We Talk About It. He Lived It.

Trusting in the decency of others is a gamble in the good times; it’s a death sentence during the bad.

Amid the horror of war, a moment of joy. Source

Rod Dreher

- who has been a tremendous friend to me and booster of this Substack, I must say - has been discussing a book titled Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets by author Svetlana Alexievich quite frequently as of late.

Here he is summarizing the book:

The book is an oral history made up of interviews with people who had lived in the USSR, taken after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is the farthest thing from a dry historical account. Alexievich just lets these people — different kinds of people — talk. What she gives us is an at times unbearable portrait of the human condition. Yes, this is about the Soviet people, and their historical experience, but it is really about the human mind, and the human soul, under conditions that are unbearable. But they bore them, and lived to tell the tale.

It’s easy to see why Rod, anyone, really, would be taken in by this story. Most Americans, as well as many throughout the West, not only have no idea what life was like under communism, but also what life was like following the end of communism. It’s a most recent example of not only what becomes of life after the collapse of a superpower, but also what a society in near-civil war-like conditions looks like. It’s ugly.

Listening to Rod talk about the Russian experience reminded me of prepper-extraordinaire Selco Begovic and his experiences during the Bosnian War. The balkanization of Yugoslavia was something the world witnessed more viscerally than Russia’s post-Soviet downfall, due to its post-collapse wars broadcast on the nightly news. Selco, as he prefers to be called, is the author of multiple books, but the one I’m still making my way through is SHTF Survival Stories: Memories From The Balkan War.

If you’re looking for a better understanding of why the Bosnian War happened, how it ended, plus all the politics surrounding the conflict, SHTF Survival Stories isn’t the book for that. Selco doesn’t talk about the “whys” of the war all that much. From a prepper’s standpoint, it happened, and that’s all that truly matters. However, you get something from Selco’s story that’s probably lacking in more academic accounts of the Bosnian War: a sense of what life was like day-to-day, what it meant to live through a collapse, and subsequently through war.

Civilization Suspended

One of the things you have to immediately like about Selco is that he’s the furthest thing from a “bad-ass.” The fact he’s such a normal guy, without a military or law enforcement background, is what makes him so compelling. He’s living proof that prepping is for everyone, because terrible things can happen to all of us. That, and he lived it. The same can’t be said for most preppers.

He says:

After writing that first article years ago, I am still writing and trying to point out my view of things, and my way is learned through the experience of 4 years of civil war in a destroyed society.

I still do not know a lot of things. I do not know how to operate 20 different weapons, I am not an ex-special forces member, I do not know how to survive in a prolonged period in the wilderness, and I am still learning a lot of things from different kinds of people, on the internet and forums and in physical courses too.

But I know how I survived SHTF and what a real SHTF looks like.

And the real problem is that it definitely does not look like the majority of preppers imagine it.

In case you didn’t know, life during an SHTF is existence distilled to its purest form. It’s the total suspension of normalcy at best (think COVID), the total suspension of civilization at worst.

If civilization guarantees you one more day, an SHTF overturns that:

Fighting for survival is an all-day, everyday task. You are constantly hunting, scavenging, gathering, finding information, looking and checking things. All while you are the most stressed you have ever been and under constant threat. All while being hungry and thirsty.

This is how wild animals live. This is what life looks like without the benefits of civilization. I often hit the Left for trying to do its damndest to sow chaos and disorder, undermining civilization in the process, but some on the Right are guilty of promoting a more feral, kill-or-be-killed existence, because they think they’d be the kings of the jungle.

Selco explains why war is often much harder on civilians than soldiers:

There is no day off. There is no break. This is the big difference between a soldier and civilian in war. A soldier has a job to do, and all his other needs are taken care of. He can just focus on his one job. In a civil war, you (and your group) need to cover all the tasks, all the time…

If you served in Army, you had clear orders, topics, outside of that you did not need to think about too many things.

