The Albanian Exodus
The End-of-History regime in Albania has created a constantly-falling standard of living for the Albanian people, who enjoy only the freedom to leave.
i. The Defeat of Albania
Thirty years after the destruction of Albanian socialism, a radio ad plays in all of Albania’s dozen or so mismanaged retail chains. The ad features an American being taught the Albanian for “I’ll have the best beer in Albania, please!”. Everyone born since the war speaks fine English and “Pride” is hosted in it without an Albanian translation. American flags are a more common sight than Albanian ones in the traffic-choked centre of Tirana, home to not one but two Burger Kings, here, as in other dependant countries, an overpriced lifestyle brand. Just down the street is the main world office of the Open Society Foundation.
Along with American “culture” has come American atrocities: the depopulation of a country and the destruction of its history and independence as a nation, the fire-sale of its land and resources on an open market, the collective impoverishment of its people, the atrophy of its traditional arts and civic institutions, and the dependence of its civic and political life on foreign NGOs that paint further economic liberalisation as a great and progressive thing while they smear and demean the leaders of the people who built the country from an illiterate swampland into a modern industrial society and defended it proudly from said liberalisation precisely to prevent everything that has characterised these last three decades from happening.
Living in Albania for even a very short amount of time is enough to understand that the depopulation of Albania is a direct outcome of state policy which has remained consistent for decades. Socialist-era American documents complain that the rising life expectancy and fertility rates in the Peoples’ Republic are “contributing to overcrowding and food shortages”, and since coming into the American sphere of influence after a protracted period of encirclement, blockade, and eventually war, the population of Albania has shrunken from 3.5 million in 1990 to 2.7 million today, a reduction of nearly one quarter. While prices rise and the country depopulates, Prime Minister Edi Rama has continued unabated in his drive to fellate at once every single foreign power and traditional enemy of the Albanian people. In a series of “culture weeks”, the flags of every foreign country from Italy to Turkey to Israel have adorned the central Skanderbeg Square in order to humiliate the Albanian nation while the economy dances to the tune of his foreign “guests”. His plan for “revitalising the economy” entails more prostitution (both literal and figurative) to a tourist industry which has been the basis of the country’s economy for decades and shorn it of virtually all of its wealth, and to that end, he has dubbed a capital city in which Albanian youth can no longer afford to live as the “European Youth Capital” for 2022. His partisan opposition? Sali Berisha, just as much a shill for the west, whose rule ended in the 1997 civil war that left the south’s major population centres in ruins, which some of them still are to this day, particularly in Delvina. He criticises Rama for allowing Serbia to eat the crumbs of the pies he bakes for America. He thinks Italy and Germany should get the crumbs — a matter of profound national importance, so he claims.
In the country that under any other economic system would proudly brag of being the first in the world to fully electrify all of its houses, a task it accomplished in 1970, during a period of intense economic encirclement by hostile powers representing not one but both sides of the Cold War, almost all infrastructure built in the past thirty years has had the function not of developing the country, but of “helping” an increasingly impoverished and car-dependant proletariat move itself every single day from the parts of the Tirana-Durres corridor that it can afford to live in to the parts where it’s forced to work, and then back to their homes every single day. 80% of the national economy is contained in this small corridor. The rest of the country is unsupported in any of its infrastructure; the houses rot or lay in ruin from the 1997 civil war as the people are unable to acquire the things that they need in order to perform basic upkeep functions. All consumer goods here are low-quality and break more quickly than one can keep up with repairing or replacing them even if one lives in Tirana. Much of the country has effectively been taken off-grid, and prolonged and regular blackouts there no longer raise the concern of the government. The village economies have been plundered and the burden on the individual for private transportation combined with the “lack of jobs” in these areas abandoned by the bourgeoisie makes life unaffordable. Although Albania has more on-shore oil than any country in Europe, all of that oil is owned by Canadian companies, forcing the Albanians into a dependence on Russian oil and therefore into yet another of the inter-imperialist wars that have characterised the region for centuries. Now we are told that there is an “energy crisis” in an oil-rich nation — something that uncomplicatedly and obviously makes even more oil-rich Canada a clear enemy of the Albanian people for roughly the same reasons as it is to the indigenous people of Alberta.
