This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

Take it from someone who grew up in the Balkans — diversity is not a strength. I was born at the start of the Yugoslav Wars, and was only a few months old when my Serbian family fled Muslim-occupied Bosnia, seeking refuge in the first place that would have us — Venezuela. Like many Latin American countries, Venezuela is a strange contradiction: it is stunningly beautiful, has a wonderful climate, and is rich in natural resources — and yet, it is a Third World slum. Today, its poverty is notorious, but even 30 years ago it was hardly a developing country. And though its dysfunction is generally blamed on its Marxist regime, that explanation overlooks the great strides in human accomplishment that many Communist governments throughout history have achieved. The USSR beat the USA in its race to be the first in sending a man into space. That was in 1961. Meanwhile, in 2020, Venezuela is on the brink of collapse.

Demographics, per usual, is the elephant in the room. Though Wikipedia may claim that Europeans are nearly half the population, as someone who lived there for years, I can tell you this is far from true. Most citizens are a mix of Amerindian, Spanish, and African ancestry. The pure whites found in wealthy, secluded neighborhoods are few and far between, and many of them are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. I never once met a single inarguably white family that was third generation Venezuelan. As Madison Grant once said of the population, “it is doubtful whether one resident in fifty can properly be called a white man, except by courtesy.” In contrast to most of its population — which, though friendly, is largely lazy, unambitious, carefree, and uneducated — the whites of Venezuela are hardworking and productive. My own family was a good example of this. We arrived as immigrants speaking no Spanish and only basic English, and with so little money we slept on the beach. Within five years, we owned the biggest supermarket in town.

When the wars in the Balkans finally ended, my family decided to head back. The artificial state Yugoslavia was no more, and as Serbs, my family went to the new nation of Serbia. That was the whole point of the wars, after all: segregation — Croats got Croatia, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) got Bosnia, Serbs got Serbia, and so on. The conflict and strife of the 1990s and early 2000s was horrific. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and many more displaced. The economic toll is probably unquantifiably high, and the whole world now views the entire region as backwards and unstable. But the truth of the matter is that on some level, the conflict we had was inevitable. The cleavages, grievances, and disdain between the various combatant groups had origins stretching back centuries. Even 50 years of harsh Communist rule — which did everything possible to erase the region’s cultural and religious heterogeneity — could not erase the hatreds burned into each demographic group’s collective memory.

Diversity does not work. Its failure in the Balkans was so pronounced, protracted, and bloody, that it birthed a new word for the failure of multiculturalism: balkanization. Ironically, twenty years later the Balkans are a peaceful place — thanks to the collapse of an artificial and diverse country, and the rise of several homogeneous nations in its place. Meanwhile, Western countries seem to want to remake themselves in the image of the former Yugoslavia — illogical polities composed of several different antagonistic and wildly different peoples. Or perhaps their long-term plan is to create new Venezuelas: genetically diverse countries where centuries of miscegenation have created something approaching homogeneity. I’m not sure which is worse.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Use a pen name, stay under 1,200 words, and send it to us here.