I had never heard of Enver Hoxha until I listened to the episodes about him on the Real Dictators podcast. Very wild stuff. I find it really fascinating and rather sobering that these invasive authoritarian governments can one day take root and control most or all of the rest of your life. I fear that people's complacency or thoughts that "surely it can't happen here" are part of what lets them rise in the first place, and I wonder just how quickly you can find yourself inside of one.
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great read on that subject. (It's very long, but the abridged versions are fine as long as you get a good translation). Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny is also great - a biography from a series of post-war interviews with the commandant at Treblinka concentration camp, who wasn't any evil genius, just someone who didn't have any particularly strong moral feelings and went with the zeitgeist. The Lives Of Others is a great film about the Stasi in East Germany too.
Totally grim, but it put to bed any queries in my mind of "how could anyone possibly end up doing that?" It was really clear how easily unremarkable people just go with the flow until they find themselves doing horrific things without batting an eyelid.
Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is really interesting (although pretty heavy going - I didn't finish it) on how bureacracy enabled the Holocaust by reducing it to a long line of people taking orders from their superiors and giving orders to their subordinates so they could compartmentalise their actions to inputs and outputs, until it got to the people who actually carried out the atrocities, which even the Nazis realised not everyone could do.
There's also a great book called transcript by Heimrad Bäcker, where he uses cut-up bits of the bureacracy (as it sounds like you'll know, the Nazis were sticklers for record-keeping) of the Holocaust in a kind of poetic form, where sometimes the things are identifiable, such as numbers of clothing items taken from people at the extermination camps, and others are just lists of numbers or words leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps.
Just keep voting for different parties/people. It's when they're able to say "I'll be in power for a long time" that the upper echelons and the army start backing their person rather than the people. Oh, and avoid having loop holes in the constitution.
> The recently completed Kraft durch Freude cruise ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was anchored in international waters near the United Kingdom to serve as a floating polling station for German and Austrian citizens living in the UK. On 10 April 1938, 1,978 voters (including 806 Austrians) were ferried from Tilbury, east of London.
I fear a lot of people are happy to look the other way when “my guy” is doing something, especially when it seems to be directed at whatever they fear.
That and I fear most people really don’t have any principles when push comes to shove.
Also the suffering they cause remains abstract due to scale. Everyone of those bunkers financially ruined a few families and the future of their offspring.
The pyramid scheme one is scary, I wonder what will happen when crypto collapses. It's gotten so big that it infects the rest of the financial system in a big way already - globally.
"Everyone is a king, but some kings are more kingly than others."
Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.
[2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them.
[3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.
>The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them
Wow, that was done by Poles in Poland? How did that happen?
Certainly the whole nation had to be behind this? [0]
I love Albania, for reasons related to my job I used to travel there multiple times a year until around 2010.
Those bunkers are absolutely everywhere, even right in the middle of nowhere (I guess that's useful if you happen to get lost in the wilderness while hiking).
In towns and cities they have been sometimes repurposed, e.g. I remember seeing that someone created a small cafe on the beach using one of the larger bunkers.
The problem with reusing them is that the vast majority of the bunkers are of the smaller type (mostly below ground level, and on the inside there is barely enough room for a couple of people) and it's hard to find a new purpose for those.
I witnessed some of those bunkers on a day trip to [0]Butrint. The tour guide told us they were constantly being told the country was on the cusp of foreign invasion during the dictatorship.
The locals had painted the domes in bright colours as a sort of added tourist attraction.
Same for me, I used to travel for work earlier (2002-2006) and I loved it. The only problem at that time was the language barrier, almost nobody was speaking English in the eastern part and just a few people in Tirana or Dures.
In 2009 I tried to go there with a friend on a motorcycle trip, but we were unable to get in the country due to language barrier, I don't know what was wrong. So we went to Ohrid instead.
I'm Italian so I had an advantage in terms of language, since it seems almost everyone understands it. I've been told it's because people used to illegally watch Italian TV under the communist regime. I guess it might be also related to past colonialism.
Ah Albanian mason who has been living in Italy since the 90s told me a story about bunkers. I cannot date it to a year nor assess its truth but here it is.
A Minister (maybe Defense? Army? whatever) went to check the new bunkers. They looked good but he asked to the chief engineer how he could be sure that Hoxha would be satisfied with them.
"You know, if he thinks they are not good I'm dead."
"They are very good."
"So you must get in. We will shell the bunker and check if it's really as good as you say."
The engineer was not happy with that but the choice was between getting in or die immediately. He got in and they shelled the bunker all day long. The bunker survived, the engineer eventually recovered from the experience (temporary deafness and other problems) and the Minister could bet his own life on those bunkers.
Albania is definitely worth visiting. BUNK'ART in Tirana is an easy way to see the bunkers for yourself.
Somewhat related: Famous Russian urbex photographer Lana Sator is still stuck in Albania, after being arrested for espionage while documenting Albania's abandoned cold war military infrastructure: https://archive.is/o7rgB
For what it's worth, she is a well known photographer. I've been following her work since the early 2010s.
We are always fighting the last war, and, as Ukraine has proven, much has changed. The situation for Ukraine is dire, mostly due to a lack of manpower for the infantry. They are always on the retreat, getting holed up in cities where it is the tower blocks that become the bunkers. There are no 'big arrow' movements by the Russians, they only ever send out small groups of soldiers after lots of artillery preparation. Commonly available MANPADS mean that big tanks and planes don't go anywhere near the front. It is drone warfare.
From the point of view of the Russian side, imagine if Ukraine was littered with these bunkers, all of them filled with drone operators. I would say that this would be an upgrade on what Ukraine has with the trenches they have been building in the East since 2014.
You need trenches, or something similar, if you are going to mount any kind of lasting defense. Specifically, you need a safe way to run your logistics (or in military terms: your lines of communication, which refers to your supply lines, not your phone lines).
A lone bunker is incredibly difficult to resuply, relieve, or reinforce. That is the power of trenches. They give protection for when you need to move goods, people, or information. If you can cut a defensive position off from any of these, it won't stand up very long.
You can still use such positions to delay. But Ukraine needs to hold territory, not delay it's loss.
> The construction of prefabricated bunkers alone cost an estimated two percent of net material product, and in total the bunkers cost more than twice as much as the Maginot Line in France, consuming three times as much concrete.
The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people, until the resources really needed are blown out. In capitalism, companies specialize on human needs and if a need goes away, investments can go down rapidly, unless the feedback loop is guarded by some government regulation. But when government is doing the investing, the whims or corruption of politicians has no feedback loop.
This is why a lot of the academic work on economic planning over the last ~30 years has been on shifting the coordination and decision making down on the hierarchy closer to where it's relevant and where the people impacted by some decision have the most to say about it, and instead aggregating statistics and issues upwards for high-level visibility (instead of taking a "top down" approach to planning). This naturally involves leveraging the communication infra and analysis tools we have today that just didn't exist in the past.
Being an industry full of people who's mostly worked their whole careers in centrally planned institutions I have full faith that they'll screw it up. Academia has (to use a broad brush) been lusting after various flavors of central planning for a century. Why would they stop now?
(That's a serious question, why are conditions different now?)
> The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people
This sounds like a political-economic analog of AIs consuming AI slop.
I've not been to Albania yet, so I can't comment from observation, but I'm surmising that most all off these bunkers would be pretty useless militarily anyway.
A bunker, by itself, is not much of a defense. It kinda advertises the defender position. Without writing a paper on the subject, the short version is that they're useful as part of a defensive plan, occupied by troops trained in their use.
Having a random bunker, unsupported, in the middle if nowhere is not useful from a defensive point of view.
Most bunkers were in line of 5, and connected by ditches/trenches. So, they almost were never by themselves (unless in some isolated aerea), but in lines, and connected to a network of trenches. As the war in Ukraine shows, trenches are still useful.
There was also communication lines, (hard telephone lines), in ditches about 1m deep, in order to survive nuclear / emp attacks.
When I was a little kid, we'd play hide and seek in those bunkers, or we'd play 'castle take over' with self made wooden swords, romans vs illyrians as kids. (Or Albanians vs Turks). Which team conquered the most bunkers, would win.
They were fun as a kid, but we had to watch out for wild animals (or snakes), take refuge on those bunkers.
Now most of them are being scraped, to recoup the metal, so there are few left.
yeah, I get that 'you see them everywhere', but almost 2/3rd of them have been scrapped, and only the large ones remain, and some left in tourist areas.
So, you are really seeing the 1/3rd left. The bunker built out during communism, was truly crazy.
Which can be a point. What do you do if you're a foot soldier and such a bunker is on your way? First, you stop. Maybe your platoon tries to find a way around it, maybe you call reinforcements (direct fire) to take it out, maybe you set up a heavy machine gun to suppress it while you cross it. But all of this takes time, which is one of the main purposes of such defensive structures - to slow the enemy down. Interestingly, such a bunker will partially work in this role even if it's unoccupied, since making sure it is in fact empty will still take time. Now consider that there's almost a million of such bunkers slowing you down. You also have to consider the era, today they'd be an easier target than in the 1970s.
If it's just a random box you move left or right and keep going. Sure there might be a conversation, but frankly it's not gonna slow the army down more than a smoke break will.
The density of these things needs to be seen to truly grasp the scale.
Assuming they were actually all manned and able to provide interlocking fire as designed (a large assumption) - there would be no moving left or right. There would simply be another bunker or three in your next chosen path.
I've visited Albania and their placement seemed quite random to me. Possibly there was some system in place which I didn't notice (I didn't go to study them specifically). They made up their deficiencies in numbers, but it's a question of how many would be manned and supplied in case of war.
I've also visited one interwar Czechoslovak fortification complex, and these were completely different beasts with an elaborate design (network of connected fortifications, vast underground spaces/infrastructure...). But they were also much more expensive to build than the rudimentary Albanian designs.
> Czechoslovak politians *just decided* to give up to Hitler
"I think you will find it's a bit more complicated than that".
Sir is falling into the trap (alarmingly common in the USA) of simplifying history to the point of meaninglessness. Indeed, you would do well to understand why the UK and France ceased their support for Bohemia in an act of appeasement; an act that certainly wasn't taken lightly and was itself done for complex reasons, partly arising from the trauma of the Great War that was still fresh in many minds.
There's the commonly shared story about them that it turned out soldiers can't shoot from the smaller ones without going deaf, even when using ear protection.
I don't know if it's true or not, but having been in one of them, it seems likely. A concrete dome is pretty much the perfect shape to reflect all the sound waves right back at you.
