The Balkan Series in Full

in 7th century Byzantium it must have seemed like the world was collapsing Islam had risen in Arabia and its zealot soldiers had conquered land faster than any living person had ever experienced soldiers of empires once considered completely unbeatable were quickly falling before their sword this new fanatical army seemed unstoppable within 25 years Arab soldiers had chewed their way through Persia the Levant and North Africa they'd conquered land from Algeria to Pakistan an area so large that it now comprises 13 different nations in the cities waiting to face their wrath they were spoken of as the horsemen of the apocalypse as unstoppable as death itself but they weren't the only problem on the borders of the Byzantines to the north a steppe tribe called the 'var had conquered a sizeable Empire stretching their lands from the Carpathian Mountains of modern Romania all the way to the Slovenian Adriatic as the arm of Constantinople grappled with the larger Arabian threat the Horde plunged repeatedly into the Balkans and everywhere they went refugees flooded before them Slavic refugees the arrival of d'Ivoire coincided with one of the greatest human migrations in history Slavic tribes pushed out from Eastern Europe in all possible directions steadily working their way into the already populated areas that surrounded them one Roman official exaggerated that there were so many tribes on the move that wherever they went the grass died we don't know what caused it in the first place but what we do know is that the of our invasion did absolutely nothing to slow its pace the further that that horde punched down into their lands the further those refugees fled into what Byzantines considered theirs soon those Slavic refugees would form what we now consider the ethnic backbone of Yugoslavia but those foundations are a lot more complicated than they might seem pinning down exactly what it is that defines a Slavic person cuts to the very heart of the frayed knot that is ethnicity it exposes just how difficult a question identity can be it questions the very basis of nationhood so to explain it's probably best we go back to the start the early Slavic people were presumably a democratic semi-nomadic collection of tribes to call them United would be a massive overstatement even in their earliest days we now group them together for the ease of history but there's little reason to believe that they would have done so in their own time these were tribes and they were doing normal tribal things they fought they absorbed people they took land wherever they could and if anyone stood in their way they'd kill them convert them or impregnate them adding people to the tribe was not just a matter of genetics it was one of culture you didn't have to be born to Slav you just had to become one people who took their ways and spoke their language were integrated alongside them and those who didn't were destroyed but their arrival didn't change the name of the empires they settled it simply changed to that Empire ruled over from the Baltics down to the Balkans the tribes of the great migration quickly covered half of Europe but it wasn't as if they were a monolith the Baltics to the Balkans is a very long way and as those incoming tribes met the people already living there just as they did impose their culture on them culture was imposed back sure the scream going out may have been in a Slavic language but the echoes returning were always worked by the landscape around them as the whole divided subgroups began to form to consider themselves people within a people groups that had entered the Alps felt Alpen and they wanted to express that those on the coast felt the sea each was reacting to the requirements of life in their new environment and in turn created lifestyles that separated them from their ancestors that made them unique from the tribes that surrounded them and yet even as those schisms drove them further apart in the eyes of a true other they could still see themselves as Slavs in the reflection under the yoke of an invader with a different language culture and religion the ancient ideal of tribal unity came roaring back to reality in true Yugoslavia the first Slavic Kingdom would be born of ethnic tension the of our cognitive you'd they're Slavic subjects as a stone that would produce blood and they were not afraid to squeeze they taxed the people too near starvation routinely raped Slavic women and gangue pressed their men into war but in doing so they let the slobs see themselves as one in the eyes of a true other a people who had never been united started looking for a king under the backing of a Frankish merchant they'd promised the crown in 631 the predecessors of the Slovenes Slovaks Moravians and Czech successfully rebelled against the Horde and we don't know what happened after that Kingdom collapsed but we do know that it only lasted 30 years the life span of a single charismatic leader one generation to still remember themselves in the reflection of that other but as soon as that other died as soon as that King died those tribes went right back to fighting themselves and while that first Slavic Kingdom wasn't to last the identities it helped define grace our maps today in the corpse of that merchant kingdom self defined ethnic states would rise like mushrooms conquer each other collapse and rear eyes as they pushed back the 'var Yugoslavia would split into many competing factions each with their own regional identity and way of life their empires would rise and fall and their people would retaliate against each other based purely on memories of the previous retaliation the more they fought each other the more distinct their identities became it was a gyre spiraling ever outwards from a center that all could see but none could ever return from the cultural supremacy of those Slavic tribes that walked South came the Slovenes and the Bulgarians the Croats