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Anti-Slavic sentiment, also called Slavophobia, refers to prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination directed at the various Slavic peoples. Accompanying racism and xenophobia, the most common manifestation of anti-Slavic sentiment throughout history has been the assertion that some Slavs are inferior to other peoples. This sentiment peaked during World War II, when Nazi Germany classified most of the Slavs— especially the Poles, Russians, Belarusians, Serbs and Ukrainians—as "subhumans" ( Untermenschen ) and planned to exterminate a large number of them through the Generalplan Ost and Hunger Plan. [1] [2] [3] Slavophobia also emerged twice in the United States: the first time was during the Progressive Era, when immigrants from Eastern Europe were met with opposition from the dominant class of Western European–origin American citizens; and again during the Cold War, when the United States became locked in an intensive global rivalry with the Soviet Union. [4]
At the beginning of the 20th century, anti-Slavism in Albania was developed by the work of the Franciscan friars [ citation needed ] who had studied in monasteries in Austria-Hungary, [5] after the recent massacres and expulsions of Albanians by their Slavic neighbours.[ unreliable source? ] [6] The Albanian intelligentsia proudly asserted, "We Albanians are the original and autochthonous race of the Balkans. The Slavs are conquerors and immigrants who came but yesterday from Asia." [ unreliable source? ] [7] In Soviet historiography, anti-Slavism in Albania was inspired by the Catholic clergy,[ citation needed ] which opposed the Slavic people because of the role the Catholic clergy [ citation needed ] and Slavs opposed "rapacious plans of Austro-Hungarian imperialism in Albania". [8]
In the 1920s, Italian fascists hated the Yugoslavs, especially the Serbs. They accused the Serbs of having "atavistic impulses" and they also claimed that the Yugoslavs were conspiring on behalf of "Grand Orient Masonry and its funds". One anti-Semitic claim stated that the Serbs were involved in a "social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot". [9]
Benito Mussolini considered the Slavic race inferior and barbaric. [10] [11] He believed that the Croats were a threat to Italy because they wanted to seize Dalmatia, a region which was claimed by Italy, and he also claimed that the threat rallied Italians at the end of World War I: "The danger of seeing the Jugo-Slavians settle along the whole Adriatic shore had caused a bringing together in Rome of the cream of our unhappy regions. Students, professors, workmen, citizens—representative men—were entreating the ministers and the professional politicians." [12] These claims often tended to emphasize the "foreignness" of the Yugoslavs by stating that they were newcomers to the area, unlike the ancient Italians, whose territories were occupied by the Slavs.
Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son in law, and the Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy who was later executed by Mussolini, wrote the following entry in his diary: [13]
Vidussoni comes to see me. After having spoken about a few casual things, he makes some political allusions and announces savage plans against the Slovenes. He wants to kill them all. I take the liberty of observing that there are a million of them. "That does not matter." he answers firmly.
