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[00:01]
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[01:00]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pican yo show. Thomas is back and we're going to start something new. How you doing, Thomas?
[01:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I'm well, thank you. Thanks for hosting me.
[01:10]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
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
[01:30]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
today? I, I anticipate this series naturally, kind of like organically. We'll go three episodes. Obviously it's your show, figuratively and literally. We'll 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, you know, Croatia, Croatia's declaration of independence. Croatia and Macedonia essentially seceding from, you know, 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, and those developments were on the situation in the Soviet Union, which 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 they were, and especially for such a small country, they played a, an important and very outsized role in the Axis alliance. Okay. 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 inarguable. This isn't some slam on. And Serbian people or, or anything of the sort. You know, Croatia is the most insinuated into the kind of Western conceptual paradigm. I mean, part of that is for. For.
[03:52]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
For.
[03:53]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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 Tujiman, who was at the helm of Croatia as it achieved independence. His. He was a. He was in some ways a kind of perfect foil to almost in like Manichean terms to Milosevic. And he was a very unique individual. And I, I think he was one of the most significant figures of the later 20th century. So I want to, today, I want to, I want to get into the, the conditions that led to the, the homeland war with a focus on, you know, the Croatian internal situation. Next time, I think we should deal with the Second World War and the constellation of factors therein and 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, the kind of all 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 some of them are. Go ahead.
[05:37]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
It all sounds good to me.
[05:39]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, their. This, the significance of these, of these things. So bear that in mind too. I will, I will come back to anything that seems ambiguous, and I'm aware that a lot of this seems ambiguous to the uninitiated.
[06:06]
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[06:26]
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[06:37]
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[07:09]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The key to understanding how things developed in the way Yugoslavia broke apart, particularly what guided decision making in the Croatian control group around Tujiman. You've got to understand what was underway vis a vis the Bush 41 administration and why they were so zealously behind Gorbachev and Shevit Nars, who was a Gorachovsky, you know, top advisor. He was kind of the man behind Parasa. 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 Scowcroft, you know, contrast the Team B coterie kind of best exemplified by people like, or most purely exemplified by people like Cheney, you know, who wanted, who wanted, who wanted the Soviet Union dismantled and, and, and kind of, you know, 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, to, 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, 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, you know, 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 think I'm overemphasizing this, there's A fascinating memoir that circulated at Department of State. I mean all the, the minutes of any like official meeting between the Secretary of State and his Soviet counterpart or the, or the Soviet chief executive would obviously, you know, be widely circulated. May 11th of 89, Gorbachev met with Baker and Chevy Nardse. It was present too. The topic of discussion was, was force levels in Europe with a particular focus on nuclear weapons. And Gorbachev initiated the conversation by putting it to Baker. I, 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, Gorachov is basically like I, I, you know, I'm not concerned with how this looks in the perspective of morality, but obviously we need some kind of guarantee from you that, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna, you're not gonna 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, before we go any further here, Gor further said that he and Warsaw, he and his Warsaw pick counterparts were prepared to conduct negotiations on a total drawdown of tactical nuclear forces, you know, just outright and as well as the abolition of the nuclear capability of, you know, quote, dual, poor dual purpose platforms, primarily cruise missiles, you know, basically put it placing them beyond use as far as being married to 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, in Bush 41 he was described by Condoleezza Rice as consummately cautious. I think that's, that's the wrong way to characterize it. Calculating. Yes, you know, incredibly thorough. Yes. But Bush was thinking systemically and that's exactly like, that's exactly the, the, the model that Nixon had for bringing about, you know, the, the end of Soviet hard power, you know, by negotiated means, you know, and I, I invoke that because I don't, I don't think anybody could say that Nixon was cautious. Okay. The gorge off further. The remainder of the, of the discussions reflected in the minutes memorializing the memoir. He basically click ticks off a list of concessions the Soviets have made. You know, they would draw in over 500 tactical nuclear munitions from the European theater if they could expect reciprocity from NATO. They they, they'd be willing to withdraw all nuclear forces, tactical nuclear forces, more so packed territory between that day in 1991, you know, and obviously tactical nuclear weapons to the Soviets were. 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, 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, that's why these battlefield nuclear weapons are of such a concern to Moscow. Like then as. No. Okay. Because deployed in the European theater, that, that's got, they've got tremendous destructive power and that, that has implications for, you know, for First Strike as well as myriad other things. The second. Interestingly too, Gorbachev 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 Paras and that Robert Gates is probably behind this effort and this needs to be openly discussed lest, you know, public opinion, you know, converge around this kind of narrative. And as, as I've indicated before, like 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 is absolutely right. Like CIA at that point, Aldrich Ames had sold out every human asset 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 you know, them pretending that it's forever 1960. I mean that they, that was their raise on Petra, you know, so girl, which was basically going down the list of things that can potentially derail.
[17:09]
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[18:09]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
This sort of disarm and concord. And Baker is, you know, playing it close to the chest but obviously warming up to these, to these, these efforts by Moscow and you know, he, he guarantees an elimination of, you know, any kind of tactical asymmetry as regards tactical forces and being in Europe, you know, immediately to be followed up by, you know, a, a further drawdown in total nuclear forces and the emphasis by Baker as well as, you know, what's emerging from the White House and vis a vis Bush's contentious dealings with Poland and some of the uh, other Warsaw pack 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, and, 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, the captive Soviet orbit. So obvious, obviously this, 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, would require a, a real commitment probably over two administrations on, you know, on the American side who were, you know, fully committed to the program and is, and, and, and reciprocally in Moscow it would have required, I mean Gorbachev ended up being very long lived, but it would have required Gorbachev retaining his mandate probably for the subsequent decade and if not he himself, you know, a protege who could be expected to essentially carry out exactly the policy program outlined by Shepherd Nards and, and you know, kind of the, the perestrika concepts. What was happening in Yugoslavia at this time? Yugoslavia was outside of the Warsaw hag orbit. You know, they, the, and they, they were treated after the, the Khrushchev thought led to the reestablishment of, of, of of cordial relations with Yugoslavia. And Tito himself and Moscow always treated Yugoslavia as part of the socialist community of nations. And there was complex interdependence in the form of common form and comic con. But Yugoslavia stood, you know, as a, as a genuine neutral in the Cold War.
[22:21]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Do you, do you consider did you consider them to be socialist?
[22:29]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah.
[22:31]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
In what way, though?
[22:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I mean, it was a planned economy, you know, based upon, you know, the centrally administered inputs and production schemes and everything else. I mean, like, they, 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 a direct investment in a way that, you know, say, like Poland, Czechoslovakia wasn't. But I mean, they absolutely, you know, they absolutely were practicing state socialism and well, they had.
[23:23]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
There were like water, water treatment plants and all sorts of things as such that were like guild owned, that were like guild run.
[23:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, they had. And they allowed, they allowed, 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 that was not unlike the kind of stuff that was emerging in Hungary after 1956. I mean, a lot of this stuff was. A lot of stuff was like, cosmetic and also like it. You could, you could carry on autonomously within certain parameters in the Yugoslavian 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 absolutely, that's the, that's, 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, is, is, is. Was. Was doomed from inception for all kinds of reasons. But the idea was. The most charitable view of Tito
[24:53]
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[24:53]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, Herzogovina would, would. They, would. They would stand together or fall together amidst the, the Cold War dynamic. And we'll get into the kind of basic suspicion of Serbs and Croats to intergovernmental organizations, including, I might add, the Catholic Church, despite the fact. I mean, the Croats are, are like a Catholic vanguard, but they're not, they were always, 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 Bosniacs as a people too. I'm not leaving them out. They're. They're hugely important. Um, but, but for our purposes right now, they kind of don't feature center stage.
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[26:06]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
May 13, 1990, that was the infamous. That's when the, the football game. I'm talking about soccer, not the pigskin game obviously. That's in a soccer match at Zagreb at Maximir Stadium between Zagreb Dynamo and Belgrade Red Star, which are like two like very. 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, ethno sectarian nationalism. The game erupted into like this general like melee between like Croats and Serbians as well as the police. And it like the, 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 sure enough would have been underway all that preceding spring was the new Croatian parliament had been convening. They. They formally held its first session. Held the first session on May 30th of 1990. But President Tujiman, and we'll get into who he was in a minute. He had he formally announced the manifesto for a new Croatian constitution and an entire like multitude literally of political, economic and social changes. Most of most concern to non Croats. The extent that this constitution outlined, what extent minority rights would be guaranteed. I mean mainly for Serbs. The relationship between cross and Bosniaks is complicated. We'll get into that as we proceed with the series. But local Serb politicians just oppose this outright. You know, they said it's a, it's a manifesto for ethnic cleansing. Which is somewhat ironic if you consider the source. I have had no luck lately.
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[28:35]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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[29:16]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It's important to understand Tujman was not a bigot. I mean he was a, he was a, 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, he was not a bigot. His view of, his view of democracy, 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 inarguable, even if one is prone to kind of universalist conceits. Otherwise, for context, as of 1990, cross represented 78.1% and Serbs self identified ethnic serves 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, these, 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, after the death of Tito, the Communist Party in, in Croatia and to a. A striking degree in Bosnia, Herzogena as well, you know, the, the like. The Yugoslavian security apparatus was becoming a like, like a Serbian institution, you know, and this, this more than anything kind of. Prompted public reception in Croatia among Croats that their back was against the wall. Because it's not, it's not as if Croatia at this time had its own army or something. The only army was the Yugoslav national army like the jna. And immediately after the Slovenians also held a parliamentary election. They held theirs in April of 1990. Know, and then the cross, as we just mentioned in 1990, in May 1990, the JNA, the Yugoslav national army, they announced an end to the Tito era doctrine of general people's defense. What that, what general people's defense in practice meant was that each discret 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, in, you know, the kind of constabulary role for policing the internal situation in event of a crisis. This was, this was, this was just abolished and Henceforth it would be replaced by a centrally directed system of defense, you know, from the JNA's general staff, which again was what was. Was for all practical purposes, you know, like a Serbian element. The Slovenians acted rapidly to try and retain control over their, over their territorial element. The Croatians played it very cool, which is fascinating, and people have a couple ideas about that. The, the weapon stockpiles of the territorial defense force element in Croat majority regions were seized by the USAV national army.
[34:02]
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[34:07]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It was 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, you know, they were claiming that, you know, we represent all, you know, Yugoslavians, but the Serbian minority is under direct, you know, like mortal physical threat in newly independent Croatia which according to Belgrade was a. Was. Was. It was a fascist state. So Tuan realized he had to proceed carefully. A lot of people believe Tujima wasn't. We'll get into his background in a minute, but he was, he was an intellectual. He was a military officer, but he was, he was kind of the cosmic east block intellectual. People think he was basically playing like a master chess game. And he realized that owing to, you know, the good offices with, with. With Germany and particularly coal, as well as America's need, you know, kind of control the situation without simply ceding responsibility for any intervention to the Russians, which was unthinkable, that basically like, if he allowed the Serbs to continue to, you know, basically kind of outrage world opinion by carrying out what was by all appearances a kind of like nakedly like 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, um, the EU with backed up by NATO force of arms, or that the United States and Germany would allow, you know, weapons to stream in and essentially give the crotch that they needed to win when push came to shove. And ultimately, four years later, that's exactly what happened. And the cross, you know, launches mass assault Operation Storm against the Serbian U. S. Love national army and like, quite literally like liberating Croatia. And we'll get into that in later episodes. But I basically accept that view of Tujiman, which is why, as I suggested as we commence this discussion, he's, you know, worthy of the praise that he receives and. And then more. Who was Tujiman? He was born on May 14, 1922. He died in December of 1999. It's inarguable that he played, he played the pivotal role in the, in the creation of like the modern Croatian state, the contemporary state. It. His vision of Croatia was he didn't run from the. It's, it's. It's passed as a fascist state, a national socialist state. 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 imprisoned 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 Tujiman'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 to note too that Tito was a Croat
[39:18]
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[39:18]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
even then there was a strong, there was a Serbian plurality. If not what's up everybody? It's Bretzky and America is turning 250 and I can't think of a better way to celebrate that than playing on an American owned social casino. Spinquest.com with all of your favorite games. Live crabs, bubble craps, live blackjack. There's no better place to play for free and win real cash prizes.
[39:49]
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[39:59]
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[40:13]
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[40:28]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The cross 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, in some national narratives. It's not, it's not a matter of what's changing, changing their hats according to political, according to historical currents. There is an internal logic there, you know, convoluted as it might seem outside of the Balkan situation. But 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 Tujiman and Milosevic as, you know, as these kinds of twin, like Balkan dictators. They, they were totally different kinds of people. They were different generations. You know, they were born, you know, over 20 years apart. Milovic was the consummate kind of company man, communist. Interestingly, he was the man the State Department favored for a kind of paras in Yugoslavia to be overseen. And you know, what I was alluding to at the onset of this discussion with in my opinion the Balan situation kind of dooming the Bush Baker, Gorbach, Shevard Nard, Concord was when as I think we discussed before. The huge man met with Helmet Cole. On October 7, 1991. And or how McCo met on Oct. 7 with Separovich, was huge month'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, the newly independent Croatia has Germany's full support. Within the notes the meeting is fascinating. Seowic says, you know, we were painted as, we're painted as national socialists by the American world press. We, we fear this is going to harm our cause. Like Cole says, like don't worry about that. You know, when, when push comes to shove, basically I'll, I'll, I'm, I'm going to inform Washington that this issue is non negotiable. You know, so cold. And of course Belgrade went nuts and claimed that they, they claim that Tujman and Cole were conspiring to develop a fourth Reich, that you know, NATO was supporting a Nazi client state of Germany in Croatia. And the, you know, that 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 pe, 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. Was tailed and maintained to guarantee. And the. Elton's people in Moscow obviously were listening, as were Wolens's people in Poland. I mean, as was. As was, you know, all these young terps throughout the. Throughout the east block. And they were saying, you know, who the hell is Bush To. To tell the Russians that they've just got to tolerate, you know, they've got to. 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. You. You know, some kind of vision that allows Gorbachev and Shiva Nardze to make. Make heroes of themselves and possibly enrich themselves exponentially, you know, in pursuit of this, um, kind of policy of. Of non action and.
[46:22]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Can I jump in. Can you jump in for a sec?
[46:24]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah.
[46:25]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Okay. How much, at this point, how much influence is coming from outside, like NGO types in the. In 1988, the. I can't remember the name of the guy who started the National Endowment for Democracy, but he. 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.
[46:51]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
There was some of that. But it's also what. What Sevovich said to Cole was correct. And there were. There were National Socialist guys who joined up to go fight and fight against the Serbs with the croas. Met some of them. And Ingo Hasselbach, who's not an admirable guy, but he did write a very interesting book. He talked about that, you know, that. That re. That. That. That. That was a shot in the arm to the National Socialist cause, especially in East Germany, you know, like the Independent State of Croatia was back. It's one thing to. It's one. It's one thing to have it. It's one thing to. To. To. To repurpose Ukraine as like a human torpedo and install like a clown, like a literal clown like Zalinsky at the helm and then like watch it destroy itself, you know, while you allow these. Why. Why. Why you allow them to like, dress up and plain Nazi. That's one thing. It's another thing to have like an actual National Socialist state that's flying the standard of that. That. That Pavilich is. NDH did. And having, you know, helmet Cole like Standing literally arm in arm with like, the president of the newly independent Croatia as a totally different ball game. And selling that. Selling that in Washington, you know, as part of a. A neocon program, was not an easy sell. What did kind of 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 MPRI was Military Products and Resources Incorporated. They were. They were a PMC outfit that was very much responsible for getting the cross and fighting shape in terms of material and training. The cross are a very martial people, and that's what facilitated Operation Storm. But it's a totally different world. And like, the. The Croats were like an underdog people. It's like, yeah, they had Germany behind them. Like, yeah, like, American media basically cast them as like, the good guys, but they also, if you go to, you know, like, yeah, like, they got. They got a whole. They got a whole exhibit, like, permanent exhibit on like, you know, the crimes of the Ustasha, you know, they're not. It's wondering if there's so many neocons that clicked up with like, Serge Trifkovich quite met. And he doesn't like me very much. But that's why. That's why during like, the height of. The height of like, war on terror. Yeah, these like, crazy, like, Laura Loomer type Zionists saying, like, see, like we. We stand with the Serbs because they're victims of the Holocaust too. And like, they're. They're also fighting Islam. Like that. 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 the. How that developed in terms of the planning and execution as well as, you know, kind of the order of battle for the rubber met the road. But, you know, the. What was obvious the forefront of everybody's mind was what would Croatia's treatment of minorities be? You know, two John Finesse that very well. Separovich openly stated that there that the Zagreb government, the future my government, they'd have absolutely no problem with, you know, an open hearing at the Hague conference that was then looming the winter time. Were participating representatives of, you know, all. All of. Of of, you know, the three ethnic groups, you know, Crot, servant Bosniak. You could, you know, get some declaration of rights from the Zagre government that would be guaranteed by, you know, like UN observers or whatever, like upon cessation of hostilities. You know, the true problem, the truth, throwing the side of the Sirs became the Albanians in Kosovo. But that's, we're not there yet. But the point is like, at least more than superficially, the cross 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, Tujiman was unwilling to compromise in his statement that self determination involves the dominance of, you know, a 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 ballsy. But again it, you know, the, this was exactly the right tactic to take. And again, some would say Tudeman 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, you know, law and order as, as, as a devised by NATO and the Hague. Like cynical as it might have been, it was a masterstroke. And Tujiman could not have known that Operation Storm would develop the way that it did. The subtext of the Cole Seowicz meeting is, is Cole is telling him, you're going to have the weapons you need to to win the homeland war when the time comes. Okay? That's if you know what to look for in analyzing these kinds of,
[53:47]
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[53:47]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, That'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 Jill of our barracks, whereby the JNA was aiming to continue their campaign to disarmament against the Croats in Croatia proper, what was to become Croatia proper. And Tujiman eventually called after, after approximately 14 days, he called off the siege and allowed the JNA 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 the active conflict by proxy.
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[56:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
in Bosnia, which again was a, 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 Tujman did what he 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, subjecting people in the Bosnian battle space, including Croats obviously, you know, to those kinds of horrors for the greater good. I mean that, that's those, those are the kinds of decisions that's that, that real statesmen, you know, like warranty statesman 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, you know, strategic matters, not moral ones. And I'm not, 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 fear hearing too, like in the concluding episode. But I think I'm frankly getting kind of tired. We're going on the hour and that was kind of dense. So I, 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 for another two hours if I get into it now. So I want to, I Want to see because it, it basically ties together Tujima's regime as a legacy government of Pavilich. And I want to drop. I want to drop the context of what the Pavlovich regime was as it existed from 1941, 1945. 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.
[58:37]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Do your plugs.
[58:38]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yes, sir. I'm very excited to say I've got a bunch of videos actually ready to go, and everybody's been, like, very patient with that. And this, like, been a learning process for me. So, like, I, I, I, I, I'm. Forgive me for that. Have been like a hype for, like, months and months. But I think, 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@real Thomas777 substag.com I've been dropping as much fresh content there as I can, including our dear friend Jay Burden has been transcribing our, 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 my website. It's thomas777.com number 7h777.com you can find me on X at capital rel._ number 7 h o m s 777. I'm also on Instagram. I can never remember. Just search Thomas777 on Instagram and you'll find me just like at number 7h o m s 777. And yeah, let's. Let's reconvene later this week, man, and we'll continue on the, the. The Balkan wars. We're gonna do it. All right.
[60:07]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Thank you.
[60:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, thank you, man.
[60:10]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanona Show. Thomas, how are you doing?
[60:15]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I'm doing very well, thanks.
[60:17]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
All right, man. Part two of the Balkans. What are we going to talk about today?
[60:23]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Today I wanted to provide a bit of context,
[60:30]
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[60:30]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
To understand the conflict cycle of the Balkan wars from 1991-95 and then later, you know, from 1999 into 2000, approximately. One has to understand the 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. The. It didn't originate in the minds of the same kinds of people who, you know, conspired with these cynics like Venice and Czechoslovakia. You know, it was. It. There was. There was deep precedent for it. Not into 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 1941-45. For a small country, it had a tremendously outsized impact. It was incredibly committed to the Axis cause. And a lot of people claim otherwise by conflating support for the Ustasha regime with support for the Axis cause and. And Adolf Hitler. And that's misguided, but also people mischaracterize the relationship of proxy as a people to the USTA show. And the Ustasha movement was a Bosnian Croat movement at base, and it. Discussing the view of the USTA Shah in Croatia proper, it's almost like. It's an imperfect analogy, but it's almost like. 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. You're remote from the conflict zone. And yes, I mean, Croats were really proud people. They're very, like, aware of this situation contra the civilizational other. I'm speaking within the terms of the. The conflict dynamics present, and I'm making some value judgment or suggesting anything in absolute terms about the populations under discussion. But in Bosnia is literally like a powder keg of. Of ethno sectarian conflict dynamics. So one's got to understand the emergence of the Ustasha as well as the emergence of. Of the. The Chetnik movement as. As a. As a. As a Bosnian phenomenon very much, you know, on the Chetnic side, there's complexities and ambitions that, you know, kind of transcended and superseded that. But you're talking about kind of the core base of organic radical support for these. For these. For these ethnic political programs and in ideological crusades, you know, the. The dynamics of Bosnia, Herzogena, are essential to understanding. So today we're gonna get into that stuff.
[64:08]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
And then.
[64:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
And then in the next episode, I think, you know, we'll get into the. We'll get into the. The homeland war itself and kind of how it resolved and what the implications were. They were 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 reg. I assume if that was underway, you. You wouldn't continue to, you know, be so kind as to host me. So I think if we go.
[64:42]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I think if we go beyond three episodes, no one's gonna complain.
[64:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, that was the. Yeah. Yeah. I. And I mean, I think we're. I think we understand each other enough. You know, we got, 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, The Balkans has a peculiar significance. There's a lot of kind of like cliche discussion about it or cliched discussion. The Balkans doesn't outsize significance. Particularly, particularly geostrategic terms just owing to, like, owing to situatedness, like literal geography and in the case of Germany, a hostile Balkans or even a neutral Balkans whereby the Germans were denied the ability to deploy specifically to reinforce Hungary and to, you know, create any kind of defense in depth or alternatively to, you know, traverse the frontiers of Hungary, Romania and creation proper. If they were, if they were denied the ability to do that, 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, the only path to victory in World War II was, 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.
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[67:39]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The situation in the Balkans, and that endures to this day. Okay. I mean, that. That doesn't change. Secondly, the kind of unique. The unique affinity that great powers have for the constituent populations there, it creates. It creates dynamics that have a unique potential for escalation. Know, like as we talked about, and we'll get more into today, the Croats and the Germans, especially Austrians and Bavarians, but also, I mean, even the, you know, even Slavians and, and, and. And the Prussian officer core 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 Helmet Cole did in 1991. So, I mean, that endorses this day too. And the Russians as a people, they've got. They've got a unique affinity for the Serbs. Okay. And I'm oversimplifying a bit for the sake of conceptual clarity, but also,
[68:56]
Bluff (Spinquest Player)
you
[68:57]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
know, we've talked a little bit about the kind of Islamic awakening or revival of the late 20th century, and it's. And its significance as an essential one of many essential causes and kind of bringing down the. The Warsaw pack structure and kind of like the, The Stalinist model of like, regime model. Bosnia was very much ground zero. Bosnias 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 traditionally, you know, they were very much adjacent and integrated into. Into the Ottoman structure. Okay. So these are not. This is not just some, like, middling ethnic conflict whereby the. The subject populations, you know, aren't viewed as. Aren't. Aren't viewed as holding any inherent significance, historical or otherwise, say, for, you know, the pragmatic business of attempting to, you know, resolve enduring conflicts in such a way that, you know, great powers can at least work with whoever emerges triumphant. You know, there's very, very deep affinities here of, you know, basically pre. Rational nature, a lot of which date to the Thirty Years War, but even that precede that, you know, so it's important to. That's important to keep in mind. I'm gonna jump around a bit here, but the bulk and theater of World War II was incredibly brutal. It was almost like the. It was almost like a Vermont expert, like, Vietnam type experience. You know, the. The Chetniks led by kind of cloak really called the hell of a Chetniks because there's various Chetnik factions, party of the conflict, and in various kind of like offshoots 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, like the Yugoslav monarchy as we got into, in our World War I series had become for all practical purposes like a, like, you know, like a monarchy that was, was, was, was very much captivated by Serbian interests. Okay? The Chetniks, the, the Chetniks were found in situations somewhat, somewhat like Chiang Kai Shek's forces did in their own theater. The primary ops of the USA and the Vermont at critical moments were the Chetniks like, not the partisans. The partisans would often avoid engaging the Vermont when possible, you know, 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 his, arguably his of like his best cadres. Okay? There was also complexities where, you know, there was 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 Shet nicks who ultimately defected in real terms, you know, to the Axis side and one of whom actually received the Knight's Cross. So I mean, it's incredibly, it was a mess, you know, but the degree to which to Hitler was forced to kind of abide all, all these competing interests and on all these conspiratorial designs of other essential allies, you know, whether you're talking about the Romanians, the Hungarians or like Eluch himself, that's key to understanding why Ante Pavich became the, the, the, you know, the, the chief executive of, of the Independent State of Croatia. Because Pavlich 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 a rebuttal to a lot of the fallacious assertions of court history. The Third Reich wasn't trying to export fascism. In fact, they were doing the opposite. They didn't want destabilizing regimes to pop up that had a shaky mandate, you know, that were, you know, kind of blowing up the internal constitution of, 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 by Berlin and becoming the official government of an essential ally like Independence Day. 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. What was. What was going to allow the. You know, what was going to allow Hungary to survive, like, as a state. Like, was what was. You know, circumstances were. Were changing, if not week to, you know, if not day to day, then week to week. So I don't think that's a fair comparison, but a point I make to people again and again too is, you know, there was. There was a peculiar, almost kind of like internal conflict in the. In the Reich security apparatus where. But like in Romania, 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. Was Hitler's best ally. Like, he was closer obviously to D. Like, like the fur was. I mean, but Antonescu made a huge commitment to Barbarosa and he was. He was a. He was a highly competent general officer. But that's. That's the. That's the proverbial horse. Hitler backs mean all the SS and the sd, like they backs the Iron Guard, I mean, owing to their. Owing to their own kind of radical inclinations and. And. And desire to sort of develop a kind of foreign policy unto itself, like. Go ahead.
