It’s actually Albania.
Life is better in a third world “shit hole” than in the fabled land of the free and home of the brave… -stevennonemaker88
I argue that America has become a totalitarian, oligarchy-run, military empire, that pretends to be a “democracy”.
Meanwhile, China has become a traditionalist, merit-driven, single-party, socialist republic.
Both nations have their benefits and liabilities. But the bottom line is always a simple one. How “free” do the people feel who live inside these nations?
Let’s look at the often overlooked nation of Albania, and see what kinds of “freedoms” that they enjoy.
Where it is located…
What it’s geography is like…
Here's a reprint of an article from UNZ, it's titled "The Freest and Most Open Country". It's written by Linh Dinh • April 28, 2021. All credit to the author, and please note that it was formatted to fit this venue.
The Freest and Most Open Country
People don’t have to pay extortionate taxes, or interest rates, to cater for their basic needs such as housing, farmland ownership, education or health. People earn little, but their relative purchasing power is higher and their lives certainly more secure and pleasant than ours in the West. -Iris
Is Albania, believe it or not, for here, you can walk around, sit inside cafes, bars or restaurants, worship at a packed church or mosque, and travel by crowded buses between cities, etc.
Though you’re supposed to wear a mask in public, most folks do so with their nose sticking out, because it’s hard to breathe otherwise, and unhealthy, too. That’s good enough for the easy-going cops.
All these people can enter Albania without a visa, vaccine passport or even a negative Covid test, and stay up to a year: European Union citizens, North Americans, most South and Central Americans, Turks, Kuwaitis, Israelis, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, South Koreans, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Australians and New Zealanders, plus a few more.
After decades of Communist isolation, Albanians are happy to reclaim their Western heritage. A bookcase is painted on a downtown high-rise. Among the authors featured are Homer, Aeschylus, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Twains, Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Kafka and the Brothers Grim. Albanian giants such as Kadare, Agolli, Fishta, Arapi and Poradeci are also honored. Unlike elsewhere, the Western canon is not assailed or canceled, but upheld and extolled.
Sidewalk book vendors are common, so Albanians are obviously reading, and not just junk either. I’ve seen volumes by Camus, Dostoevsky, Orwell and Hitler, etc. Albanian minds can still stay open.
In an old man’s bar with plenty of character, there are five wine bottles with labels showing a portrait of Mussolini, JFK, Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. Sharing the same shelf are skull and penis shaped liquor containers, and a laughing buddha.
In a more Jew-screwed nation, this goofy display would undoubtedly trigger complaints, protests and maybe even a riot that burns up half the street, if not much of downtown. Luckily, I’m in Albania.
There’s a Frederic Chopin monument here. Born in Poland, Chopin spent nearly all of his adulthood in France, and had nothing to do with Albania. As an important cultural figure, however, and not just in the West, but globally, why shouldn’t Chopin be celebrated in Tirana?
Those who reject even the best of their heritage are lobotomizing themselves. Go for it!
In my building, I’m friendly with a man roughly my age. Introducing himself, he said, “Just remember me as the guy with the hat,” and sure enough, he always wears the same baseball cap.
Like many Albanians, he has emigrated, but returned after only a few years in Greece. Vaguely dreaming of America, he entered the immigration lottery, and actually won, but by then, he has changed his mind.
“I have a cousin in Illinois,” he said. “He told me Albania is better.”
“I agree,” I laughed.
“Really? I should tell people you said that.”
“In every American city, there are homeless people all over. If you go to San Francisco, for example, you’ll see homeless people all around City Hall, right in the center! Many of them have gone crazy. Many are on drugs. They shit in the streets!”
“Hmmm.”
“There are almost no homeless in Tirana.”
“We have family. We take care of each other.”
“There are beggars here, but not too many.”
“Most of them are Gypsies.”
“Is your cousin in Chicago?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe just Illinois. Every year, he comes to Albania and stays for six months. He wants to retire here.”
“Does he have children?”
“Three. Two boys, one girl. They are big.”
“Have they been back here?”
“No, they work, all the time. They have good jobs, but they can’t get married,” he chuckled.
Near us, there were half a dozen boys playing. Hearing English, they decided to join in, but their vocabulary was limited to just “hello!” and “hi!”
Walking down a side street, I heard “hello” repeatedly, but there was no one in front or behind me. Perplexed, I finally looked up to see two small boys inside a sixth-floor window. “Hello! Hello!” I returned their greetings, waves and smiles.
My North Macedonian friend, Alex, has a peculiar habit. As we wandered through the back streets of rarely visited towns like Veles and Shtip, little kids would sometimes get very excited to see me, so Alex had to answer their questions. When they asked Alex where he was from, however, he’d also say, “Америка!”
“Why did you say that?” I asked.
“It’s more exciting for them! If I told them I was North Macedonian, they’d think, Who cares? Now, they can go home and brag about seeing two Americans today!”