It’s for this reason that having a military or law enforcement background not only doesn’t make someone a better prepper, but it also doesn’t make someone more qualified to speak on civil war or any other SHTF than anyone else. The rawest experience of what it’s like to live through such things are borne by civilians, not soldiers. This isn’t to diminish the experience of the warfighter, but it is to say that being one doesn’t mean you understand civil war or SHTF better than all others. The only people who understand it best are those who lived it, civilian or combatant.

All Risk, No Reward

This was the most gut-wrenching thing Selco wrote, among many gut-wrenching stories:

People who have not gone through experiences like war probably imagine that there is something like annual meetings of old buddies who used to shoot together and kill other folks, and on that meetings, there is huge barbecue and drinks…

They may think that at those meetings, we all have a laugh and remember how hard it was and we are lucky that we are alive. Actually, I did go to some similar meetings, but it was anything but fun, so I stopped with that.

People there mostly look at each other and we all see how destroyed we are. I have met many broken people there and the question is, has life screwed us or have we screwed up in life? And at the end, we all drink, but without music, we just look in fire from barbecue, angry because of some triviality and asking why we are here.

Actually, we do not have common topics to talk about after we spent time talking about all topics like whether or not a bad situation is in the country. Soon we know that at some point, some of us will start with, “do you remember how S. got killed?“ or that famous “man, we are lucky to be alive.”

But in reality, we all know how S. get killed. Nobody needs to asked, “do you remember?“ Most of us think about how S. or M. or L. or whoever got killed every night at home, because many of us do not have families. Most of us are unable to have normal lives with someone close anymore.

And when we come home later, we drink alone, because people like us drink alone in most of the cases. Without false modesty, those of us who made it are the best of the best from that time, real survivors. We survived everything because stupidity got punished very hard back then, usually with death. It still has burned much out of us.

We are people without purpose and aim. One of us works at the parking lot. It is a job that barely can keep him alive with minimum money for food only. No wife, no kids, no real friends, no possessions except maybe weapons hidden somewhere, because you never know.

He was a lion once, a man without fear for his life and without respect for the enemy’s life. I asked him once how he feels when he is charging for parking ticket to the guy who is 25, drives brand new BMW with couple of pretty drugged girls, who earned that by being a crooked politician and who looks at him like he is not even human. Or worse like he is invisible, like there is ghost who charges for tickets.

He said, “I try not to look, it is life, and I am too old anyway to care”.

He is 45.

That was a long passage I had you all read, but it needed to be, because you don’t feel the full impact of what Selco is saying, otherwise. Sometimes, war is necessary, but it always comes at a steep cost. The only way to mentally survive the aftermath of war is through communities and families that can literally bring a person from the darkness and back to the light. Societies throughout history have come up with all sorts of customs and rituals for doing so. The problem with civil wars is that they often destroy communities and families, leaving people even more isolated than they were before the war. It doesn’t matter if you were on the victorious side, either.

In the end, few rewards await you. They survive the war only to end up parking cars for a living or unemployed. Imagine being only 45 years old and feeling old, like there’s nothing more to expect out of life. When I think about the supposed mental illness epidemic in the United States - we are a country full of depressed, hopeless, and lonely people, despite our abundances - does anyone think things will get better after a civil war? Sure, following every Fourth Turning, American society does form stronger bonds, and maybe it’ll happen again after the current Fourth Turning. But there will also be millions left out in the cold. I just can’t imagine how a society as broken as ours will emerge from civil war stronger than it was before. We’re talking about a lost generation, maybe two.

Point being, violence is nothing to be cavalier about, even as there are people who absolutely deserve their comeuppance:

First is that violence like this is glorified in action movies, games, and sometimes the media. It should not be done easily. If you might look at your weapons at home, you see them like that and pictures of shooting come up in your mind. If people who fought do this picture of bullet impacts on the human body come up.

The smell of people dying.

The sound of last breaths.

The mess someone leaves behind.

Every time you use violence the dark passenger in you grows and it will not leave. It is part of you.

So, if the SHTF and the internet and everything else are long gone, maybe you will remember this. Maybe you will tell yourself and the people around you that all this comes with a cost.