[76:21]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Didn't Iola say that he thought the Iron Guard was one of the best chances to defeat Communism?
[76:29]
Bluff (Spinquest Player)
The.
[76:29]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yes, he did. The place Evola was coming from, he looked at the Iron Guard basically as like an orthodox mujahideen and like, that's not misplaced place. But he. Of all. His whole thing was that he looked at fascism and National Socialism is just like another kind of iteration of. Of degenerated, like modern materialism, if you like. The Iron Guard is like this return to, you know, the kind of. If you abide Dumezel's trifunctional hypothesis, you do. The Iron Guards are returned. Like a combination of. Of. Of. Of the. Of functions, you know, the warrior function and the priestly function, which is a uniquely Aryan sociological paradigm. And that in Evola's view, you know, represented, you know, owing to the kind of peculiar conditions of Romania and kind of, you know, a culture that it still managed to sustain this kind of like linear consciousness of like, ancient ways. You know, it was. 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, as well as, you know, revolutionary in, in, in, in in all the most unique ways. And yeah and everyone'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'd like preview, pretty much every like oppositional tendency is essentially derived from the same.
[77:57]
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[78:22]
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[78:28]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The same lapsed like materialist, like conceptual biases. So yeah, but it's like why the SS and the SD liked them. That's a little more complicated. Not philosophically, I mean but it's like it's, it's murky but it's. 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 corresponds or always claiming like oh the, you know, the USA should head no popular support. You know, I mean that can't really be true when I mean first of all is the fact of you know, Bosnia being the true kind of, the, the true kind of source of, of of those kinds of conceptual imperatives ideologically not Croatia proper. But also the, there was Croatia committed at least one division size element. The 3 69th reinforced infantry of the Vermont 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 size. But you know you're talking about, you're talking about thousands of men, all volunteers who are also honored as you know being assimilated into the, the, the, the, the shun like lead element of Army Group south who assault Stalingrad and all. There was, there's 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, 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 USA or something, that's Not. That's not. You can't really derive anything from that. And as we'll get into their reasons for their objections owed to Pavlich's 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 USA were just too savage. So that even. Even the horrible evil SS said tried to stand them down. That's not. That wasn't their objection. Their objection was that, you know, when Paula was essentially there to kind of like balance these furies, you know, of Italy, Romania, Hungary, as well as. As well as. As well as rooting out, you know, the. The partisan threat in Bosnia Herzegovina. You know, meanwhile, while they were doing that, they were also ethnically cleansing the. The NDH of. Of Serbs. Like, their notion was deport a third, like slaughter a third and like forcibly convert a third to Catholicism. And they. Pavlich 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. That was the. The objection was like, look, like this. 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. 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, you know, which still existed until 1941. Hiller realized that he had what all cost, like court them into the Tripartite Pact, which eventually he did. And famously, famously, the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul on June 3, 1939, the. The prince Yugoslavia. And his hidden. His wife was. Was in. Was. Was an English woman, you know, like born and bred. They were invited to Berlin. There was this whole gala celebration. There's a banquet throw in 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. Its. Its cabinet was. Was Serb dominated. Okay. And we talked about some of those dynamics again, like in our World War I series. They were absolutely. They were. They were. They were pursuing a course of declared neutrality, which in reality was a. Was a policy of area denial to forbid the Vermont from any kind of operational ingress or egress through Yugoslav territory. All right, this had to be resolved in some way, not just because it's becoming clearer and clearer that again, you know, Germany's. The. The primary threat to Germany was. Was. Was the Soviet Union. But also, you know, the only. The only way Germany could. Only Germany could. Could. 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, who. Whose oil fields were. Were literally fueling the. The German economy as well as it's. It's as well as its nascent war machine. But also again too, there was geostrategic imperatives that, you know, it's, it's simply as. As a. As the ballgains couldn't simply just be like, written off an area of operations for all kinds of reasons. And especially as it became clear, you know, 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 the. 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. Would have been, you know, through the, through the Balkan theater, you know, be it. Be it Greece, be it, you know, Yugoslavia or. Or otherwise. But to Hitler's chagrin, Paul traveled to London soon afterwards and it was clear that he was being actively courted by, you know, the, the. The intelligence establishment there. You know, and this becomes,
[85:57]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
this is
[85:57]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
key to understanding what developed in. Around Pavlich, as we'll see in a minute. It's. It's, You know, and that's something I, this is something I emphasized again and again too. Like, people tend to view Germany's attack upon Greece, which really owed you the, The. The operational shortcomings of the Italian army as Hitler trying to force. The British to stand down and abandon any abandon any claim to the Mediterranean, as well as some kind of just like show of force you know, based upon. I mean, I guess the, the first true like paratroop assault was on Creed 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 Vermont it owed entirely like 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, bellicosity. Like yes, that, that was hugely impactful in kind of the course of, of of policy in Germany, you know from the Foreign Ministry to the OKW and everything else. But in, in, in raw strategic terms what I, what I just said is not impeachable. The, if the RAF had gotten a toehold too, I mean again like they could have basically they could have, they kind of 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, if put to, if put to that purpose, you know, it would have, it would have been devastating. I mean this was.
[88:33]
Lady Luck
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[88:58]
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[89:04]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The concrete particulars of that, those sort of, of era of strategic bombing at scale wasn't yet known but it was, it was, it was known that you know, power projection against of what we'd consider to be like a, both the counter force and counter value nature. Like it was, it was, 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 or by, by the advent of hostilities when Germany and Poland, you know, 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. Hitler couldn't afford to wait and see, you know what developed and then trying to insinuate him, you know, a kind of, a kind of, you know, a kind of meaningful forward deployment in the Balkans by you know, a combination of like threats and incentivization. Like it just like was not in the cards. The, and especially when it became clear that Turkey is not gonna, you know, Turkey traditionally was, was one of, was one of the ways Germany hedged against you know, both Russian and, and British power in the Mediterranean. That was, that was off the table. It's an interesting subtext. Late 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 and seeking any port in a storm. It was never a serious ever serious. It was never seriously within the minds of anybody who, who was you know realistic. But by, By March of 1941 Hungary, Romania, Slovakia had all joined the Tripartite Pact. This was a big C Hitler because the Hungarian prime minister finally agreed to allow German troops to cross through Hungarian territory to access you know Romania and and and and and and as well as like deploy. They're basically allowed like free like ingress and egress across like the Hungarian frontier. And Horthy Admiral Hy who was was very much adjacent to Berlin the Hungarian foreign ministry had to that point been overly hostile. They taken the same tech as Yosia had and it was a complicated Horthy's role as regent. He was far from like on war and peace questions. He had something of an absolute mandate but in, in times of peace or in conditions short of war, foreign relations was basically in, in the hands of a, a cabinet that had you know like a long history really going that had like you know deep roots in the in the kind of was failing system. You know so it's, it's important to consider that. So Hitler realized that all this though was essentially null and void if Yugoslavia couldn't couldn't be wooed. Some people speculate that the Greek operation was was prioritized as it was because Hitler aimed to offer part of northern Greece to the US Law government. If 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 ambivalent 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 Czechoslovakia. Well like discrediting Britain's claim to you know the moral high ground or to you know it insinuating itself as this you know purported like rational arbiter of power political affairs on the continent, you know because it was, it's all of its moves that have been couched in you know either imperatives laid down at Versailles relating to self determination which of course is ridiculous and these you know multi ethnic monstrosities that had no actual organic support or it was or they were framed in terms of you know, systemic stability and obviously the fact that you know the U S lives joined the Tripartite Pact Owing to a basic appreciation of Soviet aggression and the existential threat it represented to them because it, 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, it, but March 27, you know, literally days later he will reported to Hitler that there have been a coup d' etat in Belgrade. Paul had been overthrown. There was crowds massing outside the German legation demanding, you know, Germany get out of Yugoslavia. Like, you know, it's, it's diplomatic representatives were being physically threatened. The Swedish envoy had been mistaken for a German had been like beaten within an inch of his life. The, the British diplomatic legation, which quite clearly was, you know, the British intelligence service under light diplomatic cover. They were doing everything they could to stir up crowds, you know, and, and, and, and arm them. This coup had been engineered. Yugoslav. The commander of the Yugoslav air force, he was a career officer named Dusan Simovich. He was a, a rabid chetnik who hated Germany. He organized revolutionary cabinet around himself. The, the can refused to ratify the Tripartite Pact. However, they said they, they, they mouth these like mild protestations, some of which his 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, I mean it was bizarre, okay. 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, of policy decisionism and by the time that was all worked out, it'd be too late. But that was an incredibly stupid gamble, especially considering the man who was at the helm in Berlin. Hitler. He will relayed later this is one of the few times he ever saw Hitler like actually like enraged, you know, like, 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 but that he summoned Kaido immediately and yodel immediately. He apparently calmed himself down and he said that, you know, owing a course not just to his Austrian upbringing, but it's 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, they're doing this again and this will not stand. He sent, he ordered fuel descent immediately. At that time was still the army chief of staff. He summoned the Hungarian and 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, 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 Dragon off. He offered a. He offered Bulgaria, Macedonia. Is it just outright. He had a brief work conference with the Halder Broch. It's in Ribbentrop. 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 is actually rare language for Hitler. He said Yugoslavia to be regarded as an enemy and is therefore to be destroyed as rapidly as possible, whatever protestations of loyalty should be momentarily utter. Now, Again, the it. The subjects here wasn't just that
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Thomas (Guest Expert)
Some of its coup had been facilitated, not an absolute measure, but in essential terms by London, but the Communist Party. Yugoslavia. They played no part in the coup, but they made a significant contribution to the mass like street protest and uprising that is 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 a point of making people again and again, you know, like the Germans. Whether you're talking about the okw, whether you're talk like this is a rare example of a quorum. You had Hitler, you had a Huell, you had von Brauch, he had Ribbentrop, he had Yodel, you had Title, basically had everybody who later on know basically by December 41, there's like a total fracturing here of, of. Of of worldview as well as ideas on strategy both immediate and grand. But there was like an absolute consensus that then the proverbial noose 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. Stalin could afford to kind of like wait and see how these machinations would develop. Like why what the hell is 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 just, it was raw hubris in my opinion. And they, they underestimated Hitler again and again and again and again. The official directive, 4-6-1941, it was fur directive 25. It's colloquially known as operation 25, okay. Or the april war 4-6-41 the invaded the assault in Yugoslavia commenced and overwhelming. It was an first with an overwhelming air assault on Belgrade with a loofah.
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[104:40]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Targeting all facilities. The Royal Yugoslav Air Force the the Vermont assaulted from southwestern Bulgaria. They were reinforced by thrust from Romania Hungary and the Ostar which is Austria Los Angeles. Italian forces were limited to air and artillery assaults until 11 April when the Italian army was permitted to assault towards what's modern day Slovenia across which I'm sure I butchered that pronunciation on the same day Hungarian forces entered was then Baka and Baranya. But like the and both the Italians and Hungarians face basically no resistance. Okay. There was a Yugoslav counter assault into the northern parts of the Italian protector of Albania which gained some initial ground. But the like the Yugoslavs the Yugoslav army was in total collapse by that point. Now why did Eagle Slav army just suddenly and like rapidly collapse? Well I believe and people have downplayed this lately onto their own sort of misguided concepts the ideological narrative. I mean there's a substantial Volksdeutsch community in Croatia and about near Scovina also I mean Croatian Slovenians. Croatians and Slovenians had you know they were abjectly opposed to the Yugoslav regime which was essentially like a Chetnik regime in disguise. And this concerted a very effective fifth column. And at least superficially the royal Yugoslav the royal Royal Yugoslav army was a multi ethnic army had to maintain the appearance of not just being you know a like, like a Chetnik revolutionary element. So I mean I, I I think basically noted with the Serbs are willing to fight. Okay. And the mask the mask dropped proverbially. The armistice was signed on 17-4-41. You know based on the what amount of the unconditional surrender the U. S Love army it just no longer existed. Okay. I mean a combination of annihilation of forces and being like mass desertion and you know just garrison's you know command garrison commanders just surrendering without firing a shot. You know the armistice came into effect at noon the next day they came. Yugoslavia was an occupied partition by the Axis. Most of Serbia and Banat became a German occupation zone. Other areas were. 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, or what remained of it, military command, like officially, you know, and what. What remained of its infrastructure just formally became under, you know, like Chetnik authority in command. So I mean, obviously this, this happened literally within hours. You know, I mean, that's, it's, it's obvious what was that. The reality of, you know, the, like the Yugoslavian state be became, you know, like kind of negatively apparent to all. But it's, but again, it's one of the, I guess Hitler's exact words inferior. Directive 25 and forgive me, forgive me if my Chicagoes accent butchers. This is Yugoslavian militaris, Which means the destroy. The total destruction of Yugoslavia militarily and as a state for all time. And to do so with Pitiless, without, Without mercy. Okay, Now enter the USTA show and Pavlovich and like, who were they and who was he? Because this is key, not just understanding how events developed, but it's also, it's key to understanding the, like the modern Croatian state, including the Croatia that exists today. I'm not saying that Croatia today or even two Croatia was just literally like the ndh, but Tujiman deliberately drew upon that precedence, you know, which again kind of defeats this claim by court history that, oh well, you know, the Oofta show was nothing but, you know, this, this, this client regime with no depth that nobody supported, you know, whether, I mean, however anybody feels about, you know, if we're talking about modern Croatian statehood, we're talking about the USA regiment. And Pavlic himself was an incredibly dynamic person. You know, he was not some peasant rabble robs or, or some, or some military strongman. You know, he was actually he, he was, he was quite cosmopolitan and, and, and just lived a remarkable life. And he was a lawyer by trade, first and foremost. I mean, he very early on bloodied his hands as, as a political soldier and a partisan. But that wasn't that that he was a man of, of many faces. Okay, you're not the USA show, Admiral Canaris, you know, the, the chief of the ab, which was Germany's foreign intelligence service. This is one of the AB there's greatest successes, okay? And there are some key successes of the AB there, despite the fact canaris was not just a fifth columnist, he was an active traitor. He was collaborating with the allies. Okay? So the adver 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 bonafide brilliant operational successes carried off by the ab. Like whether that was because in at operational levels there were committed National Socialists who were following through as if, you know, their, the institution they served had not been compromised. Whether Canaris had, you know, mixed feelings about his, his loyalties like this is not clear. But the USA shows ascendancy owed. Obviously not exclusively, but an essential contributing cause of its success was the fact that, you know, Canaris had fomented a breakaway Croatian movement from early on, okay? And a, a, this is, this, this was an armed vanguardist underground movement. There was no concept of it, you know, abiding legality. There's no concept of it standing for contested elections. Totally different situation than in Vore. Okay? The only, the only, the only way a CRA national constitution, a national state was going to be realized was, was through, was, was by the gun and by the knife. Okay? Canaris's obvious kind of choice. For a leadership element was a general named Slago. He was an officer of the old Hasbro army. He, when the USTA should, did seize power, he initially was kind of the figurehead aided by the adverse, what was codenamed the Jupiter Organization, which was. It's kind of like direct action element after the independent state have been set up. Like Pavlich, Dr. Ante Pavlich, who spent long years in exile in Italy, by that point was like revealed as poglovnik, which me approximately means fur serval Croatian. Okay, why? The bait and switch of figureheads, Pavelic, Nora, Nora were, were ciphers. They both wielded tremendous power and clout. But I'm talking, when I say figurehead, I mean in terms of outward appearances. One of Hitler's challenges 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 on the subsequent ash loose and other things. Early on he'd agreed to seed the Dalmatian coast to Italy at least as a sphere of influence at an event of.
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Thomas (Guest Expert)
In an event of general war, you know, as, as a. As a territorial imperative that they would be permitted to capture. This cause 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 193233 alliance with the Italian Fascists, he was kind of Mussolini. He wasn't Mussolini's man, as it's sometimes alleged in Zagreb, but she was Italians. And frankly, when it became clear that Italy was going to be Croatia as just kind of like this exploitable asset in the National Socialist camp so firmly. Okay, Canaris's adutant was a. He was an officer by the name of Lahousen. He warned the furor as well as his boss Canaris that they had to proceed very delicately. That the resentment over the loss of Dalmatia and just kind of the, the arrogance which the Italians were proceeding was wreaking absolute havoc. He said, literally, he said the cross are a 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 is Auntie Pavlich? Pavlic was born in Herzogovina, the village of Redina, which is literally in the mountains, okay. In central Bosnia, roughly 9 miles southwest of Hizichi was then part of the Ottoman Empire, but had been seated was formerly under the sovereignty of the sultan. But it. It had been. But the entirety of Bosnia had fallen under Habsburg rule by 1878 or the Congress of Berlin, okay? And essentially it was an. It was a conquest without a shot being fired as the Habsburgs raid an army of around 30000 men and threatened to assault it. And this is, this was one of the. If you allow the tangent, this is. This was one indicator of Ottoman power like precipitously having deteriorated. They didn't even. They didn't even take the field of battle. They just like seeded with some meaningless. With the concession of some 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 Po's upbringing directly. Now, All his parents had moved to Bosnia from a village that was in Croatia proper. Or like, what. What would be in Croatia within Croatia proper's borders today. His father had done so to work on the Sarajevo rail line. But ultimately, as a small child, the family settled in a village called Jazero or Jezero or. Paul attended primary school, but Jero was a. A Bosniac majority domain. It was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. So Pavlovich, the crowd he attended, the primary schools he attended were maktub. Like a maktab is a. Is like an Islamic elementary school. Okay. So Pavage learned Pavage 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 lore 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. He was 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 Hanar, the Bosniak Vaan ss. Its national identifier was first Croatian because official policy by order of PAV was that was that Bosnian Muslims are racial Croatians. And 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, h. Our like, division would wear. Can people see that? I think this is awesome. Like, the other people don't, but it's like literally like a fez with a. A ton cop and a. A Reich 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. 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 quintessentially cosmopolitan and like that even more than it was apparent in his early life, as we'll get into. But he. He. As he became a teenager and a young adult, he had a. He had a much older brother who lived in. In Zagreb. And during kind of like, as. As. As Paul was kind of adolescence when he was attending school in Trivnik, he became an adherent and nationalist ideologues. Like guys who. Who proceeded what we came in with, the Croatian Party of Rights, first and foremost. A guy named Ante Start Chevich was like an early, like, like, you know, like, like fraud nationalist, you know, and like, one of his, like, one of One of his kind of. One of his like, like one of his followers or, Or one of the guys he mentored kind of like in, in. In. In the art of. In philosophy of like, you know, political warfare was Yosep Frank, who later became like the leader of the Party of Rights. But Polish's notion was like, well, this is great that you know, cross have like this kind of like, have cultivate this kind of like racial sense of self, you know, and, and kind of a path forward for an independent state. But his concern was that like this is too much of like a peasant phenomenon. But 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 was very much alive in Zagreb and people were openly identifying, you know, in, you know, in what were traditionally, you know, cosmopolitan Habsburg cities, you know, Croats were. 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. And that, that from that point on, you know, like he. Pavlich realized, like this was, this was a viable way forward. Okay, again, as like a vanguardist, like revolutionary imperative. You know, like again, this was this. The, the Ego Slav situation was nothing at all like the Vimer situation. It. Pollard was always beset by health problems from the time he was a kid until he was murdered like, like, you know, years after the war. And we'll get into that in a later episode. But he, he ultimately, he ultimately took a. A law degree as frankly was like par for the course for part of the. Of the time on both sides of the eological divide. Revolutionaries rather. He obtained his doctorate in 19th 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 this kind of radicalization, in tactical terms at least really ossified. And that was around the time or it was, it was literally, it was at the same time as what became to be known as the January dictatorship. January 6, 1929, quite literally a royal dictatorship was declared in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. King Alexander the First, who we talked about some in our World War I episodes. Hey everybody.
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Thomas (Guest Expert)
Alexander's notion was quite literally to create a Yugoslav ideology and a single Yugoslav nation, you know, like under his dictatorship through, you know, a combination of, of, of a population, forced population transfers, suppression of discrete languages, presumably, you know, outright suppression of the Islamic religion, you know, attempts to strip the cross of the ability to pursue and express culture in, in, in public and, and shared forums. It ended in 1931 with the adoption of the Yugoslav constitute what was called the Yugoslav 93 US Constitution. But the, but the damage was done, okay? I mean, people realize that in their view the two probable outcomes for any Yugoslavian enterprise was either that there's 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, of all cultural expression, not unlike what's happening in the Soviet Union, you know, under the. But, 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, Pavlos formally organized the USTA show. I have absolutely no fluency in sero Croatian as I understand it, and I'm sure the fellows who do will correct me if I'm wrong. I believe USTA should roughly translates to insurgents or insurgency. Okay? The official founding in USAL lore like to this day is that the party was founded on January 7, 1929. It was around this time Pavlo came under basically like constant police surveillance. During one, during a lapse in the surveillance, he, he, he fled to Austria. And proceeded like nominally into the. With under the pretext of, you know, seeking medical treatment for its ongoing health problems there. You know, Vienna at that time was completely lit, you know, by conspiratorial designs and people 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. Most of these guys were political refugees, you know, they'd either been chased out of, of Soviet territory or they were being terrorized by the Yugoslavian secret police, you know, or they were, they were former Habsburg army officers, you know, who'd refuse to return Yugoslavia, you know, after the succession of, you know, Chetnik and royalist intrigues. After a short stay there where he made contact with, among other people, some Bulgarian radicals who had a similar, you know, with similar ambitions in mind for their own peoples, he moved to Budapest where there was a more kind of welcoming environment for partisans of the right. Okay. In March of 1929, the Ustasha element, still within Yugoslavia, undertook a campaign of direct action, the first incidence of which was the assassination of Tony Shigel in Zagra. Shyl was a basically a regime mouthpiece. He was editor of the top newspaper in Zagra. He was a close combat on a King Alexander and very much the mouthpiece of the regime, like Lisa, murdered him.
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[131:35]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
While this was going on Pavilich 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 a Schlegel. It's Schlegel or Schlegel, I think it's Schlegel. But. And he, he and some of his contacts, Bulgarian contacts that he made in Vienna. They traveled to Bulgaria in April. This led to the signing by a number of, of partisan, ethnonationalist partisan types of what came to be the Sophia declaration. It formalized up. It formalized cooperation between Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian radicals like radical nationalists who opposed, you know, the, the Belgard regime as well as the, the communists and the Chetniks. Yugoslavia formally protested the government and Sophia Pavlich was. Then he was tried for high treason in absentia and sentenced to death on 17 August 1929. Owing to that verdict. A month subsequent in September Po was arrested in Vienna. The Viennese were sympathetic, at least the. The. Those in the security apparatus, you know, had more than a fledging 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 and bad Yugoslavia was. A typical Foreign Ministry veteran of the time named Adolf Coster was a supporter of Yugoslavia. He was literally a personal friend of King Alexander. So this obviously not bode well for Pavilish before this kind of hostile sentiment from, you know, Costa's friends and I places could develop into truly threatening police action against this person. Published left Germany under an assumed name and went to Italy. He already had family as well as ecological contacts. Now in Italy, at least for a couple of years, he frequently changed location and lived under the false name. He. He lived as an Italian national. What his assumed identity was at an Italian national most often as Antonio C. Or Serdar. He had contact with Italian authorities at least, you know, the intelligence apparatus of the fascist since at least 1926 or 1927. In 1929 he managed to establish deeper contacts and through his friends in the legal profession as well as some. As well as some radical right journalists that he befriended, he managed to court Mussolini's brother Arnaldo. Mussolini was a strong supporter of crud independence just outright and like a very. Like a very like a hardline fascist Pavich again, owing to whether it's his cosmopolitan 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 cross situation among Italians, at least Italian fascists and adjacent right wingers. He was very good at this. Okay. That fall Palage 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, this, this. This brochure, if you will, was called A Salesman of the Croatian State Lasting Peace in the Balkans. Which was kind of like a. It was like a. It was a summary of. Of Croatian history, you know, from kind of like the. The. You know, the. The Habsburg German like. And an adjacent U.S. The Italian authorities did not want to formally support the usa 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 Mussolini presiding over the four powers packed. But Mussolini was he. He seen himself as this, as. As this kind of like, is this kind of like great negotiator who like presided over these kinds of diplomatic concords and like Italy is a stabilizing influence. So the Italians, for all of its, for. For all of its revolutionary aptitude and capturing power, like the fascists in this epoch and especially before the anus and things, they were behaving very much like a national conservative party. And a lot of these guys in authority, they didn't want to, they didn't want to openly support some like, some like radical right partisan, you know, like Polish and like the USTA show, you know, to protect the reputation and for sake of optics if nothing else. And that's important to understand. This is like an odd period and in kind of like the, the inner warriors, but Mussolini saw them as a Mussolini at all. First and foremost wanted to destroy Yugoslavia and capture you know, some kind of ingress to the Adriatic. So Pavlich almost undoubtedly received personal support from Mussolini and so did the Ustasha generally like their offices in, in Zagreb and elsewhere. And towards that end Mussolini allowed Pavlage to that remain in exile in Rome and openly trained as paramilitaries in preparation for war with Yugoslavia. And Pavlovich made a. So he, he developed association with Croatian expats in Italy as well as, as well as Habsburg army veterans and uh, Germans V. STO were. Had direct connection, direct links to the, to the, to, to the government of the Reich. And a lot of these guys had very strong like military experience. Okay 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 upper. Mussolini proud established formal camps for partisans. First in Bovino, Italy and ultimately
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[139:36]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
was camps, you know, throughout, throughout Italy and as well as Hungary and almost certainly Bosnia though under obviously like deep cover. The. This created this, this, this, this, this kind of infrastructure facilitated by Mussolini facilitated the smuggling of weapons and political literature and propaganda into Yoshi. The camps were moved around constantly again at the behest of Mussolini, which you know, and if Mussolini was kind of like at. 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 Pavlic was very, very fortunate to be able to curry his favor and learn from him. And again that's why Polish can't be just be dismissed as some third rate dictator or something. What he accomplished here basically is a wanted man showing up in Rome without any particular cloud or money and just, you know, within, within months, you know, getting an ear with El Duce that's something short of remarkable. That's Hitler like. And it's in unlikelihood of ascendancy. But the Ustasha managed to establish adjacent associations not just of ethnic cross, 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.
[141:42]
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[142:05]
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[142:14]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The degree to which the Croats developed the kind of outsized clout in national socialist and fascist 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 there's not that many of them. And the fact that there's this kind of reach is incredible I think. I mean obviously I'm gonna admire hobble, which I mean I think it's become clear by now. But the, this undoubtedly in 1932, 33, as, as these elements who'd been training diligently return loose, you know, there's a series of bombings and shootings in U. S Lobby proper which led to just this blanket crackdown on political activity as the state declared, you know, a state of emergency. And this counter terrorist regime. Exploited that mandate to profoundly abuse impoverished Croat peasants. You know, the brutality towards which was almost always meted out by, by, by Serbian police and, and, and insecurity elements. So this was kind of like a splendid example of cultivating a strategy attention, you know, like among, among other things in order to facilitate the emergence of a revolutionary paradigm beyond the kind. Cadre structure. We've been going for like an hour and 20 minutes and I still probably got another hour material. I'm thinking if we could break in a minute and then take this up the next episode, that would be fantastic. Let's do it.
[144:08]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Let's do it.