In Canada, many xenophobic white supremacists were deeply tied to their nation's "Anglo-Saxon" culture, specifically from the early 1900s to the end of World War II. The Ku Klux Klan in Canada was prominent in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, both of which have a relatively high Eastern European ethnic population. Immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland were frequently denounced and targeted. [14]
During World War I, thousands of Ukrainian Canadians were seen as "enemy aliens" as Canadian nativists saw them as a "threat" to Canada's Western European heritage. Due to this, many of them were interned in concentration camps. There was constant discrimination towards Ukrainians who recently immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. [15]
Though anti-Slavic sentiments reached their peak during Nazi Germany, Germany has had a long history of Slavophobia. In particular, the Germanic people of Prussia often depicted Polish people in a negative light, which paralleled future Slavophobia in the Nazi regime. [16]
Nikolay Ulyanov in his 1968 article " Замолчанный Маркс" (Hushed-up Marx) provides ample evidence of anti-Slavism the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. [17] For example, in his 1849 article "The Magyar Struggle," Engels wrote that the Slavs living in the Austrian Empire were "barbarians" who "needed to be saved" by the Germanic Austrians. [18]
Gustav Freytag's 1855 novel Soll und Haben ("Debt and Credit") was one of the most-read German novels of the 19th century, and contained antisemitic sentiments as well as depictions of Poles as incompetent. [19]
Anti-Slavic racism played a significant role within the ideology of Nazism. [21] Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party held the belief that Slavic countries - particularly Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, as well as their respective peoples - were "Untermenschen" (subhumans). According to their viewpoint, these Slavic nations were deemed to be foreign entities and were not considered part of the Aryan master race. Nazi Germany depicted the Soviet Union as an "Asiatic enemy" of Europeans, in addition to portraying its population as inferior subhumans controlled by Jews and communists. [22]
Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf was openly anti-Slavic. He wrote: “One ought to cast the utmost doubt on the state-building power of the Slavs,” and from the beginning, he rejected the idea of incorporating the Slavs into Greater Germany. [21] [23]
Hitler considered the Slavs to be racially inferior, because, in his view, the Bolshevik Revolution had put the Jews in power over the mass of Slavs, who were, by his own definition, incapable of ruling themselves but were instead being ruled by Jewish masters. [24] He considered the development of modern Russia to have been the work of Germanic, not Slavic, elements in the nation, but believed those achievements had been undone and destroyed by the October Revolution, [25] in Mein Kampf, he wrote, “The organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race.” [26]
Because, according to the Nazis, the German people needed more territory to sustain its surplus population, an ideology of conquest and depopulation was formulated for Central and Eastern Europe according to the principle of Lebensraum , itself based on an older theme in German nationalism which maintained that Germany had a "natural yearning" to expand its borders eastward ( Drang Nach Osten). [21] The Nazis' policy towards Slavs was to exterminate or enslave the vast majority of the Slavic population and repopulate their lands with millions of ethnic Germans and other Germanic peoples. [27] [28] According to the resulting genocidal Generalplan Ost , millions of German and other "Germanic" settlers would be moved into the conquered territories, and the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed or enslaved. [21] The policy was focused especially on the Soviet Union, as it alone was deemed capable of providing enough territory to accomplish this goal. [29]
"Hitler gave the already existing ideas of anti-Semitism, anti-Bolshevism and anti-Slavism the form of a genocidal alternative: either we survive or the Jews, Bolsheviks, Slavs – the people of the East – do. Based on theories of a racial hierarchy, he built the directives for an extermination programme aimed at part of the population of Europe and Asia and the creation of a Teutonic “New Order”. ... The concept of Nazi Lebensraum cannot be fully explained without bluntly stating an important motivational element of his conquests in the East: anti-Slavism." [30]
As part of the Generalplan Ost, Nazi Germany developed the Hunger Plan, a forced starvation programme which involved the seizure of all of the food which was produced on Eastern European lands and the delivery of it to Germany, primarily to the German army. The full implementation of this plan would have ultimately resulted in the starvation and death of 20 to 30 million people (mainly Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians). It is estimated that in accordance with this plan, over four million Soviet citizens were starved to death from 1941 to 1944. [31] The resettlement policy reached a much more advanced stage in occupied Poland because of its immediate proximity to Germany. [21]