The second lesson here is that you should think about a time after the collapse. I have friends in the US army and I know some of the veteran services are bad, but at least they are there.

I have read in a history book that soldiers in earlier wars had less PTSD because they traveled together for a longer time from the area of conflict. If you lead a group of survivors during SHTF think about giving them rest. Think about sort of a debriefing time.

That last point goes back to what I said about how there needs to exist mechanisms for those who’ve experienced war to be cleansed, ritually speaking, to remove someone from the ordeal. There needs to be emotional and physical distance put between them and the war. You need strong communities and families for that; it’s not going to happen by itself. Man was never meant to bear the burden of war on his own.

Reality Knows No Fairness

The book is full of tragic stories that’ll make you question your faith in humanity. I think the toughest thing most people struggle with is the concept of fairness - that is, there’s no such thing, even in the good times. Civilization makes life predictable, but it doesn’t make it fair, not necessarily. During an SHTF, fairness is a non-existent concept, and no appeals to our better nature will save you.

Selco talks about something that happened to his friend in the days leading up to the war, after he was foolish enough to participate in looting during a riot, getting shot in the process:

About one kilometer from the place where he got picked up, the group of people that actually shot him stopped the ambulance with an improvised barricade. First, they shot the driver and then they killed my friend in the back of the ambulance. They killed him a little bit slower than the driver, and more painfully – they used knives. We got there a bit later, but it was too late for my friend.

Now this story may sound confusing to you. You may say “it happens in war.” But for 95% of folks at that time it was not war – it was just violent rioting. And 95% of folks still trusted the system. They had trust in police and government that they were going to restore law and order. People still trusted that ambulances were “protected” and nobody would stop them, not to mention shooting at one.

In this story here, the wounded guy and the ambulance driver simply did not recognize the situation. He was a nice guy. Why would this happen to him? Back then, I probably would have gone with the ambulance as well if I was shot. It felt very wrong that this happened, but it was one of the first wakeup calls that fair and unfair were concepts of the past.

We’ve seen riots in America. We’ve seen riots in Europe. We’ve seen how violent they can get. We might’ve never seen something like what’s described above, not yet, but there’s nothing saying that line can never be crossed. In France, violent foreigners attack firemen and loot fire engines. In 2020, they came close to doing the same in the U.S. The veneer of civilization is incredibly thin and some of us choose to be uncivilized, even when they can choose otherwise. Trusting in the decency of others is a gamble in the good times; it’s a death sentence during the bad.

Selco compares what’s happening in America today to what happened to Yugoslavia:

I have lived in a system and country where we believed that we are all equal. Different nationalities, different religions etc. Melted all together to make one “big and prosperous” nation, to be great and equal… united.

And then leverage of world forces simply changed, and suddenly we are being taught that differences between us are more important than similarities and “one nation.” Old historic battles are been taught again, and one group suddenly is more important than other and so on and so on.

Doesn’t this all sound very familiar? One of the reasons why the murder of Austin Metcalf at the hands of Karmelo Anthony is resonating is because it demonstrates the tremendous hatred Blacks hold towards Whites and other races, along with the extent to which Blacks will stand with Blacks no matter what. If there’s any group primed for ethno/racial conflict in America, it’s Blacks. And they have the highest rates of crime. And the Regime has made it clear that their needs are more important than anyone else’s. Some people are bothered by my calls for separation, but this is the only certain way to avoid violence.

Selco warns to not bank your hopes on your civil rights:

Living in a society where you have certain rights and freedoms for years is a good thing.

The bad thing is when the SHTF and you lose all those rights in a single day, you may find yourself so shocked that you simply do not know what next to do because you had those rights for many years, it became totally natural for you to own them.

Having lots of conversations with friends from the US, I concluded that the majority of common folks simply do not understand that all your rights can be lost in one day.

He goes on to say that Americans make the mistake of thinking that laws are etched in stone, that they practically enforce themselves, when in reality, laws are made by people who can suspend them at any time. Our Founders created a government with these realities in mind, but nobody believes in the Founders’ vision for this country anymore. Even I don’t know if I still believe in it, either. It’s all about power now: To my friends, anything, to my enemies, the law.

