The Pete Quiñones Show - The 1990s Balkans Wars w/ Thomas777 - Complete

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

3 Hours and 13 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Here, in one file, are the 3 episodes Thomas777 did with Pete covering the 1990's Balkans Wars.Episode 1: The 1990's Balkan Wars - Part 1 - 'The Homeland War' w/ Thomas777Episode 2: The 1990's Balkan Wars - Part 2 - WW2 Context - w/ Thomas777Episode 3: The 1990's Balkan Wars - Part 3 - The Hostilities - w/ Thomas777Thomas' SubstackThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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and conditions apply Volkswagen financial services are limited trading as Cooper financial services is regulated by the central bank of Ireland I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Eno show Thomas is back and we're gonna start something new how you doing Thomas I'm well thank you thanks for hosting me of course we have gotten several requests for your take on the Balkans wars Bosnia, Yugoslavia, maybe even talk about Tito a little bit

but yeah, where do you want to where do you want to start this one? Today I anticipate this series naturally kind of like organically we'll go three episodes obviously it's your show figuratively and literally will go as many as you wish on the topic what I'd like to do today

I want to focus on what the Croatians call the homeland war that was the war that approximately was caused by Croatia's Declaration of Independence Croatia and Macedonia

essentially seceding from the Yugoslavian political structure in 1991 and the Serbian response to that and the relationship of that to the situation then underway in the Soviet Union and what Berlin, where Helmut Cole was still consular at the time,

what Berlin's response was how the world in turn reacted to that and what the relationship of that constellation of factors and those developments were on the situation in the Soviet Union, was at that time very volatile. In the second episode, I think we should get into the history of the independent state of Croatia. I've got a particular interest in Croatia for a few reasons. And especially for such a small country, they played an important and very outsized role in the Axis alliance. But also, it's key to understanding what happened, not just in the homeland war, but in the Bosnian War.

and later in the adjacent conflicts like that, you know, in Kosovo, where Croatia wasn't a combatant party, but Croatia and what Croatia did or did not do was instrumental in how events developed. And Croatia, it's an arguable, this isn't some slam on Serbian people or anything of the sort. You know, Croatia is the most insinuated into the kind of Western conceptual parents. I mean, part of that is, for very pragmatic strategic reasons, part of that's for reasons of values and for lack of a better term familiarity. But Croatia and particularly Tujman, who was at the helm of Croatia, as it achieved independence, he was in some ways a kind of perfect, foiled. to almost in like Manichian terms to Milosevic

and he was a very unique individual and I think it was one of the most significant figures of the later 20th century so today I want to get into the conditions that led to the the homeland war with a focus on

the Croatian internal situation next time I think we should deal with the Second World War and the constellation of factors there in the independent state of Croatia. And then in the final episode, I think we should deal with the Serbian situation, like their internal situation and more of like a deep dive capacity. And what the relationship of that is to what I believe was, you know,

the kind of final like poisoning of relations between, you know, the United States and the Russian Federation was when America assaulted Serbia in 1999 without provocation. So that's the way I think it should break down if that's agreeable to both you and the subscribers. But there's a lot here. So bear with me. And there's terms that I'll do my best to clarify as we go. But go ahead. It all sounds good to me. Okay, no, great. There's terms that I will define as we go, but aren't going to be fully fleshed out until we get into the deep dive context of, you know, know, they're, um, the significance of these, of these things. So bear that in mind, too.

Um, I will, I will come back to anything that seems ambiguous and I'm aware that a lot of that seems ambiguous to the uninitiated. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal mustabs. When the doors open, the deeps Go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value.

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Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. The key to understanding how things developed in the way Yugoslavia broke apart, particularly what guided decision-making. in the Croatian control group around Tujman you've got to understand what was underway vis-a-vis the Bush 41 administration and why they were so zealously behind Gorbachev and

Shavid Narzeh, who was a Gorbachev's top advisor he was kind of the man behind Parastrika in conceptual and policy terms. There was this basic concord between, you know, Bush and James Baker and people within, you know, Bush and Baker's orbit, like Brent Skowcroft, you know, Contra, the Team B, coterie, kind of best exemplified by people like, or most purely exemplified by people like Cheney, who wanted, who wanted, who wanted. wanted the Soviet Union dismantled and kind of laid prostrate in the most, you know, in the most complete and punitive way possible. Bush and Baker's kind of absolute imperative was that they wanted to preserve the Soviet structure, not its internal constitution, but its basic structure. It's like kind of, you know, centrally administrated governmental, organizational modality until full disarmament had been accomplished, okay?

You know, total nuclear disarmament, a drawing down of Soviet conventional forces, you know, to something minuscule, you know, to levels of some kind of like internal, you know, constabulary element. And only then would there be discussion about, you know, moving forward, like, how the Soviet Union would be structured or whether it would continue to exist at all. You know, it ending up with, you know, tanks in Red Square and Yeltsin literally banning the Communist Party

declaring himself president of the new Russian Federation and then holding what I'm on to do like an ad hoc plebiscite that was totally at odds with what the Bush administration wanted to develop okay and why that became possible in an indirect but essential way

was impacted by what happened in Yugoslavia. And for people who think I'm over-emphasizing this, there's a fascinating memo that circulated the Department of State. I mean, all the minutes of any, like, official meeting between the Secretary of State and his Soviet counterpart or the Soviet chief executive

would obviously, you know, be widely circulated. um may 11th of 89 gorbachev met with baker and uh chevonards it was present too um the topic of discussion was uh was force levels in europe um with a particular focus on nuclear weapons and Gorvachev initiated the conversation by putting it to Baker. I know, because we know, you know, through our intelligence apparatus, that you're planning to deploy, you know, a missile platform in the 1990s. That's analogous to the then very feared, you know, Soviet SS23. And, you know, this is a problem.

You know, it, uh, Gorvichhardt's base. like I you know I'm not concerned with how this looks on the perspective of morality but obviously we need some kind of guarantee from you that you know you're not going to you're not going to you're not going to you're not going to pursue these hyper advanced like next generation like strategic nuclear weapons platforms we need a guarantee from you that that's not going to happen you know um before we go any further here um gorochhoff further said that he in he and his Warsaw Pat counterparts were prepared to conduct negotiations on

a total drawdown to tactical nuclear forces just outright and as well as the abolition of the nuclear capability of you know quote dual purpose platforms primarily cruise missiles you basically put it placing them beyond use as far as being married the nuclear

warheads okay if all this seems very esoteric but that's my whole point okay is that you know this was this was the issue the only issue really in the minds of Bush and Baker

you know at Bush 41 he was described by Conno Lisa Rice as constantly cautious I think that's the wrong way to characterize it. Calculating, yes. You know, incredibly thorough yes.

But Bush was thinking systemically. And that's exactly the model that Nixon had for bringing about, you know, the end of

Soviet hard power. You know, by negotiated means you know and I invoke that because I don't I don't think anybody could say that Nixon was cautious okay um

the uh uh gorech off further the remainder of the discussion is reflected in the minutes memorializing the memo he basically ticks off a list of concessions the Soviets have made

you know they would draw on over 500 tactical nuclear munitions from the European theater if they could expect rest of Russia from NATO they'd be willing to withdraw all

nuclear forces tactical nuclear forces in Morosopac territory between that day and 1991 you know and obviously tactical nuclear weapons to the Soviets were uh

this was this was this was within this was this was literally a local threat you know I mean that's why if there seems to be a strange imbalance in you know kind of the the types of forces that are emphasized I mean that's that should be I mean obviously people have a basic understanding

of geography anybody who's bothering to listen to these talks that we have, but people might not be familiar with, you know, the strategic and tactical distinction as applied to weapons platforms. Like, that's why these battlefield nuclear weapons are of such a concern to Moscow, like then as now, okay?

Because deployed in the European theater that's got tremendous destructive power and that has implications for you know, for first strike, as well as myriad other things um the second uh interestingly too gorvichov says he's convinced that there's a special

working group within the national security council as well as the intelligence community in Washington that's working to discredit parastrike up and that uh robert gates is probably behind this effort and uh this needs to be openly discussed um less you know public opinion converge around this kind of narrative and as I've indicated before CIA at this point was really something of a joke

although they did still have some power to impact perception particularly through public diplomacy efforts and Gorbachev I believe was absolutely right like CIA by that point Aldridge Ames had sold out every human asset that they had behind the Iron Curtain,

all of whom, of course, had been unceremoniously executed by KGB and GRU. So CIA was not just flying blind, but them pretending that it's forever 1960, I mean, that they, that was their raison d'etra. You know, so Gorow is basically going down the list of things that can potentially derail. Ready for huge savings?

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but obviously warming up to these efforts by Moscow. and you know he guarantees an elimination of you know any kind of tactical asymmetry as regards tactical forces in being in Europe you know immediately to be followed up by you know a further drawdown in total nuclear forces and uh the emphasis uh by baker as well as you know as you know know, what's emerging from the White House. And vis-a-vis Bush's contentious dealings with Poland and some of the other Warsaw Pact satellites, the opposition elements in these states, you know, Bush is essentially insisting on patience and, you know, people, particularly like Valencia, who he despised,

allow this process to work. and that negotiation has to come from the top down, meaning, you know, agreements between Moscow and Washington. And only then, you know, can we talk about the future of the satellite states and transition to, you know, normalized government outside of, you know, the captive Soviet orbit? But, so obviously, we'll move on here, but this is obviously like a, this was obviously an extraordinarily delicate minuet, even if there was general stability in the Balkan theater and other potential kind of flashpoint locales. You know, it would require a real commitment, probably over two administrations. um on you know um on on on on the american side who were you know fully committed to the program and um as and and and reciprocably in moscow it would have required um i mean gorbachev ended up being very long lived but um it would have required gorv retaining his mandate probably for the

subsequent decade and if not he himself you know uh a protege who could be expected to essentially carry out exactly the policy program outlined by uh shevard narsa and you know kind of the the peristrike of concept um what was happening in in Yugoslavia at this time. Yugoslavia was outside of the Warsaw Pact orbit. You know, they, and they, they were treated after a, the cruciv thought led to the reestablishment

of, of cordial relations with Yugoslavia and Tito himself. And Moscow always treated Yugoslavia, as part of the socialist community of nations and there's complex interdependence in the form of common form and Kame Khan

but U.S. Lovia stood you know as as a genuine neutral in the Cold War do you do you consider did you consider them to be socialist

The Yugoslavians, yeah. In what way, though? I mean, it was a planned economy, you know, based upon, you know, the centrally administered imports and production schemes and everything else. I mean, like, they practice socialist economics to a T. They were thirsty for foreign currency in a way that really no other East Block country was, save, East Germany, but East Germany was kind of in the role of Hong Kong is to, you know, vis-a-vis the PRC, so that was unusual. So, I mean, Yugoslavia was able to draw direct investment in a way that, you know, say like Poland and Czechoslovakia, it wasn't. But, I mean, they absolutely, you know, they absolutely were practicing state socialism.

them. They had, there were like water, water treatment plants and all sorts of things as such that were like guild owned, that were like guild run. Yeah, they had, and they allowed, um, they allowed, uh, they allowed certain like NGOs to exist, like at least nominally, like outside the formal party structure, like, which wouldn't have washed in, you know, the Soviet Union itself. But, uh, that was not unlike the, like, the government. kind of stuff that was emerging in Hungary after 1956.

I mean, a lot of this stuff was, a lot of this stuff was like cosmetic. And also, like, you could, you could carry on autonomously within certain parameters in the U.S. Lobbyan system. But if you took on a political, if you took on a political commitment, like, you'd be crushed by the secret police, you know, just like you would anywhere else behind the wall. I mean, that's... That's the... That's the key takeaway. And Tito was a real communist, in my opinion.

You know, I mean, he... In order to... The whole idea of a Yugoslavia is... was doomed from inception for all kinds of reasons. But the idea was, the most charitable view of Tito, in terms of his geostrategic mind and impulse is that he realized that the United States and the Soviet Union both had to be kept out or you know Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina would, they would stand together or fall together amidst the Cold War dynamic. And we'll get into the kind of basic suspicion of Serbs and Croats to, uh, intergovernmental organizations, including I might add to Catholic Church, despite the fact, I mean, the Croats are like a Catholic vanguard, but they're not, they were always suspicious of, of, you know, any kind of Vatican effort to directly impact their politics and the internal situation they're in, which is interesting.

But there's a strong heritage of that in the Balkans. and we'll get into the Bosniaks as a people too. I'm not leaving them out. They're hugely important. But for our purposes right now, they kind of don't feature center stage. But May 13th, 1990, that was the infamous,

that's something, the football game. I'm talking about soccer, not the pigskin game, obviously. That's when the soccer match at Zagreb, at Maximir Stadium between Zagreb Dynamo and Belgrade Red Star, which are like two like, they're kind of like Ranger and Celtic, okay, like they're, the Rangers and Celtic, like they're, you know, like the old firm rivalry, like very nationalistic, very much a stand in for, you know,

ethnocectarian nationalism. The game erupted into like this general like melee, between like croats and serbians um as well as the police and it uh like the level of violence it was clear that something was a foot that this wasn't just typical like football pitch you know dust up kind of stuff and um sure enough would have been underway all that preceding spring was uh the new Croatian parliament had been convening they they formally held its first session held their first session on may 30th of 1990 but uh president to jemann and we'll get into who he was in a minute um he had he formally announced the manifesto for a new croatian constitution

and um an entire like multitude literally of political economic and social changes um most of most concern to non-Croat's the extent that this constitution outlined to one extent minority rights would be guaranteed I mean mainly for Serbs the relationship between Croats and Bosniaks is complicated we'll get into that as we proceed with the series but local Serb politicians just opposed this outright you know they said it's a it's a manifesto for ethnic cleansing it's somewhat ironic if you consider the source Um.