[144:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Okay. Yeah. Well, I forgive me if that was too like long winded, but there's a lot here. And next episode we'll, we'll, we'll deal with the, you know, the, the, the formal Ascendancy of Pavich to the office of Povnik and you know, the war years and Sig free cash and all of that stuff. I didn't realize I've been going on that long, so.
[144:29]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Yeah, it's okay.
[144:30]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, thanks.
[144:31]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Yeah, do plugs real quick. We'll get out of here.
[144:34]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, man. You can always find me substack real thomas777 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 Thomas777.com number 7 h o m s777.com. You hit me up on telegram. It's Thomas Graham again. Number seven, HMAS Graham. You can find me on X Real Capital R E A L underscore number seven HMAS 777. Yeah, we're, we're all over the place in this, in this man. Oh, and my Instagram too. So you can like, if you, if like you can find like my, my photographs if you want to.
[145:22]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
You know, it's funny, I, 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.
[145:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It's like, it's. I take like a lot of photos, you know, and like Instagram, it's kind of like, I don't like the user interface and like it's full of bots and, and like creepy like porn. But it's, you know, I mean, it's a good. There's like, that's how I met like Nigo Clow and stuff. And like it's, it's a good place to reach out, especially to kind of like artsy people who are like politically, politically adjacent but not really kind of like in, in that sphere of activity. But it's also, it's just like a good repository of like photos, man. You know, and it's, it's. I can rationalize like dumping a lot of photos there without feeling like a weirdo.
[146:26]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
All right, till the next time. Thank you, Thomas.
[146:28]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, thank you, man.
[146:30]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Want to welcome everyone back to the Pikino Show. Thomas is here. And part three of the Balkans. How are you doing?
[146:39]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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 I said some things that upset people. I mean, in response to some of their complaints. I, I wasn't trying to be obtuse. The reason why I focused on the Croatian side is for a few reasons. The, the horizon detra of what the State Department did, even after even post Bush and Baker, albeit the Clinton administration, like, went about it in kind of an illiterate way.
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[147:37]
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[147:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
In terms of the rationale, I mean, like, the military in those days was still pretty. They had their, their stuff together operationally. But to understand why Helmet Cole did what he did, to understand what the view was from Washington, you've gotta, 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, that's asking in any way to claim that, you know, ethnic conflict is like a schoolyard fight and some party combat, and it's always 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, I found slow but on the lowest events to actually be quite a sympathetic figure. What was done with the hag? He was quite literally killed by being put on trial. And I mean, that was grotesque. I've actually always considered myself to be pretty sympathetic to the Chetnik cause, I mean, not, not because I find common cause with it, but I mean, I, I'm similar to anybody who, you know, who's, whose ambition is to redress the historical grievances of their people in, in a way that guarantees their posterity in the future. So today we're going to get a Little bit into like 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 Jerusaleski, 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 collapsed. Which is interesting. So this idea that he was some arch chetnic genocidal maniac, I mean that, I mean that's, that, that's just, that's, that's a propaganda narrative anyway. But you know, were they, were those his stripes? I mean, he wouldn't, he, he wouldn't have enjoyed the posterity he did, which should be obvious. But we'll get into some of that stuff today and hopefully people will realize I'm not, you know, 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, 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, that's not how political affairs develop. But the Third Balkan War. Misha Glenny, he's a guy who I don't particularly like. I mean, he's, 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, 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 to. People in the west lump the, the homeland war, like the Bosnian war and the Kosovo conflict into like one, one conflict. I understand why, I understand why they do that, even if it's in, 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, that's when hostilities arrived in the Balkans within the conflict cycle that is referred to as the Third Balkan War. In at least an Anglophone countries. That was the date that the Republic of Slovenia, which led the charge towards secession. It wasn't the cross initially I mean, I think they would have anyway. I mean, it's an open ended question. But they're the ones who, who took that step that theretofore, you know, Tujiman, for all of his talk of creating a truly Croatian republic that like reflected, you know, the, the singular and, and an exclusive culture of the Croatian people, I mean he didn't make that move, okay, until after 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, about 60 to 70% were ethnic Serbs. Like that. They can't be denied what their sympathies were. I mean that I, I, I can't tell you. I mean, I'm sure it varied. I mean, but the, the fact of their majoritarian status can't be denied. Okay. The US Slav army invaded Slovenia and that was really when the die was cast. Now the State Department claim as well as what was pontificated 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 seems strange today, but there was this big hope that the UN was gonna finally fulfill its, you know, intended function since the Cold War was over. And now the, the, the reasoning was that, you know, decision making is no longer going to be colored by these, these kinds of strategic exigencies, you know, and the sort of community and nation is going to emerge, you know, and, and work towards like a totally 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 so than 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 this one. One of Bush's master strokes was the Gulf War. And it wasn't just a military operation executed with Prussian efficiency. There was truly like a quorum of, of, of civilized nations, as it were, including the then still exit Soviet Union. So when things went to 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, 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 with that point had been derived from, you know, the judgment laid at Nuremberg. They still were, 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 love people's army, that that's a Serbian, that that's a Serbian military force and all but name. So when the u. S. Slav national army intervened in Slovenia, the claim was oh, this is an example of Serbia identism, know, and that's, that's that, that that's what's causing all of this. And of course Newsweek, which and time magazine and all these kind of print media outlets which in those days too, I mean this is when legacy media was arguated 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 ser dentism, you know, and sloic is this mad dictator and the only way he's hanging on to power is because he's taking on a chetnik guys. None of which makes any sense. And for context, at the beginning of 1991, Yugoslavia, which still existed, it was a federation of six republics. It was Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzogena, Montenegro and Macedonia. Plus there's two autonomous provinces for Dina and Kosovo. The eight major ethnic populations that lived in those regions, they approximately correspond in the political divisions of the federation. And this was by design. And in each region there could, each region could claim an ethnic concentration that corresponded to, to their national signifier. But there were, there were deep minority populations in all of these loci.
[157:51]
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[158:14]
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[158:21]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Now one big weakness in the narrative, I mean there's many. Okay, but one big weakness in the narrative of Serbs going crazy is that not, not, 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 Tujiman. For all I, I've got a lot of respect for Tujiman and for all of his sophistication as a statesman and he was a military veteran, but he was basically an academic and he hung around with the Serbians. He hung around, were in Zagreb or they were cosmopolitan types, you know, who he'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 the fact that they were the minority. And when you're a minority, you tow the line. That's an open ended question. But there was even a portmanteau called Herby, which it's a, it's a conflation of her body which means Croats and Serby, 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, it was concentrated in broad slots of the countryside, particularly in Canin or Canine, which is once for context in the medieval period that's like through, like the Habsburg era. 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 of the Adriatic Sea. These rural Serbs really, for the, I mean they, these were, these were the guys who were then elderly and the descendants of guys who'd, who fought with, you know, than the hail of its Chetniks, you know, like they, they didn't suddenly become cosmopolitans who wanted to live in some Croatian republic. And Tuan, now mind you, he's a guy who came up through the Tito was the apparatus. So it's not like he was like some arch USA or something. And he wasn't a fascist, despite what people claim in Belgrade and what a lot of left wingers claimed in Germany and elsewhere. But he did draw upon a lot of Ustosha symbols and he did say like we're not going to run from our leg, you know, from our heritage in the independent state of Croatia. You know, basically people who said they wanted some sort of disavow of the state. He's like, you. And, you know, the tujiman 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. Even a dialect that's pretty similar, if suddenly. If suddenly you go outside and, like, you know, the government's not conducting business in an Alphabet you can read, you're gonna feel pretty marginalized, you know, and even beyond that, it, like, symbolically
[162:20]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
made
[162:21]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
the serbs feel not just profoundly disrespected, but when you consider that an active war was on, you know, the. The Slovenes as well as. As well as both the Bosnian cross and the bosniacs, you know, the Bosnian muslims, who. In the next episode, we'll. We'll get into their story a bit, if. If that's agreeable. You know, they were. They were looking around themselves saying, like, there's. There's. There's an ethnic war on. You know, this isn't hypothetical anymore. There's a shooting war going on between ethnic secessionists and the u. S. Law of the army, which, at least at the general officer level, is majoritarian serve. And tujiman now is saying that Croatia is a state exclusively for the croatian people, the only democracy that's valid. And tujiman did run a. A democracy. There were contested elections. That's inaruable. However, as a matter of constitutional mandate, you know, the newly invented Croatia was exclusively croatian, you know, and if you didn't identify that way, you better start. Otherwise, you know, you're not one of us. And the jump from that, in the wake of a. A Ross and cree, which has actually already jumped off, albeit in a different theater, but still, you know, local to where you live, you're gonna realize that you could very well find yourself ethnically cleansed. And the guys pointing the bandit 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 two situations, but, like, when the floyd 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, Again, it's. I think most people don't think that way in this country. I mean, I am 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 whack you. Yeah, they would.
[164:43]
McDonald's Announcer
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[164:43]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I mean, like, even here, let alone in a place, if things are bad enough, you know, I'm not saying people should be paranoid or something or, you know, order Mac and cheese buckets from Alex Jones and, you know, pretend that a 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. In. In. In a. In a. In a Ross and Cree or. Or whatever equivalent is, you know, so that's. That's basically. That's basically what the perception was. And you go, Slavia. 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. They really. It's like the countryside, like, didn't exist to them, you know, and even people like Tujman, even though in Yugoslavia, I don't believe. I don't believe Titoism was ever a doctrine or kind of Marxist Leninism, but it definitely. The political culture definitely was similar in terms of its 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 three, 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 like, oh, here in Zagreb, you know, we were all the same. And our Serb neighbors, you know, they would have funny customs, go to the wrong church, but they can learn to be Croatian.
[166:34]
Bluff (Spinquest Player)
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[166:35]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Like, there really is something to that. And, you know, that. That really can't. The overstated, You know, the. So it was basically in Kanin or Canin, and basically what became the secessionist kina Serb republic. This is where, this is where the Croats actually could not afford. If there to be some kind, kind of iridescent Serbian movement or some kind of mobilized chetnic response to what Zagreb was doing, that's the last place they could afford this to happen. And that's absolutely where it did happen. And those also to be the toughest Serbs in equation. That's where they lived. You know, the. So in the first months of Tuan's election, and again, I emphasize that Kujman was elected, people can say whatever they, you know, it's kind of like people become less friendly to Croatia, the Croatia of history in academic treatments. You know, now that we're like 30 years out and you know, they're, they're increasingly casting Tujiman is some kind of dictator. I mean, the Croatian system to this day is a strongly presidential system. But Tujiman was elected president in a normal election. You know, you can't, you can't just say, you can't claim, you know, that like Russia is not a democracy. I mean, Croatia is a democratic as any other country on earth, okay? And it was in 1991, as it is today, you know, and
[168:23]
McDonald's Announcer
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[168:23]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
lead up to Tujman's election, again, it was his 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 are advising him on policy also, you know, and what he needed, I mean, frankly, he needed the defectors from the U. S. National army who knew the situation and the military apparatus as it stood then, not 20 years ago. You know, he needed, he needed guys who, who could tell him what the situation was on the ground, you know, in the countryside where, you know, when war came, I mean, that's not only where it's decided, but that's, that's what Croatia would have to capture in order to remain viable as a. And. The. There was also two the local cadres that facilitated Tujman'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, they were guys who, for years or for decades in some cases, that they were middle aged. They were guys who'd basically been like carrying the torch of, of Croat nationalism, you know, and biting their time until the titoist regime could be torn down. These guys had a basic antipathy to Serbs, like they can't be denied, you know, so if your ground organization are basically guys who hate serves anyway, it doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter what your control group is saying. It doesn't matter what. Tuan, you know, playing mellow academic is talking about a conciliatory posture between populations. You know, I mean, it's not, it's not, it's not something, it's not something that's, that's going to resolve in anything but a violent separation. Now I, I mean, again, like nobody's an augur and I think, I think key political figures, even people who had a better understanding or a more realistic understanding of the situation than, than perhaps Tujiman himself did, they couldn't have foreseen the extent of the differences and like the degree of, of the division and the kind of hostility just beneath the surface, like coming from both sides. And when Tujman won the 1990 election, what he should have done, regardless of what he intended in terms of, know, making the civic apparatus, you know, a truly, like a truly national democratic, like exclusively crud apparatus. Like he absolutely should not have done anything provocative until it was clear where the cards were going to fall in, in terms of secession and what the response in Belgrade was going to be. But at the same time too, this is 2020 hindsight and even a, even in a relatively unfree country, which Croatia was not again, but even under conditions where an executive doesn't have to abide some sort of direct ballot mandate. I mean, every, every chief executive is bound by the tenor of the, of opinion in the body politic. You know, so I mean, I. Tujiman wasn't part being kind of carried on a current of, 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, 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 for the country. Like all these people, they're, they're just simple people. Like, they, 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'm a Healian. A lot of this is out of man's hands
[173:21]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
doing.
[173:21]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It's also
[173:25]
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[173:47]
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[173:56]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The one thing people did say at the time, and you know, Tito himself was a Croat and he successfully suppressed Serb Croat enmity during the totality of his rule. But I mean it's, I think that's misguided too man. I mean one of the things Tito, he drived his mandate not from the fact that Cross and Serb 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 it, even the most, even the most kind of sectarian minded, ethnically chauvinistic minded Cross Serb, her Bosniak would realize that, you know, in, in within this paradigm, you know, we stand together or we at least tolerate the situation as it is or, or, or, or we all die. You know, and I don't think that's entirely fair, you know. And there was other things too. I mean the, this was documented. It wasn't just propaganda from Belgrade. Like upon the ascendancy of, upon two months elections, there was like a mass demotion and termination of serves from, from high and intermediate government positions. 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, that's, I mean stuff, stuff like that is a flex, you know. I mean it doesn't. There, there's no other way to characterize
[175:47]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
it,
[175:58]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The failed conflict resolution model. Again, I mean frankly, however misguided in terms of the assumptions people held in 1991 about the potentiality of a truly sort of global collective security. At least thank God it was that coterie at Department of State and not this current crop of insane Zionists and out and out, you know, mental subnormals. I don't even, I can't even imagine that would play out. But the, the big, believe it or not, the big question was on the U in the UN General assembly and the Security Council, like, is this an international conflict or is it 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, that actually had the effect of imposing restraint upon Washington, dominating the world and facilitating his social engineering regime under the odds as a 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. The party combatants or directly inter. Or the UN Security Council had no grounds to intervene, you know, unless there was international dimension to the conflict. You know, it would be suggested by people. One of the reasons why in the era everybody loved abandoned genocide and accused people he didn't like of committing it was because 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 live it. You can't levy in an accusation of genocide within like months of the. Nothing about. Still he's like, it's. It'd obviously be a propaganda ploy, but, you know, Belgrade, which to Belgrade at the time it was. And really until the conclusion of hostilities, the. The Serbians identified as the union of you. You know, the Yugoslavian Union of Serbia and Montenegro. You know, they never claimed like, oh, we are Serbia. We're, you know, we're creating, you know, like an ethnonational state of Serbians mirroring Tujiman. They claim Yugoslavia is, you know, where the Yugoslavian government and secession is against the law. These people are engaged in. They're. They're waging war on. On. 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. Until the end. 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. A racialized view of. Of. Of high politics, like over dishonest. That may have been depending your perspective. I mean, was it, you know, Serbia never seceded. Serbia Never claimed that the U. S. Lobbying constitution was null and void, that we're reconstituting as a Serb republic. Karina did constitute itself as, as the republic of. The republic of Serbia. But you know, this is, this is important. It's not just legalese. It had real war and peace impactfulness, but it's also the, I mean, the key, the key shortcoming of the United nations in executive terms. I'm. Aside from the fact, however much philosophically, these things aren't viable. I mean, what, what, what, what, what, what are the UN Bluet gonna do? Are they gonna. Are they gonna occupy. Are they gonna 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, 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 U. N. Had come out and said this is an international conflict just in 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 and the Bosniacs kind of just trying to survive. It's like, well, coal already immediately recognized the independent state of Croatia. You know, you'd essentially be sewing 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 the 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, global collective security arrangement. People are still seriously talking about the Bush Baker model of we're gonna, we're gonna total. The Soviet Union is going to totally disarm its strategic nuclear forces and draw down its conventional forces to vibrate levels. And like, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna withdraw from Germany and like, NATO basically isn't going to exist anymore. Forth. Like this was the way people were thinking, not just Talking so that's important to consider, you know. And again the, if I think some of the, I think some of what was alleged in terms of ethnic cleansing and, and mass rape it like organized, like sexual violence. Some of that was overstated, some of it was not. Okay. I'm reluctant to use the term war crimes because it's advantage so much. The floating signifier has become meaningless. But there is direct testimony that I, I from, you know, NCOs and junior officers.
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Thomas (Guest Expert)
Who are witness to these events and they have no reason to lie about it and every reason to deny it. And I find that testimony persuasive. And these weren't guys who themselves were under indictment, you know and I think anybody doesn't believe those kinds of things happen in a Ross and free is 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 the UN should have quote done something. So like what do you do? You know, you deploy with combined arms and assault the, the U. S Love army. So like now you're at war with Serbia. Like I don't feel this 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 gunfight that you didn't have to, you know, and that's basically it. You know, it doesn't, does 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 hurts to go, you know, which I think everybody will agree was on the receiving end of the worst excesses by all, 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, you know, like, 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 Balkan, the third Balkan War was an international conflict, obviously whatever government head could be said to exist in Baz Scovina, 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. What would that force have been made up of?
[187:22]
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[187:22]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
You're gonna send like the Bundes Fair in there. So you got like a German army, you know, marching in under the office of the UN saying, oh, but we're here, you know, to represent all nations. You're g. The Russians a piece of that. You know, again, like the. 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 something you're left with, like, even if the political will is there, even if there's some sort of operational road map to resolve or, you know, to enforce a ceasefire, like, who do you deploy? You're gonna get a bunch of. You're gonna get a bunch of like, third World, like. Like dealers from, like, Ecuador or. Or to, you know, to. To police Bosnia. I mean, that's. On some level, 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 rob the its constituent states of sovereignty. Because when something like this happens, like you need Hasbro Empire to intervene, you know, you needed 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'm actually more sympathetic to than a lot of people. I mean, more sympathetic to him as a man. I mean, he's dead now, but. And as well, more sympathetic to him than a lot of the hoi polloi who say nasty things about him. Nothing like they 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. The new Croatia and the new Serbia and whatever the fate of Bosnia is, it's going to be decided on the battlefield. And obviously, he was, you know, raked over the cold and media like, oh, how dare you say this? You're encouraging mass rape and genocide. I mean, no, actually, exactly what Eagleberger said, like, ended up happening. In 91 and 95, America intervened to facilitate Operation Storm, which is the Croatian liberation of the Kina, which, you know, was the belated victory in the homeland war for Croatia. But that was. That was only the. That was only the. That was America facilitated that by use of a PMC outfit called mpri, which was incorporated essentially for that purpose, you know, for the. 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 legal Burger was saying was. Was horrifically callous. I mean, that. What it came down to was what. What resolved the conflict. The 91, 95 comic book cycle was exactly what he said. You know, the. The party combatants exhausted their ability to wage war and battlefield. A battlefield victory in Karina, albeit with, you know, American assistance, is. Is what resolved for all time the. The disputed. Or the contested objective. That was cryina. So I hope people will back off a bit on saying that, like, I hate Serbs or I'm saying bad things about them or that I. I've got some conceptual bias in favor of Croatia. Would you talk a little bit about sloping on the walls?
[192:07]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
It's been a lot of people's lifetimes, you know.
[192:11]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah. And I understand why.
[192:13]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Yeah.
[192:13]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
If I was a Serbian and I was in America or the UK Like, I'd feel very much like a population designated for hostility. You know, I understand that completely. Okay. But I don't think people.
[192:31]
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[192:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, like, 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. Or what you know, the, the third Balkan war, at least the 9195 phase that led to the creation of an independent Croatia. Like you've got to deal with the Croatian political culture and what it basically, you know, what the west view of Croatia was and what Tuan was doing. That's what was the dispositive variable. Okay, so like I begin with discussing their Croatian situation also because Croats or 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, it was the essential cause. Okay, the, what Croatia did decided the course of the war and the ultimately became the political resolution. Like where, like when the shooting stopped, you know, the, the frontiers were established and accepted. It wasn't what Slovenia or Macedonia was doing, it wasn't what the Bosniacs were doing. Like those things had an impact. But again, like that's why. So I mean, I, I would have dealt with the Serbian perspective anyway, but I thought it was especially imperative to do so for, for that reason.
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Thomas (Guest Expert)
But Milovic himself, I mean again, he was, he was a career communist epic. 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 the. 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, I. This kind of, this expost. Facto rationalization, you know, that really began in earnest in 91 and kind of just when it became totally irrational and punitive during the Clinton regime, that Milovic is like this madman like, like that's completely at odds with reality and 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 it. And honestly, you know Milosovich's fall from grace and power within his own country. Costunish was elected president on October 5, 2000. And part of the big. The big reason why Costunika or Costinic. Forgive me if I'm butchering 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 Lovich within Serbia was he turned his back on the. On the Serbian war refugees. He didn't care about our people, you know, he didn't fight hard enough, you know, for the. For the. For the. The coast of our Serbs, you know, like, he. He wasn't this big chnic. You know, like, he was basically pragmatic. And this claim that, you know, most of the. Most of the grossest excesses, wherever one falls in their sympathy or background or whatever, I don't think any would disagree that the worst excesses carried out by all party combatants took place in Bosnia. Okay? And the idea that from Belgrade, Milovic was somehow directing, like, the Bosnian Serbs to do his bidding, like, that's just not. I mean, it's not the way command authority works in. 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 the, you know, the. The affinity that their co. Ethnics 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. The sociopolitical situation, you know, like, it'd be. It's. It'd be like saying like Jefferson Davis was like, was. Was ordering Buddy Bill Anderson to. To do things. Yeah. I mean, that's like. It sounds asinine, but the claim that I just raised is asinine. And people accepted this as, oh, Milosovich is a bad guy. And like, again, I think. I think some. Sometimes it's like, you know, the propaganda being distilled down into the most kind of idiots caricature of reality. But it's also, you know, the problem with assigning legalist legalisms and par. Legalism. Parent legalist paradigms and legalisms. The high politics, as was done at Nuremberg, is it creates these perverse sort of narratives where they're, oh, there's. There. 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, the I guarantee you that some of the most hardened Chetniks in Karina and in Bosnia and probably never even heard most of it 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 Belgrade, who. Yeah, we like that he's Serbian, but other than that, you know, it's, it's ridiculous, you know, and it's also too. I mean, basically, if you look at the modern Serbian state under Milosevic and now and you look at the modern Croatian state under Tujiman and no, like, basically everything that was suggested to be this kind of like horrible undemocratic feature of Serbia or what they called Yugoslavia after the secession of Croatia and, and Slovenia. I mean, those are basically features common to Croatia. You know, there's what we would consider a basically chauvinist, you know, nationalism that, you know, characterized party politics. There's a basic distrust of pluralism and casting candidates who, who talked about what, you know, a multi ethnic Croatia were viewed as traitors, you know, bad relations with the west, you know, and, and, and admittedly that had more, 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, and I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying to be punitive. I got, I, I think the cross and serial great people and I respect the fact that they've resisted, you know, the, the social engineering regime as staunchly as they have. But you can't, you can't cast Serbia in this light but say, oh, but Croatia is not like that because they're basically mirrors of each other, like structurally, you know, and, and frankly, Tujman, 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, Buddy, in terms of. He was no more autocratic than Milosevic was like, arguably. I mean, Tujiman, once the war kicked off, I, Yes, Tujan was elected, yes, there were fair elections in, in Croatia, but I don't think he could have been removed like during his, you know, the, the state of active war. Okay. Arguably he was like, more like, like Milosovich was more susceptible, you know, to like, removal by due process than Tujamon was. So there's, I mean there's that too. Like you can't. This attempt like other, like the Serbians is, is okay. And I mean I, I had thought that I conveyed that clearly in our previous discussions, but because apparently I didn't. I, 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. But it's also too, one of the reasons why Milosevic in his favor, one of the reasons why he enjoyed the, the incumbency for 13 years. You know, like he did implement a market economy in a way that didn't completely crash the, the, 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, there was an actual opposition. You know, they did have media access. I mean this wasn't like all the kind of, all the kind of polestars that these NGO types claim, like constitute, you know, like a democratic state. We approve of. Like he met those. Okay. I mean Serbia was a hell of 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, 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 Milo Switch was their guy. His cousins was basically doing, he was basically acting like a, like a post communist, like European politician is supposed to act, you know, so this, the fact he was hailed into the hag,
[203:58]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
you
[203:59]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
know, I think but you know, he, he, he, he died when he was on trial and I, but I, I thought he acquitted himself very honorably. You know, I like. And we'll get into that in the, in the book and episode.
[204:20]
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[204:24]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
it's about all I got for today. Like, frankly, I don't mean to be a, I don't mean to be a FA or PhD Ggot, but I'm in a lot of pain right now. No problem, go ahead.
[204:39]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I'm sorry. Yeah, no problem at all. Just hit, hit up whatever you want to promote and yeah, we'll get out of here.
[204:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
No, that's great. Thank you, Pete. You can find me on substack real thomas777.substack.com I'm happy to report too Antelope Hill 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, in their creators program whereby if you. If you enter my code when you order from Antelope Press, like regardless the size of the order, you get 5% off. The code is lowercase3th E7s V E N number 5. And not only, not only will you get 5% off, but like I get a kickback from that too. So it helps my brand. So just keep that in mind. You can find out all the info on the substack. I posted up a. A little piece about it. You can find me on Twitter at Real Capital R E L R E A L underscore number 7 HMS 777. You can always find me on my website. It's Thomas777.com that's number 7 H1S777.com you can find me on YouTube at Thomas TV, number 7, HMAS TV. I'm uploading some like, videos I shoot just kind of like out and about and with some of the people I talk to and things. So that's gonna. I'm hoping that's gonna pop a little more as I upload more stuff, but that's what I got.
[206:26]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
All right, until the next time. Thank you.
[206:29]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Oh, I have had no luck lately.
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Thomas (Guest Expert)
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Summary10 min read