For strategic reasons, the Nazis deviated from some of their ideological theories by forging alliances with Ukrainian collaborators, the Independent State of Croatia (established after the invasion of Yugoslavia), the Slovak State (established after the occupation of Czechoslovakia) and Bulgaria. Yugoslav general Milan Nedić would also lead Nazi Germany's Serbian puppet government. [32] The Nazis officially justified these alliances by stating that the Croats were "more Germanic than Slav", a notion which was propagated by Croatia's leader Ante Pavelić, who espoused the view that the "Croats were the descendants of the ancient Goths" who "had the pan-Slavic idea forced upon them as something artificial". [33] [34] [35] Hitler also believed that the Bulgarians were "Turkoman", while the Czechs and Slovaks were Mongolians in their origins. [34] After conquering Yugoslavia, attention was instead focused on targeting mainly the nation's Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) population. [32]
Though Slavophobia became less prevalent after WWII, it still persisted to some degree and still persists today. Slavic immigrants in Germany experience discrimination due to their accents, their surnames, and their cuisine. [36] Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, Russian speakers in Germany have faced increased discrimination, including collective blame for Russia's actions in the war, despite most having lived in Germany for decades and many not being Russian at all. Since the Russian language was the lingua franca of the Soviet Union, an immigrant living in Germany who speaks Russian could be from anywhere that was influenced by the Soviet Union. [19]
Traditionally,[ when? ] in Greece, Slavic people were considered "invaders who separated the glory of Greek Antiquity, by bringing an era of decline and ruin to Greece – the Dark Ages". [37] In 1913, when Greece took control of Slavic-inhabited areas in Northern Greece, the Slavic toponyms were changed to Greek, and according to the Greek government, this was "the elimination of all the names which pollute and disfigure the beautiful appearance of our fatherland." [38]
Anti-Slavic sentiment escalated during the Greek Civil War, when Macedonian partisans, who aligned themselves with the Democratic Army of Greece, were not treated as equals and suffered discrimination everywhere, they were accused of committing a "sin" because they chose to identify themselves as Slavs rather than Greeks. [39] The Macedonian partisans were subjected to threats of extermination, physical attacks, murder, attacks on their settlements, forcible expulsions, restrictions on freedom of movement, and bureaucratic problems, among other discriminatory acts. [39] Although they were allied with the Greek Left, due to their Slavic identity, the Macedonians were viewed with suspicion and animosity by the Greek Left. [40]
In 1948, the Democratic Army of Greece evacuated tens of thousands of child refugees, both Greek and Slavic in origin. [41] In 1985, the refugees were allowed to re-enter Greece, claim Greek citizenship, and reclaim property, but only if they were "Greek by genus", thus prohibiting those with a Slavic identity from obtaining Greek citizenship, entering Greece, and claiming property. [42] [43]
Today, the Greek state does not recognize its ethnic Macedonian and other Slavic minorities, claiming that they do not exist, with Greece therefore having the right not to grant them any of the rights that are guaranteed to them by human-rights treaties. [44]
The United States of America has a long history of Slavophobia. Slavophobia began in earnest during the "second wave" of European immigration in the early 1900s, when many people from Southern and Eastern Europe were immigrating to the US. [4] They faced opposition from the "old" immigrants, who were mostly from Northern and Western Europe. These attitudes culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, which established quotas for and limited the numbers of people from Southern and Eastern European countries who were allowed to enter the US. [45] Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an "inferior race" who were unable to assimilate into American society. [4] They were originally not considered to be "fully white" (and thus fully American), and Slavic peoples' "whiteness" continues to be a debate to this day. [46]
Slavophobia in the US ramped up again during the Cold War, when Slavic peoples of all nationalities were considered enemies due to the United States' distrust of the Soviet Union. [47] War in the Balkans (which America often had a part in) was considered inevitable due to the Balkan peoples' "propensity for extreme war violence." [47] The United States government, while claiming to advocate for national determination for small countries, has denied national determination to many of the countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. [48] As a result, many Slavic people in the US and Western countries felt pressure (and continue to feel pressure) to Anglicize their surnames and downplay their Slavic culture. [49]
In American pop culture, Slavic people (specifically Russians) are usually portrayed as either nefarious, violent criminals [50] or as unintelligent, oblivious comic relief. [51] [52] "Dumb Pole" jokes or "Polish jokes" (derogatory jokes towards Polish people) are just one manifestation of anti-Polish sentiment in America, and can be found in all sorts of media from many time periods. [53]
Slavophobia has had a resurgence in America following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where Russian-Americans and people of Russian descent have been collectively blamed for the Russian government's actions. [49] [54]
Macedonia is a geographical and historical region of the Balkan Peninsula in Southeast Europe. Its boundaries have changed considerably over time; however, it came to be defined as the modern geographical region by the mid-19th century. Today the region is considered to include parts of six Balkan countries: all of North Macedonia, large parts of Greece and Bulgaria, and smaller parts of Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo. It covers approximately 67,000 square kilometres (25,869 sq mi) and has a population of around five million. Greek Macedonia comprises about half of Macedonia's area and population.