Yet as the countryside increasingly fills with medieval and even ancient ghost towns, which have survived the Romans, the Ottomans, and the Cold War encirclement, but do not appear set to survive the End of History of the Americans, no government plan is forthcoming to do anything for these places or the people living in them. They will soon die of old age, say the government, so quietly we almost can’t hear them, so we don’t need to do anything about it. The Albanian problem appears set to solve itself, and then there will be nothing in the way of American-approved “development”.
ii. NATO in the Balkans
Not just in Albania, but throughout the Balkans, America and NATO have taken every step to prevent the natural evolution of a lasting peace by establishing “countries” defined by internal ethnic struggle. The non-recognition of Kosovo is the single biggest powder keg in the Balkans, yet the Serbian Orthodox Church continues to preach manifest destiny unabated. While the Serbian president, a former Minister of Propaganda under Milosevic, is considered a moderate as far as Serbia’s political spectrum is now concerned, America has made no effort to influence Serbia in any way on this issue, although its intervention in other Balkan countries is an open and acknowledged pattern of which it is very proud.
Albania is to the Clintons what India was to Queen Victoria. It is the inseparable crown jewel, purged of snakes by the light of freedom. The Americans erect statues all over Albania and Kosovo of the Clintons and their friends and allies. Streets are named after the presidents of America. There are streets named after John Kennedy, Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. They rewrite Albanian history to begin with the recognition of the country by president Wilson, to continue through the eyes of the nazi collaborators of the Balli Kombetar and other “victims of communism”, now increasingly memorialised in statues erected by the end-of-history regime while those of the antifascist partisans rot into disrepair, until the “liberation” of the country by Bill Clinton, who got involved in the Yugoslav Wars mostly to get his wife to talk to him again after he invented cyberbullying to sexually abuse a young intern, so he used depleted uranium to save Kosovo forever. He and his wife declared an “end of history” around which the politics of not just America but also its geopolitical vassals in Europe, Oceania, et al have been based for the decades since, without even the barest or shallowest deviation.
Albania is not the only country in the Balkans that dances to the tune of the American fiddle. The genocidal Republika Srpska entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a NATO creation via the Dayton Accords, which recognised the settler-colonial regime. NATO continues to subject the Albanians in “North Macedonia” to the rule of a state not even the Macedonians themselves care to develop or preserve, although the stance of the Albanians towards Macedonia has always been the famous one taken by Carson against Redmond, “Damn your safeguards, we don’t want to be ruled by you!” The inclusion of Albanians in “North Macedonia” is not just an affront to the Albanian people, it is also an act of sabotage against the lukewarm, backburnered nation-building project of Macedonia itself, already an astroturf ambition outside of the Aegean Macedonian diaspora. The Albanians care more for Greece and Serbia not to share a land border than the Macedonians do about Macedonia. If anyone were serious about Macedonia continuing to exist, the first order of business would be the resolution of the issue of its 30%+ Albanian minority, concentrated as if by divine providence in a geographical area directly bordering Albania Proper, all holding the necessity of secession to be settled fact. Extensive American intervention in Macedonia has mostly been to establish the damned safeguards “for” the Albanians which obviously do not resolve the issue but only allow one side of a brewing insurgency to arm and prepare itself for an inevitable struggle while the Macedonians themselves stew in resentment against them which is even harsher than that found in Serbia. It is hard to see why that would be if anyone involved in the decision had any love for peace in the Balkans, for Macedonia, or for the Albanians. It seems a simple problem to resolve, were a resolution sought. Yet, and this is key, to have a part of its population stuck under Macedonian rule (however nominal) weakens the Albanian nation as well which must now face two, three, five struggles, against the Macedonians, the Serbs, and whoever else, rather than a united national struggle. Both the Albanians themselves and the manufactured resentment towards them are potential tools in the belt of an imperial power that openly views war in the region as a strategic opportunity for business and propaganda.
Yet we are to believe Serbia has somehow resisted American influence, and that’s why it is the way it is. A conviction for war crimes in an international court is the surest way into Serbian politics. The percentage of convicted war criminals who go on to become politicians is far greater than any university in the country. The Serbian government is packed with internationally convicted genociders because America doesn’t want that to happen? End-of-history America, the Sole Superpower, is helpless to prevent this?
I am not saying that America should act to change the political face of Serbia. I am saying that if it wanted to, that is, if among its priorities were the long-term protection of the Albanian people, it would do so. We know it has no moral objection to this. It does it all the time. For decades it openly sought to do so in Albania.