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Coopera, design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. It's important to understand Tujman was not a bigot. I mean, he was a racial patriot. I believe despite his background, we'll get into that in a minute. I believe he was something of a national socialist. But he was not a bigot. His view of, his view of democracy, his view of representation, his view of representative government was basically

like the Schmidian view. You know, that democracy is the express will of the demos. It will always, it represents domination by, you know, one cohesive, like, ethnic, sectarian or racial group, you know, to the exclusion of, the

expression of other cultures in a full and complete way. Okay. And in a place like the Balkans, that's an arguable, even if one is prone to kind of universalist conceits otherwise. For context, as of 1990, Kroats represented 78.1%.

And Serbs, self-identified ethnic Serbs, represented 12%, just over 12% of the total population. But the Serbs held a disproportionate number of official posts closed somewhere between 15% and 20%. And these posts were loaded in the police and military. And this is something that had been underway for a couple of decades. You know, Serbians becoming insinuated into the security element, as well as adjacent institutions of the party apparatus. You know, it was the, after the death of Tito, the Communist Party in Croatia.

to a striking degree in Bosnia, Herzegovina as well. You know, the, like, the Yugoslavian security apparatus was becoming a, like, a Serbian institution, you know, and this, this more than anything kind of prompted public perception in Croatia among Croats that their back was against the wall. because it's not the Croatia at this time had it to own an army or something the only army was the Yugoslav

National Army, like the J&A. And immediately after the Slovenians also held a parliamentary election, they held there's in April in 1990. And then the Croats, as we just mentioned, in 1990,

in May 1990, the J&A, the Yugoslav National Army, me, they announced an end of the Tito era doctrine of general people's defense. What general people's defense in practice meant was that each discrete republic within Yugoslavia maintained a territorial defense force. That basically, you know, at absent like a general mobilization only to total war, you know, the local territorial defense would be responsible for, you know, responding to emergency situations, as well as acting in the kind of

constabulary role for policing the internal situation in event of a crisis. This was just abolished. And henceforth, it would be replaced by a centrally directed system of defense from the JNA's general staff, which again was for all practical. purposes you know like a serbian element um the slovenians acted rapidly to try and retain control over their um over their territorial element the proeasians played it very cool which is fascinating and people

have a couple ideas about that um the uh the weapon stockpiles of the territorial defense force element in croat majority regions were seized by the uoslav national army and um it was uh Serbia's representative in the federal presidency of Yugoslavia which was then still at least theoretically intact he claimed that this action came basically at the demand of Serbia because again they were claiming that

we represent all Yugoslavians but the Serbian minority is under direct mortal physical threat in newly independent Croatia which according to Belgrade was a fascist state so Tujman

realized he had to proceed carefully a lot of people believe Tujman, we'll get into his background in a minute, but he was an intellectual. He was a military officer, but he was kind of the constant East Block intellectual. People think he was basically playing like a master chess game,

and he realized that going to the good offices with with Germany, and particularly call as well as America's need

to control the situation without simply seating responsibility for any intervention to the Russians, which was unthinkable. That basically, like if he allowed the Serbs

to continue to basically kind of outrage world opinion, like carrying out what was, by all appearances, kind of like nakedly like a ethno-sectarian program of oppression against all attempts at secession and self-determination that either there'd be direct intervention by some combination of the UN and the EU backed up by NATO force of arms or that the United States and Germany would allow weapons

to stream in and essentially give the Croats that they needed to win when push came to shove and ultimately four years later that's exactly what happened and the

Croats you know launched his mass assault Operation Storm against the Serbian U.S.-Lov National Army and like quite literally like

liberated Croatia and we'll get into that in later episodes but um i basically accept that view of tuchman um which is why as i suggested as we commenced this discussion he's you know worthy of the praise that he receives and and then more um who was tuchman he was born on may 14th 1922. He died in December of 1999. It's an arguable that he played the, he played the pivotal role in the creation of like the modern Croatian state or the contemporary state. It's, uh, his vision of Croatia, it was, um, he didn't run from the, it's, it's, it's passed as a fascist state, a national socialist state. Um, He didn't even particularly de-emphasize it.

His background, he'd fought with the partisans against the Ustasha, which is interesting. In part, motivated probably by the fact that his brother had been murdered by the Ustasha, but he could not be called an anti-fascist. And in the 30 years preceding the homeland war, he was periodically in prison for nationalist activities. he wrote a history from the Croatian perspective of World War II, whereby he essentially said that the Croatians of the people had to work within the communist paradigm

in order to achieve self-determination, and that was his motivation for joining the partisans. And in other men's cases, especially after the wall came down, that would seem laughable. In Tujamond's case, it's entirely credible. Owing to, you know, the way he lived his life and, and frankly, the kind of regime that he created

when he came to the helm. He, you know, it's important note, too, that Tito was a Croat. And even then, there was a strong there was a Serbian plurality if not ready for huge savings

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that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Across party offices, you know, within the vanguardist elements as well as, you know,

in the security apparatus that followed. so it's a croat who a croat who was a partisan during the war years and then later became an arch nationalist the way to look at that is you can't look at that the way you would in some in some national narratives

it's not it's not a matter of what's changing changing their hats according to political currents there is an internal logic there you know convolutism might seem outside of the Balkan situation but um

revisionists who write about the Balkans and there are some they made the point that it's incredibly misguided and just kind of like a I mean just kind of like a midwood conceit to paint Tugman and Milosevic as you know as these kind of twin like Balkan

dictators um they they were totally different kinds of people they were different generations you know they were born you know over 20 years apart. Milosevic was the consummate kind of company man, communist. Interestingly, he was

the man the State Department favored for kind of peristrika in Yugoslavia to be overseen. And you know, uh, what I was alluding to

at the outset of this discussion with, in my opinion, the bogging situation kind of dooming the Bush Baker, Gorbachev, Shepard Nardze, Concord, was when, as I think we discussed before, the Tujman met with Helmut Cole on October 7, 1991. And Helmut Coal met on October 7th with Sepirovich, with Tujman's foreign minister.

And he reiterated in no uncertain terms that, you know, as long as Croatia like abides, you know, the ceasefire that was then periodically in place and, you know, continues to hold, you know, regular elections that, you know, beyond mere cosmetic affairs. That, you know, the newly independent Croatia has Germany's full support. Within the notes, the meeting is fascinating. Soperovich says, you know, we were painted as, we're painted as national socialists by the American world press. We fear this is going to harm our cause. Like, Cole says, like, don't worry about that. You know, when push comes to shove, basically I'll, I'm going to inform Washington that this issue is non-negotiable. you know um

so cold and of course uh belgrade went nuts and claimed that uh they they claimed that Tujman and Cole were conspiring to

develop a fourth Reich that um you know NATO was supporting a Nazi client state of Germany in um Croatia

um and uh the You know, the response from Zagreb was that, you know, we've abided every UN resolution that has been assigned to us in order to mitigate hostilities. We are under attack. We want nothing more than self-determination. You know, we're at risk of ceasing to exist as a people based on our unwillingness to abide communist tyranny. you know isn't that what the american way is all about and what the nato enterprise was was uh was tailored and maintained to guarantee and um yelton's people in moscow obviously were listening as were um welles's people in poland i mean as was uh as was um you know all these young turks throughout the uh throughout the um east block

and they were saying you know who the hell was Bush to tell the Russians that they've just got to tolerate you know they've got to tolerate a communist tyranny for the sake of stability you know this is this is egregious

you're telling people they've got to willfully avail themselves as captives to communism or something even worse and refrain from pursuing self-determination you know simply simply simply to abide, you know, some kind of vision that allows Gorbachev and Chavezhavid Narzay to make

heroes of themselves and possibly enrich themselves exponentially, you know, in pursuit of this kind of a policy of a non-action. And this really... Can I jump it for a sec? Yeah. Okay. How much, at this point, how much influence is coming from outside, like, NGO types? In 1988, I can't remember the name of the guy who started the National Endowment for Democracy,

but he bragged in the New York Times that, you know, the National Endowment for Democracy is now going to start doing the work of the CIA. and we have our eyes on Yugoslavia. There was some of that, but it's also what Siparovic said to Cole was correct. And there were national socialist guys who joined up to go fight and fight against the Serbs with the Croas. I met some of them. And Engelhausbach was not an admirable guy, but he did write a very interesting book. He talked about it. that. You know, that, that that that that that that that that that that was a shot in the

art of the national socialist cause especially in East Germany, you know, um, like the independent state of Croatia was back. It's one thing to it's one it's one it's one thing to to to repurpose Ukraine as like a human torpedo and install like a clown like Zelensky at the helm and then like watch it destroy itself, you know, while you allow these, while you allow them to like dress up and play Nazi. That's one thing. It's another thing to have like an actual national socialist state. Um, that's flying the standard of, uh, that, that, that Pavolich's NDH did. And having a, you know, helmet Cole, like, standing literally arm an arm with like the president of the newly independent

Croatia as a totally different ballgame and selling that um selling that in Washington um you know as part of a a neo congege program was not an easy sell

um what did going to carry the day mpri which was a precursor to black water and a lot more effective in my opinion they were much more the tradition of outfits like executive outcomes that people are familiar with that. NPRI was military products and resources incorporated.

They were a PMC outfit that was very much responsible for getting the Croats in terms of material and training. The Croats are a very martial people. And that's what facilitated Operation Storm. But it was a totally different world. And like the Croats were like an underdog people. yeah they had Germany behind them like yeah I'm like American media basically cast them as like the good guys but they also um if you go to a you know like

advesham like they got a they got a whole they got a whole exhibit like um permanent exhibit on like you know the crimes of the eustasha um you know they're not um it's when there's so many neocons like clicked up with like search tritkovich quite met and he doesn't like me very much. But that's why during the height of, the height of, like, war on terror bullshit, you had these, like, crazy, like,

Laura Lumer type Zionist saying, like, see, like, we stand with the Serbs because they're victims of the Holocaust too, and, like, they're also fighting Islam. Like, that's their big thing. You know, so, like, Croats are not people who, the kind of,

the kind of NGO macroverse likes to help. Okay, that's the short answer. we can get more into that in a subsequent episode it'll become particularly relevant as we get into Operation Storm and kind of like how that developed and there's the planning and execution

as well as the order of battle for the rubber met the road but you know the what was obviously the forefront of everybody's mind was what would Croatia's treatment of minorities be you know

to do you want to finesse that very well um Sepirovich openly stated that uh that the Zagreb government the Judgment government they have actually no problem with you know an open hearing

at the Hague conference that was then looming for the wintertime where participating representatives of you know all of you know the three ethnic groups you know prood servant Bosniak you could you know get some declaration of rights from this Zagreb government that would be guaranteed by you know like you had observers or whatever like upon cessation of hostilities you know the true problem the truth thrown the side of the Serre became the Albanians in Kosovo

But that's, we're not there yet. But the point is, like at least more than superficially, the Croat said, like, look, we'd be willing to accept some international controls in terms of settlement of the Serbian minority. And we'll definitely allow observers on the ground. We've got nothing to hide here. But again, you know, Tujman was unwilling to compromise in his statement that self-determination involves the Donuts. dominance of, you know, homogenous culture and its ability to guarantee that culture's

posterity and the practice of that culture by the people who constitute it. And this is absolute. That's what self-determination is. You know, you will not force us into some multi-ethnic state under Serbian dominion. You know, we will not become a minority in our own country again. And this is not negotiable.

And that was very balzy, but again, it, you know, the, this was exactly the right tactic to take. And again, some would say Tuchman gambled by holding back the way that he did and kind of letting the war be fought in Bosnia while like the Croats, you know, were able to kind of build political cachet by appearing to, you know, be the party that was most compliant, you know, with law and order as

as devised by NATO and the Hague, like cynical as that might have been, it was a masterstroke and Tudjaman could not have known that Operation Storm would develop a way that it did. The subtext of the

Cole Sepirovich meeting is Cole is telling him you're going to have the weapons you need to to win the homeland or when the time comes. Okay, that's, if you know what to look for in analyzing these kinds of, this kind of language and placing it in context of, you know, the parties and what brings them to the table, I think that can't be disputed. So that's, it's basically what we think of as, you know,

the Balkan wars, like in our lifetime. that's what kicked off the conflict cycle and again autumn of 91 like the cross the first like real kind of conventional engagement was the siege of the

Bajilovar barracks whereby the JNA was aiming to continue their campaign to disarmament against the Croats in Croatia proper. What was to become Croatia proper? Tudjman eventually

called after approximately 14 days he called off the siege and allowed the J&A to seize what they had come to take stood down what remained of territorial forces. Adopted a purely kind of defensive posture.

And meanwhile took to waging the active conflict by proxy. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking

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In Bosnia, which again was a political and strategic masterstroke. Did that prolong the suffering of people? I mean, what happened in Bosnia is horrible, like beyond belief. But, I mean, Tuchman did what we had to do to win the war. Okay. And if, within the bound of rationality of that, like, Belgrade had to be defeated. You know, I know that sounds like callous, but, I mean, the fact is it's, you know, yeah, I mean, subjecting people in the Bosnian battle space, including Crois. obviously you know um to those kinds of horrors um for the greater good i mean that that's those

are the kinds of decisions that's that that real statesmen you know like war and peace statesmen have to make and it was the right call i'm not trying to upset people i'm not like at all i'm speaking in in terms of um you know strategic matters um not moral ones and uh i'm not uh i've got a lot of respect for the Serbian people. I'm certainly not down on them or bashing them or anything. And we will give them, like, their fair hearing, too, like in the concluding episode. But

I think I'm frankly getting kind of tired. And we're going on the hour and that was kind of dense. So I don't want to get into the second. What I'm going to get into next is kind of, is like equally dense and we'll be here in a number two hours and I get into it now.

