foundations, the media, and more
FROM: Jason Miko
RE: The Republic of Macedonia and Macedonians, everywhere
DATE: November 27, 2021
Given the political uncertainly in Macedonia these days, y’all are having conniption fits over the idea that the center-right, VMRO-DPMNE, might become the government, once again, in Macedonia. It does not matter to you that the party is pro-Western, oriented and in favor of both NATO membership and the EU, and have held this position since shortly after Macedonia became an independent nation-state in 1991. Some of you have painted them as “pro-Russian” (without a shred of evidence). Granted, calling someone or an institution “pro-Russian” these days is like calling them “racist” or “fascist” – it merely means “something I don’t like.” It’s a cheap shot and untrue. All the while you accept your preferred party, SDSM (before 1991 the League of Communists of Macedonia who still call each other “comrade” during party conferences) because they do your bidding, even though the continued tenure of the SDSM regime means moving towards (“onwards and upwards!” your SDSM comrades like to chortle) the erasure of Macedonia, Macedonian identity, and much that makes Macedonia unique.
Part of the problem here is that many of you have grown fat and comfortable, as well as arrogant, stewing in your own pomposity. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, you believed that the world was truly witnessing “the end of history and the last man” as Francis Fukuyama wrote. You believed that liberal democracy had (nearly) finally triumphed and that there was no stopping this juggernaut. Somewhere in these past 30 years, however, “liberal democracy” has gone off the rails. As John O’Sullivan writes in the Forward to “The Demon in Democracy” by the brilliant Polish author, philosopher and MEP, Ryszard Legutko, “…liberal democracy, as it has developed in recent decades, shares a number of alarming features with communism…In short, like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is becoming an all-encompassing ideology that, behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little of no disagreement.”
Many of you have grown fat and happy sucking the teat of the public purse, convincing yourselves that you are working for the public weal. Many of you born in 1980 and beyond have grown up without knowing the horrors and history of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, so you ignore what we, the West, could easily become. You now hold high positions in the aforementioned institutions and you live and work in bubbles, traveling with, interacting with, living with like-minded people who simply think and believe that you are on the “right side of history” and that, inevitably, your version of illiberal leftism will triumph. Your hubris is showing.
And the vast majority of you are quite happy with your power, your prestige, your positions and are not about to give that up. The fact that Macedonians still “cling” (in the words of one of your own, Barak Obama) to their culture, their tradition, their identity, their name, irks you to no end. You hate it. You hate them.
You therefore hold the opinion of Squealer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decision, comrades, and then where should we be?”
As the Chinese Communist Government launches hypersonic glide vehicles capable of carrying missiles with nuclear warheads with a first strike capability those of you in the US embrace growing numbers of gender pronouns in your military and you celebrate, as a man who thinks he is a woman christens a naval ship named after Harvey Milk whose greatest “achievement” was being gay. You embrace and enforce “diversity training” and end up weakening the US and by extension, the West. All of this speaks to your lack of will, your lack of courage, your lack of preparedness to fight for what is right – what the political west was originally founded on. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in Warning to the West (1974), “…at the moment the question is not how the Soviet Union will find a way out of totalitarianism but how the West will be able to avoid the same fate. How will the West be able to withstand the unprecedented force of totalitarianism?”
You view yourselves as smart intellectuals, forgetting, as economist Thomas Sowell writes, “Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.” Granted, most of you do not believe in God in the first place. The political and cultural West has lost its moral compass, though there are many of us still fighting to get us back on track. The political and cultural West is in decline – and decline is a choice – and rapidly sinking. And you seem to want to bring as many with you as you can.
Macedonians – and their friends – would appreciate it if ceased your endless talk and interference and left them alone. The Macedonians should be able to choose their government – even if it is one you loath, despise, and detest.
Certain individuals and institutions in Macedonia want to take a second look at the agreements with Greece and Bulgaria – and that is their sovereign right, and their sovereign right to undo them if they so choose. Granted, many of you Western elites can choose – in fact, have chosen – to impose your own penalties on Macedonians who choose to do this – even though it has absolutely nothing to do with you Western elites. And that is because you Western elites, ultimately, are neo-colonialists, believing you know what is best for Macedonians, and others like them, around the world. In that, you will fail, either by being destroyed by our enemies, or your own arrogance. A pox on you and your homes.