The opinion among the few Albanian history nerds in Albanian that I know is that the bunker project was really about diverting the country's resources into busy work to keep the population occupied, instead of investing in intellectually stimulating pursuits that could result in a threat to Hoxha's control.
Give me a single example of a useful bunker in the history of war. With my modest knowdeldge, from the Maginot line to the Atlantic Wall, none. They're pretty much like locks. Can be cracked with a cocktail of goodwill and *time*.
Sure, but my point stands. It still has to be occupied by trained troops to make sense, just like those bunkers. Both had to be used smart, both can be misused.
That doesn't make them pointless, it makes their use cases narrow. Hence a coffee shop in one of them.
But the random alpine bunkers are not so random, as they are part of a National Redoubt strategy (doctrine?) that's a bit less paranoid than what Hoxha conceived. Reading the actual page let me know that Albanian Partisan had similar idea to the Swiss (mountain-based guerrilla warfare), but Hoxha just said no.
Shameless plug (who would have thought):
I've played hide and seek in Albania and used a bunker as a hideout. AMA :D
That's one of the few experiences I remember when I was 3-5yo.
Another Albanian thing worth mentioning is an extensive list of oil wells dispersed across residential areas see [0].
Family legend has it that my father almost drowned in one [1] when he was a kid, and a relative had to pull him by his nose to save him.
The relative ease one could tunnel underground these days are bunkers obsolete these days? Could one build a mini underground city that is reinforced with all the amenities
Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant...
I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro).
Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc...
The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania.
Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state.
So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc.
But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans...
Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.
> Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong
I went there about ten years ago, walking across the border on a small road from Macedonia. The Macedonia border office was small but tidy. Then there was a 100m no man's land, then a Welcome to Albania sign that was full of bullet holes, and a table of Albanian border guards drinking and playing cards. Super friendly guys.
We walked about 5km into the local town, passing tons of these bunkers. Nearly every single car and truck that passed us was a Mercedes, except for the police cars which were tiny battered Fiats.
Can confirm the people we met were incredibly friendly, and the place felt very welcoming and nothing happened to make me feel unsafe.
However, I have heard some crazy stories from another friend who travelled there more extensively that make me think, while it's a relatively safe country as a tourist, it won't be uneventful if you stay there a while, especially if you get off the normal tourist track.
Given that most of the stereotypes I'd heard about Albania up to that point were "bunkers, lawlessness, and Mercedes but lovely people", I'd say that it absolutely did live up to these. However, a lot can change in a decade so maybe it's different now. Or maybe we just went to different parts of the country.
Not sure what you mean by that, but my last trip was last year, and it was new models also. Mercedes is like the Theme there. Most lovable car in Albania.
My coworkers in the former Yugoslavia countries said they import cars from Germany after TUF denies them. I think they are getter “newer” cars now, newer meaning 10-15 years old.
Tirana is full of coffee shops that are full of groups of 3-4 guys who sit around smoking and drinking coffee all day, eventually leaving in brand new 2024 S-Class Mercedes or range rovers. There are tons of brand new luxury German cars everywhere.
Rightly or wrongly, in the UK Albians have a terrible reputation for organised crime, particularly drugs.[0] How is that perceived in Albania, and is organised crime a big issue in Albania? You make it sound like everybody is very trusting there.
My only direct interactions with Albanians here was a restaurant I used to go to regularly in London which was run by Albanians, who were all lovely and recommended books by Ismail Kadare, particularly The General of the Dead Army, which I thought was wonderful.
[0] Rather like the philosophical game "All crows are black, but not all black birds are crows" I have a feeling this may be due to a majority of illegal drug networks being run by Albanians, even though a large majority of Albians in the UK have no involvement in it.
Most of the leading crime gangs in europe and worldwide are Albanian [0]. They are a global operation thats present in almost every country thats relevant to the drug trade, and thats as a result of their massive diaspora (something like 30%-40% of their whole population has fled albania since the 80s). VICE declared Albania as the first and only european narco-state.[1] I actually have a friend who worked for the UN researching the narco economy in Albania, and the conclusion was that the GDP of the drug trade was half the GDP of the whole country [2]. In 2014 there was an incident where Dutch tourists that were hiking the mountains there accidentally discovered endless cannabis plantations and posted it on YouTube after leaving the country. This prompted wide outrage everywhere in Europe, and hence the Albanian government had to do something to save face, and they burned all the crops there in the region.[3] The thing is, the government and the narcos are all the same. Albania is still the major exporter of cannabis across Europe, and Albania is still the reigning king of drug transport. The Italian mafia is closely associated and probably dwarfed by the Albanian mafia.
The gratitude they have towards America is due to the USA declaring war against Yugoslavia and Serbia, and "liberating" Kosovo. Bill Clinton is considered a national hero and even has a monument declared to him, and even boulevards are named after him. [0]
I found that many people think positively of the regime and its dictator. The population was ill-equipped to deal with a market economy when the regime fell, and many Albanians believe the country has gone down a very chaotic path. They thought the dictatorship provided more structure. My grandmother-in-law (in her 60s), whose family suffered greatly when Hoxha took over, is one such Albanian who thinks positively of him, despite how the regime treated them. This feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome.
This mass Stockholm syndrome shit that every post communist country goes through with their hitler-tier leaders is evidence for me that god doesn't exist, and that we deserve the leaders we get.
I swear to god, we could liberate North Korea and they'd turn around and cry about how good it was during the Kim era because apparently we humans are deeply masochistic to our core. We want the boot stomping on our face forever.
That's too bitter. Speaking as a westerner married into an East German family, what people seem to crave more than anything is stability, which the dead hand of The Party delivered. When I talk to them about the comforts and freedoms of their post-1990 life there's a long list of details but behind it there's a ground state of "Ostalgie", gentle yearning for a time when if tomorrow wouldn't bring especial wonders nor would it bring calamity. And crucially this would be true for everyone in your community: with far less latitude for personal decisions of consequence nobody was far ahead or behind.
What people hate is that every such regime that falls is immediately picked clean by western vultures and remainders of old power structures in new coats. If you wanted people to think positively of liberal democracy you'd have the CIA going medieval on all the crooks behind the scenes, not apparently precisely the opposite.
If you liberate DPRK and the South Koreans march in, "legitimately" buy up all the land and property and "fairly" put all the poor inhabitants into functionally perpetual indentured servitude there will eventually be some resentment.
Plus the current state of North Korea owes a lot of its conditions to the Americans. Before someone accuses me of being a Tankie I do think the Kim dynasty is absolutely deranged and I obviously think that the average North Korean would be better off if they were toppled and I am an anarchist not an auth-communist.
But let's not forget that the Americans completely levelled the territory, including destroying dams that provided people's drinking water (a war crime then and now), and then gloated about it, and have then proceeded to consistently act in bad faith.
So when the comment above talks about "liberating" I do wonder exactly what they mean and how it would be different to the first time they tried it and how might the average North Korean react.
Maybe they would install a new dictator more amenable to the "rules-based international order" (i.e. the US and people who agree with them) like they did in South Korea or countless other countries across Latin America.
North Korea was the rich, industrialized half of the country, South Korea was poorer and extensively damaged by the Korean War. The fact that the South is now 10x richer and way better on any measurable metric tells you all you need to know about how well Juche and the Kims are working for the North.
the same apply to Vietnam and Cambodia. yet those countries are far more functional than DPRK. the extreme and dynastic cult of personality seems unique to the Kim family.
The problem is expectation management. In Eastern Germany and generally Eastern / South Eastern Europe, many envied the West, its lifestyle and wealth.
But once the various dictatorships, be it the USSR, Yugoslavia, Hoxha or whoever, fell... it became clear that it would take a long time until their life materially improved other than not having to be afraid of getting gulaged randomly. Corruption continued to exist on all levels from small (police "roadblocks" with made-up traffic violation tickets) over middle (building permits taking years if not "accelerated" with bakshish) to large (to this day, most government-owned companies are looted by the elites), cost of life expenses for everything not produced domestically can be on par with Western countries... it's not much in visible improvement over the "old days" where you could at least survive as long as you kept your mouth shut.
I was in Tirana last October, he seems to be treated as some kind of whimsical amusement and mascot rather than a historical tyrant. His residence is still intact and visible in the city center and is something of a tourist photo opportunity. AFAIK it's fully closed, but from the top of the rotating restaurant nearby you can see into it.
I am Italian, I know many Albanians and I visited the country too.
As far as I know there is still somebody that feel nostalgia about the dictator, but 90% of the people are really happy about the democracy and they want to join the UE.
Just to give an anedoct: in front of Berat there is a mountain where Oxha wrote with trees his name Enver. After the end of communism, they changed in Never.
Drive down to Lili’s restaurant in Berat and order everything on the menu (it’s small), and visit the castle while you’re there. It’s well worth it. You will need to make a reservation. It’s probably the most unique dining experience I’ve ever had, and the food was exceptional.
You can visit Bunk’Art in Tirana and then take the cable car up the mountain afterwards.
Lamar Tirana had some incredible sea bass.
Odas Garden is frequently recommended for local food to tourists but I found it to be overpriced and the dishes were way overcooked, but YMMV. The atmosphere is pretty unique. There are far better small time restaurants around for local cuisine (can’t remember the names).
My fav dish was Lakror, but it can be hit or miss in Tirana.
Do the free walking tour in the main square / Skanderbeg square.
There are bakeries everywhere, getting up early and walking down to the nearest bakery and getting fresh coffee and a pastry / burek and walking a bit in the sun is such a good way to start the day.
And I second the suggestion to go to Himare, we went via Vlore along the coast and down to Himare. They’ve built a new tunnel, I highly recommend avoiding it (I've heard it's closed now for final works anyway) and going over the mountain, there’s an amazing view point next to Mt Cika.
Get up to Montenegro if you can if you love scenic drives.
Tirana is nice, I suggest to go around for the Blocku (the neighborhood that during the communism was only for the nomenclature) it's really cozy.
Just outside Tirana there is an area with several artificial lakes, you should go there for a relaxing day.
If you have more time, I suggest to visit Girokaster: it's a castle city 2 hours far from Tirana, where Enver Oxha was born.
For food I really suggested a restaurant called Oda, not far from Skanderberg square in Tirana: it's a traditional Albanian house where you can taste all the Albanian dishes.