So I want to say, because it basically ties together Tuchman's regime as a legacy government of Pobolish, and I want to drop the context of what the Poblitz regime was as it existed from 94 to 195 in the second episode. I don't want to get into it now and then just like have to stop in 10 minutes. Is that fair? Yep, no problem.

Do your plugs. Yes, sir. I'm very excited to say, I've got a bunch of videos that's actually ready to go, and everybody's been very patient with that. And this has been a learning process for me. So like I, forgive me that have been like a height for like months and months, but I think people really enjoy what I got.

And I'm shooting even more tomorrow. So sometime this week, I plan to have something to upload. So be looking for that. You can always find me on Substack at Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. I've been dropping as much fresh content there as I can, including our dear friend J. Burton has been transcribing, our dialogues here, which is great. He's a real prince.

And I've been uploading those. I've been uploading new pod content, audio, so that's there. You can find me on my website. It's Thomas 777.com, number 7-HMS-777.com. You can find me on X at capital REL underscore number seven,

HMAS, 7777. I'm also on Instagram, but I can never remember. Just search Thomas 7777 on Instagram and you'll find me. Just like at number seven, HOMAS 777. And yeah, let's reconvene later this week, man, and we'll continue on the Balkan Wars. We're going to do it.

All right. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana show. Thomas, how are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thanks. All right, man.

Part two of the Balkans. What are we going to talk about today? Today, I wanted to provide a bit of context. To understand the conflict cycle of the Balkan wars from 1991 and 95, and then later, from 1999 into 2000, approximately, one has to understand this situation of the first attempt. at creating a Yugoslavian state, which was a fool's errand from inception. But this didn't originate with the partisans or with, you know, the, it didn't originate in the minds of the same kinds of people who, you know, conspired with these cynics like Venice and Chicago, Slovakia.

You know, it was, it, there was deep precedent for it. It had no, there was no organic support for it among the constituent populations, but among various coderies and categories of elites, like this was an ongoing effort. So that's number one. Number two, there's many, many misconceptions about the independent state of Croatia as it existed from any 41 to 45. for a small country it had a tremendously outsized impact it was incredibly committed to the access cause and a lot of people

claim otherwise by conflating support for the Ustasha regime with support for the Axis cause and Adolf Hitler and that's misguided but also people mischaracterized the relationship of proaids as a people to the Ustasha and

the Ustisha movement was a Bosnian Kroa movement at base. And discussing the view of the Ustasha in Croatia proper, it's almost like, it's an impertinentality, but it's almost like polling people like in England or like London about how they feel about like

loyalism in northern Ireland. You know, like you're remote from the conflict zone. And yes, I mean, Croats were really proud people. they're very like aware of a this situation contra the civilizational other I'm speaking within the terms of the conflict dynamics present and not making some value judgment or

suggesting anything in absolute terms about the population is under discussion but um in the Bosnia is literally like a powder keg of um of um of uh... ethnic sectarian conflict dynamics. So one's got to understand the emergence of the Eustache, as well as the emergence of the Chetnik movement as a, as a Bosnian phenomenon very much. You know, on the Chetnik side, there's complexities and ambitions that, you know, kind of transcended and superseded that.

But if you're talking about kind of the core base of organic radical support for, these uh for these um for these ethnic uh political programs and in ideological crusades you know um the dynamics of bosnia herzegovina are essential understanding that so today we're going to get into that stuff and then in the next episode i think uh you know we'll get into the, we'll get into the Homeland War itself and kind of how it resolved and what the implications where they're in. There's a lot here. If we start going too long, we might drag this out into another episode, but we've not been

informed yet that we're boring people when we go longer than expected. At least, I mean, I haven't gotten any feedback in that regard, and I assume if that was underway, you wouldn't continue to, you know, be so kind as to host me. I think if we go beyond three episodes, no one's going to complain. Yeah, that was the, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think we're, I think we understand each other enough. You know, we've got kind of like a rhythm going in the way we produce content that, yeah, I think we've got a common vision in mind.

The Balkans is a peculiar significance. There's a lot of kind of like cliche. discussion about it or cliched discussion the Balkans doesn't outside significance particularly particularly in due strategic terms

just owing to like owing to situateness like literal geography and in the case of Germany a hostile Balkans or even in neutral

Balkans whereby the Germans were denied the to deploy specifically to reinforce Hungary and to um you know uh create any kind of of defense in depth or alternatively to you know traverse the frontiers of Hungary Romania and um creation both here to govina proper if they were if they were denied the ability to do that um that would essentially like cut Europe in half in operational terms. And obviously as it became clear that the Soviet Union was Germany's primary adversary. And really the only path to victory in World War II was the defeat of the Soviet Union. Okay. I mean, this was this was emergent long before Barbarossa kicked off.

Okay. So that's the key to understanding. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28th of 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value.

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. The situation in the Balkans. And that endorsed to this day. Okay. I mean, that doesn't change. Secondly, the kind of unique, the unique affinity that great powers have

for the constituent populations there, it creates dynamics that have a unique potential for escalation. You know, like as we talked about, I'll get more into it today. The Croats and the Germans especially

Austrians and Bavarians but also I mean even the you know even Slavians and the Prussian officer

Corps such that it still existed you know in in the 1930s and 40s there's a basic affinity between Germany and Croatia you know and that was essential understanding what Helmut Cole did

in 1991. So, I mean, that endorses the state too. And the Russians as a people, they've got a unique affinity for the Serbs. Okay. I'm oversimplifying a bit for the sake of conceptual clarity, but also, you know, we've talked a little bit about the kind of Islamic awakening or revival of the late 20th century. And it's, and it's significance as an essential. one of many essential causes and kind of bringing down the Warsaw Pact structure and kind of like the Stalinist model of regime model Bosnia was very much ground zero

Bosniaks became very radicalized and what became Al-Qaeda was very active there and kind of bring Bosniak people like back into the Islamic fold. Okay and Bosniaks have something of a complicated

relationship to Islam but um traditionally you know they were very much adjacent um and integrated into into the Ottoman structure okay so these are not um this is not just some like middling ethnic conflict whereby the the subject populations you know aren't viewed as um aren't aren't are aren't viewed as holding any inherent significance historical or otherwise, save for the pragmatic business of attempting to resolve enduring conflicts in such a way that you know, great powers can at least work with whoever emerges triumph.

You know, there's very, very deep affinities here of, you know, basically pre-rational nature, a lot of which date to the 30 years war, but even that precede it. You know, so that's important to them. That's important to keep in mind. And I'll jump around a bit

here, but the Balkan theater of World War II was incredibly brutal. It was almost like a Vermacht experience, like Vietnam type experience. You know, the Chetniks led by Drazama Halovich. Kind of cloak really

called them a hell of its Chetniks, because there's various Chetnik factions, party of the conflict, and various kind of offshoot of the main sort of Chetnik movement. First and foremost, they were fighting for the restoration of the monarchy. The monarchy, as we got into, like the Yugoslav monarchy, as we got into in our World War I series, had become for all practical purposes, like a, you know, like a, a monarchy that was, um, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was very much captivated by Serbian interests, okay? Um, the Chetniks, the, the Chetniks were found in some sort of situation, somewhat, somewhat like Chanky Shex's forces did, um, in their own theater. Um, the primary ops of the Ustasha and the Vermathehrmacht, at critical moments

were the Chetniks, like not the partisans. The partisans would often avoid engaging the Vermacht when possible unless it was critical for them to contest an objective. And this led to very high Chetnik body counts and, you know, it allowed Tito to spare as arguably as kind of like his best cadres. Okay.

there was also complexities where, you know, there were some Chetniks who were like somewhat adjacent, almost allied with the Italians. And the Italians are kind of trying to play everybody off against each other. There was some Chetniks who ultimately defected in real terms, you know, to the Axis side. And one of whom actually received the Knights Cross. So, I mean, it's incredibly, it was a mess. you know um but the degree to which to hitler was forced to kind of abide um all all these competing interests and on all these conspiratorial designs of other essential allies you know what they're talking about the romanians the hungarians or like l duchy himself that's key to understanding why

Ante Pavolich became the the chief executive of the independent state of Croatia because Pavlitz was a very, very unusual guy as we'll see in a minute. And as I've emphasized before, because it's not a middling point, and it also

it's important to emphasize because it's rebuttal to a lot of the fallacious assertions of court history. The Third Reich wasn't trying to export fascism. they were doing the opposite. They didn't want destabilizing regimes to pop up that had a shaky mandate, you know, that were

kind of blowing up the internal constitution of traditional German allies. Like they didn't want that at all. Okay. A rare instance of like a radical cadre-based, revolutionary

fascistoid elements being wholly supported. being wholly supported by Berlin and becoming the official government of an essential ally. Like, the independent state of Croatia was really the only instance of that. I know some people watching this are going to say, like, well, what about the Arrow Cross in Hungary? Okay, that was, the war was, I mean, this was the final months of the war. Like that, that was, you know, those were desperate conditions whereby, you know, moment to moment, what was

what was what was going to allow the you know what was going to allow hungry to survive like as a state like was you know circumstances were changing

if not week to you know if not day to day and week to week so I don't think that's a fair comparison but um a point I make of people again again too is you know there was there was a peculiar almost kind of like internal conflict

in the in the right security apparatus where about like in Romania you know, okay, you know, like the Iron Guard. Hitler did not back the Iron Guard. He backed Antonescu, who I think in a lot of ways was was Hitler's best ally. Like he was close, obviously, to Deuchy,

like the Fuhrer was, I mean. But Antonescu made a huge commitment to Barbarossa, and he was a highly confident general officer. But that's the proverbial horse Hitler backed. all the SS and the SD, like, they back to the Iron Guard. I mean, owing to their own kind of radical inclinations

and desire to sort of develop a kind of foreign policy and to itself. Did he Vola say that he thought the Iron Guard was one of the best chances to defeat communism? Yes, he did. The place he was coming from, he looked at the Iron Guard basically as like an Orthodox Mujahideen. And like that's not misplaced. But he, if all his whole thing was that he looked at fascism and national socialism,

it's just like another kind of iteration of degenerated like modern materialism. If you like the Iron Guard is like this returned, you know, the kind of, if you abide Dumazel's trifunctional hypothesis, you do the Iron Guard is a return to like a combination of functions. the warrior function and the priestly function, which is a uniquely area and sociological paradigm, and that in Evala's view,

you know, represented, you know, only to the kind of peculiar conditions of Romania and kind of, you know, a culture that had still managed to sustain this kind of like linear consciousness of like ancient ways. You know, it was, it was like capital T tradition, sort of like reaching into the modern era

and like captivating, you know, captivating a national population. in a way that, you know, is both anachronistic as well as, you know, um, revolutionary and in, in, in, in all the most unique ways. And in, yeah, in an Evo's opinion, like, that's, that's the only way that, that's the only way that communism could be eradicated, like, the entire, like, modality of communist thought.

Like, if you, like, preview pretty much every, like, oppositional tendency is essentially derived from the same. Ready for huge savings? Well mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

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Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. The same lapsed, like materialist, like conceptual biases. So yeah, but it's, like, why the SS and the SD likes them, that's a little more complicated. Not philosophically, I mean, but it's like, it's murky. But the point is the independent state of Croatia stands out, for a lot of reasons. But that's not to say that it had some kind of like weak mandate. Like people,

um, court historians, Roy's claiming like, oh, you know, the Ustusha had no popular support, you know. I mean,

I can't really be true when, I mean, first of all is the fact of, you know, Bosnia of being the true kind of, the true kind of source of, of those kinds of conceptual imperatives,

ideologically, not Croatia proper, but also, So the, there was, um, Croatia committed, uh, at least one division-sized element. The 369th reinforced infantry of the Vermacht was, was 100% Croatian. The 392nd, which was also called the blue division, not to be confused with the Spanish blue division. The 392nd was regiment-sized. But, you know, you're talking about, um, you're talking about thousands of men, all volunteers.

who were also honored as, you know, being assimilated into the the Schwerpunct, like, lead element of Army Group South to assault Stalingrad. And all, there was a Croatian Air Force Legion that fought exclusively on the Eastern Front, and they scored like over 200 kills or like victories. You know, I mean, this was, I mean, the Croats, the Croats were 100%. on board with the Axis Crusade. You know, the fact that people didn't like love the Oostashe or something, that's not, it's not, you can't really derive anything from that.

And as we'll get into, their reasons for their objections owed to publish his Machiavellian tendencies more than it did that, oh, they're too radical and violent. You know, there's this myth too. They're like, oh, the Eustach were just too savage. So even the, even the horrible evil SS. said, tried to stand them down. That wasn't their objection. Their objection was that, you know,

when Paua was essentially there to kind of like balance these theories, you know, of Italy, Romania, Hungary, as well as, as well as rooting out, you know, the partisan threat in Bosnia-Herzegovina. You know, meanwhile, while they were doing that, they were also ethnically cleansing the NDAH of Serbs. Their notion was

deport a third, like slaughter a third, and like forcibly convert a third to Catholicism. And they Pavlovich had absolutely no problem with Muslims. In fact, like he identified with them strongly. And we'll get into that in a minute. We get into some of his biographical data. But that was the objection was like,

look, like this, you know, it was a question of like misplaced priorities. It wasn't like that, you know, the view was that like the regime and Zagreb was being too mean or something. But moving on, it, the, you know, let me scroll down here and see what I've got in my outline. There's a, such that it existed, I mean, such that there was, it didn't matter. The kingdom of Yugoslavia, Hitler realized, which still existed until 1941,

Hitler realized that he had what all costs and court them into the tripartite pact, which eventually he did. And famously, um, famously, uh,

the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul on June 3rd, 1939, the prince Yugoslavia and his his wife was an English woman, you know, like born and bread. They were invited to Berlin. There was this whole gala

celebration. There was a banquet throwing their honor. There was like a full military parade. You know, and Hitler's notion was twofold. Like, first of all, the Yugoslav monarchy and its cabinet was served-dominated.