Pan-Slavism, a movement that took shape in the mid-19th century, is the political ideology concerned with promoting integrity and unity for the Slavic people. Its main impact occurred in the Balkans, where non-Slavic empires had ruled the South Slavs for centuries. These were mainly the Byzantine Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Venice.
The Slavs or Slavic people are groups of people who speak Slavic languages. Slavs are geographically distributed throughout the northern parts of Eurasia; they predominantly inhabit Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and Northern Asia, though there is a large Slavic minority scattered across the Baltic states and Central Asia, and a substantial Slavic diaspora in the Americas, Western Europe, and Northern Europe.
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany, the ultimate goal of which was to establish a Greater German Reich. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.
Drang nach Osten was the name for a 19th-century German nationalist intent to expand Germany into Slavic territories of Central and Eastern Europe. In some historical discourse, Drang nach Osten combines historical German settlement in Central and Eastern Europe, medieval military expeditions such as those of the Teutonic Knights, and Germanisation policies and warfare of modern German states such as those that implemented Nazism's concept of Lebensraum.
The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's plan for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermenschen" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass rapes, child abductions, and sexual slavery.
Macedonians are a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group native to the region of Macedonia in Southeast Europe. They speak Macedonian, a South Slavic language. The large majority of Macedonians identify as Eastern Orthodox Christians, who share a cultural and historical "Orthodox Byzantine–Slavic heritage" with their neighbours. About two-thirds of all ethnic Macedonians live in North Macedonia; there are also communities in a number of other countries.
The region of Macedonia is known to have been inhabited since Paleolithic times.
The Balkans and parts of this area may also be placed in Southeastern, Southern, Eastern Europe and Central Europe. The distinct identity and fragmentation of the Balkans owes much to its common and often turbulent history regarding centuries of Ottoman conquest and to its very mountainous geography.
Untermensch is a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or 'subhuman', which was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to their opponents and non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior. It was mainly used against "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs.
The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its fascist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, extermination, ethnic persecution and other atrocities against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of Nordic race being best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, Black People, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, including the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some non-Germanic groups such as Sorbs, Northern Italians, and Greeks to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as the Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as Slavs, Romani, and South Asian people people were considered inferior.
Serbian nationalism asserts that Serbs are a nation and promotes the cultural and political unity of Serbs. It is an ethnic nationalism, originally arising in the context of the general rise of nationalism in the Balkans under Ottoman rule, under the influence of Serbian linguist Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Serbian statesman Ilija Garašanin. Serbian nationalism was an important factor during the Balkan Wars which contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire, during and after World War I when it contributed to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and again during the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
Macedonian nationalism is a general grouping of nationalist ideas and concepts among ethnic Macedonians that were first formed in the late 19th century among separatists seeking the autonomy of the region of Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire. The idea evolved during the early 20th century alongside the first expressions of ethnic nationalism among the Slavs of Macedonia. The separate Macedonian nation gained recognition during World War II when the Socialist Republic of Macedonia was created as part of Yugoslavia. Macedonian historiography has since established links between the ethnic Macedonians and various historical events and individual figures that occurred in and originated from Macedonia, which range from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century. Following the independence of the Republic of Macedonia in the late 20th century, issues of Macedonian national identity have become contested by the country's neighbours, as some adherents to aggressive Macedonian nationalism, called Macedonism, hold more extreme beliefs such as an unbroken continuity between ancient Macedonians, and modern ethnic Macedonians, and views connected to the irredentist concept of a United Macedonia, which involves territorial claims on a large portion of Greece and Bulgaria, along with smaller regions of Albania, Kosovo and Serbia.
Anti-Serb sentiment or Serbophobia is a generally negative view of Serbs as an ethnic group. Historically it has been a basis for the persecution of ethnic Serbs.
World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia started with the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. Under the pressure of the Yugoslav Partisan movement, part of the Macedonian communists began in October 1941 a political and military campaign to resist the occupation of Vardar Macedonia. Officially, the area was called then Vardar Banovina, because the use of very name Macedonia was avoided in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It was occupied mostly by Bulgarian, but also by German, Italian, and Albanian forces.
