We've lost the Slavic H. L. Mencken
Eternal memory to Marko Marjanović, a fearless dispenser of bitter truths
Marko Marjanović, the editor of Anti-Empire.com who waged a one-man insurgency against soothing falsities, seeking favor from no one and enraging State Department toadies and Kremlin boot-lickers alike, was discovered dead in his apartment in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, on July 22. He was 40 years old.
I’d been trying to make contact with Marko after he stopped communicating in mid-July. Yesterday my worst fears were confirmed while combing the internet for clues to his possible whereabouts.
You may have never heard of Marko Marjanović, but chances are he has, directly or indirectly, disabused you of lazy heuristics and wishful thinking.
Without Anti-Empire.com, there would have been no Edward Slavsquat. The same holds true for countless commentators and writers who went down a rabbit hole that Marko dug, practically alone, by hand.
His tenacious, piercing journalism laid the foundation for a reality-based approach to understanding Russia, one devoid of the word-salad-padded fantasies popularized by so much of “alternative” media. At great personal expense, to the point where he gained pariah-like status, Marko forced his readers to grapple with Russia as she is, not how they would like to imagine her to be.
He applied the same standard to everything he wrote about—and he wrote about pretty much everything.
Marko accomplished this feat with unmatched wit slathered in Slavic dark humor. He mastered the art of the headline, so much so that his titles became self-standing testaments to our upside-down garbage world.
No one and nothing was spared the Anti-Empire treatment. Predictably, Marko’s website caught the eye of our benevolent thought-police.
Anti-Empire was shadow-banned by Google in March 2021, and the website’s Facebook page was Zucked a few months later. In August 2022, Marko was kicked off PayPal, depriving him of reader donations.
However, these were minor accolades compared to the Turkish government’s impressively petty decision to add Anti-Empire to its list of verboten websites.
Ever the diplomat, Marko tried to initiate negotiations with Ankara after he was notified by Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority that he had four hours to remove an article that painted Turkish military involvement in Syria in an unflattering light, or face the consequences:
To make a short story even shorter, Anti-Empire is still blocked in Turkey.
Perhaps in a conscious effort to give his readers reprieve from the mind-melting horrors of the daily news cycle, Marko would periodically publish his own ruminations on seemingly random subjects. These short digressions from his routine output provide a better picture of the type of person he was.
Commenting on the release of a new film adaptation of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Marjanović observed that both anti- and pro-war literature focus on the hardships and travails of armed conflict, instilling a sense of awe and reverence in the reader. Paradoxically, both genres are guilty of the same thing: humanizing the world’s most anti-human activity, he argued.
For example, Marko contrasted Remarque’s classic novel with Rudyard Kipling’s Fuzzy-Wuzzy, a salute to the spear-wielding Sudanese warriors who broke the British “square” formation. In Marko’s view, Kipling’s poem didn’t honor the Sudanese; rather, it white-washed their slaughter:
What is Kipling doing here? He lived through decades of some of the most lopsided wars that history had ever seen. Yet he is actively mining for any instances when something went wrong. And zeroing in on something as minor as that one time a British square was temporarily broken. Why is he doing this? Well, what else is he supposed to do? Write about how the British had a machine gun with them and destroyed 1,000 spear-wielders with firearms? That’s not art, that’s snuff.
By focusing on the minor British tactical setback he is actually sanitizing what happened. He’s creating a story of the battle that can be told without making the audience vomit.
What happened was that a bunch of Sudanese were doing Sudanese things in the Sudan and then a band of Space Aliens with 24th century weapons dropped into their midst and massacred the hell out of them in a “battle” in which they stood no chance at all, creating who knows how many orphans and widows and grief and trauma and now the Space Alien poet is telling them “well you know, you should feel really good about yourself, after all YOU BROKE THE SQUARE!”
True anti-war literature could only be written by a psychopath who unabashedly reveled in the murderous destruction of organized, state-sponsored violence, Marko concluded:
The most violently anti-war book has probably already been written. It’s just that it’s a book you would never want to read.