Okay. We talked about some of those dynamics again, like in our World War I series. They were pursuing a course of declared neutrality, which in reality was a policy of area denial to forbid that Vermont from any kind of operational ingress or egress to Yugoslav territory. All right, this had to be resolved in some way. not just because it's becoming clear and clearer that, again, you know, Germany's,

the primary threat to Germany was the Soviet Union, but also, you know, the only, the only way Germany could, the only Germany could literally fuel its war machine as well as deploy in the, as it needed to, was if there was, you know, access to Romania, which, and you know whose oil fields were literally fueling the the German economy as well as

as well as it's as an ass and war machine but also again too there was geo strategic imperatives that um you know it's it's simply as a as a the Balkans couldn't simply just be like written off in the area of operations

for all kinds of reasons and especially as it became clear um even before the advent of hostilities in 1939, it was clear that, you know, if the British intended to like see through on what they were, you know, alleging was these guarantees on the continent that, you know, the really the only, really, really in operational terms, like the only, the only kind of assault upon Europe that could be staged conceptually or conceivably at that time would have been, you know, through the, through the, through the, through the, in theater, you know, be it Greece, be it, um, you know, um, U.S.S. Lavia or

otherwise. But, um, the Hitler's chagrin, um, Paul traveled to London soon afterwards, and it was clear that he was being actively courted um, by, um, you know, the, uh,

the, the, the, the, the intelligence establishment there. You know, um, And this becomes, this is key to understanding what developed around Pavlich, as we'll see in a minute. It's, you know, and that's something I, this is something I emphasize again and again, too. people tend to view Germany's attack upon Greece, which really owed you the operational shortcomings, the Italian army, as Hitler trying to force the British to stand down

and abandon any claim to the Mediterranean, as well as it some kind of just like show of force, you know, based upon, I mean, I guess the first true like, um, paratroop assault was on Crete and it was a disaster. But this idea that that was some kind of flex intended to signal the UK, I mean, it's ridiculous. The reason why this was critical is for the reasons why I said, like the entire Balkan campaign of the Vermacht. it owed entirely Germany's security

concerns like conceptually orbited entirely around the Soviet Union in like existential terms okay it's not in political terms obviously yeah

like the UK's unwillingness to come to terms and it's you know unrelenting posture of bellicosity like yes that was hugely impactful in kind of the course of of um of policy in Germany

um you know from the foreign ministry to the OKW and everything else. But in raw strategic terms, what I just said is not impeachable. If the RAF had gotten a toll hold to, I mean, again, like, they could have basically, they could have laid Romania to waste.

It was, you know, those four-engine bombers that, ultimately were turned loose on Germany's civilian population, you know, if put to, if put to, um, that purpose, um, you know, it would have been devastating. I mean, this was... Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the door. doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range.

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Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. The concrete particulars of that those sort of strategic bombing at scale, wasn't yet known, but it was it was known that, you know, power projection against what we'd consider to be like both the counterforce and

counter value nature. Like it was clear that this was going to be hugely impactful in the next war. And it's also you know, the, like we talked about before, I mean, by this time, the

the Soviet Union had um or by by the advent of hostilities between Germany and Poland the Soviet Union had captured you know 410,000 square kilometers which was the size of the entire German Empire as of 1919 I mean this was not this was not um Hitler couldn't afford to wait and see you know what developed and then trying to sinewy it you know a kind of a kind of um you know, kind of meaningful, um, forward deployment in the Balkans by, you know, a combination of, like, threats and incentivization. Like, it just, like, was not in the cards. Um, the, um, and especially when it became clear that Turkey is not going to, you know, Turkey traditionally, um, was, uh, was one of,

was one of the ways Germany hedged against them, you know, both Russian and British power in the Mediterranean, and that was off the table. It's an interesting subtext laid in the war. The foreign ministries, like the overtures

the foreign ministry did make towards Ankara, but it was never, I mean, by that point, they were, you know, they were in the throes of desperation and seeking any port in a storm. It was never serious, it was never serious, it was never seriously within the minds of anybody who was, you know, realistic. But by March of 1941, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, had all joined the tripartite pact. this was a big coup of Hitler because the Hungarian Prime Minister

finally agreed to allow German troops to cross through Hungarian territory to access Romania and as well as like deploy they basically allowed like free like interest and egress across like the Hungarian frontier

and Horthy Admiral Horthy who was very much adjacent to Berlin the Hungarian foreign ministry had to that point been overly hostile they'd taken the same tack

as Yugoslavia had and it was a complicated Horthy's role as regent he was far from like on war in peace questions he had something of an absolute mandate, but in times of peace or in conditions short of war, foreign relations was basically in the hands of a cabinet that had, you know, like a long history, really going, that had, like, you know, deep roots in the kind of was failing system, you know,

so it's important to consider that. So, Hitler realized that all this, though, was essentially null and void if Yugoslavia couldn't be wooed. Some people speculate that the Greek operation was prioritized as it was, because Hitler aimed to offer part of northern Greece to the Yugoslav government at some kind of concession. Like, I don't know if that's true or not, but it finally, at the close of March of 41, the perpetually invivolent Yugoslavs signed a tripartite pact. psychological blow to London was tremendous you know this was

this is probably the biggest this is arguably more significant and more significant policy coup than had been what Hitler Tiso had accomplished in Chicago Slovakia with discrediting

Britain's claim to you know the moral high ground or to, you know, it insinuating itself as this, you know, before to do a rational arbiter of power political affairs on the continent, you know, because it was, it's, um, it, all of its moves that had been couched and, you know, um, either, uh, imperatives laid down, um, at Versailles relating to self-determination, which of course was ridiculous in these, you know, multi-emic monsteroities that had no actual organic support,

or they were framed in terms of, you know, systemic stability. And obviously the fact that, you know, the U.S. law to join the tripartite pact owing to a basic appreciation of Soviet aggression and the existential threat represented to them,

because nothing would have galled them more than again, you know, like allowing Germany basically a free hand to deploy across their frontiers. I mean, it speaks for itself. Okay. But

March 27th, you know, literally days later fuel reported to Hitler that there had been a coup d'etat and Belgrade Paul had been overthrown

there was crowds massing outside the German allegation demanding you know Germany get out of Yugoslavia like you know it's diplomatic representatives were being physically threatened

the Swedish envoy had been mistaken for a German had been beaten within an issue of his life the British diplomatic legation which quite clearly was the British intelligence service under a light diplomatic cover they were doing everything they could to stir up crowds

you know and and arm them this coup had been engineered the commander of the USLA of Air Force he was a career officer named Dusan Samovitch he was a rabid Chetnik who hated Germany he organized revolutionary cabinet around himself

the cabinet refused to ratify the tripartite pact however they said they they mouth these like mild protestations um some of its office did saying that like well we remain

you know allied with Germany against the Soviet Union you know which obviously was I I mean it was bizarre okay um I mean obviously this was a move to the belief probably was that like confusion would reign in Berlin such that

you know, there'd be some sort of paralysis of policy decisionism and by the time that was all worked out to be too late, but that was an incredibly stupid gamble. As opposed to considering the man who was at the helm in Berlin.

Hitler He will relate later, this is one of a few times he ever saw Hitler, like, actually like, enraged. You know, like yelling and, like, slamming his fist on the desk and like visibly like agitated and angry because despite what Hollywood suggests like Hitler wasn't that wasn't his nature um but that um he uh summoned uh kytel immediate and yodel immediately um he apparently uh I call himself down and he said

that you know owing a course not just to his Austrian an upbringing. But his experience in the Great War, you know, he said that, you know, chauvinistic Serbs, you know, they've always been, they've always been responsible for, you know, catastrophes at scale.

You know, and they're doing this again. And this will not stand. He said, he ordered, fuel the Senate immediately for von Browshich at that time was

still the Army Chief of Staff He summoned the Hungarian and Bulgarian diplomatic envoys He told the Hungarian envoy That

the hour had struck quote for Hungary's revenge He said Hitler said that Berlin would support any and all territorial claims against Yugoslavia held by Hungary. He offered the Hungarians access to the port of Flume or Fume, I don't know how it's pronounced, which would give them ingress into the Adriatic. The Bulgarian envoy name of Dragonov. He offered Bulgaria.

Macedonia. Is it just outright? He had a brief work conference with the Haldor Browships in Riventrup. He said the broad plan of assault in the Balkans. He said politically it's vital to fall upon the Balkans without mercy. And again, this was actually rare language for Hitler. He said, Yugoslavians to be regarded as an enemy and is there to be destroyed as rapidly as possible. whatever protestations of loyalty should be momentarily utter now again the um it's it uh the subjects here wasn't just that um the uh simovitch coup had been facilitated not an absolute measure but in essential terms by london

but the communist is pretty Yugoslavia. They played no part in the coup. But they made a significant contribution to the mass like street protest and uprising that has signaled popular support for it. And again, too, this was a

distinctly like anti-German flavor. You know, so like Moscow's hand was in this too. You know, and that's the point to make to people again and again. You know, like the Germans, what are you talking about, the okay W, whether you're talking, like this is a rare example of a quorum. You had Hitler,

you had He had Hewel, he had Von Broushich, you had Ribbentrop, had Yodel, you had Cytle, basically had everybody who later on, you know, basically by December 41, there was like a total fracturing here of worldview, as well as ideas on

strategy, both immediate and grand. But there was like an absolute consensus that the proverbial news was tightening around Germany, owing to, these developments in Yugoslavia and that was not unfounded paranoia that was absolutely correct

okay which begs the question as to what London was thinking I mean Stalin Stalin could afford to kind of like wait and see how these machinations would develop like why what that was London doing with you know

provoking the Reich again and again into like a war that the British couldn't win I think it was raw humorous in my opinion. And they underestimated Hitler again and again and again and again. The

official directive April 6, 1941, it was Fear Directive 25. It's colloquially known as Operation 25. Okay. Or the April War. April 6.41,

the invasion, the assault, then you go to Slavia commenced and the overwhelming, first with an overwhelming era salt and Belgrade by the Lufth off. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear.

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and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person, so together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.Northwest. targeting all facilities the Royal Uyoslav Air Force. The Vermont assaulted from southwestern Bulgaria. They were reinforced by thrust from Romania, Hungary,

and the Ostermark, which is Austria, Los Angeles. Italian forces were limited to air and artillery assaults until the 11th of April, when the Italian army was permitted to assault towards what's modern-day, Slovenia across Jubidiana which I'm sure I butchered that pronunciation.

On the same day Hungarian forces entered what was then Baca and Barania but like the and both the Italians and Hungarians face basically no resistance

okay there was a Yugoslav counter result into the northern parts of the Italian protector of Albania which gained some initial ground but the U.S. The U.S.S. Lov army was in total collapse by that point.

Now, why did the Yugoslav army just suddenly and like rapidly collapse? Well, I believe, and people have downplayed this lately, owing to their own sort of

misguided concepts, the ideological narrative. I mean, there was a substantial Volksgeuch community in Croatia and Bosnia Sklavia.

Also, I mean, Croatians and Slovenians had, you know, they were abjectly opposed to the Yugoslav regime, which was essentially like a Chetnik regime in disguise. And it's constituted in a very effective fifth column. And at least superficially, the Royal Yugoslav,

the Royal Yugoslav army was a multi-ethnic army. It had to maintain the appearance of not just being, you know, a, like a Chetnik revolutionary element. So, I mean, I think basically noted with the Serbs are willing to fight. Okay. And the mask, the mask dropped proverbially. The armist was signed on the 17th of April, 41, you know, based on what amounted to the

ungoditional surrender to the U.S. law of army, because it just no longer existed. Okay. I mean, a combination of a night. of forces in being like mass desertion and you know just um garrisons you know command garrison commanders is surrendering without firing a shot you know um the armist came into effect at noon the next day um the can of ioslavia was an occupied partition by the axis most of Serbia and binat became a German occupation zone other areas were

or other areas of what had been Yugoslavia were annexed by Hungary, Italy, Albania, Bulgaria, and of course Croatia became the NDH and we'll get into that momentarily but the the Yugoslav army for what remained of it it would be changed into military

command like officially you know and what remained of its infrastructure just formally became under, you know, like, Shetnik authority in command. So, I mean, obviously, this

happened literally within hours. You know what I mean? It's obvious what was that the reality of you know, the, like the Yugoslavian state became, you know, like kind of nakedly apparent to all. But it's, but again, it's one of

I guess Hitler's exact words in Fior Directive 25 and forgive me forgive me if my Chicagoese accent butchers this is Yugoslavian

militarish and out Statsbiltzschlangen which means the total destruction of Yugoslavia militarily and as a state for all time and to do so with piteous, without

mercy. Okay. Now, enter the Ustasha and Pahlic and who were they and who was he, because this is key. I'm just understanding how events developed,

but it's also, it's key to understanding the modern Croatian state, including the Croatia that exists today. I'm not saying that Croatia today or even two to know on Croatia was just literally like the NDH but Tujman deliberately drew upon that precedent

which again kind of defeats this claim by court history that oh well you know the Ustasha was nothing but you know what this this client regime with no depth that nobody supported you know whether I mean however anybody feels about it

it um you know if we're talking about modern Croatian statehood we're talking about the UstStershire regime and published himself was an incredibly dynamic person. You know, it was not some present rabble robs or some

military strongman. You know, he was quite cosmopolitan and just lived a remarkable life. And he was a lawyer by trade, first and foremost. I mean, he very early unbloodied his hands as a political soldier and a partisan, but that wasn't

that he was a man of many faces. Okay. The Ustsich, Admiral Canaris, you know, the chief of the Abver, which was Germany's foreign intelligence service. This is one of the Abraer's greatest successes, okay? And there are some key successes of the Abbaer. Despite the fact Canaris was not just a fifth columnist, he was an active traitor. He was collaborating with the Allies.