I wonder if economists regard this as a sign of a bad economy. Some years ago lowland Tajikistan (a country where the economy is weak outside of remittances from gastarbeiter in Russia) saw a sudden wave of building petrol stations one after the other to the point of absurdity. A great many of them then went bust.
Lol I don't think there are that many, which area? But gas stations can be like normal businesses there and often have restaurants and sometimes even hotels. I accidentally stayed at a gas station hotel once by the airport, when my go to hotel was full and I didn't know and booked online, and only when I arrived did I realize it was a gas station.
Exactly. I've spend a day in Albania, from Shkodër to ferry terminal in Durrës. Haven't seen a bunker, but easily saw 100s of gas stations. Almost none of them accept card, unfortunately.
My dad was a military analyst in the Balkans in the 90s. I am telling this story second-hand, but I'll try to get it correct. While in Albania, my dad shared a taxi with an older Albania gentleman. The man recounted his time working in the Albanian military in the 60s. His platoon had constructed a large number of bunkers, more than any other platoon. The dictator Enver Hoxha was slated to visit, to give them an award for building the most bunkers in the whole country. When Enver arrived, he walked around, and looked at a bunch of the bunkers they had constructed. He pointed at the bunkers. "Look! You have not used enough rebar! Obviously, you are trying to jeopardize the security of our nation, by neglecting to use enough rebar! You are traitors to Albania!" He swiftly sentenced the entire platoon of young men straight to 30 years in prison, which they approximately served. This man, after serving this time, had just gotten freed from jail. The taxi was transporting him from the halfway house.
A father of a guy that I know was an engineer and he was part of the team that designed the highway between Tirana and Valona.
Enver decided to arrest all of them because they were conspiring against the state and the highway was just a landing area for US airplanes to invade the country.
He was really paranoid about this stuff
Exactly.
You can be interrogated by police and detained only to have watched Italian TV or listen Italian radio broadcasts.
Anyway, this was a very common behaviour in Albania and it's the reason why most Albanians speaks Italian very well and know a lot about italian culture.
> Albania was even within eastern communist block considered utter shithole run by mad paranoid guy.
I may be wrong, but just across the northern border of Albania, things may have already been very different. Every time I visit a country of the former Yugoslavia, I get the feeling that Josip Broz Tito (the de-facto dictator of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1980) is still respected, even idolized by some. As a German, this always surprises me, because the leader(s) of Eastern Germany (Ulbricht and Honecker) are today mostly ridiculed as bureaucrats without a trace of charisma. Tito certainly was an interesting character, and was the only leader of the communist block to challenge the leadership of Stalin. Again, I really have no first-hand experience and may be wrong, but my parents regularly traveled through Yugoslavia (mostly through today's Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro) in the 70ies and 80ies. They mostly stayed in cheap private holiday apartments, often eating dinner / breakfast with the owner families, and didn't get the impression that this was a particularly bad place to live in. AFAIK, it was also pretty straightforward for citizens of the former Yugoslavia to leave the country / travel to the West (at least this was explained to us by an older woman in Croatia who had traveled through France as a student in the 70ies to learn the language).
Things weren’t set in stone - Yugoslavia in the 1950s (agrarian reforms, Goli Otok, and similar events) was quite different from the Yugoslavia of the 1980s. In the 1950s, many people escaped to Italy in small boats on stormy nights. Ten to fifteen years later, a significant number of people emigrated legally to Germany as unemployment was high, and the state realized it was better to receive hard currency from gastarbeiters than to deal with their discontent at home.
And Tito was no ordinary dictator, it would be interesting to see how he would navigate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West. That, combined with Yugoslavia’s brief economic prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, is why Yugoslavs were one of the European nationalities embarking on the Istanbul–Kathmandu trail, and in discovering Bali as a mass-tourist destination alongside Germans and Nordics.
That everything went to shit around the time that Tito declined and died (though correlation is not necessarily causation), does much to explain the nostalgia that you will still occasionally meet. However, that nostalgia has been challenged in recent decades through the wars and their aftermath. Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar nationalism regard, for different reasons, Tito’s pan-Yugoslav project as inimical to their respective national interests, and nationalist rhetoric has a firm grip on many sectors of local media.
That is correct. Tito is very loved and respected even now, and not just by older generations but rather pretty much even younger folks think he was a great guy. He's considered great because he managed to unify the whole balkan slavic block (despite religious differences), and there were even talks to bring Bulgaria into Yugoslavia, however Stalin objected and that never happened. People love him because he wasnt a shitty dictator, he didnt abuse his power, and he fought off both the nazis and the fascists. After Tito died, Yugoslavia went on a downfall, both economically and socially. There was also ofcourse a lot of foreign meddling.
They were different. My parents (form former soviet commie bloc) tried in vain to get approval from secret service to travel to Yugoslavia, you literally had to have special stamp in the passport on the border or ciao or worse.
Traveling of whole family with small child was seemed risky due to possibility of family escaping to the west. Heck, we couldn't travel easily even within bloc itself.
I’ve heard this all too. My father grew up and lived in the former Yugoslavia. He’s since spoken about how well regarded Tito was and the opinion many had that he played a big hand in keeping Yugoslavia united whilst he was alive. He’s also talked about how Yugoslavia was sort of a buffer zone between the east and west and so a lot of freedoms were available to citizens there that weren’t in the full on communist countries. E.g when he was younger he did some work trips to Germany and on top of earning deutschmarks had a side hustle smuggling back jeans and records to sell.
Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.
> Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.
My best friend for a while in elementary school was a girl from an Albanian refugee family. Even she, an eight-year old, had only scary things to tell about Albania, mostly told to her by her parents and grandparents I guess.
We used to live next to a tank division base in USSR. Once a conscript soldier was assigned with maintenance work on a tank. Trying to be helpful he attempted to remove laser rangefinder while the officer was away. But it being a two-person job he inevitably dropped and damaged it. He was court-martialed, got three years of prison and had the cost of the instrument withheld from his future income. The rangefinder cost was about 24000 rubles while the average Soviet monthly salary was ~160 at the time.
Now this was not Balkans but it is always startling how fundamentally inhumane and atomized all Communist societies are, in very much the same way. Am convinced one could transplant a Cuban to Romania or a Bulgarian to North Korea and save for the language and cuisine they'd instinctively know how the things work. How you should get hold of your groceries, when it's a good idea to bribe, who is important in informal way, what you shouldn't say and just how much effort you should put into your work. This was truly global, Borg-like culture like nothing before.
That's simply not true. That example should tell you that, if anything, a good part of their motivation was a healthy sense of self preservation. This is by the way what we're literally seeing play out in the US right now. Tim Cook, Zuck, all the other rich guys chipped in for the inauguration to signal their deference. Because they know Trump and Musk would remember if they didn't.
If you're interested in why this happens, try reading some of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If the choice is comply or die, fine upstanding morals don't really come into play except in very rare cases. And even then, what good does getting shot for a minor detail do in the grand scheme of things? You're not going to spur a revolution to overthrow a dictator because you were shot for not following an order to the letter in a Siberian concentration camp.
I haven't read that, but I imagine I'd agree with most of it having read the precis. My beef was really with the idea that everyone who follows orders in that kind of a system is a "piece of work". I think that's holding everyone to an incredible high - and unrealistic - standard.
That's why I wrote what I did: passive acceptance of a Führer's insanity leads to the kind of Stalinist nightmare that the Soviets experienced last century. (Yeah, I'm blending dictators: this scenario seems to be common to them all, throughout history.)
Such behavior needs to be put down immediately, with a bullet to the head. I guarantee those soldiers were better armed than that POS dictator.
Do I sound angry? Why, yes, I am. We need more individuals, not slaves.
Interesting that you'd read that and much more (like me) and had a very different reaction. I came out of it feeling understanding for people caught up in such a cruel system. To be clear, not the stoolies or collaborators, but the vast majority of people who were swept up in a system that they had no control over. I just think it's human nature. Slightly hand-wavy figures here, but I feel like you have 10% of people who are bullies and will absolutely buy into the system, 10% of people who are brave and will try to fight somehow, and 80% of people who aren't either. And as much as I'd like to think you could tip the balance significantly in favour of the brave, I just don't think that's human nature, so I don't really feel like I can blame those people for just wanting to keep their heads down and survive. If you don't have it in you, you don't have it in you. My reading also taught me that when push comes to shove, many people aren't nearly as brave as they think they are. The Gulag Archipelago in particular was instructive about what happens to people when they're starved and worked to the bone. Any notion of humanity goes out of the window, and it's the airy-fairy "we should all share" people who die almost immediately.
Coincidentally, a comment from a Ukrainian woman in Odesa, just yesterday:
"I remember in the 11th grade during an English lesson, we discussed how Freud’s student saved him and literally bought him out from the Nazis. At that time, my teacher (she was a child of the war) said one strange phrase: “War divides people into humans and non-humans.” Thirty years later, I can say how right you were." (https://x.com/tatyanaodesssa/status/1880920634978386335)
In any kind of authoritarian country, sadly this is coming back all over the place as fashion, in many countries where many folks voting are still old enough to remember how it used to be, unfortunately a minority.
I say this as first child out of revolution days that ended a dictorship, and sees the rise of such parties.
This is the most terrifying part about China: they’re competent Communists. Until now, these authoritarian states have always ruined their best. The communists of old could never abide the exceptional[0]. Nowadays they’ve integrated the lessons of the West’s market economy.
0: the other side of the Kolmogorov option is that you want your geniuses silent
Thats the story they tell the world. They are just as inept, just as incompetent, but they had a free market engine that would pedal on, not because they enabled them but not handicapped them enough. Its more a incredible powerful horse (the Chinese people) saddled with a impossible useless drunk( the party) winning the race so far, while the drunk in the saddle brags loudly about what that horse can do. And now he decided to trade the horse in for booze.
Economists say China needs to move to a consumer economy. The export model has run out of steam. But turning to a consumer economy is diametrically opposed to the communist party. Just like the soviets, their model works for a while but the inability to switch gears or relinquish any amount of control will be their doom.
Doom in which way? Russia is not going anywhere, population is in complete acceptance of current state (despite everybody complaining, but thats nothing new). Chinese seem the same, don't take some isolated protests from time to time in 1.5 billion population as sign of things breaking apart. They will be probably fine, whether we like it or not.
You are equating the soviet union with Russia. Their economic model was quite different and caused mass famines and eventual collapse.
As for going away, the demographic picture for both countries is horrific. China is in a recession and the one thing they need to do is the one thing Xi is diametrically opposed to and he calls all the shots.