No topic was off-bounds for Marko, and he never shied away from diving headfirst into hot-button issues of the day:
Totally off-topic here but something that needs to be said. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever in calling it ‘soccer’ which is just short for “association football” which is what it was called early on to distinguish it from all the other footballs, which are just as much football, and just as legitimately so, as they’re clearly played ON FOOT and not on horseback. […]
Ball sport used to be for the leisure class, the aristocracy, and used to be played from horseback. Then commoners started chasing a ball around as well but did it unceremoniously on their own two feet, which had been way too “undignified” for the image-conscious aristocracy … Sorry for the rant, now back to our usual coverage. (I want AE readers to be smart and not falling for dummy stuff.)
From a modest background in Slovenia, Marko was essentially self-educated, and through voracious reading obtained an encyclopedic knowledge of military history. He was particularly well-versed in matters pertaining to the Soviet Army and the Second World War. Before starting Anti-Empire, he worked in a factory as a mechanic, and returned to this blue-collar job when he struggled to pay the bills with reader donations.
Taking a few days off from his factory job (he had returned to Slovenia to save up money for another extended stay in the Philippines), in August 2023, Marko traveled to Moravia to visit me. We had a wonderful, wine-soaked time together, which I documented on the blog.
Austerlitz happened
This is Edward Slavsquat’s third dispatch from Czechia. (Don’t forget to read and/or reread Part I & Part II). If you visit this blog solely for Russia-related news, I apologize and you can skip this internet story or even unsubscribe out of disappointment and utter disgust.
I will never forget his impromptu history lecture before we boarded our train from Brno to Austerlitz:
“Do you know how Napoleon won the battle?” Marko, who is very well-read on these sorts of subjects, quizzed me.
“No idea. Fill me in.”
“The French were outnumbered so Napoleon deliberately weakened his left flank and strengthened his right flank, allowing him to counterattack the Third Coalition’s frontal assault. […] You see, the Russian muskets were manufactured in Tula. […] The tactic is known as a ‘center-peel’. […] Despite their best efforts, the Prince of Lichtenstein’s heavy cavalry were unable to stop the advance of Murat’s two cuirassier divisions, leading to predictable results as I’m sure you can probably imagine. […] It was all over once Marshal Soult took Pratzen Heights. […] There is still a vigorous debate about whether Marshal Lannes and his V Corps should have pursued the retreating Russians under the command of Prince Bagration, who reportedly suffered from ulcers. […] Francis II was an imbecile. […]”
There was about fifteen minutes of this.
“Marko, we’re going to miss our train if we don’t start walking…”
Marko was a self-described anarchist, advocate for pan-Slavic unity, and an unflinching opponent of all forms of imperialism, everywhere. His prickly personality sometimes alienated him from his friends and supporters. I attribute this character defect to the fact that he felt let down when others fell short of the high standards he set for himself when trying to make sense of the Madness:
Who doesn’t love a good fairy tale? Everyone does. Problem is when you are an adult, and you believe a fairy tale to be actually true.
In that case, you need some fairy-tale-slaying. You won’t like it, it will be painful and traumatic, you will resist it, and you may even hate the one doing the slaying, but it is nonetheless for your own good. Not for the good of your comfort, but for the good of you knowing true things.
Perhaps because of his working-class roots, Marko never allowed his seething hatred for NATO to rob him of his empathy for ordinary, wage-slave Westerners who, like himself, were at the mercy of the Empire:
The hegemon of our day, the American Empire, is powered by American power and run from Washington. But it is not synonymous with the USA — not with the country, nor with its people, or even its government.
Obviously a sales lady in a Milwaukee donut shop or a mechanic in Topeka are in no way the Empire. Their taxes may help fuel the Empire’s war machine but taxes ultimately rest on coercion and are not freely given.
To a lesser extent, even the taxes extracted from a Romania shepherd go toward aiding Empire’s adventures yet it would be absurd to claim he is part of the Empire as opposed to merely living under it.
Our Milwaukee sales lady and Topeka mechanic are in fact victims of the Empire, albeit the level of their victimization is infinitely smaller than for example that of a Yemeni child withering away from cholera under a US-Saudi blockade.
Aside from being coerced into paying taxes the pair is spied upon and propagandized to. Moreover, the Empire needlessly amplifies their exposure to the danger of terrorism and forces them to live under the constant background threat of a mushroom cloud.