Okay. So the Abbearer was totally compromised from the top down. On some level, the SS always knew this, and this was one of the imperatives for the development of the SD, which would seem on his face to be just like a redundant bureaucracy within the security apparatus. But there were some bona fide brilliant operational successes carried off by the ad there. Whether that was because at operational levels, there were committed national socialists. or following through as if the institution they served did not been compromised, whether

Canaris had mixed feelings about his loyalties. This is not clear, but the Eustache's a sentancy owed obviously not

exclusively, but an essential contributing cause of its success was the fact that you know, Canaris had fermented a breakaway Croatian movement from early on. Okay. And a, this is, this, this was an armed vanguardist underground movement. There was no concept of it, you know, abiding legality.

There was no concept of it standing for contested elections, a legitimate situation than in Vimar, okay? The only, the only, the only, the only way, um, across national, um, constitution um across a national state was going to be realized was was through was by the gun and by the knife

okay caneris um obvious kind of a choice um for a leadership element was a general named

uh sladko kvaternick he's an officer of the old Hasbro army um he uh when the eustach should did seize power he initially was kind of the figurehead um aided by the abber's what was codenamed the jupiter organization which was it's kind of like direct action element um after the independent state have been set up like pavillich dr anthe pavlich who'd spent long years in exile in

Italy by that point was like revealed as Koglovnik, which approximately means pure, server cerebral creation, okay? Why the bait and switch of figure heads? Like

not not Pavlovich nor nor fraternic were ciphers. They both wielded tremendous power in cloud, but I'm talking when I say figurehead, I mean, in terms of outward appearances.

When a Hitler's challenge is with balancing Italian demands on the Balkans, and specifically Croatia, in order to placate Mussolini over, among other things, the murder of Dolphus and the subsequent Anschluse and other things, early on, he agreed to cede the Dalmatian coast to Italy, at least, as a sphere of influence and an event of... Employers, did you know, you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards annually,

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you know, as a territorial imperative that they would be permitted to capture. This caused intense resentment in Zagreb. But Hitler realized it was a necessary evil. Okay. Now, Pavlovich, having spent so many years in Italy, and having courted really since 1932-33 alliance with the Italian fascist

he was kind of Mussolini, he wasn't Mussolini's man as it sometimes alleged in Zagreb, but he was Italian and frankly when it became clear that Italy was going to do Croatia as just kind of like this exploitable aspect brought published in the National Socialist camp so firmly okay um canaris's uh

adjutant was a he was an officer by name of uh Lahausen um he warned the furor as well as his boss Canaris that they had to proceed very delegately

that the resentment over the loss of Dalmatia and just kind of the arrogance of which the Italian seating, was wreaking absolute havoc. He literally said the Croats are people of honor with a long military

tradition, and it is better beyond words to be trodden down and humiliated now by an army has not been able to pin one victory to its colors. Speaking of the Italian army, okay? Now, who was Ante Pablish? Poblich was born and Herzegovina. the village of Redina, which is literally in the mountains, okay, in central Bosnia,

roughly nine miles southwest of Hizichi. It was then part of the Ottoman Empire, but it had been seated. It was formerly under the sovereignty of the Sultan, but the entirety of Bosnia's to govina had fallen under Habsburg rule by 1860s. 78 or the Congress of Berlin. Okay. And essentially it was a conquest without a shot being fired as the Hasburgs raiding army of around 30,000 men

and threatened to assault it. And this is one of the if you allow the tangent. This was one indicator of Ottoman power like precipitously having deteriorated. They didn't even take the field of battle. They just like ceded it. With some meaningless, with the and said it's a meaningless declaration that it remained under perhaps remained under ottoman authority but there's an interesting dynamic here of a cultural nature and this impacted powell's upbringing directly

now all his parents had moved to bosnia from a village that was in croatia or like what would be in croatian within croatia's borders today um his father at dunnia so to work on the Sarajevo rail line but ultimately as a small child the family settled in a village called Jazeero or Jazeero or Pahlit sent a primary school but Jazeero was a Bosni majority domain it was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim so Pavilich the Croat he attended the primary schools he attended attended were Machtaub. Like a mocktab is a, it's like an Islamic elementary school.

Okay. So Pavlige learned published until the day he died, you know, confessed his sins and went to mass daily. But he was raised literally like in Muslim traditions and lessons. And he knew the deep war of Islam. Like he knew it's like liturgical practice.

Like he knew like it's he knew everything about it. He was like almost like half raised as like a Muslim. Okay. And this is why in the NDH, Sunni Islam was the other state religion along with Catholicism.

And Hanjar, the Bosniak VafnsS, its national identifier was first Croatian because official policy, by order of Povulich was that

Bosnian Muslims a racial proations and um i'm going to i'm going to make people happy because like i brought like props today this is like the fez that like hansar like division would wear can people see that um i think this is awesome like uh maybe other people don't but it's like literally like a fez with a totem cop and a rike sadler you know i don't think it would look too like cool on me but like it's it's just freaking cool but um but i mean this is the this is like how seriously like this was taken. This wasn't just like superficial. So, you know, Pavlich was a quintessentially cosmopolitan. And like that even more than it was apparent in his early life, as we'll get into.

But he, uh, he, um, as he, um, as he became a teenager and a young adult, um, he had a much older brother who lived in, uh, in Zagra. and during um kind of like as as as as as as as as as as college got in adolescence um when he was attending school in trodnick he became an adherent and nationalist ideologues like guys who who proceeded to where we came known with the Croatian Party of Rights um first and foremost the guy named uh Ante Starchevich um was like an early uh like like you know like like proate nationalist you know and like one of his like one of his

um kind of one of his like one of his like one of his followers or um or um or uh um one of the guys he mentored kind of like in

in um in the art of uh philosophy of like you know political warfare was a Yosep Frank um who later became like the leader of the party of rights but Polish's notion was like, well, this is great that, you know, Croats have like this kind of like,

have cultivated this kind of like racial sense of self, you know, and kind of a path forward for an independent state. But its concern was that like this is too much of like a peasant phenomenon. But when he, when he, when he, when he, when he went to stay with his elder brother in Zagreb, like he realized that, you know, the Croat dialect, um, was very much alive in Zagreb and people were openly identifying, you know, in, you know, in, what were traditionally, you know, Cosmopol and Habsburg cities, you know, Croats were living openly as Croats. I mean, I'm not trying to be silly, but I mean, like, I'm trying to think of the best way to characterize it. and that um

and that that from that point on you know like he published realize like this was this was a viable way forward okay um again as like a vanguardist like um revolutionary

imperative you know like again this was the the the Egoslav situation was nothing at all like the Weimar's situation um it uh Pollard's always beset by health problems

from the time he was a kid until he was murdered like you know years after the war and we'll get into that in a later episode but um he uh he ultimately um he ultimately took a

a law degree as uh frankly was like part of the course for um part of the time on both side of the ideological divide, revolutionaries rather. He obtained his doctorate in July, 1915.

And he basically, he joined the Croatian Party of Rights formally around 1918 and worked as a lawyer in Zagreb. It was 1929 when

his kind of radicalization in tactical terms at least really ossified and that was around the time or it was at the same time as what became to be known as the January dictatorship

January 6th, 9029 um quite literally a royal dictatorship was declared in what was then the kingdom of Serbscrawts and Slovenes King Alexander I, the first who we talked about some in our world

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They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding Visit optionscar.aee today. Alexander's notion was quite literally to create a Yugoslav ideology and a single Yugoslav nation, you know, under his dictatorship, through, you know, a combination of a population,

forced population transfers, suppression of discrete languages, presumably, you know, outright suppression of the Islamic religion, attempts to strip the cross of the ability to pursue an express culture in public and shared forums. It ended in 1931 with the adoption of the Yugoslav constitution, what was called the Yugoslav constitution, but the damage was done. Okay. I mean, people realize that in their view, the two probable outcomes for any Yugoslavia enterprises. Either that is going to be a Chetnik dictatorship,

you know, with the alibi or the mask rather of, oh, this is, you know, a multi, this is a multi-ethnic state. You know, we're all, with the rights of all, all the, all three ethnic groups are, are honored. Or it was going to be,

you know, it was going to be a matter of, you know, the act of suppression, essentially, of all cultural expression, not unlike what's happening in the Soviet Union, you know, under the, but without even the kind of ideological culture of Marxist Leninism to prop it up. You know, this kind of, this kind of utterly contrived, you know, Yugoslavism as a little more than a pretext for, you know, the crushing of, of discrete. Historical identities. At this time, published, formally organized the Ustitia. I have absolutely no fluency in Serbo-Croatian. As I understand it, and I'm sure the fellows who do will correct me if I'm wrong. I believe Ustsha roughly translates to insurgents, or insurgency, okay? The official founding in Ustitia lore, like to this day, is that the party was founded on justiceship.

January 7th, 1929. It was around this time Publige came under basically constant police surveillance. During a lapse in the surveillance, he fled to Austria

and proceeded nominally under the with under the pretext of, you know, seeking medical treatment or it's not going health problems there you know vienna at that time was completely lit you know by conspiratorial designs and people's pursuing those designs and i mean that was the place to be frankly if you were trying to accomplish what he was trying to accomplish

you know he he made he made contact with other croat emigres who were you know looking for some kind of catalyzing or organizational imperative you know to develop cadres um Most of these guys were political refugees. You know, they'd either been chased out of Soviet territory, or they were being terrorized by the Yugoslavia and secret police. You know, or they were former Hapsburg Army officers, you know, who'd refused to return to Yugoslavia, you know, after the succession of, you know, Chetnik and royalist intrigues.

after a short state there where he made contact with among other people some Bulgarian radicals who had a similar you know

with similar ambitions in mind to their own people he moved to Budapest where there was a more kind of welcoming environment for parts of the right okay um in march of

1929 the Ustasha element still within Yugoslavia undertook a campaign a direct action the first incidents of which was the

assassination of uh Tony Scheigel in Zagreb Shigel was basically a regime mouthpiece he was editor of uh at the top newspaper in Zagra. It was a close covenant of King Alexander

and very much the mouthpiece of the regime. Like, Lewis is just a murdering him. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November.

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While this was going on, Pavlovich, he managed to establish contact with an element that was known as the internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. This is about a month subsequent to the murder of Schlegel. It's Schlegel or Schlegel, I think it's Schlegel. But,

and he in some of his contacts, Bulgarian context, that he made in Vienna, they traveled to Bulgaria in April. This led to the signing by a number of ethnic nationalist partisan types of what came to be the Sophia Declaration

it formalized cooperation between Croatian Macedonian and Bulgarian radicals like radical nationalists who opposed the the Belgrade regime as well as the communists and the Chetniks.

U.S. U.S.S. Lavia formally protested the government in Sofia. Pauvich was then, he was tried for high treason in an absentia and sentenced to death on the 17th of August, 1929.

Owing to that verdict, a month subsequent of September, Pauld was arrested in Vienna. The Viennes were sympathetic, or at least those in the security apparatus, you know, had more than a fludging sympathy for him and his cause.

Rather than extraditing him, they expelled him to Germany. This caused some problems because at this time there were still formerly good offices, diplomatically speaking, between Germany and Yugoslavia.

The German ambassador was a typical foreign ministry veteran of the time named Adolf Koster, who was a supporter of Yugoslavia. He was literally a personal friend of King Alexander. So this obviously not Bodewell for Provilish. Before this kind of hostile sentiment from, you know, Koster's friends and I, places could develop into truly threatening police action against his person, Pavlis left Germany under an assumed name, and went to Italy, where he already had family as well as a theological contacts.

Now in Italy, at least for a couple of years, he frequently changed location and lived under the false name. He lived as an Italian national. His assumed identity was in an Italian national. Most often is Antonio Sendar. Sardar. He had contact with Italian authorities, at least the intelligence apparatus of the fascists,

since at least 1926 and 1997. In 1929, he managed to establish deeper contacts. And through his friends in the legal profession, as well as some radical right journalists that he'd befriended,

he managed to court Mussolini's brother Arnold Mussolini was a strong supporter of fraud independence just outright and like a very like a very like a hardline fascist.

Pavlich again only to whether it's his cosmopol an upbringing or just his kind of natural intelligence for sociological affairs wherever he went he seemed to create a basic sympathy and understanding of the Croat situation among Italians

at least Italian baches and adjacent right wingers. He was very good at this. That fall published, published what became a widely circulated treaties, really, more than a brochure, but less than like an actual book. This ended up being widely circulated in the Third Reich, especially, in later years, which became significant for various reasons. but this brochure, if you will, it was called,

Esal is from the Croatian state, lasting peace in the Balkans, which was kind of like a, it was a summary of Croatian history, you know, from kind of like the, you know, the, the Habsburg German, like an adjacent Ustashe perspective.