> The Central Economic Work Conference held in December called for “vigorously spurring consumption,” to deal with weak domestic demand and over reliance on exports.
The Central Economic Work Conference is a CCP event where they announce the current direction of the Chinese economy for the year, and is headed by Xi.
Yes but the entire content of the article was taken from what that economist thinks should happen. Not what the actual plans are. The communist party has done no course correction at all so far and the actual decision what to do can only come from Xi.
Because the party is actually only reacting way to late to events. Want to know how they plan economically in reality? Look at the botched covid pandemic- that was a pulse (the pandemic) and the party reacting to it. Now you know about capabilities and reaction speeds of the CCP in the most dire of emergencies.
The statements at the CEWC are endorsements from Xi. He literally talked about boosting consumption at his keynote there.
And that's a key piece of the current 5 year plan. The CCP is actively executing on converting the Chinese economy to more of a consumption based economy.
Frankly, looking at pictures and videos from China, it looks nothing like the Soviet Union- it looks modern, rich, technologically advanced, full of people looking and acting like westerners. They might need to expand their internal markets and consume more, but any comparison with soviet Russia is absurd.
Classic westerners mistake. Thinking economic development means adoption of western values and rationality. Ignoring the parallels with the soviet union is ignorance. Xi has publicly said the collapse of the soviet union is the biggest tragedy of the 20th century. Xi has studied the soviet union extensively and thinks the state must never relinquish any control whatsoever to avoid their fate.
AFAIK we aren't sure what is going on in China. If anyone is wandering HN with a sourced rundown of how their system is structured I haven't seen it. Given how critical China is to the global economy and political situation it seems a bit weird how little information seems to leak out into the general discussion.
Their language is unique in Europe and probably originates in the Thrakian, Illyrian, and Dacian languages. With the important mention that one must not apply today's assumptions of a unified language when referring to something as "Dacian", think more of a situation like in today's Dagestan, where on a surface of 50,000 square kilometers, 3 million people speak no less than 40 languages.
The theory is that during the Roman retreat from Dacia, the population (estimated to as low as 100,000 and as high of 500,000 people, so not exactly a Biblical exodus), migrated to south of Danube and eventually today's location. The toponymy is strangely Albanian, like even the name of the Romanian capital "Bucharest" means "beautiful is" in Albanian.
Your post is sadly an example of the pop-sci history that circulates in Romania,* and it is out of sync with the considerable advances made in Albanian historical linguistics in recent decades. The evidence is overwhelming that Albanian originates from the Central Balkans. While Albanian does show signs of belonging to a Balkan Indo-European subgroup deep in prehistory, it is not closely related to Thracian – Matzinger’s 2012 paper “Zur herkunft des Albanischen: Argumente gegen die thrakische Hypothese” in the Ismajli Festschrift conveniently sets out why.
While Romanian bucur ‘happy’ and Albanian bukur ‘beautiful’ are indeed regarded as shared lexicon of disputed etymology, București (Bucharest) does not mean ‘beautiful is’ in Albanian: -ești is a common toponym-forming suffix in Romanian. It’s certainly not related to the Albanian copula, which is âshtë with a nasal vowel both historically and in many dialects still today (standard Albanian është is based on the Tosk variety that lost nasal vowels a few centuries ago).
* (For HN readers unaware of Balkan quarrels, a cornerstone of Romanian nationalism is the idea that the Romanians are descendants of a Romanized population in Dacia who remained behind when the province was lost to the Roman Empire. This would, crucially, allow the Romanians to have been in Transylvania before the Hungarians, longtime rivals for that land, arrived in 896 CE. That Romanian and Albanian share lexical material from the early first millennium is awkward for that view – many linguists internationally have concluded that the Romanian language was brought to modern day Romania from somewhere across the Danube. Romanian pop-sci, in order to save the Dacian continuity theory, therefore occasionally makes the claim that the Albanians came from the territory of Romania, or that the Albanian and Dacian languages were related.)
Legends. Not true. I was there, I heard the language, I spoke in Romanian to my Albanian colleagues and they spoke Albanian to me, I did not understand anything even if the sounding is quite similar. I was in a restaurant in Tirana with colleagues and I had the impression that I am in Bucharest based on the noise around me, but I was not able to understand the words. That's all the similarity.
There are some words that are the same in Albanian and Romanian, but very few. The languages are very different, Romanian is mostly based on Latin with Turkish, Slavonic and Polish influences (some Ukrainian also in Bucovina), the Dacian part is really small and the Albanian seems to be based on Illyrian dialects.
Unique how? It's an Indo-European language, like many of the other languages spoken in Europe. There is also a proposal that Albanian is closely related to Greek and Armenian.
I’m surprised at the length of this gag, drawing on what seemed to me to be a particularly robust Wikipedia entry. Is the point that the article strikes you as juvenile, or that you feel like it unfairly makes touristic spectacle of something more complex than the treatment here reflects?
And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM? I’m curious because of the earnestly, completeness, and the slight flavor of “how do you do, fellow kids” in lines like “Talk about a plot twist!”
> And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM?
I suspect so, as ChatGPT generates a fairly similar output[1] from the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania". As an example (this was part of the first output it produced):
OP: "Jake: So get this - there was this leader named Enver Hoxha who was super paranoid about getting invaded. We're talking an average of almost 6 bunkers per square kilometer. They're literally everywhere - beaches, mountains, cities, even in hotel gardens!"
ChatGPT: "Jake: Okay, so get this: back in the Cold War, Albania’s leader, this guy Enver Hoxha, went totally paranoid. He thought everyone was gonna invade—like, NATO, the Soviets, literally everyone.
I retried the prompt twice - the first time[2], "so get this" was used again, and the second time[3] used the name "Jake" again. Hardly proof of LLM use, but it'd be a weird coincidence if not IMO.
I started reading the wikipedia article and just couldn't get into it. It all read like blah blah blah to me but why was it on the HN homepage? There must be something interesting about it. I've used the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds" many times. The output I was able to read no problem and actually enjoyed it. Any sort of dry text this works wonders for my brain being able to comprehend it. But judging by the downvotes I'm guessing this is just me!
See, now that seems like a pretty cool use case, I’m glad to hear this technique is serving you well! I guess it’s cases like these—where I’d be inclined to do the reverse, taking “20-year-old dialog” and asking Claude to give it to me straight—where the promise of LLM personalization shines…
I suspect the downvotes have less to do with your good intentions here, and more a mix of confusion over the context and HN’s hostility toward LLM content (which tends to have a low effort-to-quantity ratio).
Personally, I probably would have reacted more positively if you’d introduced your original comment with this explanation (although I’d suggest just leaving a link to the LLM conversation rather than pasting the whole thing).
Thank you for engaging on it!
But yeah, to me the LLM version strips out the most entertaining part: the pictures of these crazy things! Who but an autocrat could look at those and think “good idea”…
I had never heard of Enver Hoxha until I listened to the episodes about him on the Real Dictators podcast. Very wild stuff. I find it really fascinating and rather sobering that these invasive authoritarian governments can one day take root and control most or all of the rest of your life. I fear that people's complacency or thoughts that "surely it can't happen here" are part of what lets them rise in the first place, and I wonder just how quickly you can find yourself inside of one.
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great read on that subject. (It's very long, but the abridged versions are fine as long as you get a good translation). Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny is also great - a biography from a series of post-war interviews with the commandant at Treblinka concentration camp, who wasn't any evil genius, just someone who didn't have any particularly strong moral feelings and went with the zeitgeist. The Lives Of Others is a great film about the Stasi in East Germany too.
Into that darkness is pretty grim, to be honest. Great read but gut wrenching
Totally grim, but it put to bed any queries in my mind of "how could anyone possibly end up doing that?" It was really clear how easily unremarkable people just go with the flow until they find themselves doing horrific things without batting an eyelid.
Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is really interesting (although pretty heavy going - I didn't finish it) on how bureacracy enabled the Holocaust by reducing it to a long line of people taking orders from their superiors and giving orders to their subordinates so they could compartmentalise their actions to inputs and outputs, until it got to the people who actually carried out the atrocities, which even the Nazis realised not everyone could do.
There's also a great book called transcript by Heimrad Bäcker, where he uses cut-up bits of the bureacracy (as it sounds like you'll know, the Nazis were sticklers for record-keeping) of the Holocaust in a kind of poetic form, where sometimes the things are identifiable, such as numbers of clothing items taken from people at the extermination camps, and others are just lists of numbers or words leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps.
I think most large bureaucracies are susceptible to this. They form of an overlay psychosis.
Just keep voting for different parties/people. It's when they're able to say "I'll be in power for a long time" that the upper echelons and the army start backing their person rather than the people. Oh, and avoid having loop holes in the constitution.
As long as you can, see Germany's 1938 "election": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_German_parliamentary_el...
I doubt that that was constitutional, but maybe it was, after all they got in power legally in 1933.
Interesting snippet:
> The recently completed Kraft durch Freude cruise ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was anchored in international waters near the United Kingdom to serve as a floating polling station for German and Austrian citizens living in the UK. On 10 April 1938, 1,978 voters (including 806 Austrians) were ferried from Tilbury, east of London.
That only works as long as fair elections are still a thing.
I fear a lot of people are happy to look the other way when “my guy” is doing something, especially when it seems to be directed at whatever they fear.
That and I fear most people really don’t have any principles when push comes to shove.
Exactly. And that lack of principals is what we should be punishing as a society, not any particular position. The rest will work itself out in time.
People with principles are dangerous precisely because they aren’t bending the rules in support of the body politic.
You want a boy scout that focuses more on the group than the ideals.
Also the suffering they cause remains abstract due to scale. Everyone of those bunkers financially ruined a few families and the future of their offspring.
Well, let's look at what was happening in Albania.
Since forever: Ruled by ottoman empire
...along comes the 20th century...
1912: We declare independence!
1914: Let's pick a king...
1925: Let's pick a new king...
1939: I guess the Italians are king now...
1944: Communism, we're all kings!
1946: Hoxha is the king of kings
1991: nope, let’s elect a parliament
1997: one more time and without pyramid schemes[1]
2009: nato
2014: official eu candidate
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania
The pyramid scheme one is scary, I wonder what will happen when crypto collapses. It's gotten so big that it infects the rest of the financial system in a big way already - globally.
"Everyone is a king, but some kings are more kingly than others."
Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-los...
[2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them.
[3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.