and the Serbs the Montenegrin Macedonians and Bosniaks all variations on a theme and perhaps if that was the only split they'd seen they might have found a way to stay united but by the 11th century two major events had taken place that would have an undying effect on this region the first was the Great Schism of Christianity a religious power struggle between Rome and Constantinople that's still creating war to this day and to the great misfortune of Yugoslavia the fault line of this theological earthquake ran right through the center of their land the second was the rise of the cell you Kemp Iyer the Byzantines had given everything fighting Arabia and those many rebellious slavic peoples so by the time this new wave of Turkic invaders arrived from the east there was little left to hold them back and while the Emperor kept his grip on Constantinople for a few hundred more years from this point on each passing decade would see a further collapse of what once the most powerful empire on earth as it breathed its last breath spas no Serbian and Turkish lovak Bulgarian forces conquered as much land as they could it was almost a thousand years later but that Eastern Roman Emperor was still having the same damn problem an invasion of Slavs and steppe tribes that he could never hope to stop eating away at that rotting Byzantine corpse Yugoslavia STIs would grow to sizes so large that they would forever be considered the high-water mark of their people they would control nearly the entire Balkans it was the culmination of thousands of years of migration of conquest this would be their crowning achievement and those Turks came and took it all away in 1463 just as they done with the rest of the Balkans the Ottomans conquered Bosnia their Christian King cried out to his neighbors for help but none answered his call the ottomans killed him divided his kingdom and set up an Islamic administration that would last for nearly 400 years and just like all those before them when they came across differences in culture and religion they aimed to change them they converted they pressured and they killed but it wasn't just about being good Muslims it was about control any leader worth his weight in salt knows that if you want boys to die for you it's better if you control their God if you write the words that they speak from that pulpit you have more than their bodies you have their souls if politics is a Hydra one of its heads is religion under the new Ottoman administration the Bosniaks would be pulled in three different directions by three different empires pushing three different gods yet unlike much of the rest of the Balkans most people here chose the new one Islam this was one of the few areas of Europe that would take on a majority Muslim identity after being conquered by the Ottomans and within a century over two-thirds of the nation would have converted to the will of Allah but the reason why likely had more to do with the politics of Christianity than it did with Islam because when those first Muslim missionaries arrived here in Bosnia they found a soil ready for their seed it wasn't that the Bosniaks were being offered something different it wasn't that they themselves were different they were just living on a religious fault line and the spiritual history of this land has always been one of abuse power-hungry men wrapped in the cloth of God lusting after their lands and tax returns and at one point or another they'd been treated as heretics by both sides of the Christian schism and they certainly hadn't forgotten it they'd even been the subject of a crusade in the early 1200s the Pope was getting quite annoyed with the Bosnian church they kept claiming they'd follow his rules and then when they went home to their remote mountain villages they just did whatever the hell they wanted at home Bosnians prayed in their own language they chose their own clerics they had their own understanding of the biblical text and the rituals it required in their churches the pulpit spoke to them for them and by them it was a little schism all its own to the pontiff this was absolutely unacceptable it wasn't which specific rules they were breaking per se it was more the fact that they were breaking the rules at all this was a land on the border of Orthodoxy and with the Great Schism only having just kneecapped his power the Pope was not gonna let this slide they would do what he said or he'd kill them or more accurately he'd ask around and find someone nearby who was willing to do the killing for him and Hungary was more than happy to help in fact they've been one the ones who spurred it on like most Crusades this was more like a war of conquest masquerading as the will of God they wanted Bosnia's land and if the local people were heretical it wasn't only internationally acceptable but it was also legal if God and man agreed then Bosnia had to go so Hungary's rulers made an unspoken deal with the papacy that they would crush the independent Bosniaks and in turn they could trust the Pope to support their claim to any land they took but the invasion failed that was unholy holy warriors were stopped in their tracks and the core of Bosnia remained very much so true to its beliefs only now with a much more suspicious view of Rome and perhaps not surprisingly that story was the same on the other side when Orthodox leaders were no less impressed with the Independence of the Bosniaks they made no fewer attempts to try to convert them either they too believed that they deserved control of the Bosnian Souls and their reasoning was they wanted them and so they were willing to kill for them and for hundreds of years the local people of Bosnia saw torture and oppression in the faces of God's men believe the preacher from the east and the West will kill you believe the West and the East will do the same so as the Ottomans conquered their way of the Balkans there were a lot of Bosniaks who are rightly really pissed