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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Albania's Long TIme Boss Tells All" (or almost all),
By Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha (Paperback)
Enver Hoxha was never a hero of mine. For most of my life I've been fascinated by Albania, its culture, history, music, and literature, but thanks to him I could only visit the country of my fascination in 1996. I found it in sorry shape, again thanks to this son of a landowning family who returned from studying in France and Belgium to be a teacher and subsequently to lead the Communist Partisans against the fascist invaders during World War II. Hoxha prepared for his takeover by fighting with the non-Communist Albanian resistance just as often as with the Italians and Germans. Remaining in power from 1944 to his death in 1985, this Balkan despot eventually quarreled with every power that aided him---Yugoslavia, the USSR, and China---and became ever more paranoid, never leaving Albania for the last 25 years of his life. It is not too much to say that Hoxha and his policies utterly ruined Albania, even if he kept it from being swallowed by greedy neighbors. He murdered, imprisoned, terrified, and kept ignorant an entire people. Seven years after his death, the whole country lay destitute, destroyed, desperate. Albania has had to begin from scratch. What has such a man got to say for himself ?THE ARTFUL ALBANIAN is an edited version of the many volumes-long memoirs of Enver Hoxha. Of course, it is possible that what Jon Halliday has not put into the present volume is as revealing as what he has. I rather doubt it though. Whatever the case, he has certainly gathered a number of interesting sections, connected by intelligent commentary. I found the book fascinating for what it revealed about this dictator of a `people's democracy" which, in the end, did not rise far above the Balkan dictatorships of the past. Hoxha emerges as more intelligent and discerning than many world leaders, certainly more than most leaders produced by the Communist "bloc" after World War II. He is at is best in criticizing the vainglorious amassing of the trappings of power of other leaders, in divulging the hypocrisies of the worker states. No word about his own foibles of course. There are a large number of interesting conversations between Eastern bloc leaders complete with open threats and farting dogs, and the intricacies of his relationship with China. Hoxha was a man who can casually speak of "liquidation" of a man or a class without the slightest qualm. In the end he killed his closest ally, Mehmet Shehu, and denounced him as a Western agent. Hoxha's last words in the book are "..the walls of our fortress are of unshakeable granite rock." The pitiful, crumbling concrete pillboxes that dot Albania today, around half a million of them, give a more accurate picture of Hoxha's achievement. If you are interested in knowing something about Hoxha, about his view of what he did and whom he met, and if you don't mind a fair bit of the old "party line" along the way, (from the horse's mouth) then by all means read this book. For anyone who wants to know what crushed Albania, why it's in the mess that it's in, this book is a good place to start.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha (Paperback)
Jon Halliday did the world an enormous service when he edited and published these excerpts from the 1939 to 1977 journals of the Albanian's Stalinist strongman Enver Hoxha. They provide a window into the mind of a tyrant who at first befriended Stalin, and later disavowed him, despised Khrushchev, and then cozied up to and finally broke with China.
Albania was nearly 73% Muslim upon its liberation from the Nazis in 1944, 17% Greek Orthodox, and over 10% Catholic. And while the Islam practiced there was "unusually weak," it was "nonetheless associated with the Ottoman occupation." But in the north at least, Albania's Muslims cooperated with the Nazis during the war, and endorsed their genocidal plans for Europe's Jewish people. Not surprisingly, all the communist leaders were of Islamic heritage. But Hoxha (pronounced hoja) also despised Islam. In 1955, he told the Fourth Congress of the Women's Union that "the canons of the Sheriat [shari'a]...closely linked with the laws of the bourgeoisie, treated woman as a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold by the male." Further more, he said "the savage ancient canons of the Sheriat...reduced woman to the proletariat of the man." One trouble, as Halliday points out, is that Hoxja does not write much about he "erradicated" Islam, and since this book came out in 1988, history has shown that the claim was entirely false. Albania has proven to be a hotbed of fundamentalism in Islamic belief since the 1990s, and there is no doubt that Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, who called for a global Islamic caliphate in his 1991 Islamic Declaration and other writings played a big hand in that. Obviously, though, Albanians' Muslim beliefs were not as "unusually weak" as Hoxha suggested here. Another difficulty is that Hoxha relied too much on his faulty memory, and the book is filled with propaganda. Nevertheless, it's a very interesting read.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
Jon Halliday did the world an enormous service when he edited and published these excerpts from the 1939 to 1977 journals of the Albanian's Stalinist strongman Enver Hoxha. They provide a window into the mind of a tyrant who at first befriended Stalin, and later disavowed him, despised Khrushchev, and then cozied up to and finally broke with China.
Albania was nearly 73% Muslim upon its liberation from the Nazis in 1944, 17% Greek Orthodox, and over 10% Catholic. And while the Islam practiced there was "unusually weak," it was "nonetheless associated with the Ottoman occupation." But in the north at least, Albania's Muslims cooperated with the Nazis during the war, and endorsed their genocidal plans for Europe's Jewish people. Not surprisingly, all the communist leaders were of Islamic heritage. But Hoxha (pronounced hoja) also despised Islam. In 1955, he told the Fourth Congress of the Women's Union that "the canons of the Sheriat [shari'a]...closely linked with the laws of the bourgeoisie, treated woman as a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold by the male." Further more, he said "the savage ancient canons of the Sheriat...reduced woman to the proletariat of the man." One trouble, as Halliday points out, is that Hoxja does not write much about he "erradicated" Islam, and since this book came out in 1988, history has shown that the claim was entirely false. Albania has proven to be a hotbed of fundamentalism in Islamic belief since the 1990s, and there is no doubt that Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, who called for a global Islamic caliphate in his 1991 Islamic Declaration and other writings played a big hand in that. Obviously, though, Albanians' Muslim beliefs were not as "unusually weak"as Hoxha thought. Another difficulty is that Hoxha relied too much on his faulty memory, and the book is filled with propaganda. Nevertheless, it's a very interesting read.
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