The Pete Quiñones Show

Episode: The 1990s Balkans Wars w/ Thomas777 - Complete

Date: August 10, 2026
Participants:

Host: Pete Quiñones
Guest: Thomas777

Episode Overview

In this extensive three-part series, Pete Quiñones is joined by historian and revisionist Thomas777 for a deep dive into the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, focusing on the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the key players, the preceding historical context, and the narratives that have shaped modern perceptions of the conflict. Across the episodes, Thomas outlines the geopolitical maneuvers, ethnic tensions, and policy missteps that led to the violent fragmentation of the Balkans, emphasizing both Croatian and Serbian perspectives amid a backdrop of global power shifts following the Cold War.

Structure & Main Theme

Episode 1: The Croatian "homeland war," Yugoslav breakup, Croatia’s independence, and West vs. East perspectives.
Episode 2: Historical roots—particularly the Independent State of Croatia in WWII, the Ustasha movement, and how that legacy impacted 1990s nationalism.
Episode 3: Serbian experiences, the misrepresentation of blame, the function and limitations of the international community, and the realities of post-war political structures.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Part 1 – The Croatian Axis: Independence, Collapse, and Geopolitics

1. Episode’s Plan & Focus

Thomas proposes a three-part structure (01:29):
- Ep. 1: The Croatian "homeland war" and its 1990s context.
- Ep. 2: WWII era, the Independent State of Croatia, and Axis connections.
- Ep. 3: Focus on Serbia, its internal dynamics, and reflections on U.S./Russia relations post-1999.
- Quote – Thomas:
  
  “Today, I want to get into the conditions that led to the homeland war with a focus on the Croatian internal situation. Next time, the WWII context and the Independent State of Croatia. And finally, a deep dive on the Serbian situation and the poisoning of US-Russia relations with the 1999 assault on Serbia.” (03:52)

2. International Context: US Policy & Soviet Collapse

Bush 41 (George H.W. Bush), James Baker, and Gorbachev’s delicate balance (07:08):
- The U.S. wanted to keep the Soviet structure intact until total nuclear and conventional disarmament.
- Events in Yugoslavia, particularly the Croatian/Slovenian drive for independence, indirectly undermined this plan by destabilizing the region and inspiring secessionist movements elsewhere.
- Historical anecdote: A 1989 meeting where Gorbachev voiced deep concern about NATO missile deployments and reciprocation on nuclear reductions, revealing high-level anxieties over European security and Soviet stability.
- Quote – Thomas:
  
  “This was the issue, the only issue really in the minds of Bush and Baker... Bush was described by Condoleezza Rice as consummately cautious. That’s the wrong way to characterize it. Calculating, yes. Incredibly thorough, yes. But Bush was thinking systemically.” (11:32)

3. Croatia’s Path to War

Internal political developments (26:05):
- May 13, 1990: The infamous soccer riot in Zagreb marked spiraling ethnic tensions.
- President Tuđman’s push for a new constitution alarmed the Serb minority, leading to claims it was a “manifesto for ethnic cleansing.”
Croat/Serb social dynamics:
- Croats: about 78% of the population.
- Serbs: about 12%, holding 15-20% of key official posts (mainly in police/military).
- The Yugoslav National Army (JNA) became increasingly Serb-dominated, alarming Croatian public opinion.
- Quote – Thomas:
  
  “It’s important to understand Tuđman was not a bigot. He was a racial patriot... His view was basically the Schmittian view; democracy is the express will of the demos... domination by one cohesive ethnic group.” (29:16)
Strategic patience:
- Tuđman, leveraging U.S. and German interests, appeared to hold back militarily, potentially as a way to win Western support against Serbian aggression.
- Germany’s full political backing under Chancellor Helmut Kohl was crucial.

4. Tuđman’s Political Strategy

Tuđman’s background & logic (34:06):
- Former partisan, later imprisoned multiple times for nationalist activities.
- Unlike simplistic portrayals, he “did not run from” Croatia’s WWII legacy, including the Ustasha period.
- “He was worthy of the praise he receives, and then some.” (34:06)
Role of Germany:
- Germany’s early recognition of Croatia’s independence angered Belgrade and Russia.
- Kohl reassured the Croatian leadership that support was unwavering against American media narratives depicting them as “national socialists.”
- Quote – Thomas (Croatia/Germany relationship):
  
  “Kohl says don’t worry about that—when push comes to shove, I’m going to inform Washington this issue is non-negotiable.” (40:27)

5. NGO and Western Influence

West’s wariness about “helping” Croatian nationalists (46:50):
- Although far-right volunteers did support Croatia, the kind of “NGO macroverse” that often props up favored client regimes was largely absent, as the Croats did not fit prevailing Western activist narratives.
- Private military firms and German/American training were decisive (esp. for 1995’s Operation Storm).

Part 2 – Historical Roots: The NDH, the Ustasha, and WWII Legacies

6. The Ustasha and the Independent State of Croatia (60:10+)

Context setting for WWII:
- The creation of post-WWI Yugoslavia brought together opposing nations and elites with little grassroots support—a “fool’s errand.”
- Examining WWII’s NDH (Independent State of Croatia), the Ustasha movement, and neighboring Chetnik (Serbian) and Bosniak (Muslim) factions is essential for grasping the enduring ethnic divisions.
- Quote – Thomas:
  
  “Many misconceptions... For a small country, it [Croatia] had a tremendously outsized impact. It was incredibly committed to the Axis cause...” (60:23)
German, Italian, and local nationalist maneuvering (67:39):
- The Balkans were essential for Axis strategic depth vs. the Soviets; local ethnic militias and resistance groups all vied for survival, autonomy, or power, often with bloody results.
Relationship between NDH and Axis (Germany/Italy):
- Hitler and Mussolini reluctantly enabled radical Croatian ultranationalists as official rulers—despite fascist Germany’s typical preference for more traditional elites.
- Quote – Thomas (Pragmatism in alliances):
  
  “The Third Reich wasn’t trying to export fascism. In fact, they were doing the opposite. Rarely did Berlin support radical cadre-based movements. The NDH was the only instance.” (68:56)

7. Ante Pavelić and Ustasha Ideology

Biography of Pavelić (115:25):
- Born into a Catholic family but raised among Muslims in Bosnia, Pavelić had deep familiarity with both Catholic and Islamic traditions—reflected in the NDH’s dual state religions and military recruitment policies.
- His political radicalization occurred amid suppression from both royalist and later communist Yugoslav polities.
- Quote – Thomas (on Pavelić’s identity):
  
  “This was a man who went to Mass daily but grew up being taught in Islamic maktab schools... This was not superficial.” (115:25)
Exile, organization, and terror:
- Fleeing Yugoslav persecution, Pavelić spent years in Austria, Hungary, and Italy, building connections with other nationalist militants.
- The Ustasha formed alliances with Macedonian and Bulgarian radicals, orchestrated assassinations, trained paramilitaries openly in Italy, and smuggled arms throughout Yugoslavia.
- Quote – Thomas (on the Ustasha abroad):
  
  “The degree to which the Croats developed outsized clout [in fascist and nationalist circles] can’t be overstated...” (142:14)
Long-term impact:
- These networks fueled Croatian nationalism in the diaspora and contributed to the rapid mobilization seen in the 1990s.
- The 1930s violence and Yugoslav royal dictatorship’s oppressive policies made the prospect of a multiethnic Yugoslavia increasingly untenable.