America’s divide isn’t ethnic, and it’s not racial either, not entirely. It’s ideological, has always been throughout our history, but Selco warns not to get too caught up in your belief system:

Do not look for higher reasons for the situation. You may have political options today, factions, candidates, government. But when the SHTF, all of those are empty words from some other distant time. When SHTF you will have yourself and people who want to harm you. That is it.

It’s worth mentioning: if you listen to Selco speak, he always does so with his voice altered, and he doesn’t show his face, not unless it’s in person, anyway. That’s because there are still people in Bosnia who would like to see him dead if they knew what he looked like or where he was.

War casts a long shadow. Civil wars, more so.

Some People Are Good. Some Are Bad. You’ll Find Out Who’s Who.

Selco discusses the temptation of evil - why do some people succumb to it, while others don’t? It’s a loaded discussion. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the line between good and evil passes through every human heart. Though true in a philosophical sense, it’s not necessarily so in a practical sense.

He elaborates:

A few times I have mentioned young guys (and some older, too) on survival forums, who have opinion that when SHTF, it is something like a mix of a Mad Max movie and a video game. They seem to think all you have to do is to have a gun and go around and take stuff from people and kill them and that’s it.

It is not like that in real life.

Committing acts of violence will shock you hard and depending on what kind of person you are deep inside and what kind of training you have, you must be prepared to suffer consequences because of what you did.

Why people do bad things is a question that is as old probably as mankind is.

The truth is that you do not know what kind of man you are or how you will act before you find yourself in SHTF situation.

You must know that when times are bad, all kinds of scum crawl out to do their job. Kill, rape, torture, steal. But you may be surprised that the monster does not necessarily always look like a monster.

Gang members, criminals, addicts – they are all gonna prey on people when SHTF and you will expect that of course.

But also expect that your next-door neighbor who is a local bus driver for example, and your kids played with his kids, might turn out to be a sadistic maniac when the SHTF. SHTF may be his playground.

I knew a lot of psychopaths who became “important” in terms that they were deciding about the life and death of folks. And lot of them were nobody before SHTF, absolutely nobody, not even decent criminals.

The point is that they always were bad deep inside. They just waited for their chance.

In most of the situations, SHTF does not make bad people. It just pulls out the bad that is already in them. They already were bad but often too scared because of laws to let all the hate and anger and crazy ideas out.

Selco offers a more specific example of someone who seemed perfectly decent and harmless, only to unmask the monster beneath during the SHTF:

I knew a guy before the SHTF who was a nobody. An ordinary worker from one of the industrial machine parts factories.

Actually, I did not really know him than the usual “hello” on the street, or football discussion sometimes in the neighborhood.

He lived alone, looked decent, and had a typical work and afterward “coffee house/bar with friends” life. If someone asked me to describe him, I would say “just a guy from the neighborhood” or a typical “normal dude”.

When the SHTF, he emerged as one of the leaders of a local group. And he was popular, he had something that made people want to follow him. The problem was that he had something that made bad kinds of people follow him. He was pretty much something like a psychopath.

Murders, rape, robbing and everything else that goes with that was their way of life in that time. And to make things clear here, I need to say that whenever I met him and his group out on the street I would go and hide even I knew him from his former life as a “normal guy.”

It really makes you look at your neighbors differently, doesn’t it? The lesson isn’t to begin regarding them with hostility and suspicion. It’s to understand that you just don’t know who someone really is. Lesson: someone sharing your political views doesn’t make them a good person. Politics is often an excuse, not a motivation, for violence. During an SHTF, civil war, what have you, even those on the same side as you could still end up becoming a threat to you.

Selco reminds us the importance of not losing your humanity. It’s easy to hate people today based on politics, but when they’re battered, broken, on the verge of death, your feelings may change. In fact, if they don’t, you’ve lost your humanity. The Left might talk about empathy in terms of validating fantasies and lies about themselves and the world, but it’s much simpler than that, actually. It’s about recognizing that we’re all mortal, in the end.