>The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them
Wow, that was done by Poles in Poland? How did that happen? Certainly the whole nation had to be behind this? [0]
>some German-occupied country in World War Two
Ah, the bare minimum mention at the end.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations#Nu...
> Fun fact about World War II Albania...... they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.
That is perhaps an interesting fact. But not really a fun one.
Well, it was more fun than the one about Poland...and it wasn't all about death and dying and genocide, which is really as fun as Holocaust facts get.
I love Albania, for reasons related to my job I used to travel there multiple times a year until around 2010.
Those bunkers are absolutely everywhere, even right in the middle of nowhere (I guess that's useful if you happen to get lost in the wilderness while hiking).
In towns and cities they have been sometimes repurposed, e.g. I remember seeing that someone created a small cafe on the beach using one of the larger bunkers.
The problem with reusing them is that the vast majority of the bunkers are of the smaller type (mostly below ground level, and on the inside there is barely enough room for a couple of people) and it's hard to find a new purpose for those.
I witnessed some of those bunkers on a day trip to [0]Butrint. The tour guide told us they were constantly being told the country was on the cusp of foreign invasion during the dictatorship.
The locals had painted the domes in bright colours as a sort of added tourist attraction.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butrint
Same for me, I used to travel for work earlier (2002-2006) and I loved it. The only problem at that time was the language barrier, almost nobody was speaking English in the eastern part and just a few people in Tirana or Dures.
In 2009 I tried to go there with a friend on a motorcycle trip, but we were unable to get in the country due to language barrier, I don't know what was wrong. So we went to Ohrid instead.
I'm Italian so I had an advantage in terms of language, since it seems almost everyone understands it. I've been told it's because people used to illegally watch Italian TV under the communist regime. I guess it might be also related to past colonialism.
Japan has the famous "love hotels". If the bunkers fit two...
'albanian concrete fuck hovel' could be a punk band name
"Love bunker" has a certain ring to it.
Further down the wiki article, it mentions that the bunkers re indeed often used for this :)
Public restroom
Suicide booth
Ah Albanian mason who has been living in Italy since the 90s told me a story about bunkers. I cannot date it to a year nor assess its truth but here it is.
A Minister (maybe Defense? Army? whatever) went to check the new bunkers. They looked good but he asked to the chief engineer how he could be sure that Hoxha would be satisfied with them.
"You know, if he thinks they are not good I'm dead."
"They are very good."
"So you must get in. We will shell the bunker and check if it's really as good as you say."
The engineer was not happy with that but the choice was between getting in or die immediately. He got in and they shelled the bunker all day long. The bunker survived, the engineer eventually recovered from the experience (temporary deafness and other problems) and the Minister could bet his own life on those bunkers.
Yes this is a widely circulating anecdote. That Minister was Mehmet Shehu[0], an interesting character in his own right.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_Shehu
And the guy that was forced to get inside the bunker was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Moisiu
Albania is definitely worth visiting. BUNK'ART in Tirana is an easy way to see the bunkers for yourself.
Somewhat related: Famous Russian urbex photographer Lana Sator is still stuck in Albania, after being arrested for espionage while documenting Albania's abandoned cold war military infrastructure: https://archive.is/o7rgB
For what it's worth, she is a well known photographer. I've been following her work since the early 2010s.
We are always fighting the last war, and, as Ukraine has proven, much has changed. The situation for Ukraine is dire, mostly due to a lack of manpower for the infantry. They are always on the retreat, getting holed up in cities where it is the tower blocks that become the bunkers. There are no 'big arrow' movements by the Russians, they only ever send out small groups of soldiers after lots of artillery preparation. Commonly available MANPADS mean that big tanks and planes don't go anywhere near the front. It is drone warfare.
From the point of view of the Russian side, imagine if Ukraine was littered with these bunkers, all of them filled with drone operators. I would say that this would be an upgrade on what Ukraine has with the trenches they have been building in the East since 2014.
You need trenches, or something similar, if you are going to mount any kind of lasting defense. Specifically, you need a safe way to run your logistics (or in military terms: your lines of communication, which refers to your supply lines, not your phone lines).
A lone bunker is incredibly difficult to resuply, relieve, or reinforce. That is the power of trenches. They give protection for when you need to move goods, people, or information. If you can cut a defensive position off from any of these, it won't stand up very long.
You can still use such positions to delay. But Ukraine needs to hold territory, not delay it's loss.
> The construction of prefabricated bunkers alone cost an estimated two percent of net material product, and in total the bunkers cost more than twice as much as the Maginot Line in France, consuming three times as much concrete.
Incredible.
There is a reason why Albania was for a long time the poorest country in Europe. This is one of the reasons, maybe the largest one.
Rare Earth - The 750,000 Bunkers of Albania
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU
The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people, until the resources really needed are blown out. In capitalism, companies specialize on human needs and if a need goes away, investments can go down rapidly, unless the feedback loop is guarded by some government regulation. But when government is doing the investing, the whims or corruption of politicians has no feedback loop.
This is why a lot of the academic work on economic planning over the last ~30 years has been on shifting the coordination and decision making down on the hierarchy closer to where it's relevant and where the people impacted by some decision have the most to say about it, and instead aggregating statistics and issues upwards for high-level visibility (instead of taking a "top down" approach to planning). This naturally involves leveraging the communication infra and analysis tools we have today that just didn't exist in the past.
Being an industry full of people who's mostly worked their whole careers in centrally planned institutions I have full faith that they'll screw it up. Academia has (to use a broad brush) been lusting after various flavors of central planning for a century. Why would they stop now?
(That's a serious question, why are conditions different now?)
Academic economics is cargo cult science.
> The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people
This sounds like a political-economic analog of AIs consuming AI slop.
I've not been to Albania yet, so I can't comment from observation, but I'm surmising that most all off these bunkers would be pretty useless militarily anyway.
A bunker, by itself, is not much of a defense. It kinda advertises the defender position. Without writing a paper on the subject, the short version is that they're useful as part of a defensive plan, occupied by troops trained in their use.
Having a random bunker, unsupported, in the middle if nowhere is not useful from a defensive point of view.
Most bunkers were in line of 5, and connected by ditches/trenches. So, they almost were never by themselves (unless in some isolated aerea), but in lines, and connected to a network of trenches. As the war in Ukraine shows, trenches are still useful.
There was also communication lines, (hard telephone lines), in ditches about 1m deep, in order to survive nuclear / emp attacks.
When I was a little kid, we'd play hide and seek in those bunkers, or we'd play 'castle take over' with self made wooden swords, romans vs illyrians as kids. (Or Albanians vs Turks). Which team conquered the most bunkers, would win.
They were fun as a kid, but we had to watch out for wild animals (or snakes), take refuge on those bunkers.
Now most of them are being scraped, to recoup the metal, so there are few left.
Are you sure? I just spent two months in Albania and there are bunkers literally everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. I must’ve counted thousands.
yeah, I get that 'you see them everywhere', but almost 2/3rd of them have been scrapped, and only the large ones remain, and some left in tourist areas.
So, you are really seeing the 1/3rd left. The bunker built out during communism, was truly crazy.
> It kinda advertises the defender position.
Which can be a point. What do you do if you're a foot soldier and such a bunker is on your way? First, you stop. Maybe your platoon tries to find a way around it, maybe you call reinforcements (direct fire) to take it out, maybe you set up a heavy machine gun to suppress it while you cross it. But all of this takes time, which is one of the main purposes of such defensive structures - to slow the enemy down. Interestingly, such a bunker will partially work in this role even if it's unoccupied, since making sure it is in fact empty will still take time. Now consider that there's almost a million of such bunkers slowing you down. You also have to consider the era, today they'd be an easier target than in the 1970s.
If it's just a random box you move left or right and keep going. Sure there might be a conversation, but frankly it's not gonna slow the army down more than a smoke break will.
The density of these things needs to be seen to truly grasp the scale.
Assuming they were actually all manned and able to provide interlocking fire as designed (a large assumption) - there would be no moving left or right. There would simply be another bunker or three in your next chosen path.
I've visited Albania and their placement seemed quite random to me. Possibly there was some system in place which I didn't notice (I didn't go to study them specifically). They made up their deficiencies in numbers, but it's a question of how many would be manned and supplied in case of war.
I've also visited one interwar Czechoslovak fortification complex, and these were completely different beasts with an elaborate design (network of connected fortifications, vast underground spaces/infrastructure...). But they were also much more expensive to build than the rudimentary Albanian designs.
> interwar Czechoslovak fortification complex
Got a pointer/URL ? Sounds interesting. Czech design always stands out.
Here it is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_border_fortific...
Sadly it was never used. Czechoslovak politians just decided to give up to Hitler
> Czechoslovak politians *just decided* to give up to Hitler
"I think you will find it's a bit more complicated than that".
Sir is falling into the trap (alarmingly common in the USA) of simplifying history to the point of meaninglessness. Indeed, you would do well to understand why the UK and France ceased their support for Bohemia in an act of appeasement; an act that certainly wasn't taken lightly and was itself done for complex reasons, partly arising from the trauma of the Great War that was still fresh in many minds.
The clueless downvoters are out again!
If you bypass a fortification, you just earned yourself an attack behind the front on your supply lines. The seems unwise.
This is the secondary point of a fortification (unless something has drastically changed since I was taught these matters).
> would be pretty useless militarily anyway
There's the commonly shared story about them that it turned out soldiers can't shoot from the smaller ones without going deaf, even when using ear protection.
I don't know if it's true or not, but having been in one of them, it seems likely. A concrete dome is pretty much the perfect shape to reflect all the sound waves right back at you.
Today bunkers could be operated remotely (using deeply buried optical fiber) or they could be even autonomous, so this would no longer be a problem.
The opinion among the few Albanian history nerds in Albanian that I know is that the bunker project was really about diverting the country's resources into busy work to keep the population occupied, instead of investing in intellectually stimulating pursuits that could result in a threat to Hoxha's control.
Give me a single example of a useful bunker in the history of war. With my modest knowdeldge, from the Maginot line to the Atlantic Wall, none. They're pretty much like locks. Can be cracked with a cocktail of goodwill and *time*.
Ok, but wouldn't that be also true if you substitute every "bunker" and "defence" word with "tank" and "attack"?
I don't see a goal of your comment.
Tanks, unlike bunkers, can move. Fairly quickly, in fact.
They can move. They can be repositioned. They can congregate to provide mutual support.
More significantly they can be used in attack as well as defense.
Sure, but my point stands. It still has to be occupied by trained troops to make sense, just like those bunkers. Both had to be used smart, both can be misused.
