The Blair Experience – Have Not Albanians suffered enough?

I celebrated becoming one of the top 18 million most followed folks on twitter (titter ye not, after 7 weeks I have way more than the mean number of followers) by wandering off in search of the Mosque here in Sarande. More on that tomorrow but it was hard to find and I kept ending up at the synagogue (ruined for 1500 years). Perhaps that tells you something. Eventually, post Mosque, I got lost again and found myself at the tourist office where I enquired about buses to Butrint, my next stop and how I go from there to Zitsa. The place was also a bookshop and so I had a butchers. Dad, sorry to report that none of your Albanian epics are on sale.

Prominently displayed was Mein Kampf in both German and Albanian. What is the market for Hitler’s crazed blueprint for a Nazi world among Albanian speakers? I hope that it is rather small. And which Germans want a copy? Does that guy giving the interesting salute to the Kraut team at the Olympic opening ceremony, holiday in Albania and feel the need to brush up on the basics of racial purity? The mind boggles, but both versions were positioned where you could not avoid seeing them.

Under Hoxha the Albanians were not allowed any exposure to Western media bar the films of the late Norman Wisdom, known here as “Pitkin.” As far as I can see Wisdom only had one joke. He did something silly. Fell down. Grinned like an idiot and then stood up again. It works once. Maybe twice. But a non stop diet of this for 40 years? It strikes me that old Hoxha should have been dragged off to the Hague for inflicting that on his people. But now they have a choice. Well sort of.

I pondered the Albanian language biographies. Most were of Albanians I had never heard of. But also in there were volumes on George W Bush, the frightful Clinton Woman, Cherie Blair’s autobiography and that of her mendacious husband Tony. What a choice. Have not these poor sods suffered enough without inflicting this on them? The killer would have been to discover that Louise Mensch’s trash novels had been translated into Albanian but so far the people of this country have escaped that fate. Or perhaps they just have better taste than we do.

It was certainly a limited choice. What, I wonder, would I do if stuck on a beach and was offered as my only choice of reading material: Tony Blair’s “ A Journey,” the autobiography of the wicked witch or Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf? It is a hard call but I think I’d rather wander into the sea than face even a page of the Wicked Witch. As such it is a choice between the work of a deluded fantasist who dreamed of leading a united Europe, left the economy of his country a total train wreck and who kept on invading other countries illegally or…. Adolf Hitler.

Boom Boom. I suspect you saw that one coming.