Selco talks about a fatally wounded woman he encountered, how he tried to give her peace in her last moments:

Then I took her hand so that she would stop touching her face. She became quieter, almost relaxed. So, I sat there, holding her hand and she started talking about how nice the place was before the war. We sat and talked for maybe twenty minutes. I’m not sure if she really heard me, and then she was gone. I thought that holding hands had helped make her last journey more relaxed.

I saw many people dying in my time during the war and always tried to give them gentle touch if they wanted. It usually has the same effect. They get more relaxed and peaceful. Some want to roll up and be left alone, but many more do not want to be alone.

Innocents make up a tremendous proportion of casualties during a civil war. Women and children will be among them. If you manage to muster empathy for anyone, let it be them. Take pity on your enemies, too.

I just got done watching the 2024 film In the Land of Saints and Sinners, available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Set in 1974 Ireland, during The Troubles, four IRA terrorists arrive in a coastal town to evade capture. I won’t spoil the movie for you (see it - it’s excellent), but in the end, the last terrorist standing, who is fatally-wounded, remains defiant as ever. Yet her last words before death aren’t about politics - it’s about her brother. Our enemies are human, in the end. It’s what makes war so tragic.

Lately, there’s a lot of talk about political violence on social media, including calls for assassinating the president. I’m not going to link to any of these posts - you can find them yourself if you don’t believe me - but while you should take these people dead seriously, know that these people are already broken. During a civil war or SHTF, they’ll either be among the first casualties, or they’ll end up being among the worst.

War Is Terrible, So Find Joy Wherever You Can

It wasn’t all fighting and surviving in Bosnia. The will to keep on living is strong, especially during hard times. People will find reasons to celebrate and enjoy things, even when there seems like there’s nothing to celebrate or enjoy:

So, in reality if you attended some kind of party where we had 10-15 people including women, it was not like in parties before and after that. I guess it comes from fact that life was not worth too much so due to that, connections between man and woman could be made more easily than in normal times, much more easily.

If a girl wanted to connect with you, or you wanted to connect with a girl, you just asked. Some things just became easier to do, with lots of shortcuts. People just did things without regretting them because times were hard and so unpredictable.

Nobody wanted to have too many missed chances.

When I read that, I thought about the loneliness crisis in America, how a massive percentage of young men have never had a girlfriend or approached someone of the opposite sex. It appears as though the only solution to this might be war. It’s terrible, but the current incentive structure simply isn’t conducive for establishing relationships, not like it used to be. Social norms are difficult to change, if not impossible to do so. As long as feminist values prevail in the West, the loneliness crisis won’t abate.

War, however, will collapse the feminist order literally overnight. I don’t know if Selco says it anywhere in the book, but that’s exactly what he said on one of the interviews for one of his courses on SHTFschool.com. It’s not a political argument, either. It’s a practical one, borne from firsthand experience. Progressive values don’t survive first contact with the harshest of realities.

Look at the photograph I selected to head this essay: you can see hints of rubble in the background. The groomsman on the left is holding a rifle, underscoring the reality of the world in which this otherwise wonderful day is taking place. Yet everyone is smiling, the bride looking beautiful in her white dress. People are fragile, but resilient. It’s often in the hard times that celebrating moments like these becomes so important. There’s a lesson here.

Prophecy? Or Just A Warning?

Secondhand Time is a bottomless pit of stories, most of them bad. I’m not done talking about the book, nor will I ever be done. It’s a must for any prepper, anyone who wants to ready themselves for the tumult to come. I did want to go ahead and share some of the more poignant stories that we might be able to relate to now, before our own SHTF has happened.

Which brings up the disheartening truth: many of Selco’s lessons won’t resonate at all until we undergo a similar experience ourselves. It proves the old saw about how nobody really learns from history; we learn from firsthand experience. The time for learning is fast-approaching.