Part 3 – The Serbian Perspective, Blame, and the Limits of Intervention

8. The Case for Serbia

Correcting the narrative (146:39):
- Thomas addresses criticisms for not giving the “Serbian side” and pushes back against simplistic blame narratives.
- Quote – Thomas:
  
  “It was entirely misguided for [Serbia] to be accused of starting the war, because they absolutely didn’t... To claim ethnic conflict is like a schoolyard fight with one clear instigator is not reality.” (147:46)

9. Ethnic Geography and Internal Dynamics

Serb populations outside Serbia proper (158:21):
- 600,000 Serbs lived in Croatia, with most urbanized and relatively integrated. However, rural Serb communities (notably in Krajina) retained strong nationalist and Chetnik traditions.
- Tuđman’s symbolic policies (shifting to the Latin alphabet, purging Serbs from official posts) stirred understandable fears among Serbian communities.
- Quote – Thomas:
  
  “Even if you speak the same language... if you go outside and the government's not conducting business in an alphabet you can read, you’re going to feel pretty marginalized... especially as war is breaking out.” (162:20)
Tuđman's administration:
- Though elected in real elections, his platform and ground operation was dominated by hardline anti-Serb nationalists, many of whom had long harbored secessionist ambitions.
- Thomas argues that, with the benefit of hindsight, Tuđman should have avoided provocative actions until after clearer secession outcomes emerged, but acknowledges that the political momentum was difficult to resist.

10. Tito’s Legacy

Suppression of Serb-Croat tension:
- Tito, himself a Croat, maintained peace not via real reconciliation but by ensuring both superpowers stayed out, and through iron-fisted suppression.
- Modern attempts to recast Tuđman as a dictator are exaggerated; Croatia was (and is) a strongly presidential system, but fundamentally operated within a multi-party framework.

11. International Reactions and UN Paralysis

Debate over "civil war" vs. "international conflict" (175:57):
- The UN was stymied: unless the conflict was “international,” it had no charter authority to intervene meaningfully.
- Overzealous application of terms like “genocide” became a way to override such legal limitations in later years, but not in 1991.
- Quote – Thomas:
  
  “The big question at the UN was: is this an international conflict or a civil war? … The General Assembly had no grounds to sanction or intervene unless there was an international dimension.” (175:57)
Realpolitik and the limits of intervention:
- Practical difficulties of deploying intervention forces (which army? under whose authority?) made “UN solutionism” a dead letter.
- Ultimately, battlefield outcomes—especially U.S.-backed Croatian offensives—determined new borders.

12. Legacy of Milosevic

Mischaracterizations:
- Slobodan Milosevic was initially viewed by Western powers as a potential liberalizer (the “Yugoslav Gorbachev”). His later demonization as a "madman" was, to Thomas, a product of post-hoc propaganda.
- The worst atrocities occurred in Bosnia, but command responsibility is over-simplified: local forces pursued their own often brutal agendas.
- Quote – Thomas, on Milosevic:
  
  “The idea that from Belgrade, Milosevic was directing the Bosnian Serbs to do his bidding... that's just not the way command authority works in a modern state. The Bosnian Serbs might as well have been in a different country.” (195:03)
Comparative politics:
- Croatia and Serbia ended up with similar nationalist structures, with similar skepticism toward pluralism and Western liberal dogma.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“You can’t look at Tuđman and Milosevic as twin Balkan dictators. They were totally different kinds of people, different generations.” (40:27)
“Real statesmen have to make these kinds of decisions... Did the Croatian strategy prolong suffering in Bosnia? Yes. But it was the only way to win the war.” (56:31)
“The U.N. had no grounds to intervene unless there was an international dimension... realpolitik emerges, and you can’t erase the human element from these affairs.” (175:57)
“Most of the excesses, by all party combatants, took place in Bosnia. The worst happened there—no one can really dispute that.” (195:03)

Timeline of Key Segments

(01:29) – Thomas lays out the episode/series structure
(07:08–18:09) – U.S./Soviet diplomacy and its effects on Yugoslavia
(26:05–29:16) – May 1990 Zagreb soccer riot and establishment of Croatian independence principles
(34:06–40:27) – Tuđman’s strategy and leadership; the role of Germany and Western opinion
(60:10–68:56) – WWII context: The Ustasha, NDH, and the Balkans during the Axis era
(115:25–142:14) – The life of Ante Pavelić, Ustasha networks, and ethnic violence between the wars
(146:39–147:46) – Opening statements on the Serbian perspective, correcting blame narratives
(158:21–162:20) – Internal ethnic geography in Yugoslavia, Serbs in Croatia, policy provocations
(175:57–184:28) – Limits of UN intervention, legal and practical challenges, and realpolitik outcomes
(195:03–203:58) – Milosevic and comparative postwar state-building

Final Thoughts & Takeaways

The breakup of Yugoslavia was rooted in the legacies of both WWII-era ethno-nationalism and Cold War strategic calculations.
Simplistic narratives about “good nationalists” and “bad aggressors” obscure the complex, often tragic motivations and histories of the populations involved.
External actors (USA, Germany, Russia, NGOs) played major but sometimes contradictory roles.
The 1990s wars are best understood through the prism of state collapse, ethnic power struggles, and the limits of international law and intervention.

For Further Study

Thomas777's Substack: realthomas777.substack.com
Thomas777's Website: thomas777.com
Recommended Reading: Misha Glenny’s apologia for the Serbian side, various works on the Ustasha, NDH, and revisionist histories of 1990s Yugoslavia.

This summary aims to capture the factual content, tone, and complexity of the discussion, emphasizing the nuance and scholarly approach characteristic of both host and guest.