Could there be a strategic objection? Do the sprawling, undefended Serbian flatlands not leave enough wiggle room for a foreign military operation? Are its medieval political institutions too well-organised, its defeated and ignorant people too vigilant, discerning, and politically educated? Its political leaders too cunning and ingenious, too able to rally the people behind a unified program, too patriotic, sincere, principled, and stalwart? Incorruptible? Cue Serbian laughter! They’d get behind the effort for $200 split between all of them. Yet there is no peace movement, no dark horse opposition, no “sudden, spontaneous” protests calling to abandon aggressive-to-genocidal irredentist ambitions against its neighbours.
It is not that there are no western-supported movements in Serbia. Euro“Pride” took place in Belgrade just last September. But lasting peace and security in the Balkans just has not been on the agenda for these movements. It’s not optics either, the west has no idea what’s going on in Serbia and doesn’t care, if they did they wouldn’t have sent a bunch of Albanians over to protest for gay rights and get beaten up in the streets at a time when the country’s powerful “extreme right”, with the blessing of its self-proclaimed “left”, have been labouring tirelessly to bring the country into a committed dependence on Russian money rather than playing “both sides” with the Russians and Americans.
Serbia is led by a group of moderate genociders because America wants Serbia to be led by a group of moderate genociders. If they didn’t, it would be led by someone else. They want this because the Albanians themselves will tolerate to be America’s crown jewel only as long as America is needed to protect from the Serbian threat looming overhead, its government full of ICTY convicts, guns pressed to the heads of the Albanian people, Serbs ready to lemming rush the Albanian mountains like a priest painted a tunnel onto the side of them.
The “great powers” have always used Albania and the Balkans as kindling to set off any conflict, local or global, that needed setting off. They never have and never will take a step towards robbing themselves of the ability to do that.
iii. The Mythology of the Albanian Exodus
Today, we are told that Albania is a “young democracy”. It’s rife with violence, conflict, corruption, crime, and poverty, as young democracies are wont to be. Supposedly, it takes more than 30 years for democracy to really get rolling. Supposedly, it’ll be worth the wait when we’re a mature democracy like America and the UK supposedly are. Again, the optics — I wonder, if while every American talking head wails and gnashes their teeth about how their democracy is dying in darkness, if they’ve paused to give thought to how that’s playing to the “young democracies” of the world?
By 1974, that is, 30 years after its foundation in 1944, communists had turned the country from a disease-riddled swampland into a modern industrial society, universally literate and electrified. These thirty peaceful years had allowed Albania to make numerous advances in socialist theory and other sciences, modelling for the rest of the world forever a correct path of socialist development, under which the population had doubled and a literate, educated generation had been brought up in circumstances unimaginable in any era prior. This generation had begun to reject the vestiges of capitalism and feudalism and work towards the emancipation of women in real, economic terms. While the western feminists fought a battle against the men of their own class or lower, (almost never higher!) in Albania it was the students and the party men leading the charge to womens’ emancipation, not because they were forced to do so, but because doing so was a necessary step in socialist construction as understood by their Marxist ideology. Despite the adverse economic circumstances brought about by American, British, and Soviet blockades as well as an unfavourable geography for agriculture, the people ate as well as anyone in generally undernourished 20th-century Europe could expect due to the superior utilisation of available resources. The 1967 Cultural and Ideological Revolution represented in some ways achievements greater than those achieved by Russia under Stalin, and were the practical realisation of his and Molotov’s theories about the struggle against the formation of a class of privileged bureaucrats, and the better part of a decade had elapsed since its implementation, leading to success after success in the development of socialism as well as the country overall.
The socialist regime never resorted to excuses, had no excuses to give and nothing to make them for. Nobody dared to say it’s only been thirty years of socialism, we’ll abolish crime, religion, prostitution, we’ll emancipate women eventually, in so many decades.
Yet all we hear today is that Albania is a young democracy, and we’ll get it eventually! Just another 30 years, another 50 years, another 100 years of poverty and exodus, of pillage and atrocity, of decay and neglect, and we’ll be a mature democracy like places like America and the UK and India supposedly are. Supposedly, those countries are very good, and exceptionally well put together politically, and only good things are in their future, we are told, as the UK begins to collect letters of no confidence against its fourth prime minister this year.
30 years into democracy, colonial Albania hasn’t caught up to 1974 levels of industrialisation, nutrition, education, science, healthcare, or womens’ involvement in government. It’s almost back to where it was in terms of population, though — after gaining over a million people between 1974 and 1990, the continued exodus has undone the better part of that progress.