with the politics of Christianity it's not that they didn't fight valiantly against the invasion but once they were conquered it shouldn't come as a huge surprise to find that there were many people willing to try out this new God from their end the ottomans were for the most part less than forceful about convert that isn't to say that there weren't many forced conversions such as with the Janissaries or that they didn't heavily incentivize Islam of course they did they want to control the people's souls just as much as Rome or Constantinople but they were also a sprawling multi-ethnic and multi-religious Empire eradicating the entire population of the region simply wasn't feasible forced conversion of such a huge area of land would lead to more uprisings than it would presumably be worth so if they really truly wanted to change people's minds they had to be smart about it so they made all non-muslims into second-class citizens and said you want to get to the frontal line okay convert non-muslims would be known as Dimmie and they would be protected from violence and depredation but that's about it the whole point of the barrier was to incentivize removing it non-muslims wouldn't be able to trade on the Ottoman trade networks they wouldn't be able to hold office they wouldn't be able to ride a horse or carry a sword I mean some of these were clearly meant to stop rebellion but most were just simply basic forms of oppression after all that was the point it could go away at any time it was your choice so for the most part becoming a Muslim in the Ottoman Empire was a decision it was the price you had to pay to make more money to get more power and for many of the already heretical followers of the Bosnian church that didn't really seem like that bad of a trade if politics is a Hydra one of its heads is the economy and as more of their people rose to positions of power Bosniaks realized that in this regime if they converted early they could turn the tables and become the new ruling elite those on the bottom could rise to the top converting early was a way to get more respect from the Empire more power in their positions at home and pay less tax in their communities and it worked Bosniaks became one of the Empire's most prized citizens they were given positions of power and influence despite just a generation before being looked down on by their peasant peers these were now people at the forefront of a global society to them it was as simple as when they changed to Christianity in the first place but to others it was the greatest treason they could possibly imagine and as time progressed just as with the schism before it this new religious divide changed what it meant to be Bosnian language and culture were no longer at crossroads for all people because the more Bosniaks who turned Muslim the more it pushed those who hadn't into the arms of their spiritual Patriots Orthodox Bosniaks found themselves now aligning with Serbs the Catholics with crow hats Slavic identities divided down yet another fault line and became just if not more important than the religious ones alongside them in the eyes of Bosnia's muslims they were simply expressing the same religious freedom that had always defined this land in a way tolerance to heresy was a part of what it meant to be Bosniak but in the eyes of both Orthodox and Catholic Bosnians the Muslims had given up what it made to be Slavic there were no different than the Turks than the 'var they were now just another other to see themselves reflected in and if that wasn't enough the realpolitik of governance only divided them further for the next 400 years Christian Slavic oppression came from a Muslim Slavic hand the ruling elite may have lived in a nation of Tolerance but they were still the ruling elite they taxed they spent and they crushed rebellion those who had seen their own religious freedoms fall before the pressures of empire were now the ones imposing it on others and those others would not forget it if politics is a Hydra one of its heads is identity as the Empire corrupted and rotted from the inside its people rose in revolution taking to the ideals of ethnic nationalism now popular across Europe the Young Turks would drive a wedge into their own heart creating a shock wave that would end up splintering the Empire and causing genocides that feel raw even today and just as with the Byzantines before them the weakened anuman Empire began to fall to the uprising Slavs as Imperial hegemony receded once suppressed cultures were raised back from the dead deliberate work was put into reviving ancient traditions folklore and languages and admirably futile attempts to turn the past into the future but the more work they did to redefine themselves the more they realized that you can't fix a chasm of time the people had changed the region had changed a new era of ethnic nationalism had reached the Balkans and before it was said and done over 17 million people would be dead [Music] Gavrilo Princip believed in yugoslavia he believed in the unity of his people it's just it wasn't exactly sure who those people were what form of a nation it should take but he certainly believed in their unity as he died in prison he was quoted as saying I don't care who rules it I just want there to be a Yugoslavia like so many Slavs before him Gavrilo defined himself in the reflection of the other his people were anyone but the imperialists he was an ottoman and he wasn't austro-hungarian he was a Slav and had he lived long enough to see the changes he inspired in the world he might have called himself an orthodox Bosnian Serb but Gavrilo was not destined for a long life here in the tolerant capital of Sarajevo he murdered an Archduke when he was 19 years old just a kid and idealist and like most idealists from the outside his goals seemed noble he wanted self-governance a homeland for his people he wanted Bosnia to take part in the great ethnic uprisings that