That doesn't make them pointless, it makes their use cases narrow. Hence a coffee shop in one of them.
Right, "able to operate in territory you didn't control yesterday" is a pretty big offensive bonus for tanks relative to bunkers.
Counterexample: The swiss defense plans
But the random alpine bunkers are not so random, as they are part of a National Redoubt strategy (doctrine?) that's a bit less paranoid than what Hoxha conceived. Reading the actual page let me know that Albanian Partisan had similar idea to the Swiss (mountain-based guerrilla warfare), but Hoxha just said no.
Shameless plug (who would have thought): I've played hide and seek in Albania and used a bunker as a hideout. AMA :D That's one of the few experiences I remember when I was 3-5yo.
Another Albanian thing worth mentioning is an extensive list of oil wells dispersed across residential areas see [0]. Family legend has it that my father almost drowned in one [1] when he was a kid, and a relative had to pull him by his nose to save him.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_in_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visoka_oil_field
The relative ease one could tunnel underground these days are bunkers obsolete these days? Could one build a mini underground city that is reinforced with all the amenities
Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant...
I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro).
Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc...
The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania.
Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state.
So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc.
But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans...
Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.
> Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong
I went there about ten years ago, walking across the border on a small road from Macedonia. The Macedonia border office was small but tidy. Then there was a 100m no man's land, then a Welcome to Albania sign that was full of bullet holes, and a table of Albanian border guards drinking and playing cards. Super friendly guys.
We walked about 5km into the local town, passing tons of these bunkers. Nearly every single car and truck that passed us was a Mercedes, except for the police cars which were tiny battered Fiats.
Can confirm the people we met were incredibly friendly, and the place felt very welcoming and nothing happened to make me feel unsafe.
However, I have heard some crazy stories from another friend who travelled there more extensively that make me think, while it's a relatively safe country as a tourist, it won't be uneventful if you stay there a while, especially if you get off the normal tourist track.
Given that most of the stereotypes I'd heard about Albania up to that point were "bunkers, lawlessness, and Mercedes but lovely people", I'd say that it absolutely did live up to these. However, a lot can change in a decade so maybe it's different now. Or maybe we just went to different parts of the country.
To avoid confusion, the Mercedes cars are from 80s or 90s. Not new ones, which are completely unaffordable by most locals.
Not sure what you mean by that, but my last trip was last year, and it was new models also. Mercedes is like the Theme there. Most lovable car in Albania.
Fair enough, I've visited 10 years ago and it was mostly old Mercedes cars. (I was mostly in the countryside)
Albania has an (upper) middle class as well, so surely there are some new ones as well.
My coworkers in the former Yugoslavia countries said they import cars from Germany after TUF denies them. I think they are getter “newer” cars now, newer meaning 10-15 years old.
Tirana is full of coffee shops that are full of groups of 3-4 guys who sit around smoking and drinking coffee all day, eventually leaving in brand new 2024 S-Class Mercedes or range rovers. There are tons of brand new luxury German cars everywhere.
Rightly or wrongly, in the UK Albians have a terrible reputation for organised crime, particularly drugs.[0] How is that perceived in Albania, and is organised crime a big issue in Albania? You make it sound like everybody is very trusting there.
My only direct interactions with Albanians here was a restaurant I used to go to regularly in London which was run by Albanians, who were all lovely and recommended books by Ismail Kadare, particularly The General of the Dead Army, which I thought was wonderful.
[0] Rather like the philosophical game "All crows are black, but not all black birds are crows" I have a feeling this may be due to a majority of illegal drug networks being run by Albanians, even though a large majority of Albians in the UK have no involvement in it.
Most of the leading crime gangs in europe and worldwide are Albanian [0]. They are a global operation thats present in almost every country thats relevant to the drug trade, and thats as a result of their massive diaspora (something like 30%-40% of their whole population has fled albania since the 80s). VICE declared Albania as the first and only european narco-state.[1] I actually have a friend who worked for the UN researching the narco economy in Albania, and the conclusion was that the GDP of the drug trade was half the GDP of the whole country [2]. In 2014 there was an incident where Dutch tourists that were hiking the mountains there accidentally discovered endless cannabis plantations and posted it on YouTube after leaving the country. This prompted wide outrage everywhere in Europe, and hence the Albanian government had to do something to save face, and they burned all the crops there in the region.[3] The thing is, the government and the narcos are all the same. Albania is still the major exporter of cannabis across Europe, and Albania is still the reigning king of drug transport. The Italian mafia is closely associated and probably dwarfed by the Albanian mafia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_mafia
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-inside-story-of-europes-...
[2] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/albania-dr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Lazarat_drug_raid
The gratitude they have towards America is due to the USA declaring war against Yugoslavia and Serbia, and "liberating" Kosovo. Bill Clinton is considered a national hero and even has a monument declared to him, and even boulevards are named after him. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Boulevard#/media/...
What is the general view on Enver Hoxha by today's Albanian population?
My wife is Albanian, I lived there in 2021/2022.
I found that many people think positively of the regime and its dictator. The population was ill-equipped to deal with a market economy when the regime fell, and many Albanians believe the country has gone down a very chaotic path. They thought the dictatorship provided more structure. My grandmother-in-law (in her 60s), whose family suffered greatly when Hoxha took over, is one such Albanian who thinks positively of him, despite how the regime treated them. This feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome.
This mass Stockholm syndrome shit that every post communist country goes through with their hitler-tier leaders is evidence for me that god doesn't exist, and that we deserve the leaders we get.
I swear to god, we could liberate North Korea and they'd turn around and cry about how good it was during the Kim era because apparently we humans are deeply masochistic to our core. We want the boot stomping on our face forever.
That's too bitter. Speaking as a westerner married into an East German family, what people seem to crave more than anything is stability, which the dead hand of The Party delivered. When I talk to them about the comforts and freedoms of their post-1990 life there's a long list of details but behind it there's a ground state of "Ostalgie", gentle yearning for a time when if tomorrow wouldn't bring especial wonders nor would it bring calamity. And crucially this would be true for everyone in your community: with far less latitude for personal decisions of consequence nobody was far ahead or behind.
What people hate is that every such regime that falls is immediately picked clean by western vultures and remainders of old power structures in new coats. If you wanted people to think positively of liberal democracy you'd have the CIA going medieval on all the crooks behind the scenes, not apparently precisely the opposite.
If you liberate DPRK and the South Koreans march in, "legitimately" buy up all the land and property and "fairly" put all the poor inhabitants into functionally perpetual indentured servitude there will eventually be some resentment.
Plus the current state of North Korea owes a lot of its conditions to the Americans. Before someone accuses me of being a Tankie I do think the Kim dynasty is absolutely deranged and I obviously think that the average North Korean would be better off if they were toppled and I am an anarchist not an auth-communist.
But let's not forget that the Americans completely levelled the territory, including destroying dams that provided people's drinking water (a war crime then and now), and then gloated about it, and have then proceeded to consistently act in bad faith.
So when the comment above talks about "liberating" I do wonder exactly what they mean and how it would be different to the first time they tried it and how might the average North Korean react.
Maybe they would install a new dictator more amenable to the "rules-based international order" (i.e. the US and people who agree with them) like they did in South Korea or countless other countries across Latin America.
North Korea was the rich, industrialized half of the country, South Korea was poorer and extensively damaged by the Korean War. The fact that the South is now 10x richer and way better on any measurable metric tells you all you need to know about how well Juche and the Kims are working for the North.
Probably has more to do with sanctions and the US spending shitloads of money to rebuild and trade with only the South.
I've read a few of these sources, it is my understanding that nearly 2/3 of all buildings in
North Korea were destroyed in the Korean War. S3 Sources - Blowback https://search.app/8ZBidRZFnNxnWUcG9
I don't think it's too hard to figure out why the US has worked closely with the South Korean for decades. They're anti Communist.
the same apply to Vietnam and Cambodia. yet those countries are far more functional than DPRK. the extreme and dynastic cult of personality seems unique to the Kim family.
The problem is expectation management. In Eastern Germany and generally Eastern / South Eastern Europe, many envied the West, its lifestyle and wealth.
But once the various dictatorships, be it the USSR, Yugoslavia, Hoxha or whoever, fell... it became clear that it would take a long time until their life materially improved other than not having to be afraid of getting gulaged randomly. Corruption continued to exist on all levels from small (police "roadblocks" with made-up traffic violation tickets) over middle (building permits taking years if not "accelerated" with bakshish) to large (to this day, most government-owned companies are looted by the elites), cost of life expenses for everything not produced domestically can be on par with Western countries... it's not much in visible improvement over the "old days" where you could at least survive as long as you kept your mouth shut.
I was in Tirana last October, he seems to be treated as some kind of whimsical amusement and mascot rather than a historical tyrant. His residence is still intact and visible in the city center and is something of a tourist photo opportunity. AFAIK it's fully closed, but from the top of the rotating restaurant nearby you can see into it.
I am Italian, I know many Albanians and I visited the country too. As far as I know there is still somebody that feel nostalgia about the dictator, but 90% of the people are really happy about the democracy and they want to join the UE. Just to give an anedoct: in front of Berat there is a mountain where Oxha wrote with trees his name Enver. After the end of communism, they changed in Never.
> Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because…
Albanians gratitude to the USA continues beyond Woodrow Wilson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Boulevard
I'm visiting Tirana in March. Any must-see suggestions?
What was your favorite Albanian dish?
Drive down to Lili’s restaurant in Berat and order everything on the menu (it’s small), and visit the castle while you’re there. It’s well worth it. You will need to make a reservation. It’s probably the most unique dining experience I’ve ever had, and the food was exceptional.
You can visit Bunk’Art in Tirana and then take the cable car up the mountain afterwards.
Lamar Tirana had some incredible sea bass.
Odas Garden is frequently recommended for local food to tourists but I found it to be overpriced and the dishes were way overcooked, but YMMV. The atmosphere is pretty unique. There are far better small time restaurants around for local cuisine (can’t remember the names).
My fav dish was Lakror, but it can be hit or miss in Tirana.
Do the free walking tour in the main square / Skanderbeg square.
There are bakeries everywhere, getting up early and walking down to the nearest bakery and getting fresh coffee and a pastry / burek and walking a bit in the sun is such a good way to start the day.
And I second the suggestion to go to Himare, we went via Vlore along the coast and down to Himare. They’ve built a new tunnel, I highly recommend avoiding it (I've heard it's closed now for final works anyway) and going over the mountain, there’s an amazing view point next to Mt Cika.