Though Albania is wide open, there are very few tourists here. In 2 ½ months, I’ve only seen eight Orientals on the streets, plus two Chinese cooks inside restaurants. I’ve chanced upon American English maybe ten times, but Italian just twice. Once, I ran into a group of Turks. I’ve never gone this long without seeing a single black.
It has been raining too much, but with more reliable sunshine, visitors will come. Ali, a taxi driver, certainly hopes so.
Impulsively one morning, I paid Ali $24 to take me to Durres, 24 miles away. It’s a pretty good deal, and Ali could surely use my business. Too often, I see him just standing around near the Swiss Embassy, his usual spot. This also gave us a chance to chatter.
Like the man with the hat, Ali has also gone abroad. He spent six years in Australia.
“Wow! How did you get a visa for that?”
“I paid,” meaning to the right people.
After sweating his ass off at various menial jobs, and saving almost nothing, Ali returned to Tirana, his hometown.
Here, Ali got a job driving trucks, then buses, before becoming a cabbie 15 years ago. Until the Covid mess, everything was going fine.
Ali also got married then, so his son is almost 14, and his daughter, 10. He showed me their photos.
“Nice kids! Are they good students?”
“No,” Ali laughed.
As his name indicates, Ali is Muslim, but only nominally.
“It’s Ramadan,” I noted, “but all the restaurants are busy. Nobody is fasting!”
“Some people are. My kids are fasting. I’m not.”
“They’re better Muslims than you are!”
Ali just shrugged.
After the collapse of Communism in 1991, thousands of Albanian boat people fled to Italy from Durres. This ugly, chaotic exodus lasted until the end of that decade.
Now, Durres is a very pleasant city with an elegant seaside promenade. Before Covid, ferries departed often for Bari, Ancona and even Trieste (where James Joyce spent nearly a decade). Soon, buses will resume their daily routes to Athens.
Basking in sea breeze-tempered sunshine, I watched parents pushing strollers, a stern boy bouncing a ball and three tots on swings. Busking, a beer bellied, middle-aged man tooted his clarinet. A stand briskly sold “Petulla te Gjyshi” [“Grandpa’s Fried Dough”].
As you’re tucked into your novel nightmare, Albanians have quite impressively exited theirs. How bad was it?
An escapee risked being shot or jailed for years, and if he manages to get out, a family member would be arrested instead. For trying to flee, poet Uran Kostreci was locked up for two decades.
Just getting into Albania was very difficult. Defining the border as “a checkpoint against foreign ideology,” Enver Hoxha declared that “The People’s Republic of Albania is closed to enemies, spies, hippie tourists and other vagabonds.”
First of, Albania was not a republic, much less a “people’s republic,” and there’s no ideology more foreign to Albania than Jewish Marxism, in any permutation. A fanatical us-against-them mindset is the Jewish core. A dictator, Hoxha ruled Albania for 40 years, until his death.
Of the hundreds of Hoxha statues that once dotted this poor land, only one remains that’s not damaged. A ten-foot bronze, it lies in the basement of the former museum in Labinot, a Communist stronghold.
In 1975, the Albanian government posted this guideline:
- The border authorities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs do not allow the entrance into the People’s Republic of Albania of all those foreigners who, with their appearance go against the norms of the socialist aesthetics, such as men with long hair like women, with exaggerated sideburns, with irregular beards and with inappropriate clothing, and women with mini and maxi skirts.
- Persons with extravagant clothing and irregular appearance […] may enter into the People’s Republic of Albania only if they choose to be adjusted (to cut their hair, to dress normally) […]
To facilitate such adjustments, a barbershop and a store with socialist-approved clothing were available at Albanian borders.
Even eight years ago, Albania was still a wreck, apparently, at least according to an unsolicited account I just received.
Reading about me being sick in Tirana, a reader emailed to say that he had come here in 2013, to be somewhere “as ugly as [he] felt”!
An American living in France, he had spent a year in “herpes hell,” which he had gotten from “an attractive empty vessel who worked in the Paris fashion scene.”
Bald, loveless, with “a ruined penis” and nearly broke, he thought about killing himself, then “had a better idea”:
I would identify the most miserable country on Earth and I would go there. Anything but suicide. I wanted to be somewhere as ugly as I felt. I wanted to see bleak, closed, hard faces. I wanted to see mute wifebeaters and battered women caked in whore makeup. So I went to Albania. I wandered around Tirana with sores on my dick for a few days, considering suicide. One day I found this weird field next to the train station, just a big garbage-strewn negative space at the heart of the city. There were fetid ponds, plastic bags everywhere, and little paths through the half-dead grass. An old Balkan crone squatted next to one of the paths with a few carrots and onions spread out on a scarf in front of her. Men in tracksuits with brutal pimp faces came and went. I went to the center of the field, squatted down, and dug through the trash a little. I found a broken teacup, an old domino, and a playing card. It was Christmas Day. I felt like I was at the negative center of the universe. Here I was, at ground zero of our ruined Jew world with pus coming out of sores on my dick surrounded by the most ugly and corrupted goyim on Earth, the despised and despicable Albanian race.
