Highly Respected Croatian Diplomat Offers Unique Perspective on Balkans, Ukraine, Russia

What follows is an interview conducted by AFP’s James Edwards with retired Croatian diplomat Dr. Tomislav Sunic, who has had a distinguished career as not only a writer and translator, but also as an expert on the Balkans and European New Right movements.

AFP: You served in various diplomatic positions with the Croatian government in Zagreb, London, Co¬pen¬hagen, and Brussels. What did your work entail?
Sunic: During my diplomatic tenure, from 1993 to 2000, I managed to present lectures and undergo several publishing projects in Europe and the United States. The first Croat president, Franjo Tudjman, was described by The New York Times and liberal outlets as a “revisionist and authoritarian ruler,” but he didn’t object to my efforts. I invited myself to colleges and media outlets where I tried to demolish dark World War II legends about Croatia.

Also, I had ties to Croat emigre circles and foreign friends eager to join the Croat armed forces. Although vilified as “neo-fascists” and “Ustasha” by the Western media, they played a significant role in establishing Croatia’s statehood. Tiny Croatia with its 4 million people had just emerged on the map with its diplomacy operating in a chaotic manner, nobody knowing how long the country would last.

My Croat co-workers didn’t like me, most of them being individuals of a dubious communist past and a pedigree featuring snitching. Out of fear for their physical and professional survival, they rebranded themselves into big-time Croat nationalists and, later on, into latter-day liberals. It was all a big commedia dell’arte except that it resulted in many casualties on the ground and fueled Serbo-Croat resentments.

The preceding strife between the Yugoslav Communist League at the federal level and the communists from the five constituent republics was the prime cause of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ironically, it was Croat rightwingers and expats from Australia, Germany, and the U.S.A., along with their hardware and money, who rescued their former communist inquisitors. In hindsight, I regret that the war degenerated into a Serbo-Croat conflict instead of turning into a joint removal of the Yugoslav communists.

AFP: You recently shared with me that Croatia is the safest and most ethnically homogeneous nation in the European Union. How has Croatia been able to maintain its national identity while much of Europe is being flooded with aliens from the Third World?

Sunic: The harshness of life in communist-ruled Eastern Europe served as a deterrent for the masses of would-be Afro-Asian migrants. Instead, they opted for the more opulent, albeit guilt-ridden West contaminated by surreal World War I-era tales of racism, fascism, and colonialism, with self-hating Germany being the prime target of such self-denial. Hence the reason Eastern Europe today is more European than Western Europe. If the Soviet troops, in May 1945, had marched to the Prado Museum in Spain, would the whole of Europe be all-white today?

It is foolish to make doomsday projections in politics. A good statesman must know how to weigh in on a geopolitical loophole and avoid wishful thinking. Be careful what you wish for, as the Roman poet Juvenal wrote long ago. For the time being, Croatia is racially the most homogeneous country in Europe, also the safest. But only for the time being.

AFP: To what extent has the Great Replacement started to encroach your borders?

Sunic: Following the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989, it was to be expected that the liberal mystique of the free flow of goods and people would fill the void in Eastern Europe. What communist internationalism had not achieved through the Gulag sewage system, its twin liberal brother has been achieving more effectively ever since.

Let’s be clear on the semantics. The Great Replacement in Europe did not kick off with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “welcome posters” for millions of Afro-Asian freeloaders in 2016. It took place shortly after WWII as a deliberate attempt to uproot the national consciousness of European peoples. The demon of looming fascism had to be fabricated by the system in order to defuse any notion of a third political option. The liberal reenactment now taking place in Croatia and in Eastern Europe won’t last forever. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that the system and its proconsuls in Eastern Europe will give in without a fight.

AFP: What cultural influences would you attribute to Croatia’s right-leaning tendencies?

Sunic: Croats have been firmly tied to their Catholic tradition, due to threats coming from the East, mostly Islamic Turks from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

Also, the German cultural sphere and the Holy Roman Empire made Croats believe that any political authority must be respected. Some parallels could be drawn with the nationalists in Poland.

Unlike Poles, however, Croats have historically been friendly to the German people. During WWI and WWII, Croats remained the last allies of Germany. The war of secession from Yugoslavia, from 1991-95, further bolstered right-wing tendencies among segments of the Croat nation. But times are changing.

Over the last two decades, with the liberal experiment going full steam, the mindset of many Croats has changed, particularly among folks born in the late 1990s and after. Younger Croats are also subject to transgender propaganda—all imports from the far-left West.

AFP: Though the citizenry of Croatia is predominately conservative, the government itself is servile to President Joe Biden’s policies, especially concerning military assistance to Ukraine. How do you explain this?

Sunic: I mentioned the role of WWII Croatia as the last ally of national socialist Germany. The “Nazi” stigma has been pestering the Croat political class ever since 1945, starting with Croat communist apparatchiks who, in order to offset this demonic label, doubled down on their servile communist and Yugoslav feelings, more so than their Serbian counterparts. The present government in Croatia is using the same mode of mimicry, showing the EU commissars that it is more pro-EU than the chief U.S. and EU movers and shakers. The parallel can be drawn with the mindset of Germany’s ruling class, which puts on display 24/7 its anti-nationalist, pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine, pro-LGBTQ credentials. Thanks to its war of secession, the process of liberal brainwashing and self-pathologization has not achieved similar clinical proportions in Croatia. In comparison to Germany and other EU countries, critical conferences on WWII, debates on the great replacement, etc., are mostly tolerated in Croatia.