Get up to Montenegro if you can if you love scenic drives.
Tirana is nice, I suggest to go around for the Blocku (the neighborhood that during the communism was only for the nomenclature) it's really cozy. Just outside Tirana there is an area with several artificial lakes, you should go there for a relaxing day. If you have more time, I suggest to visit Girokaster: it's a castle city 2 hours far from Tirana, where Enver Oxha was born.
For food I really suggested a restaurant called Oda, not far from Skanderberg square in Tirana: it's a traditional Albanian house where you can taste all the Albanian dishes.
Go to Berat, then Himare, and drive along the green coast. Incredible drive. There’s also a nice ancient castle by Vlore with a great view.
Now they’re building hundreds of gas stations every 100 meters. Gas stations with very unique architecture.
I wonder if economists regard this as a sign of a bad economy. Some years ago lowland Tajikistan (a country where the economy is weak outside of remittances from gastarbeiter in Russia) saw a sudden wave of building petrol stations one after the other to the point of absurdity. A great many of them then went bust.
Lol I don't think there are that many, which area? But gas stations can be like normal businesses there and often have restaurants and sometimes even hotels. I accidentally stayed at a gas station hotel once by the airport, when my go to hotel was full and I didn't know and booked online, and only when I arrived did I realize it was a gas station.
Exactly. I've spend a day in Albania, from Shkodër to ferry terminal in Durrës. Haven't seen a bunker, but easily saw 100s of gas stations. Almost none of them accept card, unfortunately.
My dad was a military analyst in the Balkans in the 90s. I am telling this story second-hand, but I'll try to get it correct. While in Albania, my dad shared a taxi with an older Albania gentleman. The man recounted his time working in the Albanian military in the 60s. His platoon had constructed a large number of bunkers, more than any other platoon. The dictator Enver Hoxha was slated to visit, to give them an award for building the most bunkers in the whole country. When Enver arrived, he walked around, and looked at a bunch of the bunkers they had constructed. He pointed at the bunkers. "Look! You have not used enough rebar! Obviously, you are trying to jeopardize the security of our nation, by neglecting to use enough rebar! You are traitors to Albania!" He swiftly sentenced the entire platoon of young men straight to 30 years in prison, which they approximately served. This man, after serving this time, had just gotten freed from jail. The taxi was transporting him from the halfway house.
A father of a guy that I know was an engineer and he was part of the team that designed the highway between Tirana and Valona. Enver decided to arrest all of them because they were conspiring against the state and the highway was just a landing area for US airplanes to invade the country. He was really paranoid about this stuff
He seems more like a moron.
Good thing people are no longer electing such people to high office.
Trump is very stupid be he hasn't (so far) sentenced anyone to 30 years in prison for not using enough rebar.
[flagged]
for not invading Albania or what?
for electing another moron president... twice!
At one point, every third Albanian had either been interrogated by the Sigurimi or they had been incarcerated in labour camps, around 25k murdered [1]
Albania was even within eastern communist block considered utter shithole run by mad paranoid guy. Well, he certainly was.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha#Political_repressi...
Exactly. You can be interrogated by police and detained only to have watched Italian TV or listen Italian radio broadcasts. Anyway, this was a very common behaviour in Albania and it's the reason why most Albanians speaks Italian very well and know a lot about italian culture.
> Albania was even within eastern communist block considered utter shithole run by mad paranoid guy.
I may be wrong, but just across the northern border of Albania, things may have already been very different. Every time I visit a country of the former Yugoslavia, I get the feeling that Josip Broz Tito (the de-facto dictator of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1980) is still respected, even idolized by some. As a German, this always surprises me, because the leader(s) of Eastern Germany (Ulbricht and Honecker) are today mostly ridiculed as bureaucrats without a trace of charisma. Tito certainly was an interesting character, and was the only leader of the communist block to challenge the leadership of Stalin. Again, I really have no first-hand experience and may be wrong, but my parents regularly traveled through Yugoslavia (mostly through today's Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro) in the 70ies and 80ies. They mostly stayed in cheap private holiday apartments, often eating dinner / breakfast with the owner families, and didn't get the impression that this was a particularly bad place to live in. AFAIK, it was also pretty straightforward for citizens of the former Yugoslavia to leave the country / travel to the West (at least this was explained to us by an older woman in Croatia who had traveled through France as a student in the 70ies to learn the language).
Things weren’t set in stone - Yugoslavia in the 1950s (agrarian reforms, Goli Otok, and similar events) was quite different from the Yugoslavia of the 1980s. In the 1950s, many people escaped to Italy in small boats on stormy nights. Ten to fifteen years later, a significant number of people emigrated legally to Germany as unemployment was high, and the state realized it was better to receive hard currency from gastarbeiters than to deal with their discontent at home.
And Tito was no ordinary dictator, it would be interesting to see how he would navigate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West. That, combined with Yugoslavia’s brief economic prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, is why Yugoslavs were one of the European nationalities embarking on the Istanbul–Kathmandu trail, and in discovering Bali as a mass-tourist destination alongside Germans and Nordics.
That everything went to shit around the time that Tito declined and died (though correlation is not necessarily causation), does much to explain the nostalgia that you will still occasionally meet. However, that nostalgia has been challenged in recent decades through the wars and their aftermath. Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar nationalism regard, for different reasons, Tito’s pan-Yugoslav project as inimical to their respective national interests, and nationalist rhetoric has a firm grip on many sectors of local media.
>The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West.
Why does “A Guide to the Serbian Mentality by Momo Kapor” say that they were not permitted to travel internationally?
That is correct. Tito is very loved and respected even now, and not just by older generations but rather pretty much even younger folks think he was a great guy. He's considered great because he managed to unify the whole balkan slavic block (despite religious differences), and there were even talks to bring Bulgaria into Yugoslavia, however Stalin objected and that never happened. People love him because he wasnt a shitty dictator, he didnt abuse his power, and he fought off both the nazis and the fascists. After Tito died, Yugoslavia went on a downfall, both economically and socially. There was also ofcourse a lot of foreign meddling.
They were different. My parents (form former soviet commie bloc) tried in vain to get approval from secret service to travel to Yugoslavia, you literally had to have special stamp in the passport on the border or ciao or worse.
Traveling of whole family with small child was seemed risky due to possibility of family escaping to the west. Heck, we couldn't travel easily even within bloc itself.
I’ve heard this all too. My father grew up and lived in the former Yugoslavia. He’s since spoken about how well regarded Tito was and the opinion many had that he played a big hand in keeping Yugoslavia united whilst he was alive. He’s also talked about how Yugoslavia was sort of a buffer zone between the east and west and so a lot of freedoms were available to citizens there that weren’t in the full on communist countries. E.g when he was younger he did some work trips to Germany and on top of earning deutschmarks had a side hustle smuggling back jeans and records to sell.
Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.
> Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.
My best friend for a while in elementary school was a girl from an Albanian refugee family. Even she, an eight-year old, had only scary things to tell about Albania, mostly told to her by her parents and grandparents I guess.
We used to live next to a tank division base in USSR. Once a conscript soldier was assigned with maintenance work on a tank. Trying to be helpful he attempted to remove laser rangefinder while the officer was away. But it being a two-person job he inevitably dropped and damaged it. He was court-martialed, got three years of prison and had the cost of the instrument withheld from his future income. The rangefinder cost was about 24000 rubles while the average Soviet monthly salary was ~160 at the time.
Now this was not Balkans but it is always startling how fundamentally inhumane and atomized all Communist societies are, in very much the same way. Am convinced one could transplant a Cuban to Romania or a Bulgarian to North Korea and save for the language and cuisine they'd instinctively know how the things work. How you should get hold of your groceries, when it's a good idea to bribe, who is important in informal way, what you shouldn't say and just how much effort you should put into your work. This was truly global, Borg-like culture like nothing before.
And yet to this day we have many Westerners who idealise communism :|
That is wild. Enver was a piece of work for sure.
So was everyone who followed his directives...
That's simply not true. That example should tell you that, if anything, a good part of their motivation was a healthy sense of self preservation. This is by the way what we're literally seeing play out in the US right now. Tim Cook, Zuck, all the other rich guys chipped in for the inauguration to signal their deference. Because they know Trump and Musk would remember if they didn't.
If you're interested in why this happens, try reading some of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If the choice is comply or die, fine upstanding morals don't really come into play except in very rare cases. And even then, what good does getting shot for a minor detail do in the grand scheme of things? You're not going to spur a revolution to overthrow a dictator because you were shot for not following an order to the letter in a Siberian concentration camp.
Vaclav Havel has a few things to say about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
I haven't read that, but I imagine I'd agree with most of it having read the precis. My beef was really with the idea that everyone who follows orders in that kind of a system is a "piece of work". I think that's holding everyone to an incredible high - and unrealistic - standard.
I have read it, and much more.
That's why I wrote what I did: passive acceptance of a Führer's insanity leads to the kind of Stalinist nightmare that the Soviets experienced last century. (Yeah, I'm blending dictators: this scenario seems to be common to them all, throughout history.)
Such behavior needs to be put down immediately, with a bullet to the head. I guarantee those soldiers were better armed than that POS dictator.
Do I sound angry? Why, yes, I am. We need more individuals, not slaves.
Interesting that you'd read that and much more (like me) and had a very different reaction. I came out of it feeling understanding for people caught up in such a cruel system. To be clear, not the stoolies or collaborators, but the vast majority of people who were swept up in a system that they had no control over. I just think it's human nature. Slightly hand-wavy figures here, but I feel like you have 10% of people who are bullies and will absolutely buy into the system, 10% of people who are brave and will try to fight somehow, and 80% of people who aren't either. And as much as I'd like to think you could tip the balance significantly in favour of the brave, I just don't think that's human nature, so I don't really feel like I can blame those people for just wanting to keep their heads down and survive. If you don't have it in you, you don't have it in you. My reading also taught me that when push comes to shove, many people aren't nearly as brave as they think they are. The Gulag Archipelago in particular was instructive about what happens to people when they're starved and worked to the bone. Any notion of humanity goes out of the window, and it's the airy-fairy "we should all share" people who die almost immediately.
Coincidentally, a comment from a Ukrainian woman in Odesa, just yesterday:
"I remember in the 11th grade during an English lesson, we discussed how Freud’s student saved him and literally bought him out from the Nazis. At that time, my teacher (she was a child of the war) said one strange phrase: “War divides people into humans and non-humans.” Thirty years later, I can say how right you were." (https://x.com/tatyanaodesssa/status/1880920634978386335)
In a communist country, never under any circumstances should you stand out. There are no rewards, only punishments.
