Letter From Croatia I: Brac

“Croatian Cloud,” watercolor by Hallie Cohen

There is a rumor that stone from Brac was used in the making of the White House pillars. In any case the largest island in Croatia (there are over a thousand of them) noted for its beaches and its rocky beauty, still houses Croatia’s only stonemasonry school, where students can learn an age old trade for free. The quarries of Pucisca, Postira and Selca still produce stone that is sought after for its facility in producing a clean polished surface. Brac is reached by boat from Split (where Diocletian’s Palace still stands as a monument to Bracian stone) and its geography gave it a certain immunity from the turbulence that swept the country during the The Croatian War of Independence which was fought from l991-5. Flying from Rome to Split, you enter a new time zone. In Rome stone is a tourist attraction. On Brac, it’s an industry. Yet the sleepy villages, whose hotels with their spare socialist realist style décor still cater to Russian tourists (along with throngs of Italians, English and Americans) as they did when Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia was allied, albeit ambivalently, with the Soviet bloc, are firmly a part of Marshall McCluhan’s Global Village. Unlike their cousins in Bosnia, the Croats (who historically braved the Ottomans from the northeast and the Habsburgs from the northwest) have emerged as intact from the strife of the past as the tidy red stone roofs visible from an airplane (in July they joined the EU). Even the Croatian clouds seem to prosper outlandishly, being so fluffy as to look like gigantic self-satisfied wads of cotton, or even snow that’s developed an immunity to heat.

Feudalism in Our Future

The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan

Syria, and Iraq were ill-fated creations, the legacy of a period of colonial rule following the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Yugoslavia was another example of a modern invention, albeit under the auspices of different historic forces. Arab Spring fractured the slim nationalistic ties that were often held together by tyrants. Essentially Assad, Hussein and Gaddafi were right. Without terror the conflicting agendas of their fractured constituencies would create an unparalleled cauldron of ethnic volatility. So what will the new Iraq and Syria look like? What will be the fate of Libya? Yugoslavia faced a similar situation after the death of Tito when the countries liberation from Communism unleashed centuries old vendettas that had been suppressed by in that country’s case, a benevolent despot. One looks back longingly at benevolent despotism and cynically at the prospect of democracy in countries where irrational hatred seems to be the lingua franca of political life. In fact, neither despotism nor democracy is likely to prevail and perhaps the currently hopeless situation in a country like Syria where terrorist groups, like Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, who are themselves bitter enemies, vie for control of the revolution presages the future of many parts of the world.  What we are witnessing is a return to tribalism and feudalism. Unable to live together, each religious and ethnic group will stake out their territory with former nation states fragmenting into highly guarded enclaves, the walled fortresses of the middle ages. New Yorkers joke about seceding from the United States, such is their revulsion at the values of middle America. But it’s no joke. What's happening in the Mideast could spread like a virus even in those Western countries who consider themselves both the beneficiaries and benefactors of the Englightenment.

The Grand Inquisitor

The Times reported that two of the names on the bomb packages sent to synagogues in Chicago by Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen were addressed to famous Inquisitors who had persecuted Muslims in medieval times. Diego Deza, a successor to the infamous Tomás de Torquemada, was one of the names, and Reynald Krak “…is another name for Reynald of Châtillon—a French knight of the Second Crusade who wantonly killed Muslim pilgrims and was later beheaded by Saladin, the Kurdish warrior famous for his defeat of Western invaders in the 12th century” (“In Parcel Bomb Plot, 2 Dark Inside Jokes,” NYT, 11/2/10). It is curious that the terrorists sent bombs addressed to Inquisitors to synagogues, since both Jews and Muslims faced a common fate at the hands of the Inquisition. In any event, this strain of terrorism seems like something out of a Dan Brown novel in which the past itself actually plays a murderous role. But the curious element is the significance that centuries-old conflicts hold for the modern-day terrorist mind. This was particularly obvious in the massacres at Sarajevo during the Bosnian-Serb conflict, in which the place itself was so resplendent with both relatively recent (the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated World War I) and more ancient hostilities between Christians and Muslims. These conflicts seethed beneath the surface normalcy that had been cultivated during the Tito era, in which ethnicity was subsumed under the ideology of a benevolently despotic totalitarian state. Stephan Daedalus comments that “history is a nightmare,” and it always creates a shudder when one realizes how powerful historical memory is and how it’s passed on to generation after generation. Who would have thought that names like Reynald de Châtillon and Diego Deza could be on the minds of jihadists in Yemen, a country that, on the space-time continuum, seems light years from The Crusades?