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Transcript168 lines

[00:01]
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[01:00]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pican yo show. Thomas is back and we're going to start something new. How you doing, Thomas?
[01:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I'm well, thank you. Thanks for hosting me.
[01:10]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
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
[01:30]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
today? I, I anticipate this series naturally, kind of like organically. We'll go three episodes. Obviously it's your show, figuratively and literally. We'll 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, you know, Croatia, Croatia's declaration of independence. Croatia and Macedonia essentially seceding from, you know, 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, and those developments were on the situation in the Soviet Union, which 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 they were, and especially for such a small country, they played a, an important and very outsized role in the Axis alliance. Okay. 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 inarguable. This isn't some slam on. And Serbian people or, or anything of the sort. You know, Croatia is the most insinuated into the kind of Western conceptual paradigm. I mean, part of that is for. For.
[03:52]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
For.
[03:53]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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 Tujiman, who was at the helm of Croatia as it achieved independence. His. He was a. He was in some ways a kind of perfect foil to almost in like Manichean terms to Milosevic. And he was a very unique individual. And I, I think he was one of the most significant figures of the later 20th century. So I want to, today, I want to, I want to get into the, the conditions that led to the, the homeland war with a focus on, you know, the Croatian internal situation. Next time, I think we should deal with the Second World War and the constellation of factors therein and 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, the kind of all 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 some of them are. Go ahead.
[05:37]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
It all sounds good to me.
[05:39]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, their. This, the significance of these, of these things. So bear that in mind too. I will, I will come back to anything that seems ambiguous, and I'm aware that a lot of this seems ambiguous to the uninitiated.
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[07:09]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The key to understanding how things developed in the way Yugoslavia broke apart, particularly what guided decision making in the Croatian control group around Tujiman. You've got to understand what was underway vis a vis the Bush 41 administration and why they were so zealously behind Gorbachev and Shevit Nars, who was a Gorachovsky, you know, top advisor. He was kind of the man behind Parasa. 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 Scowcroft, you know, contrast the Team B coterie kind of best exemplified by people like, or most purely exemplified by people like Cheney, you know, who wanted, who wanted, who wanted the Soviet Union dismantled and, and, and kind of, you know, 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, to, 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, 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, you know, 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 think I'm overemphasizing this, there's A fascinating memoir that circulated at Department of State. I mean all the, the minutes of any like official meeting between the Secretary of State and his Soviet counterpart or the, or the Soviet chief executive would obviously, you know, be widely circulated. May 11th of 89, Gorbachev met with Baker and Chevy Nardse. It was present too. The topic of discussion was, was force levels in Europe with a particular focus on nuclear weapons. And Gorbachev initiated the conversation by putting it to Baker. I, 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, Gorachov is basically like I, I, you know, I'm not concerned with how this looks in the perspective of morality, but obviously we need some kind of guarantee from you that, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna, you're not gonna 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, before we go any further here, Gor further said that he and Warsaw, he and his Warsaw pick counterparts were prepared to conduct negotiations on a total drawdown of tactical nuclear forces, you know, just outright and as well as the abolition of the nuclear capability of, you know, quote, dual, poor dual purpose platforms, primarily cruise missiles, you know, basically put it placing them beyond use as far as being married to 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, in Bush 41 he was described by Condoleezza Rice as consummately cautious. I think that's, that's the wrong way to characterize it. Calculating. Yes, you know, incredibly thorough. Yes. But Bush was thinking systemically and that's exactly like, that's exactly the, the, the model that Nixon had for bringing about, you know, the, the end of Soviet hard power, you know, by negotiated means, you know, and I, I invoke that because I don't, I don't think anybody could say that Nixon was cautious. Okay. The gorge off further. The remainder of the, of the discussions reflected in the minutes memorializing the memoir. He basically click ticks off a list of concessions the Soviets have made. You know, they would draw in over 500 tactical nuclear munitions from the European theater if they could expect reciprocity from NATO. They they, they'd be willing to withdraw all nuclear forces, tactical nuclear forces, more so packed territory between that day in 1991, you know, and obviously tactical nuclear weapons to the Soviets were. 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, 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, that's why these battlefield nuclear weapons are of such a concern to Moscow. Like then as. No. Okay. Because deployed in the European theater, that, that's got, they've got tremendous destructive power and that, that has implications for, you know, for First Strike as well as myriad other things. The second. Interestingly too, Gorbachev 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 Paras and that Robert Gates is probably behind this effort and this needs to be openly discussed lest, you know, public opinion, you know, converge around this kind of narrative. And as, as I've indicated before, like 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 is absolutely right. Like CIA at that point, Aldrich Ames had sold out every human asset 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 you know, them pretending that it's forever 1960. I mean that they, that was their raise on Petra, you know, so girl, which was basically going down the list of things that can potentially derail.
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[18:09]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
This sort of disarm and concord. And Baker is, you know, playing it close to the chest but obviously warming up to these, to these, these efforts by Moscow and you know, he, he guarantees an elimination of, you know, any kind of tactical asymmetry as regards tactical forces and being in Europe, you know, immediately to be followed up by, you know, a, a further drawdown in total nuclear forces and the emphasis by Baker as well as, you know, what's emerging from the White House and vis a vis Bush's contentious dealings with Poland and some of the uh, other Warsaw pack 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, and, 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, the captive Soviet orbit. So obvious, obviously this, 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, would require a, a real commitment probably over two administrations on, you know, on the American side who were, you know, fully committed to the program and is, and, and, and reciprocally in Moscow it would have required, I mean Gorbachev ended up being very long lived, but it would have required Gorbachev retaining his mandate probably for the subsequent decade and if not he himself, you know, a protege who could be expected to essentially carry out exactly the policy program outlined by Shepherd Nards and, and you know, kind of the, the perestrika concepts. What was happening in Yugoslavia at this time? Yugoslavia was outside of the Warsaw hag orbit. You know, they, the, and they, they were treated after the, the Khrushchev thought led to the reestablishment of, of, of of cordial relations with Yugoslavia. And Tito himself and Moscow always treated Yugoslavia as part of the socialist community of nations. And there was complex interdependence in the form of common form and comic con. But Yugoslavia stood, you know, as a, as a genuine neutral in the Cold War.
[22:21]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Do you, do you consider did you consider them to be socialist?
[22:29]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah.
[22:31]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
In what way, though?
[22:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I mean, it was a planned economy, you know, based upon, you know, the centrally administered inputs and production schemes and everything else. I mean, like, they, 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 a direct investment in a way that, you know, say, like Poland, Czechoslovakia wasn't. But I mean, they absolutely, you know, they absolutely were practicing state socialism and well, they had.
[23:23]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
There were like water, water treatment plants and all sorts of things as such that were like guild owned, that were like guild run.
[23:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, they had. And they allowed, they allowed, 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 that was not unlike the kind of stuff that was emerging in Hungary after 1956. I mean, a lot of this stuff was. A lot of stuff was like, cosmetic and also like it. You could, you could carry on autonomously within certain parameters in the Yugoslavian 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 absolutely, that's the, that's, 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, is, is, is. Was. Was doomed from inception for all kinds of reasons. But the idea was. The most charitable view of Tito
[24:53]
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[24:53]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, Herzogovina would, would. They, would. They would stand together or fall together amidst the, the Cold War dynamic. And we'll get into the kind of basic suspicion of Serbs and Croats to intergovernmental organizations, including, I might add, the Catholic Church, despite the fact. I mean, the Croats are, are like a Catholic vanguard, but they're not, they were always, 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 Bosniacs as a people too. I'm not leaving them out. They're. They're hugely important. Um, but, but for our purposes right now, they kind of don't feature center stage.
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[26:06]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
May 13, 1990, that was the infamous. That's when the, the football game. I'm talking about soccer, not the pigskin game obviously. That's in a soccer match at Zagreb at Maximir Stadium between Zagreb Dynamo and Belgrade Red Star, which are like two like very. 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, ethno sectarian nationalism. The game erupted into like this general like melee between like Croats and Serbians as well as the police. And it like the, 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 sure enough would have been underway all that preceding spring was the new Croatian parliament had been convening. They. They formally held its first session. Held the first session on May 30th of 1990. But President Tujiman, and we'll get into who he was in a minute. He had he formally announced the manifesto for a new Croatian constitution and an entire like multitude literally of political, economic and social changes. Most of most concern to non Croats. The extent that this constitution outlined, what extent minority rights would be guaranteed. I mean mainly for Serbs. The relationship between cross and Bosniaks is complicated. We'll get into that as we proceed with the series. But local Serb politicians just oppose this outright. You know, they said it's a, it's a manifesto for ethnic cleansing. Which is somewhat ironic if you consider the source. I have had no luck lately.
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[29:16]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It's important to understand Tujman was not a bigot. I mean he was a, he was a, 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, he was not a bigot. His view of, his view of democracy, 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 inarguable, even if one is prone to kind of universalist conceits. Otherwise, for context, as of 1990, cross represented 78.1% and Serbs self identified ethnic serves 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, these, 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, after the death of Tito, the Communist Party in, in Croatia and to a. A striking degree in Bosnia, Herzogena as well, you know, the, the like. The Yugoslavian security apparatus was becoming a like, like a Serbian institution, you know, and this, this more than anything kind of. Prompted public reception in Croatia among Croats that their back was against the wall. Because it's not, it's not as if Croatia at this time had its own army or something. The only army was the Yugoslav national army like the jna. And immediately after the Slovenians also held a parliamentary election. They held theirs in April of 1990. Know, and then the cross, as we just mentioned in 1990, in May 1990, the JNA, the Yugoslav national army, they announced an end to the Tito era doctrine of general people's defense. What that, what general people's defense in practice meant was that each discret 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, in, you know, the kind of constabulary role for policing the internal situation in event of a crisis. This was, this was, this was just abolished and Henceforth it would be replaced by a centrally directed system of defense, you know, from the JNA's general staff, which again was what was. Was for all practical purposes, you know, like a Serbian element. The Slovenians acted rapidly to try and retain control over their, over their territorial element. The Croatians played it very cool, which is fascinating, and people have a couple ideas about that. The, the weapon stockpiles of the territorial defense force element in Croat majority regions were seized by the USAV national army.
[34:02]
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[34:07]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It was 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, you know, they were claiming that, you know, we represent all, you know, Yugoslavians, but the Serbian minority is under direct, you know, like mortal physical threat in newly independent Croatia which according to Belgrade was a. Was. Was. It was a fascist state. So Tuan realized he had to proceed carefully. A lot of people believe Tujima wasn't. We'll get into his background in a minute, but he was, he was an intellectual. He was a military officer, but he was, he was kind of the cosmic east block intellectual. People think he was basically playing like a master chess game. And he realized that owing to, you know, the good offices with, with. With Germany and particularly coal, as well as America's need, you know, kind of control the situation without simply ceding responsibility for any intervention to the Russians, which was unthinkable, that basically like, if he allowed the Serbs to continue to, you know, basically kind of outrage world opinion by carrying out what was by all appearances a kind of like nakedly like 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, um, the EU with backed up by NATO force of arms, or that the United States and Germany would allow, you know, weapons to stream in and essentially give the crotch that they needed to win when push came to shove. And ultimately, four years later, that's exactly what happened. And the cross, you know, launches mass assault Operation Storm against the Serbian U. S. Love national army and like, quite literally like liberating Croatia. And we'll get into that in later episodes. But I basically accept that view of Tujiman, which is why, as I suggested as we commence this discussion, he's, you know, worthy of the praise that he receives and. And then more. Who was Tujiman? He was born on May 14, 1922. He died in December of 1999. It's inarguable that he played, he played the pivotal role in the, in the creation of like the modern Croatian state, the contemporary state. It. His vision of Croatia was he didn't run from the. It's, it's. It's passed as a fascist state, a national socialist state. 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 imprisoned 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 Tujiman'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 to note too that Tito was a Croat
[39:18]
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[39:18]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
even then there was a strong, there was a Serbian plurality. If not what's up everybody? It's Bretzky and America is turning 250 and I can't think of a better way to celebrate that than playing on an American owned social casino. Spinquest.com with all of your favorite games. Live crabs, bubble craps, live blackjack. There's no better place to play for free and win real cash prizes.
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[40:28]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The cross 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, in some national narratives. It's not, it's not a matter of what's changing, changing their hats according to political, according to historical currents. There is an internal logic there, you know, convoluted as it might seem outside of the Balkan situation. But 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 Tujiman and Milosevic as, you know, as these kinds of twin, like Balkan dictators. They, they were totally different kinds of people. They were different generations. You know, they were born, you know, over 20 years apart. Milovic was the consummate kind of company man, communist. Interestingly, he was the man the State Department favored for a kind of paras in Yugoslavia to be overseen. And you know, what I was alluding to at the onset of this discussion with in my opinion the Balan situation kind of dooming the Bush Baker, Gorbach, Shevard Nard, Concord was when as I think we discussed before. The huge man met with Helmet Cole. On October 7, 1991. And or how McCo met on Oct. 7 with Separovich, was huge month'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, the newly independent Croatia has Germany's full support. Within the notes the meeting is fascinating. Seowic says, you know, we were painted as, we're painted as national socialists by the American world press. We, we fear this is going to harm our cause. Like Cole says, like don't worry about that. You know, when, when push comes to shove, basically I'll, I'll, I'm, I'm going to inform Washington that this issue is non negotiable. You know, so cold. And of course Belgrade went nuts and claimed that they, they claim that Tujman and Cole were conspiring to develop a fourth Reich, that you know, NATO was supporting a Nazi client state of Germany in Croatia. And the, you know, that 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 pe, 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. Was tailed and maintained to guarantee. And the. Elton's people in Moscow obviously were listening, as were Wolens's people in Poland. I mean, as was. As was, you know, all these young terps throughout the. Throughout the east block. And they were saying, you know, who the hell is Bush To. To tell the Russians that they've just got to tolerate, you know, they've got to. 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. You. You know, some kind of vision that allows Gorbachev and Shiva Nardze to make. Make heroes of themselves and possibly enrich themselves exponentially, you know, in pursuit of this, um, kind of policy of. Of non action and.
[46:22]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Can I jump in. Can you jump in for a sec?
[46:24]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah.
[46:25]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Okay. How much, at this point, how much influence is coming from outside, like NGO types in the. In 1988, the. I can't remember the name of the guy who started the National Endowment for Democracy, but he. 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.
[46:51]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
There was some of that. But it's also what. What Sevovich said to Cole was correct. And there were. There were National Socialist guys who joined up to go fight and fight against the Serbs with the croas. Met some of them. And Ingo Hasselbach, who's not an admirable guy, but he did write a very interesting book. He talked about that, you know, that. That re. That. That. That. That was a shot in the arm to the National Socialist cause, especially in East Germany, you know, like the Independent State of Croatia was back. It's one thing to. It's one. It's one thing to have it. It's one thing to. To. To. To repurpose Ukraine as like a human torpedo and install like a clown, like a literal clown like Zalinsky at the helm and then like watch it destroy itself, you know, while you allow these. Why. Why. Why you allow them to like, dress up and plain Nazi. That's one thing. It's another thing to have like an actual National Socialist state that's flying the standard of that. That. That Pavilich is. NDH did. And having, you know, helmet Cole like Standing literally arm in arm with like, the president of the newly independent Croatia as a totally different ball game. And selling that. Selling that in Washington, you know, as part of a. A neocon program, was not an easy sell. What did kind of 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 MPRI was Military Products and Resources Incorporated. They were. They were a PMC outfit that was very much responsible for getting the cross and fighting shape in terms of material and training. The cross are a very martial people, and that's what facilitated Operation Storm. But it's a totally different world. And like, the. The Croats were like an underdog people. It's like, yeah, they had Germany behind them. Like, yeah, like, American media basically cast them as like, the good guys, but they also, if you go to, you know, like, yeah, like, they got. They got a whole. They got a whole exhibit, like, permanent exhibit on like, you know, the crimes of the Ustasha, you know, they're not. It's wondering if there's so many neocons that clicked up with like, Serge Trifkovich quite met. And he doesn't like me very much. But that's why. That's why during like, the height of. The height of like, war on terror. Yeah, these like, crazy, like, Laura Loomer type Zionists saying, like, see, like we. We stand with the Serbs because they're victims of the Holocaust too. And like, they're. They're also fighting Islam. Like that. 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 the. How that developed in terms of the planning and execution as well as, you know, kind of the order of battle for the rubber met the road. But, you know, the. What was obvious the forefront of everybody's mind was what would Croatia's treatment of minorities be? You know, two John Finesse that very well. Separovich openly stated that there that the Zagreb government, the future my government, they'd have absolutely no problem with, you know, an open hearing at the Hague conference that was then looming the winter time. Were participating representatives of, you know, all. All of. Of of, you know, the three ethnic groups, you know, Crot, servant Bosniak. You could, you know, get some declaration of rights from the Zagre government that would be guaranteed by, you know, like UN observers or whatever, like upon cessation of hostilities. You know, the true problem, the truth, throwing the side of the Sirs became the Albanians in Kosovo. But that's, we're not there yet. But the point is like, at least more than superficially, the cross 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, Tujiman was unwilling to compromise in his statement that self determination involves the dominance of, you know, a 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 ballsy. But again it, you know, the, this was exactly the right tactic to take. And again, some would say Tudeman 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, you know, law and order as, as, as a devised by NATO and the Hague. Like cynical as it might have been, it was a masterstroke. And Tujiman could not have known that Operation Storm would develop the way that it did. The subtext of the Cole Seowicz meeting is, is Cole is telling him, you're going to have the weapons you need to to win the homeland war when the time comes. Okay? That's if you know what to look for in analyzing these kinds of,
[53:47]
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this
[53:47]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, That'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 Jill of our barracks, whereby the JNA was aiming to continue their campaign to disarmament against the Croats in Croatia proper, what was to become Croatia proper. And Tujiman eventually called after, after approximately 14 days, he called off the siege and allowed the JNA 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 the active conflict by proxy.
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[56:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
in Bosnia, which again was a, 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 Tujman did what he 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, subjecting people in the Bosnian battle space, including Croats obviously, you know, to those kinds of horrors for the greater good. I mean that, that's those, those are the kinds of decisions that's that, that real statesmen, you know, like warranty statesman 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, you know, strategic matters, not moral ones. And I'm not, 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 fear hearing too, like in the concluding episode. But I think I'm frankly getting kind of tired. We're going on the hour and that was kind of dense. So I, 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 for another two hours if I get into it now. So I want to, I Want to see because it, it basically ties together Tujima's regime as a legacy government of Pavilich. And I want to drop. I want to drop the context of what the Pavlovich regime was as it existed from 1941, 1945. 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.
[58:37]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Do your plugs.
[58:38]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yes, sir. I'm very excited to say I've got a bunch of videos actually ready to go, and everybody's been, like, very patient with that. And this, like, been a learning process for me. So, like, I, I, I, I, I'm. Forgive me for that. Have been like a hype for, like, months and months. But I think, 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@real Thomas777 substag.com I've been dropping as much fresh content there as I can, including our dear friend Jay Burden has been transcribing our, 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 my website. It's thomas777.com number 7h777.com you can find me on X at capital rel._ number 7 h o m s 777. I'm also on Instagram. I can never remember. Just search Thomas777 on Instagram and you'll find me just like at number 7h o m s 777. And yeah, let's. Let's reconvene later this week, man, and we'll continue on the, the. The Balkan wars. We're gonna do it. All right.
[60:07]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Thank you.
[60:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, thank you, man.
[60:10]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanona Show. Thomas, how are you doing?
[60:15]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I'm doing very well, thanks.
[60:17]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
All right, man. Part two of the Balkans. What are we going to talk about today?
[60:23]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Today I wanted to provide a bit of context,
[60:30]
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the.
[60:30]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
To understand the conflict cycle of the Balkan wars from 1991-95 and then later, you know, from 1999 into 2000, approximately. One has to understand the 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. The. It didn't originate in the minds of the same kinds of people who, you know, conspired with these cynics like Venice and Czechoslovakia. You know, it was. It. There was. There was deep precedent for it. Not into 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 1941-45. For a small country, it had a tremendously outsized impact. It was incredibly committed to the Axis cause. And a lot of people claim otherwise by conflating support for the Ustasha regime with support for the Axis cause and. And Adolf Hitler. And that's misguided, but also people mischaracterize the relationship of proxy as a people to the USTA show. And the Ustasha movement was a Bosnian Croat movement at base, and it. Discussing the view of the USTA Shah in Croatia proper, it's almost like. It's an imperfect analogy, but it's almost like. 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. You're remote from the conflict zone. And yes, I mean, Croats were really proud people. They're very, like, aware of this situation contra the civilizational other. I'm speaking within the terms of the. The conflict dynamics present, and I'm making some value judgment or suggesting anything in absolute terms about the populations under discussion. But in Bosnia is literally like a powder keg of. Of ethno sectarian conflict dynamics. So one's got to understand the emergence of the Ustasha as well as the emergence of. Of the. The Chetnik movement as. As a. As a. As a Bosnian phenomenon very much, you know, on the Chetnic side, there's complexities and ambitions that, you know, kind of transcended and superseded that. But you're talking about kind of the core base of organic radical support for these. For these. For these ethnic political programs and in ideological crusades, you know, the. The dynamics of Bosnia, Herzogena, are essential to understanding. So today we're gonna get into that stuff.
[64:08]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
And then.
[64:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
And then in the next episode, I think, you know, we'll get into the. We'll get into the. The homeland war itself and kind of how it resolved and what the implications were. They were 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 reg. I assume if that was underway, you. You wouldn't continue to, you know, be so kind as to host me. So I think if we go.
[64:42]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I think if we go beyond three episodes, no one's gonna complain.
[64:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, that was the. Yeah. Yeah. I. And I mean, I think we're. I think we understand each other enough. You know, we got, 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, The Balkans has a peculiar significance. There's a lot of kind of like cliche discussion about it or cliched discussion. The Balkans doesn't outsize significance. Particularly, particularly geostrategic terms just owing to, like, owing to situatedness, like literal geography and in the case of Germany, a hostile Balkans or even a neutral Balkans whereby the Germans were denied the ability to deploy specifically to reinforce Hungary and to, you know, create any kind of defense in depth or alternatively to, you know, traverse the frontiers of Hungary, Romania and creation proper. If they were, if they were denied the ability to do that, 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, the only path to victory in World War II was, 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.
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[67:39]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The situation in the Balkans, and that endures to this day. Okay. I mean, that. That doesn't change. Secondly, the kind of unique. The unique affinity that great powers have for the constituent populations there, it creates. It creates dynamics that have a unique potential for escalation. Know, like as we talked about, and we'll get more into today, the Croats and the Germans, especially Austrians and Bavarians, but also, I mean, even the, you know, even Slavians and, and, and. And the Prussian officer core 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 Helmet Cole did in 1991. So, I mean, that endorses this day too. And the Russians as a people, they've got. They've got a unique affinity for the Serbs. Okay. And I'm oversimplifying a bit for the sake of conceptual clarity, but also,
[68:56]
Bluff (Spinquest Player)
you
[68:57]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
know, we've talked a little bit about the kind of Islamic awakening or revival of the late 20th century, and it's. And its significance as an essential one of many essential causes and kind of bringing down the. The Warsaw pack structure and kind of like the, The Stalinist model of like, regime model. Bosnia was very much ground zero. Bosnias 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 traditionally, you know, they were very much adjacent and integrated into. Into the Ottoman structure. Okay. So these are not. This is not just some, like, middling ethnic conflict whereby the. The subject populations, you know, aren't viewed as. Aren't. Aren't viewed as holding any inherent significance, historical or otherwise, say, for, you know, the pragmatic business of attempting to, you know, resolve enduring conflicts in such a way that, you know, great powers can at least work with whoever emerges triumphant. You know, there's very, very deep affinities here of, you know, basically pre. Rational nature, a lot of which date to the Thirty Years War, but even that precede that, you know, so it's important to. That's important to keep in mind. I'm gonna jump around a bit here, but the bulk and theater of World War II was incredibly brutal. It was almost like the. It was almost like a Vermont expert, like, Vietnam type experience. You know, the. The Chetniks led by kind of cloak really called the hell of a Chetniks because there's various Chetnik factions, party of the conflict, and in various kind of like offshoots 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, like the Yugoslav monarchy as we got into, in our World War I series had become for all practical purposes like a, like, you know, like a monarchy that was, was, was, was very much captivated by Serbian interests. Okay? The Chetniks, the, the Chetniks were found in situations somewhat, somewhat like Chiang Kai Shek's forces did in their own theater. The primary ops of the USA and the Vermont at critical moments were the Chetniks like, not the partisans. The partisans would often avoid engaging the Vermont when possible, you know, 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 his, arguably his of like his best cadres. Okay? There was also complexities where, you know, there was 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 Shet nicks who ultimately defected in real terms, you know, to the Axis side and one of whom actually received the Knight's Cross. So I mean, it's incredibly, it was a mess, you know, but the degree to which to Hitler was forced to kind of abide all, all these competing interests and on all these conspiratorial designs of other essential allies, you know, whether you're talking about the Romanians, the Hungarians or like Eluch himself, that's key to understanding why Ante Pavich became the, the, the, you know, the, the chief executive of, of the Independent State of Croatia. Because Pavlich 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 a rebuttal to a lot of the fallacious assertions of court history. The Third Reich wasn't trying to export fascism. In fact, they were doing the opposite. They didn't want destabilizing regimes to pop up that had a shaky mandate, you know, that were, you know, kind of blowing up the internal constitution of, 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 by Berlin and becoming the official government of an essential ally like Independence Day. 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. What was. What was going to allow the. You know, what was going to allow Hungary to survive, like, as a state. Like, was what was. You know, circumstances were. Were changing, if not week to, you know, if not day to day, then week to week. So I don't think that's a fair comparison, but a point I make to people again and again too is, you know, there was. There was a peculiar, almost kind of like internal conflict in the. In the Reich security apparatus where. But like in Romania, 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. Was Hitler's best ally. Like, he was closer obviously to D. Like, like the fur was. I mean, but Antonescu made a huge commitment to Barbarosa and he was. He was a. He was a highly competent general officer. But that's. That's the. That's the proverbial horse. Hitler backs mean all the SS and the sd, like they backs the Iron Guard, I mean, owing to their. Owing to their own kind of radical inclinations and. And. And desire to sort of develop a kind of foreign policy unto itself, like. Go ahead.