On 27 January 2000, the Assembly of the Republic of Albania approved by law the National Security Strategy for that year, of which I recently purchased a copy near Enver’s former residence in Blloku for 500 Lek. Although the policy is on the whole traitorously negligent of the actual outstanding security needs of the enemy-rich country, which had seen a civil war three years prior, the policy does correctly state the following:
9.5 The massive migration of Albanian citizens to more prosperous countries (sic) is a serious risk for the Albanian nation and its development. The massive and clandestine migration of Albanians constitutes now a critical risk for Albania. This is due to the emigration of the Albanian intelligence, the artificially aging population, the lack of desire to work in Albania the feelings of disgust for their motherland, the insecure lives for emigrated people and loss of national pride.
From our National Security and Defense point of view the demographic problems are considered to be very serious. Currently, there is an uncontrollable flow movement of population from northern areas southward to our capital and other cities. This has caused a large unbalance in the population not only with regard to our overpopulated cities and towns, but also in terms of sparse population to northern areas. This population removal is assessed to be of real concern to the future, when the situation requires this region to provide manpower resources for the defense of our country.
How has this young democracy fared in curtailing these issues in the 22 years that have elapsed since the approval of this policy? From a total population of 3.1 million in 2000, the population has continued to decline to 2.7 million. The two northernmost counties of the country are Shkodra and Kukes. How have they, in particular, fared? Worse. Shkodra has gone from a population of 255,898 in 2001 to a population of 200,007 in 2020. Kukes looks even worse, much worse, in fact, and has gone from 112,000 in 2001 to 77,394 in 2018. And they’re all 22 years older and 22 years poorer than they were 22 years ago. The Cherokee weathered first contact with the Americans better than the Albanians — it looks like the document’s prime directive of “integration of Albania into Euro-Atlantic security structures” has not been so successful in guaranteeing “the survival of our nation in the XXI Century” as its framers had hoped.
The Albanians have an origin myth for the foundation of capitalist Albania. Once upon a time there was an evil dictator. The one whose little path would make us sad, whose power was Satan. He’d give those with him 666. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer.
Among the more substantiated claims of this man and his era are that you couldn’t leave the country without a permit, as opposed to now. That’s one of the really bad dictator things he did, that makes it so you know that he was a bad guy dictator and not a good guy democratic warlord like Sali Berisha. There’s a whole museum in the Tirana centre made out of a bunker (yes) and it has like a few rooms with artificially bad lighting (communism is when bad lighting) talking about how Enver used to train dogs to rip people to shreds for trying to cross the border. In the event of a nuclear attack against Tirana, this exhibit is one of the only things that will survive.
Under Berisha, it must be said, virtually the entire southern half of the country, which was seen as a stronghold of the communist movement as late as 1997, had the “freedom” to make a mass exodus to Greece and Italy. Berisha destroyed the south during the civil war, and worked with the Secret Police (then called SHIK, now called SHISH) to make sure all the fighting happened there, in Vlorë, Saranda, and Delvina, the lattermost of which is still in ruins, although it was then a major population centre. Of course there was a mass exodus of the population of these areas at this time. How did the Albanians come to enjoy such wonderful freedom?
On 8 August 1991, 30,000 Albanians hijacked a boat, the Vlora, named after the city, and took it to Italy. Supposedly, this demonstrates the horrors of communism, and how desperate the people were to leave. The traditional telling stops here exactly. But in real life, over 90% of those Albanians returned to Albania within a week, some of them under compulsion, some of them after being lured onto boats with false promises to be taken to other cities in Italy, and some of them voluntarily returned, seeing how they were being treated. Practically all of them would return by the second week. Despite this, this story is often told as the first breath of freedom for the Albanian nation, and Italian imperialism is often justified because apparently, and I have not been able to confirm this, a few guys who went over on the Vlora apparently became successful businessmen in Italy or whatever. I doubt it’s even true. It’s just the kind of thing drunk guys tell tourists at backpacker hostels here.
From that point on, the European countries, and in particular Greece and Italy, would pioneer some of the harshest anti-immigrant policies seen up to that point. Fortress Europe didn’t arise overnight with the Syrian war, but in fact spent the 90’s honing its cruelty against the Albanians, who, criminalised, still constitute a permanently exploited agricultural underclass in rural Greece and who face egregious cruelty in Italy and other European countries as well, where they do unskilled labour, often illegally, and often for below minimum wage. In fact, Albanian migration was one of the most important political issues in Greece throughout the 90’s, and elections were fought and immigration policy was radically rewritten in light of it. Today, refugees in Greece, and there are many, are all made victims of these policies that were written with Albanians in mind and that have since become the European standard. Europe in fact maintains a policy of extraditing all asylum seekers to Greece, the country that has trained its cruelty against immigrants more than any other in Europe.