Which then brings me to this: how concerned should we be that Selco’s reality will become ours? I’ve been fairly consistent on what I see coming up the road for the U.S. and the West as a whole: not quite a Bosnia-like civil war, but still far from peaceful. Technically, what’s coming isn’t a civil war, I just call it that for the sake of simplicity. Think of it as predatory, reciprocal violence: done not out of achieving a tangible political outcome, such as independence, but simply to hurt the other side out of malice, punishment for misdeeds, both perceived and real.

Prepper Fabian Ommar recently explained what’s coming in the near-term:

The worse the crisis, the more dangerous it gets out there. It’s not just crime and violence of all kinds that go up, but other forms of uncivilized savagery as well: road rage, domestic violence, abuses against children, elders, women, minorities, and more.

Road rage, in particular, is a big issue because when everyone is at boiling point, the risks of getting inadvertently involved in trouble simply by everyday exposure and friction increase exponentially.

And:

Most important, it’s not an SHTF. The world as we know it is changing, not ending. Not everything will be fine, but it never is anyway, and that’s okay. It’s perfectly possible to live a good and normal life in a volatile world.

Ommar strikes a more optimistic tone than Selco. This is because Ommar, a Brazilian, has lived his whole life enduring one crisis after another, while never seeing his entire world unravel, like Selco did. Neither man is more right or more wrong, in the end. It’s just a matter of different perspectives. But this only goes to show why it’s so important to consider different perspectives. Nobody owns the truth, after all.

Back in 2023, Ommar also said:

I’m trying to argue that for some events to occur, a long and complicated list of preconditions and predecessors must be present simultaneously. Civil war is not a fire waiting for a spark to happen. Even in a banana republic or during a severe crisis, it’s no trivial matter. Other than the sentiment, there’s not much indicating it’s imminent.

And:

Either way, until something major happens (if it does), unrest and other social disturbances will spread and get worse. Essentially, an escalation of violence and criminality that’s already taking place everywhere. Mass shootings, unprovoked attacks, climate terrorism, authoritarianism, cyberattacks. That’s the stuff that happens in real life during a secular downturn cycle.

What Ommar is saying is this: a Bosnia-level civil war doesn’t happen everywhere, but all other forms of violence below that threshold can happen anywhere and already does. So before getting too caught up in the stories like people like Selco, just remember: we have a lot of bad things to get through before we need to really start worrying about civil war. This is all perfectly in line with what Dr. David Betz of King’s College London has been saying about civil war coming to the West. He’s yet to say any country in the West, let alone Britain, which he sees in a most urgent state, becoming like Bosnia.

I recently said that I’m at a point where I believe a civil war might be a better option than there not being one at all. I don’t say that lightly. I say that because if one doesn’t happen, it means we’ve capitulated, or somehow compromised with our enemies without even putting up a fight. Still, understand what we’re getting ourselves into. We’re stuck with bad choices. One isn’t necessarily better than the other. It’s just that surrendering because we’re afraid of what might happen by fighting back is cowardice, and nothing good comes out of that.

Learn What You Can - Save You, It Will!

The Bosnian War will have been over for 30 years later this year. It’s crazy to think about - 30 years before 1995, America was fighting in Vietnam. The fact that we’re as far removed from the Bosnian War today as we were from the Vietnam War in 1995 is something I cannot wrap my brain around. Bosnia was such a big news story at the time, with thousands of U.S. service members ultimately participating in the conflict. Now we don’t talk about it much at all, like it never even happened.

It does mean, however, that it’s no longer too early to look back and learn lessons from that war. We likely cannot prevent a civil war happening in the West any more than the people of Bosnia could prevent one in theirs. But thanks to Selco, we can prepare ourselves for it. We should be grateful every day that he’s here with us to share his experiences.

Over to you - what are your thoughts on Selco’s experiences, the lessons he imparted? Do you think something like Bosnia could happen in America or elsewhere in the West? Why or why not? What are your predictions? Is there any other literature on civil war you think is useful for preparing ourselves for what’s to come?

Let’s talk about it all in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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