Shkodra,
Albania. When you fly over the main square here, you
instantly notice a Moslem mosque and Christian church adjacent to
each other. They are both brand new, built in the last few
years.
Then there is another Catholic church that isn't
new, but had to have its interior refurbished -- because it used to be a
basketball court.
I'm writing this in a modern hotel room with
wi-fi and a beautiful pool below. It's brand new too. In fact,
virtually everything in this entire country is brand new or
refurbished. Including the people in a certain way. Everyone
looks normal, acts normal, dresses normal, and drives normal - but it's
all amazing, especially the driving.
Up until not much
more than 20 years ago, there wasn't a single private car in Albania, and
only those allowed to drive government vehicles knew how. Albania's
roads and city streets today are filled with cars, and everyone behind
their wheels just learned how to drive. Somehow, they not only
learned how to drive well, but courteously.
For anyone
familiar with how crazy Italians drive - and Italy is right across the
Adriatic from Albania - this is a shock. Yet it is only the mildest
of shocks when you learn what Albanians have been through to be where they
are.
From the end of World War II, in
December 1945, to March of 1992 - 46 years - Albania was the North Korea
of Europe. A Stone Age Communist lunatic paranoid dictatorship,
established and run by one of the weirdest Marxist sociopaths of the
20th century (and that's quite a claim), Enver Hoxha
(ho-sha - 1908-1985).
Hoxha
impoverished his people building hundreds of thousands of small concrete
bunkers along the Adriatic coastline and border with Greece and (fellow
Communist) Yugoslavia. The whole world was envious of Albania's
Commie paradise and wanted to invade it, was his argument. But
should any Albanian want to escape the paradise, armed soldiers with dogs
were posted every kilometer or so to shoot on sight.
And should
anyone manage to escape, their entire family - parents, siblings, children
- were immediately arrested and shipped off to remote slave labor
camps.
If you complained about anything - say, about unripe
tomatoes in a government store - you were an enemy of the state and got 10
to 20 years in the camps. If you were caught praying, even in your
own home, to the Allah of Islam or the God of Christianity, you got 10 to
20 years. Your children were encouraged to turn you in.
Every
vestige of religion was destroyed, every church, every mosque.
Christians managed to convert that Shkodra church into a basketball court
with false walls and ceiling. Had anyone of them who did so, or even
knew about it and didn't report it, been caught, they would not have been
sent to a slave labor camp - they would have been brutally tortured then
shot.
Torture followed by firing squad was one of Hoxha's most
popular punishments for anyone he didn't like or suspected of
disloyalty. Hoxha's secret police, the Sigurimi, were
everywhere, modeled on Stalin's KGB and the East German Stasi.
Nothing private was allowed, no one could own anything, property, a home,
a car, even tools for your job. You were assigned a job by the State
and you had no choice - complain and you were in the slave labor camp or
dead.
Hoxha croaked in 1985, and his Commie elite held on until the
collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Albanians stepped out
of the Dark Ages into the light of the modern world, not believing the
scam of the horror they had been forced to live through. For the
first time in their lives, for example, they got to eat bananas, and eat
like regular human beings.
So - what's this all got to do with
Blacks? Not Blacks in Africa or Albania, but Blacks in
America? There are no blacks in Albania at all - but American Blacks
should come here to learn something.
That something
is forgiveness. Albanians are predominately Moslem, as
they were forced to be so by the conquering Ottoman Turks in the early
1500s - but for more than a thousand years before they had been
Christians. Thus they have retained many Christian traits while the
Islam they practice is a form of moderate Sufism - virtually a "secular
Islam" as women dress normal and beer and wine are popular - local
breweries and wineries make both. Vineyards are everywhere. So
are bars.
The point here is that when I ask Albanians why didn't
they shoot the Communist tyrants, elite, soldiers, and secret police who
made their lives such an evil hell, they answer - "We don't want the
blood." They look to the future, not the past, they refuse to be
victims and wallow in grievance and revenge.
Thus they are prospering. Whether Moslem or Catholic
or Albanian Orthodox, they are practicing Christian forgiveness as they
understand how damaging it is to themselves and their future if they do
not.
American blacks need to come here
and learn how to do the same. Any discrimination, even the awful
kind in the Jim Crow South of a half-century ago, they or their parents
suffered is penny-ante compared to what the Albanians endured. The
slavery their great-great-great grandparents suffered prior to the Civil
War was vastly more benign than Hoxha's slavery.
The bottom line is
that endless whining about past injustices is counter-productive in the
extreme. Until Blacks in America start behaving like real Christians
practicing Christian forgiveness, start acting like Albanians looking to
the future rather than the past, they will continue to doom themselves to
wallow in bitterness, grievance, and government dependency.
It is
so inspiring to be here. This is a country and a people with a
future - because they don't want to be bothered with a past far worse than
any American Black could even imagine. The future of American Blacks
could be the same. It won't be with a grievance-peddler like
Zero. But someday and soon, the Zero Presidency will be history -
and with that, blacks will have a chance to be as free of the past as
Albanians. |
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