It is a testament to his human integrity that even though he dreamed of a NATO-free world, and felt Moscow had every right to intervene in Ukraine to halt the “defensive” alliance’s destructive machinations, Marko ultimately concluded that a Russian military incursion would do more harm than good, killing tens of thousands of his fellow Slavs, while likely exacerbating the problems that such an operation aimed to correct:
I don’t know how [Russian military intervention] is supposed to fix Putin’s problem of Ukraine being “anti-Russia”. Isn’t a war between the two only going to deepen animosities and provide Ukrainian nationalists with more fodder? Try as they might at least until now it has been very difficult for Ukrainian nationalists to find historical examples of Ukrainians and Russians spilling each other’s blood.
[…]
While rearranging borders in a coloring book is a blast, this isn’t a video game. The Russian military is an artillery-firepower army. It is incredibly lethal. The takeover of Southern and Eastern Ukraine doesn’t happen without tens of thousands of deaths. Mostly Ukrainian. But didn’t Putin just explain that Ukrainians are Russians too? Well, I prefer my Malorussians deluded (and even anti-Russian) over dead.
[…]
Take it from someone who knows a little about fratricidal war: You don’t want one.
He wrote the above lines in January 2022, at a time when all the big names in “independent” media, who are currently raking in huge sums of money with their cheery forecasts for the appalling tragedy unfolding before our eyes, insisted that Moscow would never attack Ukraine, and that anyone who even hinted otherwise was some sort of CIA-backed agitator. Ironic that so many of them are former US military and intelligence veterans. There’s a lesson here, somewhere?
Marko took so much abuse for correctly predicting the events of February 2022, and where they would likely lead, that he published an open letter to his readers, berating them for refusing to even consider information that inconvenienced their own worldviews.
He wrote on February 28, 2022, four days after the launch of the SMO:
It’s hilarious really. There are alt-media brains who were still making definite statements about Russian escalation being impossible as late as the day before the war commenced.
Anti-Empire by contrast treated it as a possibility that deserved consideration since December. And tried raising alarm about it being a possibility that wasn’t being taken seriously enough for the past two months.
In my naivete I thought that when I published the case that Russian-initiated escalation is a real possibility people would read it, consider it, and move on.
I thought the real danger was that some readers might come to love the idea of such an escalation and start rooting for it to happen. I thought that my role would be to try to remind the reader of the human cost of war, and dampen that enthusiasm a little bit.
Instead, my suggestion that [Russia launching a military operation in Ukraine] had to be treated as a real possibility was met with hatred, hysterics, and meltdown. Apparently, the mere idea that Moscow could move to enlarge the war threatened the fragile identities of some.
In the months that followed, he understandably expressed frustration over how his work continued to be ignored and dismissed, even as “experts” who arrived late to the party began parroting what he had been saying since before the SMO even started.
I am still searching for answers to the circumstances surrounding Marko’s death. It’s frankly unbearable to even think about. All I can do now, as a friend and admirer, is try to preserve his legacy. This is a time-sensitive endeavor that I need your assistance with.
There are several free-to-use programs to download copies of entire websites (HTTrack, Cyotek WebCopy, among others), but I cannot get any of them to work properly because I am technologically inept. Instead, I’ve started manually downloading each individual article using a browser extension. This will take me a very long time.
If anyone reading this has the know-how to help preserve Marko’s incredible body of work for posterity, please do so as soon as you can, and make the archive accessible for public viewing or download. I don’t know how much longer we have until his domain expires, and the mere thought that Anti-Empire might go offline before a complete record of Marko’s work can be compiled for safekeeping fills me with unbearable despair.
Please, if you are able, do it now, and inform me in the comments section below, or email me directly at riley dot waggaman at gmail dot com.
In the meantime, I have created a new category on the blog, Marko Was Right, where I will republish his underappreciated journalism, much of which was years ahead of its time. Indeed, many of the internet’s most celebrated “independent” journalists are still incapable of coming to terms with observable realities that Marko wrote about three years ago.
Marko, you will be missed more than you will ever know.
Love you, buddy,
Riley
I will download and upload again the whole website. I will write to you again when ready.
This is really tough news to take. I can’t quite process it. Even though he had gone silent, I didn’t doubt that Marko was out there somewhere perceiving things correctly and courageously, and that he’d eventually return to the blogwaves to tell us about it.
Marko was the most important person to me in all of media. For much of 2020, he was the only person in the universe I either knew or knew of who hadn’t been assimilated into covidianism. Without him I would have been completely alone.
Ok, now I’m crying. I guess that’s the start of processing it.
Please, someone help Riley properly archive his work. It is essential and cannot be lost.