In any kind of authoritarian country, sadly this is coming back all over the place as fashion, in many countries where many folks voting are still old enough to remember how it used to be, unfortunately a minority.
I say this as first child out of revolution days that ended a dictorship, and sees the rise of such parties.
I'm sorry, the tone of your comment makes it sound like it comes from a place of personal knowledge. Can you elaborate?
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” - Beria
If you get noticed the future might not turn out well for you.
I'm from a former European communist country.
This is the most terrifying part about China: they’re competent Communists. Until now, these authoritarian states have always ruined their best. The communists of old could never abide the exceptional[0]. Nowadays they’ve integrated the lessons of the West’s market economy.
0: the other side of the Kolmogorov option is that you want your geniuses silent
Thats the story they tell the world. They are just as inept, just as incompetent, but they had a free market engine that would pedal on, not because they enabled them but not handicapped them enough. Its more a incredible powerful horse (the Chinese people) saddled with a impossible useless drunk( the party) winning the race so far, while the drunk in the saddle brags loudly about what that horse can do. And now he decided to trade the horse in for booze.
Economists say China needs to move to a consumer economy. The export model has run out of steam. But turning to a consumer economy is diametrically opposed to the communist party. Just like the soviets, their model works for a while but the inability to switch gears or relinquish any amount of control will be their doom.
Doom in which way? Russia is not going anywhere, population is in complete acceptance of current state (despite everybody complaining, but thats nothing new). Chinese seem the same, don't take some isolated protests from time to time in 1.5 billion population as sign of things breaking apart. They will be probably fine, whether we like it or not.
You are equating the soviet union with Russia. Their economic model was quite different and caused mass famines and eventual collapse.
As for going away, the demographic picture for both countries is horrific. China is in a recession and the one thing they need to do is the one thing Xi is diametrically opposed to and he calls all the shots.
Xi has been publicly touting how China needs to convert to more of a consumer economy for its next phase of development.
https://www.chinabankingnews.com/p/xi-wants-to-create-a-nati...
This article just says what some economist thinks should happen. Not what Xi plans to do.
> The Central Economic Work Conference held in December called for “vigorously spurring consumption,” to deal with weak domestic demand and over reliance on exports.
The Central Economic Work Conference is a CCP event where they announce the current direction of the Chinese economy for the year, and is headed by Xi.
Yes but the entire content of the article was taken from what that economist thinks should happen. Not what the actual plans are. The communist party has done no course correction at all so far and the actual decision what to do can only come from Xi.
Because the party is actually only reacting way to late to events. Want to know how they plan economically in reality? Look at the botched covid pandemic- that was a pulse (the pandemic) and the party reacting to it. Now you know about capabilities and reaction speeds of the CCP in the most dire of emergencies.
The statements at the CEWC are endorsements from Xi. He literally talked about boosting consumption at his keynote there.
And that's a key piece of the current 5 year plan. The CCP is actively executing on converting the Chinese economy to more of a consumption based economy.
Talk is cheap. China shifting their economic model would be a geopolitical event of the decade. Nothing other than talk has happened.
What would be evidence for you?
Sovjet union was a donut empire- all value generated was produced in the ring around the empire core and then exported to russia.
There were no famines in the USSR from 1947 to 1991.
Frankly, looking at pictures and videos from China, it looks nothing like the Soviet Union- it looks modern, rich, technologically advanced, full of people looking and acting like westerners. They might need to expand their internal markets and consume more, but any comparison with soviet Russia is absurd.
Classic westerners mistake. Thinking economic development means adoption of western values and rationality. Ignoring the parallels with the soviet union is ignorance. Xi has publicly said the collapse of the soviet union is the biggest tragedy of the 20th century. Xi has studied the soviet union extensively and thinks the state must never relinquish any control whatsoever to avoid their fate.
So, the most terrifying part about China is that it's not really that terrifying.
Authoritarians are always terrifying to me. But I understand if those less likely to fall afoul are unafraid.
Isn't China "state capitalism"? There is no "self governance of workers" in China.
AFAIK we aren't sure what is going on in China. If anyone is wandering HN with a sourced rundown of how their system is structured I haven't seen it. Given how critical China is to the global economy and political situation it seems a bit weird how little information seems to leak out into the general discussion.
> This is the most terrifying part about China: they’re competent Communists.
What year are you living in!
China hasn't been a communist state since before I grew pubes.
They are an authoritarian state certainly; one that encourages capitalism to grow its economy.
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Since we're at it, I read a theory that Albanians may be the descendants of Dacians, from the Roman province: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dacia
Their language is unique in Europe and probably originates in the Thrakian, Illyrian, and Dacian languages. With the important mention that one must not apply today's assumptions of a unified language when referring to something as "Dacian", think more of a situation like in today's Dagestan, where on a surface of 50,000 square kilometers, 3 million people speak no less than 40 languages.
The theory is that during the Roman retreat from Dacia, the population (estimated to as low as 100,000 and as high of 500,000 people, so not exactly a Biblical exodus), migrated to south of Danube and eventually today's location. The toponymy is strangely Albanian, like even the name of the Romanian capital "Bucharest" means "beautiful is" in Albanian.
Your post is sadly an example of the pop-sci history that circulates in Romania,* and it is out of sync with the considerable advances made in Albanian historical linguistics in recent decades. The evidence is overwhelming that Albanian originates from the Central Balkans. While Albanian does show signs of belonging to a Balkan Indo-European subgroup deep in prehistory, it is not closely related to Thracian – Matzinger’s 2012 paper “Zur herkunft des Albanischen: Argumente gegen die thrakische Hypothese” in the Ismajli Festschrift conveniently sets out why.
While Romanian bucur ‘happy’ and Albanian bukur ‘beautiful’ are indeed regarded as shared lexicon of disputed etymology, București (Bucharest) does not mean ‘beautiful is’ in Albanian: -ești is a common toponym-forming suffix in Romanian. It’s certainly not related to the Albanian copula, which is âshtë with a nasal vowel both historically and in many dialects still today (standard Albanian është is based on the Tosk variety that lost nasal vowels a few centuries ago).
* (For HN readers unaware of Balkan quarrels, a cornerstone of Romanian nationalism is the idea that the Romanians are descendants of a Romanized population in Dacia who remained behind when the province was lost to the Roman Empire. This would, crucially, allow the Romanians to have been in Transylvania before the Hungarians, longtime rivals for that land, arrived in 896 CE. That Romanian and Albanian share lexical material from the early first millennium is awkward for that view – many linguists internationally have concluded that the Romanian language was brought to modern day Romania from somewhere across the Danube. Romanian pop-sci, in order to save the Dacian continuity theory, therefore occasionally makes the claim that the Albanians came from the territory of Romania, or that the Albanian and Dacian languages were related.)
> many linguists internationally have concluded that
That's some weaselly wording conflating "opinion" and "proof".
Legends. Not true. I was there, I heard the language, I spoke in Romanian to my Albanian colleagues and they spoke Albanian to me, I did not understand anything even if the sounding is quite similar. I was in a restaurant in Tirana with colleagues and I had the impression that I am in Bucharest based on the noise around me, but I was not able to understand the words. That's all the similarity.
There are some words that are the same in Albanian and Romanian, but very few. The languages are very different, Romanian is mostly based on Latin with Turkish, Slavonic and Polish influences (some Ukrainian also in Bucovina), the Dacian part is really small and the Albanian seems to be based on Illyrian dialects.
Unique how? It's an Indo-European language, like many of the other languages spoken in Europe. There is also a proposal that Albanian is closely related to Greek and Armenian.
Albanian is unique because its the only surviving branch of a particular branch of proto-Indo-European languages .
This is a pretty good explanation
http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html
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I’m surprised at the length of this gag, drawing on what seemed to me to be a particularly robust Wikipedia entry. Is the point that the article strikes you as juvenile, or that you feel like it unfairly makes touristic spectacle of something more complex than the treatment here reflects?
And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM? I’m curious because of the earnestly, completeness, and the slight flavor of “how do you do, fellow kids” in lines like “Talk about a plot twist!”
> And without intending offense—is this a work of LLM?
I suspect so, as ChatGPT generates a fairly similar output[1] from the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania". As an example (this was part of the first output it produced):
OP: "Jake: So get this - there was this leader named Enver Hoxha who was super paranoid about getting invaded. We're talking an average of almost 6 bunkers per square kilometer. They're literally everywhere - beaches, mountains, cities, even in hotel gardens!"
ChatGPT: "Jake: Okay, so get this: back in the Cold War, Albania’s leader, this guy Enver Hoxha, went totally paranoid. He thought everyone was gonna invade—like, NATO, the Soviets, literally everyone.
I retried the prompt twice - the first time[2], "so get this" was used again, and the second time[3] used the name "Jake" again. Hardly proof of LLM use, but it'd be a weird coincidence if not IMO.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcdaa-bda4-8011-a3a9-a5d03e7c9d...
[2] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcf87-869c-8011-8727-8e370bde6f...
[3] https://chatgpt.com/share/678dcfd5-f87c-8011-b1ff-dca4dfd5eb...
I started reading the wikipedia article and just couldn't get into it. It all read like blah blah blah to me but why was it on the HN homepage? There must be something interesting about it. I've used the prompt "put this into dialog form between two American 20 year olds" many times. The output I was able to read no problem and actually enjoyed it. Any sort of dry text this works wonders for my brain being able to comprehend it. But judging by the downvotes I'm guessing this is just me!
It was https://claude.ai pro plan.
See, now that seems like a pretty cool use case, I’m glad to hear this technique is serving you well! I guess it’s cases like these—where I’d be inclined to do the reverse, taking “20-year-old dialog” and asking Claude to give it to me straight—where the promise of LLM personalization shines…
I suspect the downvotes have less to do with your good intentions here, and more a mix of confusion over the context and HN’s hostility toward LLM content (which tends to have a low effort-to-quantity ratio).
Personally, I probably would have reacted more positively if you’d introduced your original comment with this explanation (although I’d suggest just leaving a link to the LLM conversation rather than pasting the whole thing).
Thank you for engaging on it!
But yeah, to me the LLM version strips out the most entertaining part: the pictures of these crazy things! Who but an autocrat could look at those and think “good idea”…
I thought the article was entertaining because of how absurd and obviously bad the idea of constructing the bunkers was.