[76:21]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Didn't Iola say that he thought the Iron Guard was one of the best chances to defeat Communism?
[76:29]
Bluff (Spinquest Player)
The.
[76:29]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yes, he did. The place Evola was coming from, he looked at the Iron Guard basically as like an orthodox mujahideen and like, that's not misplaced place. But he. Of all. His whole thing was that he looked at fascism and National Socialism is just like another kind of iteration of. Of degenerated, like modern materialism, if you like. The Iron Guard is like this return to, you know, the kind of. If you abide Dumezel's trifunctional hypothesis, you do. The Iron Guards are returned. Like a combination of. Of. Of. Of the. Of functions, you know, the warrior function and the priestly function, which is a uniquely Aryan sociological paradigm. And that in Evola's view, you know, represented, you know, owing to the kind of peculiar conditions of Romania and kind of, you know, a culture that it still managed to sustain this kind of like linear consciousness of like, ancient ways. You know, it was. 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, as well as, you know, revolutionary in, in, in, in in all the most unique ways. And yeah and everyone'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'd like preview, pretty much every like oppositional tendency is essentially derived from the same.
[77:57]
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[78:22]
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[78:28]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The same lapsed like materialist, like conceptual biases. So yeah, but it's like why the SS and the SD liked them. That's a little more complicated. Not philosophically, I mean but it's like it's, it's murky but it's. 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 corresponds or always claiming like oh the, you know, the USA should head no popular support. You know, I mean that can't really be true when I mean first of all is the fact of you know, Bosnia being the true kind of, the, the true kind of source of, of of those kinds of conceptual imperatives ideologically not Croatia proper. But also the, there was Croatia committed at least one division size element. The 3 69th reinforced infantry of the Vermont 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 size. But you know you're talking about, you're talking about thousands of men, all volunteers who are also honored as you know being assimilated into the, the, the, the, the shun like lead element of Army Group south who assault Stalingrad and all. There was, there's 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, 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 USA or something, that's Not. That's not. You can't really derive anything from that. And as we'll get into their reasons for their objections owed to Pavlich's 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 USA were just too savage. So that even. Even the horrible evil SS said tried to stand them down. That's not. That wasn't their objection. Their objection was that, you know, when Paula was essentially there to kind of like balance these furies, you know, of Italy, Romania, Hungary, as well as. As well as. As well as rooting out, you know, the. The partisan threat in Bosnia Herzegovina. You know, meanwhile, while they were doing that, they were also ethnically cleansing the. The NDH of. Of Serbs. Like, their notion was deport a third, like slaughter a third and like forcibly convert a third to Catholicism. And they. Pavlich 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. That was the. The objection was like, look, like this. 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. 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, you know, which still existed until 1941. Hiller realized that he had what all cost, like court them into the Tripartite Pact, which eventually he did. And famously, famously, the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul on June 3, 1939, the. The prince Yugoslavia. And his hidden. His wife was. Was in. Was. Was an English woman, you know, like born and bred. They were invited to Berlin. There was this whole gala celebration. There's a banquet throw in 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. Its. Its cabinet was. Was Serb dominated. Okay. And we talked about some of those dynamics again, like in our World War I series. They were absolutely. They were. They were. They were pursuing a course of declared neutrality, which in reality was a. Was a policy of area denial to forbid the Vermont from any kind of operational ingress or egress through Yugoslav territory. All right, this had to be resolved in some way, not just because it's becoming clearer and clearer that again, you know, Germany's. The. The primary threat to Germany was. Was. Was the Soviet Union. But also, you know, the only. The only way Germany could. Only Germany could. Could. 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, who. Whose oil fields were. Were literally fueling the. The German economy as well as it's. It's as well as its nascent war machine. But also again too, there was geostrategic imperatives that, you know, it's, it's simply as. As a. As the ballgains couldn't simply just be like, written off an area of operations for all kinds of reasons. And especially as it became clear, you know, 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 the. 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. Would have been, you know, through the, through the Balkan theater, you know, be it. Be it Greece, be it, you know, Yugoslavia or. Or otherwise. But to Hitler's chagrin, Paul traveled to London soon afterwards and it was clear that he was being actively courted by, you know, the, the. The intelligence establishment there. You know, and this becomes,
[85:57]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
this is
[85:57]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
key to understanding what developed in. Around Pavlich, as we'll see in a minute. It's. It's, You know, and that's something I, this is something I emphasized again and again too. Like, people tend to view Germany's attack upon Greece, which really owed you the, The. The operational shortcomings of the Italian army as Hitler trying to force. The British to stand down and abandon any abandon any claim to the Mediterranean, as well as some kind of just like show of force you know, based upon. I mean, I guess the, the first true like paratroop assault was on Creed 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 Vermont it owed entirely like 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, bellicosity. Like yes, that, that was hugely impactful in kind of the course of, of of policy in Germany, you know from the Foreign Ministry to the OKW and everything else. But in, in, in raw strategic terms what I, what I just said is not impeachable. The, if the RAF had gotten a toehold too, I mean again like they could have basically they could have, they kind of 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, if put to, if put to that purpose, you know, it would have, it would have been devastating. I mean this was.
[88:33]
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[88:58]
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[89:04]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The concrete particulars of that, those sort of, of era of strategic bombing at scale wasn't yet known but it was, it was, it was known that you know, power projection against of what we'd consider to be like a, both the counter force and counter value nature. Like it was, it was, 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 or by, by the advent of hostilities when Germany and Poland, you know, 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. Hitler couldn't afford to wait and see, you know what developed and then trying to insinuate him, you know, a kind of, a kind of, you know, a kind of meaningful forward deployment in the Balkans by you know, a combination of like threats and incentivization. Like it just like was not in the cards. The, and especially when it became clear that Turkey is not gonna, you know, Turkey traditionally was, was one of, was one of the ways Germany hedged against you know, both Russian and, and British power in the Mediterranean. That was, that was off the table. It's an interesting subtext. Late 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 and seeking any port in a storm. It was never a serious ever serious. It was never seriously within the minds of anybody who, who was you know realistic. But by, By March of 1941 Hungary, Romania, Slovakia had all joined the Tripartite Pact. This was a big C Hitler because the Hungarian prime minister finally agreed to allow German troops to cross through Hungarian territory to access you know Romania and and and and and and as well as like deploy. They're basically allowed like free like ingress and egress across like the Hungarian frontier. And Horthy Admiral Hy who was was very much adjacent to Berlin the Hungarian foreign ministry had to that point been overly hostile. They taken the same tech as Yosia had and it was a complicated Horthy's role as regent. He was far from like on war and peace questions. He had something of an absolute mandate but in, in times of peace or in conditions short of war, foreign relations was basically in, in the hands of a, a cabinet that had you know like a long history really going that had like you know deep roots in the in the kind of was failing system. You know so it's, it's important to consider that. So Hitler realized that all this though was essentially null and void if Yugoslavia couldn't couldn't be wooed. Some people speculate that the Greek operation was was prioritized as it was because Hitler aimed to offer part of northern Greece to the US Law government. If 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 ambivalent 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 Czechoslovakia. Well like discrediting Britain's claim to you know the moral high ground or to you know it insinuating itself as this you know purported like rational arbiter of power political affairs on the continent, you know because it was, it's all of its moves that have been couched in you know either imperatives laid down at Versailles relating to self determination which of course is ridiculous and these you know multi ethnic monstrosities that had no actual organic support or it was or they were framed in terms of you know, systemic stability and obviously the fact that you know the U S lives joined the Tripartite Pact Owing to a basic appreciation of Soviet aggression and the existential threat it represented to them because it, 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, it, but March 27, you know, literally days later he will reported to Hitler that there have been a coup d' etat in Belgrade. Paul had been overthrown. There was crowds massing outside the German legation demanding, you know, Germany get out of Yugoslavia. Like, you know, it's, it's diplomatic representatives were being physically threatened. The Swedish envoy had been mistaken for a German had been like beaten within an inch of his life. The, the British diplomatic legation, which quite clearly was, you know, the British intelligence service under light diplomatic cover. They were doing everything they could to stir up crowds, you know, and, and, and, and arm them. This coup had been engineered. Yugoslav. The commander of the Yugoslav air force, he was a career officer named Dusan Simovich. He was a, a rabid chetnik who hated Germany. He organized revolutionary cabinet around himself. The, the can refused to ratify the Tripartite Pact. However, they said they, they, they mouth these like mild protestations, some of which his 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, I mean it was bizarre, okay. 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, of policy decisionism and by the time that was all worked out, it'd be too late. But that was an incredibly stupid gamble, especially considering the man who was at the helm in Berlin. Hitler. He will relayed later this is one of the few times he ever saw Hitler like actually like enraged, you know, like, 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 but that he summoned Kaido immediately and yodel immediately. He apparently calmed himself down and he said that, you know, owing a course not just to his Austrian upbringing, but it's 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, they're doing this again and this will not stand. He sent, he ordered fuel descent immediately. At that time was still the army chief of staff. He summoned the Hungarian and 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, 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 Dragon off. He offered a. He offered Bulgaria, Macedonia. Is it just outright. He had a brief work conference with the Halder Broch. It's in Ribbentrop. 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 is actually rare language for Hitler. He said Yugoslavia to be regarded as an enemy and is therefore to be destroyed as rapidly as possible, whatever protestations of loyalty should be momentarily utter. Now, Again, the it. The subjects here wasn't just that
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[101:53]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Some of its coup had been facilitated, not an absolute measure, but in essential terms by London, but the Communist Party. Yugoslavia. They played no part in the coup, but they made a significant contribution to the mass like street protest and uprising that is 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 a point of making people again and again, you know, like the Germans. Whether you're talking about the okw, whether you're talk like this is a rare example of a quorum. You had Hitler, you had a Huell, you had von Brauch, he had Ribbentrop, he had Yodel, you had Title, basically had everybody who later on know basically by December 41, there's like a total fracturing here of, of. Of of worldview as well as ideas on strategy both immediate and grand. But there was like an absolute consensus that then the proverbial noose 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. Stalin could afford to kind of like wait and see how these machinations would develop. Like why what the hell is 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 just, it was raw hubris in my opinion. And they, they underestimated Hitler again and again and again and again. The official directive, 4-6-1941, it was fur directive 25. It's colloquially known as operation 25, okay. Or the april war 4-6-41 the invaded the assault in Yugoslavia commenced and overwhelming. It was an first with an overwhelming air assault on Belgrade with a loofah.
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[104:33]
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[104:40]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Targeting all facilities. The Royal Yugoslav Air Force the the Vermont assaulted from southwestern Bulgaria. They were reinforced by thrust from Romania Hungary and the Ostar which is Austria Los Angeles. Italian forces were limited to air and artillery assaults until 11 April when the Italian army was permitted to assault towards what's modern day Slovenia across which I'm sure I butchered that pronunciation on the same day Hungarian forces entered was then Baka and Baranya. But like the and both the Italians and Hungarians face basically no resistance. Okay. There was a Yugoslav counter assault into the northern parts of the Italian protector of Albania which gained some initial ground. But the like the Yugoslavs the Yugoslav army was in total collapse by that point. Now why did Eagle Slav army just suddenly and like rapidly collapse? Well I believe and people have downplayed this lately onto their own sort of misguided concepts the ideological narrative. I mean there's a substantial Volksdeutsch community in Croatia and about near Scovina also I mean Croatian Slovenians. Croatians and Slovenians had you know they were abjectly opposed to the Yugoslav regime which was essentially like a Chetnik regime in disguise. And this concerted a very effective fifth column. And at least superficially the royal Yugoslav the royal Royal Yugoslav army was a multi ethnic army had to maintain the appearance of not just being you know a like, like a Chetnik revolutionary element. So I mean I, I I think basically noted with the Serbs are willing to fight. Okay. And the mask the mask dropped proverbially. The armistice was signed on 17-4-41. You know based on the what amount of the unconditional surrender the U. S Love army it just no longer existed. Okay. I mean a combination of annihilation of forces and being like mass desertion and you know just garrison's you know command garrison commanders just surrendering without firing a shot. You know the armistice came into effect at noon the next day they came. Yugoslavia was an occupied partition by the Axis. Most of Serbia and Banat became a German occupation zone. Other areas were. 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, or what remained of it, military command, like officially, you know, and what. What remained of its infrastructure just formally became under, you know, like Chetnik authority in command. So I mean, obviously this, this happened literally within hours. You know, I mean, that's, it's, it's obvious what was that. The reality of, you know, the, like the Yugoslavian state be became, you know, like kind of negatively apparent to all. But it's, but again, it's one of the, I guess Hitler's exact words inferior. Directive 25 and forgive me, forgive me if my Chicagoes accent butchers. This is Yugoslavian militaris, Which means the destroy. The total destruction of Yugoslavia militarily and as a state for all time. And to do so with Pitiless, without, Without mercy. Okay, Now enter the USTA show and Pavlovich and like, who were they and who was he? Because this is key, not just understanding how events developed, but it's also, it's key to understanding the, like the modern Croatian state, including the Croatia that exists today. I'm not saying that Croatia today or even two Croatia was just literally like the ndh, but Tujiman deliberately drew upon that precedence, you know, which again kind of defeats this claim by court history that, oh well, you know, the Oofta show was nothing but, you know, this, this, this client regime with no depth that nobody supported, you know, whether, I mean, however anybody feels about, you know, if we're talking about modern Croatian statehood, we're talking about the USA regiment. And Pavlic himself was an incredibly dynamic person. You know, he was not some peasant rabble robs or, or some, or some military strongman. You know, he was actually he, he was, he was quite cosmopolitan and, and, and just lived a remarkable life. And he was a lawyer by trade, first and foremost. I mean, he very early on bloodied his hands as, as a political soldier and a partisan. But that wasn't that that he was a man of, of many faces. Okay, you're not the USA show, Admiral Canaris, you know, the, the chief of the ab, which was Germany's foreign intelligence service. This is one of the AB there's greatest successes, okay? And there are some key successes of the AB there, despite the fact canaris was not just a fifth columnist, he was an active traitor. He was collaborating with the allies. Okay? So the adver 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 bonafide brilliant operational successes carried off by the ab. Like whether that was because in at operational levels there were committed National Socialists who were following through as if, you know, their, the institution they served had not been compromised. Whether Canaris had, you know, mixed feelings about his, his loyalties like this is not clear. But the USA shows ascendancy owed. Obviously not exclusively, but an essential contributing cause of its success was the fact that, you know, Canaris had fomented a breakaway Croatian movement from early on, okay? And a, a, this is, this, this was an armed vanguardist underground movement. There was no concept of it, you know, abiding legality. There's no concept of it standing for contested elections. Totally different situation than in Vore. Okay? The only, the only, the only way a CRA national constitution, a national state was going to be realized was, was through, was, was by the gun and by the knife. Okay? Canaris's obvious kind of choice. For a leadership element was a general named Slago. He was an officer of the old Hasbro army. He, when the USTA should, did seize power, he initially was kind of the figurehead aided by the adverse, what was codenamed the Jupiter Organization, which was. It's kind of like direct action element after the independent state have been set up. Like Pavlich, Dr. Ante Pavlich, who spent long years in exile in Italy, by that point was like revealed as poglovnik, which me approximately means fur serval Croatian. Okay, why? The bait and switch of figureheads, Pavelic, Nora, Nora were, were ciphers. They both wielded tremendous power and clout. But I'm talking, when I say figurehead, I mean in terms of outward appearances. One of Hitler's challenges 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 on the subsequent ash loose and other things. Early on he'd agreed to seed the Dalmatian coast to Italy at least as a sphere of influence at an event of.
[114:56]
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[115:25]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
In an event of general war, you know, as, as a. As a territorial imperative that they would be permitted to capture. This cause 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 193233 alliance with the Italian Fascists, he was kind of Mussolini. He wasn't Mussolini's man, as it's sometimes alleged in Zagreb, but she was Italians. And frankly, when it became clear that Italy was going to be Croatia as just kind of like this exploitable asset in the National Socialist camp so firmly. Okay, Canaris's adutant was a. He was an officer by the name of Lahousen. He warned the furor as well as his boss Canaris that they had to proceed very delicately. That the resentment over the loss of Dalmatia and just kind of the, the arrogance which the Italians were proceeding was wreaking absolute havoc. He said, literally, he said the cross are a 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 is Auntie Pavlich? Pavlic was born in Herzogovina, the village of Redina, which is literally in the mountains, okay. In central Bosnia, roughly 9 miles southwest of Hizichi was then part of the Ottoman Empire, but had been seated was formerly under the sovereignty of the sultan. But it. It had been. But the entirety of Bosnia had fallen under Habsburg rule by 1878 or the Congress of Berlin, okay? And essentially it was an. It was a conquest without a shot being fired as the Habsburgs raid an army of around 30000 men and threatened to assault it. And this is, this was one of the. If you allow the tangent, this is. This was one indicator of Ottoman power like precipitously having deteriorated. They didn't even. They didn't even take the field of battle. They just like seeded with some meaningless. With the concession of some 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 Po's upbringing directly. Now, All his parents had moved to Bosnia from a village that was in Croatia proper. Or like, what. What would be in Croatia within Croatia proper's borders today. His father had done so to work on the Sarajevo rail line. But ultimately, as a small child, the family settled in a village called Jazero or Jezero or. Paul attended primary school, but Jero was a. A Bosniac majority domain. It was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. So Pavlovich, the crowd he attended, the primary schools he attended were maktub. Like a maktab is a. Is like an Islamic elementary school. Okay. So Pavage learned Pavage 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 lore 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. He was 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 Hanar, the Bosniak Vaan ss. Its national identifier was first Croatian because official policy by order of PAV was that was that Bosnian Muslims are racial Croatians. And 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, h. Our like, division would wear. Can people see that? I think this is awesome. Like, the other people don't, but it's like literally like a fez with a. A ton cop and a. A Reich 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. 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 quintessentially cosmopolitan and like that even more than it was apparent in his early life, as we'll get into. But he. He. As he became a teenager and a young adult, he had a. He had a much older brother who lived in. In Zagreb. And during kind of like, as. As. As Paul was kind of adolescence when he was attending school in Trivnik, he became an adherent and nationalist ideologues. Like guys who. Who proceeded what we came in with, the Croatian Party of Rights, first and foremost. A guy named Ante Start Chevich was like an early, like, like, you know, like, like fraud nationalist, you know, and like, one of his, like, one of One of his kind of. One of his like, like one of his followers or, Or one of the guys he mentored kind of like in, in. In. In the art of. In philosophy of like, you know, political warfare was Yosep Frank, who later became like the leader of the Party of Rights. But Polish's notion was like, well, this is great that you know, cross have like this kind of like, have cultivate this kind of like racial sense of self, you know, and, and kind of a path forward for an independent state. But his concern was that like this is too much of like a peasant phenomenon. But 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 was very much alive in Zagreb and people were openly identifying, you know, in, you know, in what were traditionally, you know, cosmopolitan Habsburg cities, you know, Croats were. 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. And that, that from that point on, you know, like he. Pavlich realized, like this was, this was a viable way forward. Okay, again, as like a vanguardist, like revolutionary imperative. You know, like again, this was this. The, the Ego Slav situation was nothing at all like the Vimer situation. It. Pollard was always beset by health problems from the time he was a kid until he was murdered like, like, you know, years after the war. And we'll get into that in a later episode. But he, he ultimately, he ultimately took a. A law degree as frankly was like par for the course for part of the. Of the time on both sides of the eological divide. Revolutionaries rather. He obtained his doctorate in 19th 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 this kind of radicalization, in tactical terms at least really ossified. And that was around the time or it was, it was literally, it was at the same time as what became to be known as the January dictatorship. January 6, 1929, quite literally a royal dictatorship was declared in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. King Alexander the First, who we talked about some in our World War I episodes. Hey everybody.
[125:32]
Lady Luck
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[125:56]
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[126:03]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Alexander's notion was quite literally to create a Yugoslav ideology and a single Yugoslav nation, you know, like under his dictatorship through, you know, a combination of, of, of a population, forced population transfers, suppression of discrete languages, presumably, you know, outright suppression of the Islamic religion, you know, attempts to strip the cross of the ability to pursue and express culture in, in, in public and, and shared forums. It ended in 1931 with the adoption of the Yugoslav constitute what was called the Yugoslav 93 US Constitution. But the, but the damage was done, okay? I mean, people realize that in their view the two probable outcomes for any Yugoslavian enterprise was either that there's 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, of all cultural expression, not unlike what's happening in the Soviet Union, you know, under the. But, 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, Pavlos formally organized the USTA show. I have absolutely no fluency in sero Croatian as I understand it, and I'm sure the fellows who do will correct me if I'm wrong. I believe USTA should roughly translates to insurgents or insurgency. Okay? The official founding in USAL lore like to this day is that the party was founded on January 7, 1929. It was around this time Pavlo came under basically like constant police surveillance. During one, during a lapse in the surveillance, he, he, he fled to Austria. And proceeded like nominally into the. With under the pretext of, you know, seeking medical treatment for its ongoing health problems there. You know, Vienna at that time was completely lit, you know, by conspiratorial designs and people 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. Most of these guys were political refugees, you know, they'd either been chased out of, of Soviet territory or they were being terrorized by the Yugoslavian secret police, you know, or they were, they were former Habsburg army officers, you know, who'd refuse to return Yugoslavia, you know, after the succession of, you know, Chetnik and royalist intrigues. After a short stay there where he made contact with, among other people, some Bulgarian radicals who had a similar, you know, with similar ambitions in mind for their own peoples, he moved to Budapest where there was a more kind of welcoming environment for partisans of the right. Okay. In March of 1929, the Ustasha element, still within Yugoslavia, undertook a campaign of direct action, the first incidence of which was the assassination of Tony Shigel in Zagra. Shyl was a basically a regime mouthpiece. He was editor of the top newspaper in Zagra. He was a close combat on a King Alexander and very much the mouthpiece of the regime, like Lisa, murdered him.
[131:03]
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[131:25]
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[131:35]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
While this was going on Pavilich 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 a Schlegel. It's Schlegel or Schlegel, I think it's Schlegel. But. And he, he and some of his contacts, Bulgarian contacts that he made in Vienna. They traveled to Bulgaria in April. This led to the signing by a number of, of partisan, ethnonationalist partisan types of what came to be the Sophia declaration. It formalized up. It formalized cooperation between Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian radicals like radical nationalists who opposed, you know, the, the Belgard regime as well as the, the communists and the Chetniks. Yugoslavia formally protested the government and Sophia Pavlich was. Then he was tried for high treason in absentia and sentenced to death on 17 August 1929. Owing to that verdict. A month subsequent in September Po was arrested in Vienna. The Viennese were sympathetic, at least the. The. Those in the security apparatus, you know, had more than a fledging 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 and bad Yugoslavia was. A typical Foreign Ministry veteran of the time named Adolf Coster was a supporter of Yugoslavia. He was literally a personal friend of King Alexander. So this obviously not bode well for Pavilish before this kind of hostile sentiment from, you know, Costa's friends and I places could develop into truly threatening police action against this person. Published left Germany under an assumed name and went to Italy. He already had family as well as ecological contacts. Now in Italy, at least for a couple of years, he frequently changed location and lived under the false name. He. He lived as an Italian national. What his assumed identity was at an Italian national most often as Antonio C. Or Serdar. He had contact with Italian authorities at least, you know, the intelligence apparatus of the fascist since at least 1926 or 1927. In 1929 he managed to establish deeper contacts and through his friends in the legal profession as well as some. As well as some radical right journalists that he befriended, he managed to court Mussolini's brother Arnaldo. Mussolini was a strong supporter of crud independence just outright and like a very. Like a very like a hardline fascist Pavich again, owing to whether it's his cosmopolitan 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 cross situation among Italians, at least Italian fascists and adjacent right wingers. He was very good at this. Okay. That fall Palage 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, this, this. This brochure, if you will, was called A Salesman of the Croatian State Lasting Peace in the Balkans. Which was kind of like a. It was like a. It was a summary of. Of Croatian history, you know, from kind of like the. The. You know, the. The Habsburg German like. And an adjacent U.S. The Italian authorities did not want to formally support the usa 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 Mussolini presiding over the four powers packed. But Mussolini was he. He seen himself as this, as. As this kind of like, is this kind of like great negotiator who like presided over these kinds of diplomatic concords and like Italy is a stabilizing influence. So the Italians, for all of its, for. For all of its revolutionary aptitude and capturing power, like the fascists in this epoch and especially before the anus and things, they were behaving very much like a national conservative party. And a lot of these guys in authority, they didn't want to, they didn't want to openly support some like, some like radical right partisan, you know, like Polish and like the USTA show, you know, to protect the reputation and for sake of optics if nothing else. And that's important to understand. This is like an odd period and in kind of like the, the inner warriors, but Mussolini saw them as a Mussolini at all. First and foremost wanted to destroy Yugoslavia and capture you know, some kind of ingress to the Adriatic. So Pavlich almost undoubtedly received personal support from Mussolini and so did the Ustasha generally like their offices in, in Zagreb and elsewhere. And towards that end Mussolini allowed Pavlage to that remain in exile in Rome and openly trained as paramilitaries in preparation for war with Yugoslavia. And Pavlovich made a. So he, he developed association with Croatian expats in Italy as well as, as well as Habsburg army veterans and uh, Germans V. STO were. Had direct connection, direct links to the, to the, to, to the government of the Reich. And a lot of these guys had very strong like military experience. Okay 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 upper. Mussolini proud established formal camps for partisans. First in Bovino, Italy and ultimately
[139:36]
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[139:36]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
was camps, you know, throughout, throughout Italy and as well as Hungary and almost certainly Bosnia though under obviously like deep cover. The. This created this, this, this, this, this kind of infrastructure facilitated by Mussolini facilitated the smuggling of weapons and political literature and propaganda into Yoshi. The camps were moved around constantly again at the behest of Mussolini, which you know, and if Mussolini was kind of like at. 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 Pavlic was very, very fortunate to be able to curry his favor and learn from him. And again that's why Polish can't be just be dismissed as some third rate dictator or something. What he accomplished here basically is a wanted man showing up in Rome without any particular cloud or money and just, you know, within, within months, you know, getting an ear with El Duce that's something short of remarkable. That's Hitler like. And it's in unlikelihood of ascendancy. But the Ustasha managed to establish adjacent associations not just of ethnic cross, 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.
[141:42]
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[142:05]
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[142:14]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The degree to which the Croats developed the kind of outsized clout in national socialist and fascist 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 there's not that many of them. And the fact that there's this kind of reach is incredible I think. I mean obviously I'm gonna admire hobble, which I mean I think it's become clear by now. But the, this undoubtedly in 1932, 33, as, as these elements who'd been training diligently return loose, you know, there's a series of bombings and shootings in U. S Lobby proper which led to just this blanket crackdown on political activity as the state declared, you know, a state of emergency. And this counter terrorist regime. Exploited that mandate to profoundly abuse impoverished Croat peasants. You know, the brutality towards which was almost always meted out by, by, by Serbian police and, and, and insecurity elements. So this was kind of like a splendid example of cultivating a strategy attention, you know, like among, among other things in order to facilitate the emergence of a revolutionary paradigm beyond the kind. Cadre structure. We've been going for like an hour and 20 minutes and I still probably got another hour material. I'm thinking if we could break in a minute and then take this up the next episode, that would be fantastic. Let's do it.
[144:08]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Let's do it.