AFP: While the Croatian government is pro-Biden and pro-Ukraine, neighboring Serbia is allied with Vladimir Putin and Russia. Why?

Sunic: Let’s be clear on the choice of words. This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. This is a war between the neocon-run Biden regime against Russia—albeit by proxy means. U.S. figures like Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland (now thankfully gone), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer feign concern about the integrity of Ukraine’s borders while dismissing the security of America’s southern borders. They are up in arms about protecting the Ukrainian nation, skirting the fact that their Jewish forefathers had ugly experiences with Ukrainian nationalists in the not-too-distant past. In the midst of the great 1933 terror famine in Ukraine—the largest Bolshevik-sponsored genocide, resulting in as many as 9 million dead Ukrainians—U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union.

For the reasons stated above, Croatia’s government must support the American policy of weaponizing Ukraine. But there are historical and religious reasons, too. Similar to the Baltic nations and Finland, all having had negative historical experiences with Russia, dozens of Croat nationalists decided to fight on the Ukrainian side. Another tragic rift is now in the making among European nationalists, with each party invoking its mythical cultural past and choosing either the pro-Russian or pro-American/Ukrainian side.

Serbia, with its Orthodox Christian population, views Moscow as its spiritual homeland. In fact, Serbia’s coming into physical existence was largely due to tsarist Russian pan-Slavic involvement in the Balkans since the Berlin Congress of 1878. European nationalists, in general, unlike their U.S. nationalist colleagues who focus more on the issue of race, are morbidly obsessed with their historical memories, which often take the shape of what Friedrich Nietzsche called “monumental history.” Let’s stop eulogizing European “nationalisms.” They are just as destructive as the monotheism of the free market, or Freudo-Marxian scholasticism.

AFP: The U.S. ambassador to Croatia is a left-leaning Hispanic woman named Nathalie Rayes. What do you make of this?

Sunic: I suspect that the lady was nominated by Biden in accordance with the affirmative action edicts that are in effect in the U.S. federal bureaucracy and college hirings.

Given her engagements in Los Angeles Latino policies, I can only speculate about her true allegiance. Her phenotype is Southern European, which makes me wonder whether she is of Spanish ancestry.

Americans of European descent need to dismiss once and for all the defamatory label “white supremacists.” As a former diplomat, I noticed that high-level diplomats from Latin America or Turkey, whose facial features were white European, loved to invoke their European ancestry. In California, for instance, Latinos know well who qualifies as a “cholo” [mixed-breed], “pardo” [triracial descendants of Southern Europeans, American Indians and West Africans], “hidalgo” [upper class Mexicans, formerly of the nobility] or simply as a “beaner” [an average Mexican]. Turkish diplomats I met often bragged about their Bosnian or Albanian ancestry. Race matters, except for self-hating whites in the United States and EU who prefer to wallow in atonement gesticulations.

AFP: Croatia is located in an interesting part of the world known as the Balkans. Which ones of these nations have governments and conditions most favorable to the unique group interests of Western civilization.

Sunic: The “Western civilization” term has lost its original meaning. It stands today for the liberal system and dictatorship of “well-being.” Current Western civilization is the epitome of soft totalitarianism, leaving our bodies for the time intact, or rather obese, but killing our souls.

Croatia also got caught in the trap of “Western civilization.” Let’s illustrate this conceptual fraud again with a war-torn Ukraine all geared up for Western civilization. When and if it joins this civilization, Ukraine will have to foist LGBTQ banners and replace its traditional Christian values.

AFP: The overall national health of Croatia seems to be better than that of the United States. How realistic is it for an American to move to Croatia and live?

Sunic: I’d encourage European Americans with no criminal record to consider moving to Croatia—and scout out the country first. Alongside Germans, Americans of European extraction are much beloved by the Croat people.

Let’s face it, the age of the nation-state is over. Establishing fenced ethno-states sounds unrealistic. Side by side with the disruptive process of balkanization, we are moving now into the field of racial and professional ghettoization. Let’s call it by its real name: self-segregation. This is the only solution to the dystopian conflict-prone multiracial system our elites have been tampering with and forcing on us over the last 70 years. Even liberal pontiffs realize that this system is self-destructive. One cannot import millions of low IQ workers and expect to run high-tech sectors such as the fields of communication and aviation smoothly, or dream about a permanent rise in GDP. Our forefathers taught us the old wisdom: suum cuique—“to each its own”—that is, let’s give each race, each community its proper inborn and cultural due.

AFP: You travel regularly around the world on the lecture circuit. What are some of the topics of your upcoming speaking appearances?

Sunic: I will talk at the upcoming Europa Awakening conference in Finland in April about “Weimerika” and the travesty of the rule of law in the United States and EU, with a focus on Carl Schmitt. By mid-May, I have two lectures in French for graduate students at the Faculty of Letters in Ljubljana, Slovenia. One will be on the Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais and his blasphemous verses against the church of his time. The other one will be on the French dramatist Jean Anouilh’s play Antigone and the judicial persecution Anouilh endured in the aftermath of WWII.

We need classy journals such as THE BARNES REVIEW and a few others currently in existence. Given the spirit of self-censorship in the media and academia, these are the sole platforms for upholding free intellectual inquiry in today’s world.

James Edwards is the outspoken host of The Political Cesspool, one of America’s most potent talk radio programs. He has made numerous television guest appearances and his work as a political commentator over the past two decades has been the subject of articles in hundreds of print publications and media broadcasts around the world. Visit ThePoliticalCesspool.org for more info.