A story that of late has received more attention among Albanians who haven’t completely given up on life and country is that of the Otranto Massacre six years later. As Berisha and his paramilitaries and secret police ravaged the south, including Vlorë, the Albanian ship Kateri i Rades set sail from the city of Vlorë to the nearby Italian city of Otranto. In keeping with a bilateral agreement between Italy and the traitorous Albanian regime, which had cooperated in this since the Vlora incident in 1991 to stop Albanian emigration, an Italian navel vessel collided, maybe-accidentally, with the Kateri i Rades and capsized it, resulting in the deaths of a still-unconfirmed number of people. At least 80-something.
What was the cause of this exodus? Today we are told that the Albanian people were caged birds, chirping to be free from the tyranny of socialism, but although all of them were armed and received military training as a part of a basic high school education, they were kept frozen in their tracks out of fear of Enver Hoxha’s fearsome border patrol dogs, guarding what I’m sure would have otherwise been a very popular escape route to Yugoslavia.
This is a clear anachronism, not least because the exodus began after the fall of socialism. Sali Berisha had been in office for four months before the Vlora incident, and it was under him that cooperation intensified between Italy and Albania in preventing Albanian emigration. Albania accepted $9 million in “aid” from Italy in exchange for putting the ports under military control and halting all passenger trains. (Apparently they were halted forever, because there are no passenger trains here at all anymore.) Not only that, but the reasons for this exodus are actually provided in the 2000 Defence Policy:
This is due to the emigration of the Albanian intelligence, the artificially aging population, the lack of desire to work in Albania the feelings of disgust for their motherland, the insecure lives for emigrated people and loss of national pride.
It’s interesting that at a time of intense anti-communist repression the wound was still too new to try to pass off as a result of communism. What could have happened to create a loss of national pride and a lack of desire to work in Albania? Could it have been the war, the destruction of the country, its prostitution to foreigners?
It’s not true that it became more possible to emigrate after the fall of socialism, because four months after the inauguration of Sali Berisha, the ports were put under military control. Albania maintained normal trade relations with Italy throughout the socialist period, as well as many other countries, so it’s not like the ships were a new thing either — the Vlora itself was sold to the Sino-Albanian Shipping Company by Italy in 1961 and immediately based in Durres. As noted before, there were also passenger trains back then, making it easier then than now to get around. If there was a change later on, it was the rise of armed criminal gangs with the ability to commandeer ships, and if this is the progressive emigration legacy that capitalism wants to claim for itself here then I say it should be allowed to do so. But these gangs had no part in the hijacking of the Vlora.
As the traitorous politicians in blue-flag Kosovo work towards “visa liberalisation”, one should ask what the intended outcome of “visa liberalisation” is in one of the poorest and also most besieged countries in Europe, which has a much larger neighbour which openly shouts its genocidal ambitions, and one should question whether this is in line with the actually existing national security needs of the country, or with the petty bourgeois aspirations of a few professionals to abandon their country and of the politicians to benefit personally from the kind of European labour trafficking that the Albanians have now been victim to for decades.
The ideology of Europe is collapsing. At this rate, it may not survive the winter. Complementing its complete destruction is the clear degeneration of America and the UK into complete political chaos. The Albanian people will soon come to understand, if they don’t already, that for all the moral failings that may be found among any group of people on earth, none of them is responsible for this thirty year apocalypse.
The freedom of movement, so beloved by the end-of-history regimes even as their peoples are scattered to the winds as slave labourers and mail-order brides, seems never to have amounted to anything other than the right to make life in a given location impossible. Don’t like it? You’re free to leave. There’s your “freedom”.
I live in Albania. The communist movement has been decimated by decades of repression, and academia is in shambles as well. Sad as it is, I’m one of the only historians in the country, with most educated people having left the country. I don’t work with any academy or organisation, and I’m trying to keep a low profile for the time being while I flesh out this analysis of the current historical moment and continue the ongoing process to educate myself on Marxist theory. I also have other ongoing projects as well, and I am very interested in hearing from people like podcasters, publishing agents, and so forth.
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