[144:08]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Okay. Yeah. Well, I forgive me if that was too like long winded, but there's a lot here. And next episode we'll, we'll, we'll deal with the, you know, the, the, the formal Ascendancy of Pavich to the office of Povnik and you know, the war years and Sig free cash and all of that stuff. I didn't realize I've been going on that long, so.
[144:29]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Yeah, it's okay.
[144:30]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, thanks.
[144:31]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Yeah, do plugs real quick. We'll get out of here.
[144:34]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, man. You can always find me substack real thomas777 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 Thomas777.com number 7 h o m s777.com. You hit me up on telegram. It's Thomas Graham again. Number seven, HMAS Graham. You can find me on X Real Capital R E A L underscore number seven HMAS 777. Yeah, we're, we're all over the place in this, in this man. Oh, and my Instagram too. So you can like, if you, if like you can find like my, my photographs if you want to.
[145:22]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
You know, it's funny, I, 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.
[145:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It's like, it's. I take like a lot of photos, you know, and like Instagram, it's kind of like, I don't like the user interface and like it's full of bots and, and like creepy like porn. But it's, you know, I mean, it's a good. There's like, that's how I met like Nigo Clow and stuff. And like it's, it's a good place to reach out, especially to kind of like artsy people who are like politically, politically adjacent but not really kind of like in, in that sphere of activity. But it's also, it's just like a good repository of like photos, man. You know, and it's, it's. I can rationalize like dumping a lot of photos there without feeling like a weirdo.
[146:26]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
All right, till the next time. Thank you, Thomas.
[146:28]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah, thank you, man.
[146:30]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Want to welcome everyone back to the Pikino Show. Thomas is here. And part three of the Balkans. How are you doing?
[146:39]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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 I said some things that upset people. I mean, in response to some of their complaints. I, I wasn't trying to be obtuse. The reason why I focused on the Croatian side is for a few reasons. The, the horizon detra of what the State Department did, even after even post Bush and Baker, albeit the Clinton administration, like, went about it in kind of an illiterate way.
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[147:37]
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[147:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
In terms of the rationale, I mean, like, the military in those days was still pretty. They had their, their stuff together operationally. But to understand why Helmet Cole did what he did, to understand what the view was from Washington, you've gotta, 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, that's asking in any way to claim that, you know, ethnic conflict is like a schoolyard fight and some party combat, and it's always 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, I found slow but on the lowest events to actually be quite a sympathetic figure. What was done with the hag? He was quite literally killed by being put on trial. And I mean, that was grotesque. I've actually always considered myself to be pretty sympathetic to the Chetnik cause, I mean, not, not because I find common cause with it, but I mean, I, I'm similar to anybody who, you know, who's, whose ambition is to redress the historical grievances of their people in, in a way that guarantees their posterity in the future. So today we're going to get a Little bit into like 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 Jerusaleski, 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 collapsed. Which is interesting. So this idea that he was some arch chetnic genocidal maniac, I mean that, I mean that's, that, that's just, that's, that's a propaganda narrative anyway. But you know, were they, were those his stripes? I mean, he wouldn't, he, he wouldn't have enjoyed the posterity he did, which should be obvious. But we'll get into some of that stuff today and hopefully people will realize I'm not, you know, 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, 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, that's not how political affairs develop. But the Third Balkan War. Misha Glenny, he's a guy who I don't particularly like. I mean, he's, 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, 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 to. People in the west lump the, the homeland war, like the Bosnian war and the Kosovo conflict into like one, one conflict. I understand why, I understand why they do that, even if it's in, 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, that's when hostilities arrived in the Balkans within the conflict cycle that is referred to as the Third Balkan War. In at least an Anglophone countries. That was the date that the Republic of Slovenia, which led the charge towards secession. It wasn't the cross initially I mean, I think they would have anyway. I mean, it's an open ended question. But they're the ones who, who took that step that theretofore, you know, Tujiman, for all of his talk of creating a truly Croatian republic that like reflected, you know, the, the singular and, and an exclusive culture of the Croatian people, I mean he didn't make that move, okay, until after 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, about 60 to 70% were ethnic Serbs. Like that. They can't be denied what their sympathies were. I mean that I, I, I can't tell you. I mean, I'm sure it varied. I mean, but the, the fact of their majoritarian status can't be denied. Okay. The US Slav army invaded Slovenia and that was really when the die was cast. Now the State Department claim as well as what was pontificated 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 seems strange today, but there was this big hope that the UN was gonna finally fulfill its, you know, intended function since the Cold War was over. And now the, the, the reasoning was that, you know, decision making is no longer going to be colored by these, these kinds of strategic exigencies, you know, and the sort of community and nation is going to emerge, you know, and, and work towards like a totally 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 so than 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 this one. One of Bush's master strokes was the Gulf War. And it wasn't just a military operation executed with Prussian efficiency. There was truly like a quorum of, of, of civilized nations, as it were, including the then still exit Soviet Union. So when things went to 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, 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 with that point had been derived from, you know, the judgment laid at Nuremberg. They still were, 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 love people's army, that that's a Serbian, that that's a Serbian military force and all but name. So when the u. S. Slav national army intervened in Slovenia, the claim was oh, this is an example of Serbia identism, know, and that's, that's that, that that's what's causing all of this. And of course Newsweek, which and time magazine and all these kind of print media outlets which in those days too, I mean this is when legacy media was arguated 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 ser dentism, you know, and sloic is this mad dictator and the only way he's hanging on to power is because he's taking on a chetnik guys. None of which makes any sense. And for context, at the beginning of 1991, Yugoslavia, which still existed, it was a federation of six republics. It was Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzogena, Montenegro and Macedonia. Plus there's two autonomous provinces for Dina and Kosovo. The eight major ethnic populations that lived in those regions, they approximately correspond in the political divisions of the federation. And this was by design. And in each region there could, each region could claim an ethnic concentration that corresponded to, to their national signifier. But there were, there were deep minority populations in all of these loci.
[157:51]
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[158:14]
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[158:21]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Now one big weakness in the narrative, I mean there's many. Okay, but one big weakness in the narrative of Serbs going crazy is that not, not, 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 Tujiman. For all I, I've got a lot of respect for Tujiman and for all of his sophistication as a statesman and he was a military veteran, but he was basically an academic and he hung around with the Serbians. He hung around, were in Zagreb or they were cosmopolitan types, you know, who he'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 the fact that they were the minority. And when you're a minority, you tow the line. That's an open ended question. But there was even a portmanteau called Herby, which it's a, it's a conflation of her body which means Croats and Serby, 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, it was concentrated in broad slots of the countryside, particularly in Canin or Canine, which is once for context in the medieval period that's like through, like the Habsburg era. 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 of the Adriatic Sea. These rural Serbs really, for the, I mean they, these were, these were the guys who were then elderly and the descendants of guys who'd, who fought with, you know, than the hail of its Chetniks, you know, like they, they didn't suddenly become cosmopolitans who wanted to live in some Croatian republic. And Tuan, now mind you, he's a guy who came up through the Tito was the apparatus. So it's not like he was like some arch USA or something. And he wasn't a fascist, despite what people claim in Belgrade and what a lot of left wingers claimed in Germany and elsewhere. But he did draw upon a lot of Ustosha symbols and he did say like we're not going to run from our leg, you know, from our heritage in the independent state of Croatia. You know, basically people who said they wanted some sort of disavow of the state. He's like, you. And, you know, the tujiman 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. Even a dialect that's pretty similar, if suddenly. If suddenly you go outside and, like, you know, the government's not conducting business in an Alphabet you can read, you're gonna feel pretty marginalized, you know, and even beyond that, it, like, symbolically
[162:20]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
made
[162:21]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
the serbs feel not just profoundly disrespected, but when you consider that an active war was on, you know, the. The Slovenes as well as. As well as both the Bosnian cross and the bosniacs, you know, the Bosnian muslims, who. In the next episode, we'll. We'll get into their story a bit, if. If that's agreeable. You know, they were. They were looking around themselves saying, like, there's. There's. There's an ethnic war on. You know, this isn't hypothetical anymore. There's a shooting war going on between ethnic secessionists and the u. S. Law of the army, which, at least at the general officer level, is majoritarian serve. And tujiman now is saying that Croatia is a state exclusively for the croatian people, the only democracy that's valid. And tujiman did run a. A democracy. There were contested elections. That's inaruable. However, as a matter of constitutional mandate, you know, the newly invented Croatia was exclusively croatian, you know, and if you didn't identify that way, you better start. Otherwise, you know, you're not one of us. And the jump from that, in the wake of a. A Ross and cree, which has actually already jumped off, albeit in a different theater, but still, you know, local to where you live, you're gonna realize that you could very well find yourself ethnically cleansed. And the guys pointing the bandit 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 two situations, but, like, when the floyd 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, Again, it's. I think most people don't think that way in this country. I mean, I am 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 whack you. Yeah, they would.
[164:43]
McDonald's Announcer
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[164:43]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
I mean, like, even here, let alone in a place, if things are bad enough, you know, I'm not saying people should be paranoid or something or, you know, order Mac and cheese buckets from Alex Jones and, you know, pretend that a 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. In. In. In a. In a. In a Ross and Cree or. Or whatever equivalent is, you know, so that's. That's basically. That's basically what the perception was. And you go, Slavia. 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. They really. It's like the countryside, like, didn't exist to them, you know, and even people like Tujman, even though in Yugoslavia, I don't believe. I don't believe Titoism was ever a doctrine or kind of Marxist Leninism, but it definitely. The political culture definitely was similar in terms of its 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 three, 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 like, oh, here in Zagreb, you know, we were all the same. And our Serb neighbors, you know, they would have funny customs, go to the wrong church, but they can learn to be Croatian.
[166:34]
Bluff (Spinquest Player)
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[166:35]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Like, there really is something to that. And, you know, that. That really can't. The overstated, You know, the. So it was basically in Kanin or Canin, and basically what became the secessionist kina Serb republic. This is where, this is where the Croats actually could not afford. If there to be some kind, kind of iridescent Serbian movement or some kind of mobilized chetnic response to what Zagreb was doing, that's the last place they could afford this to happen. And that's absolutely where it did happen. And those also to be the toughest Serbs in equation. That's where they lived. You know, the. So in the first months of Tuan's election, and again, I emphasize that Kujman was elected, people can say whatever they, you know, it's kind of like people become less friendly to Croatia, the Croatia of history in academic treatments. You know, now that we're like 30 years out and you know, they're, they're increasingly casting Tujiman is some kind of dictator. I mean, the Croatian system to this day is a strongly presidential system. But Tujiman was elected president in a normal election. You know, you can't, you can't just say, you can't claim, you know, that like Russia is not a democracy. I mean, Croatia is a democratic as any other country on earth, okay? And it was in 1991, as it is today, you know, and
[168:23]
McDonald's Announcer
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[168:23]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
lead up to Tujman's election, again, it was his 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 are advising him on policy also, you know, and what he needed, I mean, frankly, he needed the defectors from the U. S. National army who knew the situation and the military apparatus as it stood then, not 20 years ago. You know, he needed, he needed guys who, who could tell him what the situation was on the ground, you know, in the countryside where, you know, when war came, I mean, that's not only where it's decided, but that's, that's what Croatia would have to capture in order to remain viable as a. And. The. There was also two the local cadres that facilitated Tujman'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, they were guys who, for years or for decades in some cases, that they were middle aged. They were guys who'd basically been like carrying the torch of, of Croat nationalism, you know, and biting their time until the titoist regime could be torn down. These guys had a basic antipathy to Serbs, like they can't be denied, you know, so if your ground organization are basically guys who hate serves anyway, it doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter what your control group is saying. It doesn't matter what. Tuan, you know, playing mellow academic is talking about a conciliatory posture between populations. You know, I mean, it's not, it's not, it's not something, it's not something that's, that's going to resolve in anything but a violent separation. Now I, I mean, again, like nobody's an augur and I think, I think key political figures, even people who had a better understanding or a more realistic understanding of the situation than, than perhaps Tujiman himself did, they couldn't have foreseen the extent of the differences and like the degree of, of the division and the kind of hostility just beneath the surface, like coming from both sides. And when Tujman won the 1990 election, what he should have done, regardless of what he intended in terms of, know, making the civic apparatus, you know, a truly, like a truly national democratic, like exclusively crud apparatus. Like he absolutely should not have done anything provocative until it was clear where the cards were going to fall in, in terms of secession and what the response in Belgrade was going to be. But at the same time too, this is 2020 hindsight and even a, even in a relatively unfree country, which Croatia was not again, but even under conditions where an executive doesn't have to abide some sort of direct ballot mandate. I mean, every, every chief executive is bound by the tenor of the, of opinion in the body politic. You know, so I mean, I. Tujiman wasn't part being kind of carried on a current of, 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, 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 for the country. Like all these people, they're, they're just simple people. Like, they, 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'm a Healian. A lot of this is out of man's hands
[173:21]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
doing.
[173:21]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
It's also
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[173:56]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The one thing people did say at the time, and you know, Tito himself was a Croat and he successfully suppressed Serb Croat enmity during the totality of his rule. But I mean it's, I think that's misguided too man. I mean one of the things Tito, he drived his mandate not from the fact that Cross and Serb 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 it, even the most, even the most kind of sectarian minded, ethnically chauvinistic minded Cross Serb, her Bosniak would realize that, you know, in, in within this paradigm, you know, we stand together or we at least tolerate the situation as it is or, or, or, or we all die. You know, and I don't think that's entirely fair, you know. And there was other things too. I mean the, this was documented. It wasn't just propaganda from Belgrade. Like upon the ascendancy of, upon two months elections, there was like a mass demotion and termination of serves from, from high and intermediate government positions. 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, that's, I mean stuff, stuff like that is a flex, you know. I mean it doesn't. There, there's no other way to characterize
[175:47]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
it,
[175:58]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
The failed conflict resolution model. Again, I mean frankly, however misguided in terms of the assumptions people held in 1991 about the potentiality of a truly sort of global collective security. At least thank God it was that coterie at Department of State and not this current crop of insane Zionists and out and out, you know, mental subnormals. I don't even, I can't even imagine that would play out. But the, the big, believe it or not, the big question was on the U in the UN General assembly and the Security Council, like, is this an international conflict or is it 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, that actually had the effect of imposing restraint upon Washington, dominating the world and facilitating his social engineering regime under the odds as a 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. The party combatants or directly inter. Or the UN Security Council had no grounds to intervene, you know, unless there was international dimension to the conflict. You know, it would be suggested by people. One of the reasons why in the era everybody loved abandoned genocide and accused people he didn't like of committing it was because 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 live it. You can't levy in an accusation of genocide within like months of the. Nothing about. Still he's like, it's. It'd obviously be a propaganda ploy, but, you know, Belgrade, which to Belgrade at the time it was. And really until the conclusion of hostilities, the. The Serbians identified as the union of you. You know, the Yugoslavian Union of Serbia and Montenegro. You know, they never claimed like, oh, we are Serbia. We're, you know, we're creating, you know, like an ethnonational state of Serbians mirroring Tujiman. They claim Yugoslavia is, you know, where the Yugoslavian government and secession is against the law. These people are engaged in. They're. They're waging war on. On. 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. Until the end. 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. A racialized view of. Of. Of high politics, like over dishonest. That may have been depending your perspective. I mean, was it, you know, Serbia never seceded. Serbia Never claimed that the U. S. Lobbying constitution was null and void, that we're reconstituting as a Serb republic. Karina did constitute itself as, as the republic of. The republic of Serbia. But you know, this is, this is important. It's not just legalese. It had real war and peace impactfulness, but it's also the, I mean, the key, the key shortcoming of the United nations in executive terms. I'm. Aside from the fact, however much philosophically, these things aren't viable. I mean, what, what, what, what, what, what are the UN Bluet gonna do? Are they gonna. Are they gonna occupy. Are they gonna 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, 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 U. N. Had come out and said this is an international conflict just in 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 and the Bosniacs kind of just trying to survive. It's like, well, coal already immediately recognized the independent state of Croatia. You know, you'd essentially be sewing 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 the 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, global collective security arrangement. People are still seriously talking about the Bush Baker model of we're gonna, we're gonna total. The Soviet Union is going to totally disarm its strategic nuclear forces and draw down its conventional forces to vibrate levels. And like, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna withdraw from Germany and like, NATO basically isn't going to exist anymore. Forth. Like this was the way people were thinking, not just Talking so that's important to consider, you know. And again the, if I think some of the, I think some of what was alleged in terms of ethnic cleansing and, and mass rape it like organized, like sexual violence. Some of that was overstated, some of it was not. Okay. I'm reluctant to use the term war crimes because it's advantage so much. The floating signifier has become meaningless. But there is direct testimony that I, I from, you know, NCOs and junior officers.
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[184:29]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Who are witness to these events and they have no reason to lie about it and every reason to deny it. And I find that testimony persuasive. And these weren't guys who themselves were under indictment, you know and I think anybody doesn't believe those kinds of things happen in a Ross and free is 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 the UN should have quote done something. So like what do you do? You know, you deploy with combined arms and assault the, the U. S Love army. So like now you're at war with Serbia. Like I don't feel this 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 gunfight that you didn't have to, you know, and that's basically it. You know, it doesn't, does 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 hurts to go, you know, which I think everybody will agree was on the receiving end of the worst excesses by all, 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, you know, like, 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 Balkan, the third Balkan War was an international conflict, obviously whatever government head could be said to exist in Baz Scovina, 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. What would that force have been made up of?
[187:22]
McDonald's Promo Voice
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[187:22]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
You're gonna send like the Bundes Fair in there. So you got like a German army, you know, marching in under the office of the UN saying, oh, but we're here, you know, to represent all nations. You're g. The Russians a piece of that. You know, again, like the. 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 something you're left with, like, even if the political will is there, even if there's some sort of operational road map to resolve or, you know, to enforce a ceasefire, like, who do you deploy? You're gonna get a bunch of. You're gonna get a bunch of like, third World, like. Like dealers from, like, Ecuador or. Or to, you know, to. To police Bosnia. I mean, that's. On some level, 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 rob the its constituent states of sovereignty. Because when something like this happens, like you need Hasbro Empire to intervene, you know, you needed 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'm actually more sympathetic to than a lot of people. I mean, more sympathetic to him as a man. I mean, he's dead now, but. And as well, more sympathetic to him than a lot of the hoi polloi who say nasty things about him. Nothing like they 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. The new Croatia and the new Serbia and whatever the fate of Bosnia is, it's going to be decided on the battlefield. And obviously, he was, you know, raked over the cold and media like, oh, how dare you say this? You're encouraging mass rape and genocide. I mean, no, actually, exactly what Eagleberger said, like, ended up happening. In 91 and 95, America intervened to facilitate Operation Storm, which is the Croatian liberation of the Kina, which, you know, was the belated victory in the homeland war for Croatia. But that was. That was only the. That was only the. That was America facilitated that by use of a PMC outfit called mpri, which was incorporated essentially for that purpose, you know, for the. 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 legal Burger was saying was. Was horrifically callous. I mean, that. What it came down to was what. What resolved the conflict. The 91, 95 comic book cycle was exactly what he said. You know, the. The party combatants exhausted their ability to wage war and battlefield. A battlefield victory in Karina, albeit with, you know, American assistance, is. Is what resolved for all time the. The disputed. Or the contested objective. That was cryina. So I hope people will back off a bit on saying that, like, I hate Serbs or I'm saying bad things about them or that I. I've got some conceptual bias in favor of Croatia. Would you talk a little bit about sloping on the walls?
[192:07]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
It's been a lot of people's lifetimes, you know.
[192:11]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Yeah. And I understand why.
[192:13]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
Yeah.
[192:13]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
If I was a Serbian and I was in America or the UK Like, I'd feel very much like a population designated for hostility. You know, I understand that completely. Okay. But I don't think people.
[192:31]
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[192:32]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
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, like, 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. Or what you know, the, the third Balkan war, at least the 9195 phase that led to the creation of an independent Croatia. Like you've got to deal with the Croatian political culture and what it basically, you know, what the west view of Croatia was and what Tuan was doing. That's what was the dispositive variable. Okay, so like I begin with discussing their Croatian situation also because Croats or 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, it was the essential cause. Okay, the, what Croatia did decided the course of the war and the ultimately became the political resolution. Like where, like when the shooting stopped, you know, the, the frontiers were established and accepted. It wasn't what Slovenia or Macedonia was doing, it wasn't what the Bosniacs were doing. Like those things had an impact. But again, like that's why. So I mean, I, I would have dealt with the Serbian perspective anyway, but I thought it was especially imperative to do so for, for that reason.
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[195:03]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
But Milovic himself, I mean again, he was, he was a career communist epic. 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 the. 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, I. This kind of, this expost. Facto rationalization, you know, that really began in earnest in 91 and kind of just when it became totally irrational and punitive during the Clinton regime, that Milovic is like this madman like, like that's completely at odds with reality and 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 it. And honestly, you know Milosovich's fall from grace and power within his own country. Costunish was elected president on October 5, 2000. And part of the big. The big reason why Costunika or Costinic. Forgive me if I'm butchering 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 Lovich within Serbia was he turned his back on the. On the Serbian war refugees. He didn't care about our people, you know, he didn't fight hard enough, you know, for the. For the. For the. The coast of our Serbs, you know, like, he. He wasn't this big chnic. You know, like, he was basically pragmatic. And this claim that, you know, most of the. Most of the grossest excesses, wherever one falls in their sympathy or background or whatever, I don't think any would disagree that the worst excesses carried out by all party combatants took place in Bosnia. Okay? And the idea that from Belgrade, Milovic was somehow directing, like, the Bosnian Serbs to do his bidding, like, that's just not. I mean, it's not the way command authority works in. 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 the, you know, the. The affinity that their co. Ethnics 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. The sociopolitical situation, you know, like, it'd be. It's. It'd be like saying like Jefferson Davis was like, was. Was ordering Buddy Bill Anderson to. To do things. Yeah. I mean, that's like. It sounds asinine, but the claim that I just raised is asinine. And people accepted this as, oh, Milosovich is a bad guy. And like, again, I think. I think some. Sometimes it's like, you know, the propaganda being distilled down into the most kind of idiots caricature of reality. But it's also, you know, the problem with assigning legalist legalisms and par. Legalism. Parent legalist paradigms and legalisms. The high politics, as was done at Nuremberg, is it creates these perverse sort of narratives where they're, oh, there's. There. 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, the I guarantee you that some of the most hardened Chetniks in Karina and in Bosnia and probably never even heard most of it 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 Belgrade, who. Yeah, we like that he's Serbian, but other than that, you know, it's, it's ridiculous, you know, and it's also too. I mean, basically, if you look at the modern Serbian state under Milosevic and now and you look at the modern Croatian state under Tujiman and no, like, basically everything that was suggested to be this kind of like horrible undemocratic feature of Serbia or what they called Yugoslavia after the secession of Croatia and, and Slovenia. I mean, those are basically features common to Croatia. You know, there's what we would consider a basically chauvinist, you know, nationalism that, you know, characterized party politics. There's a basic distrust of pluralism and casting candidates who, who talked about what, you know, a multi ethnic Croatia were viewed as traitors, you know, bad relations with the west, you know, and, and, and admittedly that had more, 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, and I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying to be punitive. I got, I, I think the cross and serial great people and I respect the fact that they've resisted, you know, the, the social engineering regime as staunchly as they have. But you can't, you can't cast Serbia in this light but say, oh, but Croatia is not like that because they're basically mirrors of each other, like structurally, you know, and, and frankly, Tujman, 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, Buddy, in terms of. He was no more autocratic than Milosevic was like, arguably. I mean, Tujiman, once the war kicked off, I, Yes, Tujan was elected, yes, there were fair elections in, in Croatia, but I don't think he could have been removed like during his, you know, the, the state of active war. Okay. Arguably he was like, more like, like Milosovich was more susceptible, you know, to like, removal by due process than Tujamon was. So there's, I mean there's that too. Like you can't. This attempt like other, like the Serbians is, is okay. And I mean I, I had thought that I conveyed that clearly in our previous discussions, but because apparently I didn't. I, 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. But it's also too, one of the reasons why Milosevic in his favor, one of the reasons why he enjoyed the, the incumbency for 13 years. You know, like he did implement a market economy in a way that didn't completely crash the, the, 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, there was an actual opposition. You know, they did have media access. I mean this wasn't like all the kind of, all the kind of polestars that these NGO types claim, like constitute, you know, like a democratic state. We approve of. Like he met those. Okay. I mean Serbia was a hell of 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, 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 Milo Switch was their guy. His cousins was basically doing, he was basically acting like a, like a post communist, like European politician is supposed to act, you know, so this, the fact he was hailed into the hag,
[203:58]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
you
[203:59]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
know, I think but you know, he, he, he, he died when he was on trial and I, but I, I thought he acquitted himself very honorably. You know, I like. And we'll get into that in the, in the book and episode.
[204:20]
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[204:24]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
it's about all I got for today. Like, frankly, I don't mean to be a, I don't mean to be a FA or PhD Ggot, but I'm in a lot of pain right now. No problem, go ahead.
[204:39]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
I'm sorry. Yeah, no problem at all. Just hit, hit up whatever you want to promote and yeah, we'll get out of here.
[204:46]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
No, that's great. Thank you, Pete. You can find me on substack real thomas777.substack.com I'm happy to report too Antelope Hill 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, in their creators program whereby if you. If you enter my code when you order from Antelope Press, like regardless the size of the order, you get 5% off. The code is lowercase3th E7s V E N number 5. And not only, not only will you get 5% off, but like I get a kickback from that too. So it helps my brand. So just keep that in mind. You can find out all the info on the substack. I posted up a. A little piece about it. You can find me on Twitter at Real Capital R E L R E A L underscore number 7 HMS 777. You can always find me on my website. It's Thomas777.com that's number 7 H1S777.com you can find me on YouTube at Thomas TV, number 7, HMAS TV. I'm uploading some like, videos I shoot just kind of like out and about and with some of the people I talk to and things. So that's gonna. I'm hoping that's gonna pop a little more as I upload more stuff, but that's what I got.
[206:26]
Show Host (Picanona Show)
All right, until the next time. Thank you.
[206:29]
Thomas (Guest Expert)
Oh, I have had no luck lately.
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Thomas (Guest Expert)
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