Summary

Miroslav Krleža was a Croatian socialist writer who used irony and satire to expose political hypocrisy on the Balkans. In “Balkan Impressions” (1924), his shocking descriptions of Belgrade supporting feudal Albanian beys and killing highlanders with machine guns are not endorsements but bitter criticism. Krleža condemned both Serbian and Croatian elites for betraying the people and aligning with imperial and reactionary powers. His provocative tone aimed to reveal the moral corruption and cynicism of postwar Balkan p olitics, where nationalism and power replaced genuine social justice and human dignity.

Cited

“And so today we are witnessing a scene full of fundamental contradictions, that industrial and imperialist Italy supports the Shqiptar paradise, and Belgrade, the center of the Balkan peasantry of the country, in its wave of reactionary madness, takes the side of the Shqiptar beys. On the coast, the feudal system of Ahmed-bey Zogu should be supported, to prevent the (Albanian) highlanders from approaching the sea and becoming civilized, and then, on our southern border, if they seek a normal outlet, they should be killed with machine guns, and we will have free exit to Shkodra and to the sea!”

– Miroslav Krleža, “Balkan impressions”, 1924.

This passage is a blistering indictment of cynical power politics — and it deserves that heat.

Krleža exposes a grotesque moral inversion: industrial, imperialist Italy champions a curated “Shqiptar paradise” while Belgrade, portrayed as the heart of Balkan peasantry, backs the very feudal elites (the beys) whose rule keeps the majority impoverished and backward. The result is a political triangulation in which foreign empire-building and local reactionary interests collude to deny a people self-determination and social progress.

Notice the brutality in the rhetoric Krleža quotes: policing a people’s access to the sea with machine guns is not strategy, it is terror. Framing the highlanders as a threat that must be kept “uncivilized” reveals both racist paternalism and class contempt — an explicit desire to preserve extractive relations (feudal landlords and imperial markets) by force. That the coast should be defended for feudal privilege while the interior is violently contained shows how nationalism can be perverted into a tool for elites and foreign powers, not for popular liberation.

Critically, Krleža’s passage forces us to ask: who benefits from this “order”? Clearly not the peasantry or the marginalized, but landlords and imperial states. His language—sharp, disgusted—correctly links political hypocrisy, class betrayal, and state violence. The lesson for readers today is twofold: be suspicious of powers that speak of “civilizing” missions while backing repression, and recognize how alliances between foreign imperialism and local elites can fracture genuine movements for emancipation.”

Reference

https://pescanik.net/pregled-istorije-odnosa-srbijejugoslavije-i-albanije/