Albanian nationalism is a general grouping of nationalist ideas and concepts generated by ethnic Albanians that were first formed in the 19th century during the Albanian National Awakening. Albanian nationalism is also associated with similar concepts, such as Albanianism ("Shqiptaria") and Pan-Albanianism, that includes ideas on the creation of a geographically expanded Albanian state or a Greater Albania encompassing adjacent Balkan lands with substantial Albanian populations.
The history of Macedonians has been shaped by population shifts and political developments in the southern Balkans, especially within the region of Macedonia. The ideas of separate Macedonian identity grew in significance after the First World War, both in Vardar and among the left-leaning diaspora in Bulgaria, and were endorsed by the Comintern. During the Second World War, these ideas were supported by the Communist Partisans, but the decisive point in the ethnogenesis of these South Slavic people was the creation of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia after World War II, as a new state in the framework of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The Independent State of Macedonia was a proposed puppet state of Nazi Germany during the Second World War in the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that had been occupied by the Tsardom of Bulgaria following the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941.
Macedonians or Macedonian Bulgarians, sometimes also referred to as Macedono-Bulgarians, Macedo-Bulgarians, or Bulgaro-Macedonians are a regional, ethnographic group of ethnic Bulgarians, inhabiting or originating from the region of Macedonia. Today, the larger part of this population is concentrated in Blagoevgrad Province but much is spread across the whole of Bulgaria and the diaspora.
Anti-Albanian sentiment or Albanophobia is discrimination and prejudice towards Albanians as an ethnic group, described primarily in countries with a large Albanian population as immigrants, seen throughout Europe.
Notes
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Albanian intelligentsia, despite the backwardness of their country and culture: 'We Albanians are the original and autochthonous race of the Balkans. The Slavs are conquerors and immigrants who came but yesterday from Asia.'
Great Soviet Encyclopaedia of Moscow... (March 1950): "The literary activities of the Catholic priest Gjergj Fishta reflect the role played by the Catholic clergy in preparing for Italian aggression against Albania. As a former agent of Austro-Hungarian imperialism, Fishta... took a position against the Slavic peoples who opposed the rapacious plans of Austro-Hungarian imperialism in Albania. In his chauvinistic, anti-Slavic poem 'The highland lute,' this spy extolled the hostility of the Albanians towards the Slavic peoples, calling for an open fight against the Slavs".
When dealing with such a race as Slavic – inferior and barbarian – we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy. We should not be afraid of new victims. The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps. I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians.[ permanent dead link ]
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)But during and after the Civil War of 1943-1949, the 'Slavs' themselves became a national enemy. Throughout the Civil War, the Slav Macedonians of northern Greece made an important contribution to the Communist cause. A strong link was thus established between national identity and political orientation, as the Civil War and the subsequent defeat of the left-wing movement turned Slav Macedonians into the Sudetens of Greece (Augustinos 1989: 23). By 1950, those embracing the ideology of the right saw their political rivals as the embodiment of everything that was anti-national, Communist, and Slavic. To hold Fallmerayeran views thus became a crimen laesae maiestatis. Dionysios A. Zakythinos, the author of the first monograph on medieval Slavs in Greece, wrote of the Dark Ages separating Antiquity from the Middle Ages as an era of decline and ruin which was brought by Slavic invaders (Zakythinos 1945: 72 and 1966: 300, 302 and 316). In the United States, Peter Charanis regarded Emperor Nikephoros I as the hero who saved Greece from Slavonicisation (Charanis 1946). The early medieval Slavs thus became a historiographic problem, to slavikon zetema.
The terror campaign which was unleashed after Varkiza against the entire Left by the Greek Right was directed with special vehemence against the Macedonians. In addition to the ideological "treachery" of supporting EAM-ELAS, they were attacked for committing the ultimate "sin" of not being, or rather not considering themselves, Greeks. They were condemned as Bulgars, komitajis, collaborators, autonomists, Sudetens of the Balkans, and so forth, and threatened with extermination.
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: CS1 maint: others (link)Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 5 Oct. 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781628928273.ch-004