have been working their way across the planet to shed the yoke of colonialism and join the modern era and he would get his wish as he died in that dark Austrian prison the flames he'd ignited would burn the world he knew to the ground the fire of revolution ripped through the continent that one small Domino that he'd knocked over would go on to start the bloodiest war humanity had ever seen that one dead Archduke would be followed to the grave by tens of millions of soldiers and civilians it would lead to a resetting of the world order that would create an even more devastating war just a single generation later the true outcome of ethnic nationalism but out of the ashes rose Yugoslavia Gavrilo would get his wish not everyone would be so lucky though one person who would never get his wish was on Tate rhombic he was one of the many men who was actually going to have to put in practice what gavrilos ideology had started the thing about being an assassin is that you get to die a hero you don't actually have to stick around and figure out what Yugoslavia actually means drum each tried to form some political glue that could bind together this fledgling state and while he may have been a nationalist Croat at heart he was facing down the barrel of both Italian and Austrian conquest and in the shadow of the other he was willing to unite he believed that so long as they created the right organization a unified Yugoslavia would be the best possible solution for his people a united states of the Balkans a fresh start to a troubled land intellectuals and political leaders from across the region sat down with the Serbian Kingdom looking for a path to integration any way to come together Italy had entered the war on the promise of exiting with Slovenian and Croatian land and the best way to stop them from that was to present a unified front they would create an entity that could compete with the great powers of Europe a federation so strong that they could never be colonized again all it had to do was keep from destroying itself in the meantime to strike a balance between the multitude of self defined ethnicities and unites and from their side the crow hats had some demands well they were happy to live as equals if they were treated equally they had no interest in signing up to be second-class citizens of a new serve Empire their Yugoslavia would require the political agreement of all South Slavic people not just the most dominant it would give power to weakened ethnic states and allow for a truly federated state it would provide balance to a system weighted against the small and form a framework for the creation of a new pan-slavic identity a utopian ideal for all their citizens to rally behind and of course problems arose almost immediately the ideals of intelligentsia are rarely well met by reality but when the enemies were at their gates the Yugoslavs had shown they could find ways to work together the gang that killed Franz Ferdinand after all contained Bosnian Serbs Muslims and Croats and together they'd aimed to be an example of that united identity that they'd always seen in the reflection of their enemies with all their enemies dead they had to start to ask themselves what comes next if the basis of their Federation was an ethnic identity then what stopped them from further breaking down into sub identities nationalism doesn't end with everybody united it ends with them divided with the lowest common denominator of identity if Serbia couldn't treat the other ethnicities within this Federation as equal then what stopped them from dominating the government what stopped them from taking essentially a multi-ethnic democracy on paper and turning it into a single ethnicity dictatorship in practice nothing that's what and so of course it happened the only thing that could stand in his way was violence and so of course there was violence no matter how many different ways they aligned the ideology the old schisms remained the same crow hats and Slovenes were still Catholic they still pulled to the west Serbs were still Orthodox and with the Russian Empire in full swing they had a valuable patron in the East and with their hatreds still fresh from the ottoman era neither of them was even remotely willing to consider the Muslim Bosniaks of a people worthy of distinction from their point of view they've long since traded their Slav identities for those of the invader they were either Turks or heretical Serbs or something but what they weren't was a unique people within the Yugoslavia and when the time came the Serb leadership intended to split the land that they lived on that they owned that they'd farmed with Croatia and take Muslim Bosnia as their own they were just never really able to come the country down enough to make it happen but the Bosnians weren't the only ones they were denying an identity the Serb leadership claimed that they were the ethnic foundation for both the Montenegrin and Macedonian census they were both Orthodox that put them in the Serb sphere of influence and if they wanted to prove otherwise they'd have to do so like everybody else with a gun so with the swing of the pendulum the Serbs had switched to the role of a presser with the power back in their hands they would begin repressing those who disagreed with them be it due to ethnicity religion or culture just as was done to them under so many previous regimes for their part the Serbs saw themselves as the natural leaders of the Yugoslavia view the Montenegrins the Bosniaks everyone they were simply just a version of them who hadn't realized it yet they saw themselves somewhat like the Prussians of the Balkans and their cultural backbone would offer the pan Slavs a way to unite that they'd never found before and just like all those colonizers and religious leaders before them if anyone disagreed with that identity they'd killed her no matter how much resistance they came across they always found a way to