The Italian authorities did not want to formally support the UstShtia, not just because, believe it or not at this, time and we made the point before you know kind of like the zenith of this was musulini presiding over the four powers pact um but muslini was he he assumed himself as this as this kind of like um is this kind of like great negotiator who like presided over um these kinds of diplomatic concords and like it'll use a stabilizing influence so the italians um

for all of its for all of its revolutionary aptitude and capturing power, like the fascists in this epoch, and especially before the unflucing things, they were behaving very much like a national conservative party.

And a lot of these guys in authority, they didn't want to openly support some like radical right partisan, you know, like abolish and like the Oostashe, you know, to protect the reputation and for sake of optics of nothing else. And that's important understand. It's like an odd period and in kind of like the inner warriors.

But Mussolini saw them as a... Musilini, first and foremost, wanted to destroy Yugoslavia and capture, you know, some kind of ingress of the Adriatic. So, um, published almost undoubtedly received personal support from Mussolini and, so did the Ustisha generally, like their offices in Zagra and elsewhere. And towards that end, Mussolini allowed Pauldge to remain in exile in Rome and openly trained as paramilitaries in preparation for war with Yugoslavia. And Poblige made a, so he developed association with Croatian expats in Italy, as well as as well as um haps for army veterans and uh germans uh volkesthoits who were um had direct connections direct links to the to the to the government of the rike and um a lot of these guys had um very strong like military experience

okay um so he was making all the he was making all the right moves and connecting with all the right people to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish. 1931, again, a financial up from Mussolini. Powell established formal camps for partisans. First, in Bovino,

Italy, and ultimately, uh, there was camps, you know, throughout, um, throughout Italy and as well as, uh, Hungary. And almost certainly Bosnia, though,

under obviously like the cover. This created this this kind of infrastructure facilitated by Mussolini facilitated the smuggling of weapons and political literature and

propaganda into Yugoslavia proper the camps were moved around constantly again at the behest of Mussolini which, you know, when if Mussolini was kind of like he like shined brightest when he was charged with a revolutionary task.

You know, once such revolutions had been, ambitions have been consolidated, Mussolini didn't shine so bright, but he was very much in his element here. And Paulditch was very, very fortunate to be able to

curious favor and learn from him. And again, that's why Pollard can't be just be dismissed as some third-rate dictator or something. What he accomplished here? Basically, he's a wanted man showing up in Rome without any particular cloud or money and just, you know, within months, you know, getting an ear with

El-Ducce, that's something short of remarkable. That's Hitler-like and it's an unlikelyhood of ascendancy. But the Ustsha managed to establish adjacent associations, not just of ethnic Croas, but a sympathetic fascist and national socialists all throughout Western Europe, and in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and even in the United States and Canada. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area

and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash Northwest. Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shelf voucher or a special? Spend Anywhere card, when with Options Card, you can have both.

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in national socialist and fascists and adjacent circles like they can't be overstated I mean this is a tiny country with like a very very small expat community is because they're not that many of them and the fact that there's this kind of reach is incredible I think I mean obviously I'm an admirer of published I mean I think that's being clear by now but um the uh this undoubtedly in 932323 as um as these elements who had been training diligently were turned loose you know there's a series of bombings and shootings in us lobbyia proper which led to just this blanket cracked on a political activity as the state declared you know a state of emergency and uh this

counter-terrorist regime, it exploited that mandate to profoundly abuse impoverished Croat peasants, you know, the brutality towards which was almost always meted out by Serbian police

and insecurity elements. So this was kind of like a splendid example of cultivating a strategy of tension, you know, among other things, in order to facilitate. it's a emergency revolutionary paradigm beyond the kind of narrow um cadre structure um we've been going for like an hour and 20 minutes and I still

probably got another hour of material I'm thinking if we could break in a minute and then um take this up in the next episode um that would be fantastic let's do it let's do yeah well I forgive me if that was too like long-winded but there's a lot here next episode will deal with the formal ascendency of Pavilich to the office of Poglovnik

and the Warriors and Sigfried Cash and all of that stuff. I didn't realize I've been going on that long. It's okay. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, do plugs real quick. I'll get out of here. Yeah, man. You can always find me on Substack Real Thomas 777.

That'substack.com. actually you can always find me on my website that's the best kind of one-stop place to find my content of all kinds is literally Thomas-777.com number 7-h-M-A-S-77-com you hit me up on telegram it's Thomas Graham

again number seven H-M-A-S gram you can find me on X real capital R-E-A-L underscore number seven H-MAS 7777 yeah we're all over the place in this in this bitch man I want to my

Instagram too is you gonna like if you like you can find like my photographs if you want to you know it's funny I never go on I rarely go on Instagram sometimes someone will link me like something on Instagram like a video or something and it'll take me

to it and then I'll back out of it and inevitably there you are there's your Instagram because you're like only one of you're one of very few people that I follow so it's like I never go on there but I always see your posts it's like I take like a lot of photos you know and like Instagram it's kind of I don't like the user interface and like it's full of bots and like creepy bullshit like porn bullshit but it's um you know I mean it's a good there's like that's I met like

Nico Klau and stuff and like it's it's a good place to reach out especially to um kind of like artsy people who are like politically politically adjacent but not really kind of like in and then sphere of activity. But it's also, it's just like a good repository of like photos, man. You know, and it's, I can rationalize like dumping a lot of photos there without feeling like a fucking wero. All right. Until the next time.

Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, thank you, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino show. Thomas is here and part three of the Balkans. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for hosting me. Of course.

some people got upset thinking that I wasn't telling the Serbian side of the story. I mean, that wasn't my intention at all. Like, I got kind of irritated, and I wasn't feeling very well. So if I said some things that upset people, I mean, in response to some of their complaints, I wasn't trying to be obtuse. The reason why I focused on the Croatian side is for a few reasons. The whole reason on detra of what the State Department did, even after, even post Bush and Baker, I'll be at the Clinton administration, like, went about it in kind of an illiterate way.

Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together, we can create a more reliable, sustainable, sustainable, sustainable. sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.e.4 slash northwest. Employers, rewarding your staff?

Why choose between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card when with options card you can have both? With options card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's favorite retailers or choose a spend anywhere card. It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, it's easy to use and totally flexible. They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause.

Make your awards more rewarding. Visit Optionscar.i.e. today. In terms of their rationale, I mean, like the military in those days was still pretty, they had their stuff together operationally. But to understand why Helmut Cole did what he did, to understand what the view was from Washington, you've got to look at what the Croatians were doing. Okay, that's why.

Today I'm going to take up what the Serbian case was and why it was entirely misguided for them to be accused of starting the war because they absolutely didn't. I mean, that's asked on any way to claim that, you know, an ethnic conflict is like a schoolyard fight and some party combatant. It's, oh, it's their fault. That's not how things work. And even though he, even though he doesn't gain a lot of sympathy, I mean, even from, like, his own people, like, I found slow down the lowest of it to actually be quite a sympathetic figure. what was done to him with the Hague, he was quite literally killed by being put on trial.

I mean, that was grotesque. I've actually always considered myself to be pretty sympathetic to the Chittinac cause. I mean, not because I find common cause with it, but I mean, I'm similar to anybody who, you know, whose

ambition is to redress the historical grievances of their people in a way that guarantees their posterity. in the future. So today, we're going to get a little bit into the Serbian situation, as it was in 1991, and why, you know, Milosevic was basically somebody who was, he was the only, as a head of state, other than Jarzelszelsky, who doesn't really count. He was the only, he was the only communist functionary who remained in an executive role after the inter-German border collapse,

which is interesting. So this idea, that he was some arch chetnik genocidal maniac I mean that I mean that's that's just that's that's a propaganda narrative anyway but you know

were that were those as stripes I mean he wouldn't he wouldn't have enjoyed the posterity he did which should be obvious but we're some of that stuff today and um

hopefully people will realize I'm not trying to assign blame to any party combatant or any side. I mean, I don't do that anyway. I mean, there's rare, one of the reasons why the Ukraine situation is bizarre, is because it's a rare case of quite literally a conspiracy to provoke an irrational war. That almost never happens, you know.

But even in that case, obviously, there's conditions on the ground that make that possible. It's not just some sort of spontaneous contrivance or conspiratorial design, made real, because that's not how political affairs develop. But the third Balkan War, Misha Glenni, he's a guy who I don't particularly

like, I mean, he's basically, he's kind of like a typical, like, globalist liberal, but he did actually write about the only apologia for the Serbian people that got, like, mainstream promotion, which is interesting.

so he's more complicated than some of his declared positions on sociological things would suggest he assigns the onset of the third Balkan war which is what we you know people in the west lump it people in the west lump the uh the homeland war like the bosnian war and the kosable conflict into like one one conflict i understand why i understand why they do that even if it's in complete shorthand for what really is, you know, three discrete conflicts that derive from a common nexus of causality. But something that shouldn't be controversial. June 25, 1991, that's when hostilities arrived in the Balkans within the conflict cycle that is referred to as the third Balkan War in at least in Anglophone countries. that was the date that the Republic of Slovenia, which led the charge towards the session, it wasn't the Croats initially.

I mean, I think they would have any way, I mean, it's an open-ended question, but they're the ones who took that step, that theretofore, you know, Tujman, for all of his talk of creating a truly Croatian republic that, like, reflected, you know, the singular and, an exclusive culture, the Croatian people. I mean, he didn't make that move, okay, until out of the Slovenians declared independence.

After the Republic of Croatia did, the Yugoslav people's army, which was Serbian-led. Some people attacked me for suggesting that the security apparatus was Serb-heavy. Yugoslav National Army was, it wasn't overwhelmingly Serbian, but the majority of general officers to the tune of about 60% of 70% were ethnic Serb. like that they can't be denied. What their sympathies were, I mean, I can't tell you. I mean, I'm sure it buried. I mean, but the fact of their

majoritarian status can't be denied, okay? The Yugoslav army invaded Slovenia, and that was really when the die was cast. Now, the State Department claim, as well as

what was Pontific about on the floor of the United Nations, which in those days, on the heels of the Gulf War, the UN still had clout, which seemed strange today, but there was this big hope that the UN was going to

finally fulfill its intended function since the Cold War was over. And now the reasoning was that you know, decision making is no longer going to be colored by these kinds of strategic exigencies.

And now the sort of community and nation is going to emerge, you know, and work towards like a truly globalized collective security. That's asinine, in my opinion, for all kinds of reasons. But that was the belief. And coming off of the Gulf War, which really, even more something, the Korean War, because, I mean, the Korean War, the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council. And so was, and so were a bunch of their client states. Like there's, one of Bush's master's strokes was the Gulf War. and it wasn't just a military operation executed with Prussian efficiency. There was truly like a quorum of civilized nations as it were,

including the then-s-like-said Soviet Union. So when things, what the hell in Yugoslavia, everybody, whether, you know, from Berlin to Paris to London to Tokyo to Washington, was, oh, well, this is a UN matter. We'll come to some sort of... We'll come to some sort of, you know, solution there. And we'll get into that in a minute. But because, in my opinion, conceptually, even people don't realize they're doing it.

And even that coterie of national leadership that was in place in 1991 globally, even the more sophisticated among them, they were still sort of drunk on their own rhetoric, which for decades by that point had been derived from, you know, the judgment. in Nuremberg. They still were operating according to this idea that, well, warfare has aggressors and victims. Or, you know, it has people who strike first and people are defending themselves. So I think a genuine prejudice set in against the Chetnik cause for a lot of reasons. But initially, the claim was, oh, you know, the U.S. law of people's army, that that's a Serbian that's a Serbian

military force and all but names. So, when the U.S. Muslimian Army intervened in Slovenia, the claim was, oh, this is an example of Serbia identism. You know, and that's that's what's

causing all of this. And of course, Newsweek, which in Time magazine, and all these kind of print media outlets, which in those days too, I mean, this is when legacy media was arguably at Zenith. They started running these stories about, you know,

ethnic cleansing and mass rape in Bosnia. And the framing of the narrative was, well, this is all happening because of Serbia-Ridentism. You know, and Slobodom-Losvich is this mad dictator. And the only way he's hanging on to power is because he's taking on a Chetnik guy's. None of which makes any sense.

And for context, at the beginning of 1991, Yugoslavia, which still existed, there was a federation of six republics. It was Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Plus, there's two autonomous provinces, Voszodina and Kosovo.

The eight major ethnic populations that lived in those regions, they approximately corresponded in the political divisions of the Federation. And this was by design. And in each region, each region could claim an ethnic concentration that corresponded to their national signifier, but there were deep minority populations in all of these loci. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans.

Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.n. Northwest. Employers, did you know, you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free. And even better, you can spread it over five different occasions. Now is the perfect time to try Options Card.

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not all Serbs lived in the geographic region arbitrarily designated Serbia. There were 600,000 Serbs lived in Croatia. The majority of these were urbanized and it went so far as Tujman, I've got a lot of respect with Tudjaman and for all of his

sophistication as a statesman and he wasn't military veteran but he was basically an academic and he hung around, the Serbians he hung around were in Zagreb, or they were cosmopolitan types, you know, who we'd met in, like, university life. And there was, the urbanized Serbs in Zagreb, they had a symbiotic relationship with their Croatian neighbors. Like, how much of this owed to the fact that they were the minority, and when you're a minority, you told the line, that's an open-ended question. but there was even a portmanteau called herbie which uh it's a it's a conflation of hervati which means croats and serbi which means serbs so this was like a thing all right but the core of kind of serbian identity and patriotism in croatia it was a rural was concentrated uh in broadslaus of the countryside, particularly in Canine, which is once, per context, in the medieval period, that's, like, through like the Habsburg, or Europe.