That’s some beautiful writing about an ugly situation. Today’s Tirana, though, is nothing like that.
Though many of the buildings are drab, each Tirana street is lively with cafes, bars, restaurants and shops, and the people are very pleasant, mellow and lovely.
Most are slim and not misshapen. Children are well behaved and not agitated. Young men don’t sneer or bluster. Many women are confidently beautiful. The old are dignified.
Though Albania is one of Europe’s poorest countries, with an extremely high emigration rate, its social fabric is more intact than in more advanced nations. Its great men are justly revered. It’s also freer and more open, and as safe as any, with no mugging or riot around any corner.
Unlike in Philadelphia, I don’t wake up each morning to news of another murder or two. There were 499 in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020!
The United States will never catch up to Albania.
This is most interesting. Albania always seemed like a pit of drabness, repression, and despair during the Cold War. Not that I actually read anything about it, of course. Now here it is quite relaxed about life while the US slips ever deeper into unreason, minority hatred of whites, wars that are beyond stupid, open borders, multicultural delusion, corrupt courts, a lunatic legislature, contemptible corporate whores, a rotten FBI, a worthless press, malevolent central bank, Jewish control, feminist malevolence, and leftist thuggery. Did I leave anything out? -Ace
Conclusion
It is difficult for Americans to understand, and grasp this fact, but most of the world outside the United States is MUCH freer.
This is a fair and philosophical point, which contains a much large-ranging truth: – Traditional societies favour the collective and protect the weakest among them but at the expense of some of the individuals’ freedoms. This is why there are less junkies and homeless in the streets of poorer countries, as they remain within the family fold, but individuals sometimes feel suffocated by social pressure. – Modern Western societies, especially with the ascent of Anglo-Saxon “liberal” values, purport to favour the individual and individual freedoms. This should normally give great opportunities to the brightest and smartest to achieve and accomplish their professional and economic potential, at the expense of the less gifted who are let down. This is how it was supposed to work anyway, and maybe it did work like that up to the 80’s or 90’s. But since globalisation took off, the individualist dream hyped in the West has remained just a dream. No matter how hard one works, it is obvious that the middle classes are disappearing to the benefit of an ever-more powerful plutocracy. So Western working people are actually only getting the anxiety and precarity, without the economic security, the worst of two worlds. I can very well understand why the Albanians described by Mr Dinh have returned to Albania after initially emigrating to the West. -Iris
Americans have 24-7 narratives about “American Exceptionalism” rammed into their mushy brains for decades. So much so that they believe it. And then, coupled with the non-stop fear-mongering about the rest of the world being a very dark and gloomy place, it’s no wonder that Americans hide inside their homes and huddle in front of the flickering blue monitors for their entertainment.
Freedom is not a nice road, a fancy mall, a impressive government building, or being able to own guns. It’s nothing of the sort.
A large proportion of Americans today, think freedom is the right shop at Walmart, eat at Burger King and to get a quick Covid shot. How things have changed -Joe Paluka
Freedom is the ability to live your life, as you see fit, without interference by anyone for any reason.
Freedom
- Never having to report any income, or financial information to the government.
- Never having to ask your government for permission to do something.
- Being allowed to eat, smoke, ingest anything your want to your own body.
- Never worrying about the police.
- Being able to redress your grievances with the government locally and get results in a timely manner.
Not Freedom
- Asking permission to buy bullets, and then once granted, having to pay taxes on them, and enter onto a watch list.
- Being forced to buy something simply because you are a citizen.
- Having your ability to leave the nation prevented and subject to a tax audit.
- Your taxes are used for other things that do not directly impact your quality of life.
When I say that my life in China is far freer than what it was in the United States, it’s not hyperbole. It’s truth. It’s on a very personal, and direct, visceral level.
And I have experiences that back this up. So it’s non-debatable.
People, if you are miserable with your life…
…instead of blaming yourselves, maybe you need to start looking at where you are living and what you put up with. Most Americans will discover an exceptional amount of personal freedom the moment they step outside the monstrous United States Military Empire.
And that’s a fact Jack.
The best case in point would be in New York City. Take the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy, for instance. Aside from the fact that the policy has proven to be vehemently racist, what kind of free society allows their police officers to search people without just cause? Imagine casually walking home from work only to have a police officer stop you, ask for ID, question you and frisk you. All you’re guilty of is walking home. How is this any different than the Gestapo asking you to see your papers? -The rise of the American Police State
You all won’t see that anywhere else in the world.
Only in America.
America is more and more like a contagious disease. It would be fine if the US contained their toxic culture and influence to their own border and left the rest of the world alone. But no… They want to make the whole world like them. Enough. -Dumbo
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