That's where Croatian kings were coronated. Okay. It became a militant home of Serb nationalism, okay? It's very impoverished. People's fortunes and outcomes are very limited even today. it's also on the path literally to Dalmatia which is essential it's a life's blood of Croatia and like the Balkans in general

okay for obvious reasons you know that's that's the that's the ingress and egress to the Adriatic Sea um these rural Serbs really for the I mean they these are the guys where and elderly and the descendants of guys who'd fought with

you know, then the hail of its Chetniks. You know, like they didn't suddenly become cosmopolins who wanted to live in some Croatian Republic. And Tugman. Now mind you, he's a guy who came up to do that Tito was the apparatus. So it's not like he was like some arch-eustache or something, and he

wasn't a fascist, despite what people claimed in Delgrade and what a lot of left-wangers claimed in Germany and elsewhere. But, But he did draw upon a lot of eustaceous symbols. And he did say, like, we're not going to run from our, like, you know, from our heritage in the independent state of Croatia. You know, basically people who said they wanted something to disavowal of the state. He's like, fuck you.

And, you know, um, the Tudgeoning regime started doing things, you know, like only conducting official business in the Western alphabet. Okay, Serbs use Cyrillic. And this isn't a small thing. okay like even if you speak the same common language you know even a dialect that's pretty similar if suddenly if suddenly you go outside and like

you know the government's not going to be business in an alphabet you can read you're going to feel pretty fucking marginalized you know um and even beyond that it like symbolically it it um it made the service feel not just profoundly

disrespected but when you consider that an active war was on, you know, the Slovenes, as well as as well as both the Bosnian cross and the Bosniaks, you know, the Bosnian Muslims, who in the next

episode will get into their story a bit if that's agreeable. You know, they were looking around themselves saying, like, there's an ethnic war on, you know, this isn't hypothetical anymore. There's a shooting war going on between ethnic secessionists and a Uislav army, which

at least at the general officer level is majoritarian Serb. And Tujman now was saying that Croatia is a state, exclusively for the Croatian people, the only democracy that's valid. And Tuchman did run a democracy. There were contested elections.

That's an arguable. However, as a matter of constitutional mandate, the newly independent of Croatia was exclusively Croatian. And if you didn't identify that way, you better start.

otherwise, you know, you're not one of us. And they jump from that in the wake of a Rosson Creek, which has actually already jumped off, albeit in a different theater, but still, you know, local to where you live, you're going to realize that you could very well find yourself ethnically cleansed. And the guys pointing the band it at you could be guys who you were totally at peace with, you know, a year ago or a month ago or a day ago you know and people think that's not possible

like even in America obviously I'm not comparing the few situations but like when the Floyd bullshit jumped off that's right before I got off probation like right before I got back on the internet and I was like

I was living in this like ghetto YMCA that was like 80% black and I was like okay with those guys but I realized I get the worst of it I'm like, you know, if things get like really bad, like, these guys aren't going to be my friend. You know, like, and it's, I think most people don't think that way in this country. I mean, I'm a minority here.

I mean, thankfully not in my town, but in the municipality, I'm like a minority of one. But, I mean, so this idea that, oh, those people just went crazy, like, your neighbors wouldn't fucking whack you. Yeah, they would. I mean, like, even here, let alone in a place, so things are bad enough. You know, I'm not saying people should be paranoid or something or, you know, or, you know, order mac and cheese buckets from Alex Jones and pretend that a fucking apocalypse is coming. But this idea that, you know,

politics can't turn on you because, oh, we, there was some kind of concord with my neighbors and they like me. Like, that's, all bits are off in a Ross and Krieg or whatever equivalent is. You know, so that's, that's basically, um, that's basically what the perception was.

And Yugoslavia, like a lot of the satellite states You know, one of the reasons why East Berlin was so important to the Warsaw Pact. It wasn't just because that was, you know, the westernmost frontier of the communist world. It was because of the communists, especially because of their pretensions about, you know, the industrial proletariat and the degree to which they relied kind of upon these intellectual university types to kind of facilitate the program. you know, they really, it's like the countryside, like, didn't exist to them.

You know, and even people like Tujima, even though in Yugoslavia, I don't believe, I don't believe Titoism was ever adoption or kind of Marxist Leninism. But it definitely, the political culture definitely was similar in terms of with the blind spots. And these guys, it's like

even in a small country, you know, it's like, it's like the countryside, you know, where, you know, 600,000 Serbs live, you know, who view life and the ethnic situation the same way they did in 1941, it's like this didn't exist. They're like, oh, here in Zagreb, you know, we were all the same, and our Serb neighbors, you know, I'm going to have funny customs, go to the wrong church, but they can learn to be Croatian. Like, there really is something to that. And, you know,

that really can't be overstated. Um, you know, the, uh, So it was basically in Canine or Kinin and basically what became the secessionist Krayana Serb Republic. This is where the Croats actually could not afford if there to be some kind of iridescent Serbian movement or some kind of mobilized Chittnick response to what Zagreb was doing. That's the last place they could afford to this to happen. and it's absolutely where it did happen. And there's also ought to be the toughest Serbs

who live in Croatia. That's where they lived. So in the first months at Tujman's election, and again, I emphasize that Tuchman was elected. People were going to say whatever they were. You know, it's kind of like, people have become less friendly to Croatia,

the Croatia of history in academic treatments, you know, that we're like 30 years out and you know they're they're increasingly casting Tudjaman is somebody a dictator I mean the Croatian system of this day is a strongly presidential system but Tujman was elected president in a normal election you know you can't you can't just like you can't claim you know that like Russia is not a democracy I mean Croatia is a democratic as any other country on her okay it was in 1991 as it is today um

You know, and in the lead up to Tugeman's election, again, it was its academic university friends who not only ran his campaign and sort of integrated his platform and his optics into a modern media apparatus of the kind that, you know, existed in the West. But these are the guys who were advising him on policy also. You know, and what he needed, I mean, frankly, you know, he needed the defectors from the U.S. of National Army who knew the situation in the military apparatus as it stood then not 20 years ago. He needed

guys who could tell him what the situation was on the ground in the countryside where when war came, I mean that's not only where it's decided, but that's what Croatia would have to

capture in order to remain viable as a state. And the, there was also two, the local cadres that facilitated Tuchman's ascendancy. In contrast to the people who constituted his cabinet, a lot of these guys were probably what would be viewed under normal conditions as extreme. You know, there were guys who for years or for decades in some cases that they were middle age. there were guys who basically been like carrying the torch of of croix nationalism you know inviting their time until the teedous regime could be torn down these guys had a basic antipathy to serbs like they can't be denied you know um so if your ground organization are basically guys who hate serbs anyway it doesn't matter what it doesn't matter what um your control group is saying it doesn't matter what tuchman you know playing mellow academic is talking about a conciliatory posture between populations you know i mean it's not um it's not it's not something it's not something that's that's going to resolve in anything but

a violent um separation now i i mean again like always an auger and i think i think key political figures, even people who had a better understanding or a more realistic understanding of the situation than perhaps Tuchman himself did. They couldn't have foreseen the extent of the differences in like the degree of the division.

And the kind of hostility just beneath the surface, like coming from both sides. And when Tuchman won the 1990 election, what he should have done, regardless of what he intended in terms of, you know, making the civic apparatus, you know, a truly

national, democratic, like a truly national, democratically, exclusively crud apparatus, like he absolutely should not have done anything provocative until it was clear where the cards were going to fall in terms of secession and what the response in Belgrade was going to be.

But at the same time, too, this is a 2020 hindsight and even a relatively unfree country, which Croatia was not again, but even under conditions where an executive doesn't, have, have to abide some sort of direct ballot mandate. I mean, every chief executive is bound by the tenor of the opinion in the body politic.

You know, so, I mean, Tudjumont wasn't part of being kind of carried on a current of, of zeitgeist that probably was irrepressible. And there's also, I mean, there's always, there's always something of, I mean, you, as you know, because of where you live now, and compared to the locale of your birth and upbringing, there's always some kind of disdain that the city has from the country. Like, all these people, they're

just simple fucking people. Like, they're passive, they're going to tolerate whatever we kind of put on them. Like, that's never the case. You know, and particularly not when there's a tradition of partisanship that breaks down

rigidly on ethnic lines. I mean, like there was in Croatia. But, you know, again, a lot of this I think is out of, I mean, I'm a Higelian, a lot of this is out of man's hands. You know, and it's also... Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area

and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.Nor slash northwest. Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card, when with Options Card, you can have both.

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The one thing people did say at the time, and, you know, Tito himself was a Croat. and he successfully suppressed Serb-Craud enmity during the totality of his rule. But, I mean, I think that's misguided too, man. I mean, one of the things is Tito, he derived his mandate not from the fact that Cross and Serbs suddenly decided they love one another.

It's because the genius of Tito was he found a way to keep both Uncle Sam and the Soviets out. You know, and I mean, even the most even the most kind of sectarian-minded, ethnically chauvinistic-minded pro-ar Serb or Bosniac would realize that, you know, within this paradigm, you know, we stand together

or we at least tolerate the situation as it is or we all die. You know, and I don't think that's entirely fair. You know, and there was other things too. the this was documented it wasn't just propping in it from Belgrade like upon the ascendancy of upon a two month's election

there was like a massed emotion and termination it serves from from high and intermediate government positions um you know literary Croat literary Croatian it had to be spoken

in administrative positions of officialdom it wasn't just the Western alphabet had to be used by everybody but you were basically prohibited from speaking with a Serbian accent. I mean, that's, I mean, stuff like there is a flex. You know, I mean, it doesn't, um,

there's no other way to characterize it. Um, and the, um, the failed, uh, conflict resolution model again. Um,

I mean, frankly, uh, however misguided in terms of the assumptions people held, in 1991 about the potentiality of a truly global collective security at least thank God it was that coterie at Department of State and not

this current crop of insane highness and out and out mental sub-normals I can't even imagine what that would play out but the um the big believe it or not the big question was in the UN General Assembly

and the Security Council, like is this an international conflict or is this a civil war? And that significance was key, okay, because the United Nations misguided as it may have been you know, philosophically to suggest that such a thing could be viable. The charter was written with an eye for restraint, in part because, you know, obviously Stalin's representatives had to be placated.

And ironically, you know, as Yaki pointed out again and again, I mean, it actually had the effect of imposing restraint upon Washington dominating the world and facilitating its social engineering regime and the office of the collective security. But the UN General Assembly had no, they had no grounds to vote a resolution on a civil war

as regards, you know, sanctioning the party combatants or directly, or the UN Security Council, let no grounds to intervene, you know, unless there was an international dimension to the conflict. You know, it would be suggested by people, one of the reasons why in the era everybody loved to bandy genocide and accused people he didn't like of committing it, was this arguably the genocide convention superseded the UN charter as a

de jure grounds for intervention if one accepts international law paradigms as legitimate but obviously in 1991 it wasn't credible to talk that way I mean it wasn't particularly in subsequent years but you can't levy you

an accusation of genocide within like months of the honest about stillities like it would obviously be a propaganda employee but um you know belgrade which belgrade at the time it was and really

until uh the conclusion of hostilities um the uh the serbians identified as the union of you know the us-lobian union of Serbia and

Montenegro you know they never claimed like oh we are Serbia where you know we're creating you know like an ethno-national state of Serbians mirroring Tugman. They claim Yugoslavia is, you know, where the U.S. Slavian government and secession is against the law. These people are engaged in, they're waging war on the sovereign government of Yugoslavia, you know, which is, which is, which is both illegal and as well as an

internal affair, you know. Now is key. The, uh, until the end, the, the, official position of Belgrade was that this is a civil war you know and Yugoslavia never ceased to exist you know and the people are claiming

that it's a dead letter that Yugoslavia is kaput are fascists who have you know a racialized view of of high politics like over dishonest that may have been depending on perspective I mean it

it was you know Serbia never succeeded. Serbia never claimed that the U.S. Lobbyian Constitution was null and void. That were reconstituting as a Serb Republic. Crayina did constitute itself as the Republic of Serbia. But, you know, this is important. It's not just legalese.

It had real war and peace and tactfulness. But it's also the, I mean, the key shortcoming of the United Nations in executive terms. from the fact however much philosophically these things aren't viable I mean what

what are you and Blue that's going to do? Are they going to occupy I think an occupy Bosnia and assault the Yugoslav army with combined arms? I mean no one's ever been able to explicate how this works

and even in situations like in Lebanon after 82 where the United Nations deploys the United Nations deploys permissively because all party combatants allow it to deploy. You know what I mean? It's not you're not, you can't speak of international

law when it's when categorically it can't be compulsory. So it's sort of paralysis set in, but it's also there's a broader problem that we touched on in the first episode. If the UN had come out and said this is an international

conflict, just an absolute terms. It's not a civil war. You know, that would have, at this time, there was still a truly conciliatory posture towards the Soviet Union, which was about to dissolve, albeit, but saying suddenly, this is Croatia versus Serbia, with Bosnia caught in the middle, when the Bosniaks kind of just trying to survive, it's like, well, Cole already immediately recognized the independent state of Croatia. You'd essentially be sowing the seeds of

a wider ethnic conflict between Germany and Russia, like each backing their client regime and a sort of zero-sum paradigm developing. I think that was underway anyway, but again, you've got to put yourself in year

1991. You know, this wasn't, this wasn't accepted thinking. The idea was that this is sort of a blip on the path to you know a global collective security arrangement. People are still seriously talking

about the Bush Baker model of we're going to we're going to total, the Soviet Union is going to totally disarm its strategic nuclear forces and draw down its conventional forces to buy our levels. And like we're going to we're going to withdraw from Germany and like NATO basically

isn't going to exist anymore. Like this was the way people were thinking, not just talking. So that's important to consider. You know, and again, if, um, I think some of the, uh, I think some of what was alleged in terms of

um, ethnic cleansing and mass rape, it like organized, like sexual violence. Some of that was overstated. Some of it was not. Okay. And we're all going to use the term war crimes because it's been dandy so much as a floating signifier has become meaningless. But there is direct testimony that I, from, you know, NCOs and junior officers.

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and they had no reason to lie about it and every reason to deny it. And I find that testimony persuades him and these weren't guys to themselves who were under indictment. know and I think anybody doesn't believe those guys things happen in a Ross and crees being naive and I think everybody agrees that that kind of stuff is horrible but again it's like what do you

it's never been clear with the people who claim that you should have quote done something so like what do you do you know you deploy with combined arms and assault the the US law of armies like now you're at war with Serbia like I don't know the US idea that somehow you can enter a combat zone like an active conflict zone

you know with combined arms and like be like the police or something and people stop what they're doing you know like you you just become a party combatant when you do that you know you're you're joining a gun fight that you didn't have to you know

and that's basically it you know it doesn't there's not there's not there's not there's not some equitable resolution because, oh, they represent the United Nations.

You know, it's preposterous. Now, there was a claim, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which I think everybody will agree was on the receiving end of the worst excesses by all party combatants. Under Article 25 of the UN Charter, member states can vote to intervene

in a conflict zone where to not intervene would be inconsistent with the fundamental protection of human rights and things of this sort. The language is ambiguous but the fact of the situation in Bosnia

where arguably there was no majoritarian ethnos and even if you disagreed with the idea that you know the Yugoslavian, the third Balkan war was an international

conflict. Obviously, whatever government had could be said to exist in Bader's Kovina had totally broken down. That would have been the best case if you were going to rely upon United Nations legal rationales to intervene. But again, like what

would that force have been made up of? You're going to send like the Bundesphere in there, so he got like a German army, you know, marching in under the office of the UN, saying, oh, but we're you know to represent all nations. You can have the Russians a piece of that. You know, again, like the degree to which

real politic emerged in earnest of a sort that was somewhat more complicated than during the Cold War just in terms of the kind of conflict diets, potentially that were emergent. Like, that can't be overstated too. I mean, so then it's, some of you're left with, like, even if the political will is there,

even if there's some sort of operation, roadmap to resolve or you know to enforce a ceasefire like who do you deploy you're gonna get a much you're gonna get a much like third world like like delisters from like Ecuador or or uh

to you know to to police Bosnia I mean that's at some level um you know there was kind of a hard lesson driven home about what a foolish move it was to destroy Europe and kind of like

robbed its constituent states of sovereignty. Because when something like this happens, you need Hasburg Empire to intervene. You need a Germany intervene. Or you needed Germany and a Russia to intervene and kind of decide among themselves what sphere of influences. You know, people can say all they want. Like, well, that doesn't matter if we're talking about the rule of law. It absolutely does matter.

You know, because like the human dimension always matters. and we're talking about human affairs. So, it was this kind of paralysis that just dragged on. And Lawrence Eagleberger, I mean, actually more sympathetic to it than a lot of people.

I mean, I'm more sympathetic to him as a man. I mean, he's dead now, but, and as well, I'm more sympathetic to him than a lot of the hoi-poly

who say nasty things about him, not only did Kissinger, but he was under secretary of state for a time in the Bush, 41 administration he said

immediately the onset of hostilities look you've got to let this conflict cycle punch itself out because if you intervene you're just going to upset the balance you're going to drag out hostilities you know there isn't a solution basically you know the new Croatia

and the new Serbia and whatever the fate of Bosnia it's going to be decided on the battlefield and obviously he was you know raked over the calls and media like, oh, how dare you say this? You're encouraging mass rape and genocide.

I mean, no, actually, exactly what Eagle River said, like, ended up happening. In 91 and 95, America intervened the facilitated Operation Storm, which was the Croatian liberation of the Crayana,

which, you know, was the belated victory in the homeland war for Croatia. But that was America facilitated that by use of a PMC outfit called MPRI

which was incorporated essentially for that purpose for an operation in Croatia which is very interesting and in the final episode we'll get into that but basically you know for all the talk about how

William Berger was saying was horrifically callous I mean that what it came down to was um what resolved the conflict the 91-995 conflict cycle was exactly what he said you know the the party combatants

exhausted um their ability to wage war um and uh battlefield a battlefield victory in Crayina albeit with you know

American assistance is what resolved for all time the disputed um or the contested objective that was Criena I hope people will back off a bet on saying that

like I hate Serbs or I'm saying bad things about them or that I have got some conceptual bias and favor of Croatia. We should talk a little bit of sloping down and the lowest I mean

it's been a lot of people's lifetimes. Yeah, and I understand why if I was a Serbian and I was in America or the UK, like I feel very much like a population designated for hostility.

You know, I understand that completely. Okay, but I don't think people. One of the reasons I focus so much on the Third Reich is because the international system and the entire sort of conceptual horizon that's been crafted around World War II, you've got to deal with the Third Reich as sort of like the primary agent, like in that narrative. Okay. So I'm not just like fixated on these things. At a smaller scale, if you're talking about if you're talking about the Yugoslavian wars or what you know the um the third Balkan war at least the 91-95 phase

that led to the creation of an independent Croatia like you've got to deal with the Croatian political culture and what and basically you know what the West's view of Croatia was and what Tuchman was doing that's what was the dispositive variable okay so like I begin with discussing their Croatian situation. Also, because Croats are

like German adjacent and thus like Western adjacent, I frankly know more about them than I do Serbians, but in my defense, again, what was happening in Zagreb and it wasn't the sole proximate cause of the conflict,

but it was the essential cause, okay? The, what Croatia did decided that course of the war and the ultimately became the political resolution like where like when the shooting stopped you know the frontiers were established

and accepted it wasn't what Slovenia or Macedonia was doing it wasn't what the Bosniaks were doing like those things had an impact but again like that's why so I mean I would have dealt with the Serbian perspective anyway but I thought it was especially imperative

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Get the Faxby Drinkaware, visitdrinkaware.com. But Milosevic himself, I mean, again, he was a career communist separatic. He rose to a general secretary position or equivalent around 1987. And actually, the late Reagan administration looked at him as their guy. Like he was going to be like this big liberalizer. Like he was basically like he was supposed to be like the Yugoslavian Gorbachev, okay? that's one of the ways he got swept into power, was able to consolidate

his authority the way that he did. You know, like, so this, like, this kind of, this ex post facto rationalization, you know, that really began in earnest in 91 and kind of just went, became totally irrational and punitive during the Clinton regime.

That Volosevic is like this madman like Chetnik. Like, that's completely at odds with reality in history. Like, the, he, he, he, He was this big, like, liberal moderate. That's how he enjoyed the kind of patronage that he did. And honestly, you know, Milosevic's fall from grace and power within his own country. Kastunisha was elected president on October 5, 2000. And part of the big reason why Kostunica or Kostunich,

forgive me if I'm picturing the pronunciation one of the big reasons why he was able to break through is because he was a Serb nationalist and Milosevic, the big criticism of Milosevic within Serbia was he turned his back on the Serbian refugees, he didn't

care about our people, you know, he didn't fight hard enough, you know, for the coast of our Serbs. You know, like he wasn't this big Chetnik, you know, like he was basically pragmatic and this claim that most of the grossest excesses,

wherever one falls in their sympathy or background or whatever, I don't think anyone would disagree that the worst excesses carried out by all party combatants took place in Bosnia. Okay? And the idea that from Belgrade, Milosevic was somehow directing, like, the Bosnian Serbs to do his bidding. Like, it's not the way command authority

works in a modern state. But it's also, like, the Bosnian stirs might as well have been in a different country. Okay, like I'm not saying that, you know, the, the, the affinity that their co-ethics had for them was misplaced. I'm not saying that at all. Like, it was not misplaced.

But the point is, it was almost, it was a totally it was a totally different socio-political situation. You know, like it'd be, um, it'd be, it'd be like saying like Jefferson Davis was, like, was ordering buddy Bill Anderson

to, to do things. You know, I mean, it's like it's not asinine but the clan that I just raised is as asinine and people accepted this as oh, Milosovich's is a bad guy and like again I think I think someone that's just like you know the propaganda

being distilled down into the most kind of idiot's caricature of reality but it's also you know the problem with assigning legalist legalisms and peritless paradigms and legalisms

the high politics, as was done at Nuremberg, it creates these perverse sort of narratives where there's, oh, there's command authorities who are bad actors, you know, and they're the proximate cause of conflict, and everybody within that chain of command is accountable to this bad actor. Like, this is not reality. You know,

um, the, uh, I guarantee you that some of them was hardened Shetniks in uh kriena and in bosnia and probably never even heard moosevic speak in their lives like even on the radio you know like he had nothing to do with their conceptual horizon other than he was like this remote like boss who in delgrade who yeah we like that he's serbian but other than that you know it's it's ridiculous you know um and it's also too i mean basically if you look at the modern serbian state under milosevic and

And now, and you look at the modern Croatian state under Tudjman and now, like basically, everything they're suggested to be this kind of like horrible and democratic feature of Serbia or what they called Yugoslavia after the secession of Croatia and Slovenia. I mean, those are basically features common to Croatia. you know um there's what we would consider a basically chauvinist uh you know nationalism that you know characterized the party politics there's a basic discrust of pluralism and uh casting uh candidates who talked about like you know a multi-ethnic uh Croatia were we're viewed as traitors you know bad relations with the West and admittedly they had more to do with what the West was doing than what Serbia and Croatia were doing

but you know consistent economic stagnation you know reliance on subsidies and you know a handful of kind of key like national industries I mean this is like everything they say about Serbia like being dysfunctional is like a mirror image of the reality in Croatia so I mean there's that too like I mean I'm not I'm not saying it to be punitive I got I think the crowd and serves both great people and I respect the fact that they've resisted you know the

the social engineering regime as staunches they have but you can't you can't cast Serbia in this light but say oh but Croatia's not like that because they're basically mirrors of each other like structurally you know and um and frankly Tuchman uh he was a lot different than Milosevic like in terms of his character and in terms of like his background like we talked about in the first episode but he in terms of it he was no more autocratic than Milosevic was like arguably I mean Tujman

once the war kicked off I yes Tudemann was elected yes there were fair elections in Croatia but I don't think he could have been removed like during a you know the the state of active war okay arguably he was like more like Milosvich was more susceptible

you know to like removal by due process than Tudemann was so there's I mean there's that too like you can't this attempt to other like the Serbians is is bullshit okay and uh i mean i i i thought that i conveyed that clearly in our previous discussions but because apparently i didn't i wanted our serbian orthodox friends to know that i i take that very seriously and i'm not i'm not disdaining them or their considerations um but it's also too one of the reasons why milosevic in his favor one of the reasons why

he enjoyed the incumbent seat for 13 years. You know, like, he did implement a market economy in a way that didn't completely crash the country. You know, unlike Yeltsin, for example, he did tolerate multi-party elections. I mean, admittedly, like, the political culture was exclusively, you know, kind of like Serb-centric. But, I mean, again, that's appropriate in a national democracy.

there was an actual opposition you know they did have media access um i mean this wasn't uh like all the kind of all the kind of poll stars that these NGO types claim

like constitute you know like a democratic state we approve of like he met those okay i mean Serbia is a hell a lot more free than Israel is I'll tell you that much I mean if that's you know if that's any if that's the metric

you know, you can't, you can't claim that it was, it was like Saddam's Iraq or, or like, it was this dictatorship or something. You know, I mean, it basically, one of the reasons why, again, like Reagan's people and then Bush's people, initially, Milosevic was their guy. He was because he was basically doing, he was basically acting like a, like a post-communist, the, like, European politician is supposed to act. You know, um, so this, the fact that he was. was hailed into the Hague. You know, I think, but, you know, he, he, he died when he was on trial, and I, but I, I thought he acquitted himself very honorably. You know, I, like, well, and we'll get into that in the, um, in the bookend episode.

Um, I think, uh, it's about all I got for today. Like, frankly, I don't mean to be a, I don't mean to be a, uh, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, uh, and, F-A or P-H-A-G-D-O-T, but I'm in a lot of pain right now. No problem. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah, no problem at all. Just hit up whatever you want to promote, and, yeah, we'll get out of here. Oh, that's great.

Thank you, Pete. You can find me on Substack, Real Thomas-777.7.com. I'm happy to report, too, Anilipil Publishing. They're dear friends of mine, and they publish some really incredible books. and I hope to pose with them in the future. But I'm participating in their in their creators program whereby

if you enter my code when you order from Anilop Press, regardless of the size of the order, you get 5% off. The code is lowercase 3, T-H-R-E, 7 S-E-E-N number 5 and not only you get 5% off but like I get a kickback from that too that helps my brand so just keep that in mind you can find all the info on the sub stack I posted up a little piece about it you can find me on Twitter

at real capital R-E-L R-E-A-L underscore number 7 H-M-A-S-777 you can always find in my website it's Thomas 7777.com That's number 7h1.mase 777.com. You can find me on YouTube at Thomas TV Number 7 HMAS

TV. I'm uploading some videos I shoot just kind of like out and about and with some of the people I talk to and things. So that's going to, I'm hoping that's going to pop a little more as I upload more stuff, but that's what I got. All right. Until the next time. Thank you.