claim that it was meant to uphold a United Yugoslavia and as ridiculous as it might seem now many truly believed that because in their eyes the stronger the Serbs the stronger the nation in the eyes of many it didn't matter if the name on paper was Yugoslavia what they were starting to see was the return of Greater Serbia and ten years after they'd united trumpet was wishing he never agreed the people he brought together were now at each other's throats and for the Croats the writing was on the wall that they were gonna have to fight their way back out the door that he'd convinced them to enter just a few years before with each passing day it only got worse in 1928 on the floor of parliament a Serb deputy shot five members of an opposing Croatian party to would die then in there one of whom was their leader in turn the Serbian King suspended the Constitution and stripped all of their ethnic groups of their political power he turned the state into a true dictatorship his last-ditch effort to keep the people together or perhaps put another way to stay in power as dissenting voices started to scream their demands the government turned to imprisonment and murder prominent activists and scholars were killed without recourse political leaders were locked in cages the state undertook a massive campaign of oppression particularly against the ethnicities that refuted the dominance of the Serbs any who felt an identity beyond that which they were given was punished and soon Croats would be fighting again to be free only this time it would be against the very Union that they'd helped to create this was no foreign invader for the Slavs to oppose no 'var to unite against now they were fighting purely against themselves it wouldn't be long before they committed suicide in 1934 sixteen years after Gavrilo shot that famed Archduke the second assassination would Rock the Balkans in Marseilles France with the help of the Croatian nationalists a member of Macedonia's secret paramilitary murdered Yugoslavia is king although the state he led would limp forward for a few more years in his absence the writing was on the wall and what's more it was written in blood it took two shots in Sarajevo to bring about the first kingdom of Yugoslavia and two shots in France to destroy it it would be another world war and the mass slaughter of 300 thousand innocent Serbs before they'd try again yosef Broz Tito believed in Yugoslavia he believed in the unity of his people well so long as those people were communists anyway the story of his rise is the story of a battle against a fellow Croat for the very souls of Yugoslavia a fascist so deeply perverse he made him lafiel disgust his name was on tape Pavlich and he didn't just inflict horror he reveled in it he famously said that knives pistols machine guns and bombs these were the idols the bells that would announce the dawn of the resurrection of an independent Croatia and the one thing that he and Tito shared in common was an unapologetic justification for whatever deaths were required to achieve their goals it's just that Pavelec seemed to enjoy it it can be hard to see how a man like him comes to power he was no pulpit for the glory of his people he wasn't personification of charisma he was fear a man so terrified what might come to his door that he was willing to burn down his entire house just to avoid it he was a psychopath aiming for a purity that doesn't exist that can't exist but well he would open the lock it was Italy who gave him that key mussolini saw in him a way to recolonize the Venetian Adriatic and in turn he saw in Mussolini a way to purge the lands that he claimed as his Hitler objected he was no more a fan of the Serbs than Pavich but it was in his best interest to keep Yugoslavia United at least for the time being their workforce was better spent providing resources for his war machine than in turmoil killing themselves but as the years progressed his hand was forced and in 1941 the kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by the axis and split apart into many little rump states in ten days it was completely overrun and destroyed the Germans felt that the Serbs due to their natural with Russia we're not really trustworthy allies and Italy had been working for years to install their puppet fascists in Zagreb anyway so they just focused on them and with a few promises that they'd killed Jews alongside the newly formed independent Croatia became a mass grave into which they sank their Serbs the German propaganda machine began aligning their national pseudoscience to confirm the superiority of the Croatians alongside them it isn't just their unique history they'd say was their bloodline crow hats were clearly Germans they're not Slavs their bloods Aryan they're different so long as they fought with the Nazis everybody who knew what was good for them would agree they're different and for his part Pavel each was certainly different the brutality that he didn't flicked would be among the worst of the war anywhere in the world his stated aim outloud his public goal was to leave a third of the Serbs exiled a third converted and a third dead in four years his Eustache have fanatically killed over a quarter million people towards that aim to fulfill promises made to Hitler now his military and political benefactor he killed over 80% of Croatia's Jews this had nothing to do with war war was just a cover and unshackling of the humanity that binds these monsters hands elderly women and children were hacked to death with machetes religious leaders were slaughtered and their churches were burnt to the ground for no other reason than who they were innocent men had their heads cut off with their farm equipment nobody was spared nobody was meant to be spared they purged down the old lines religion language identity in an independent Croatian state the genocide would continue until everyone felt united until everyone said that they were Croatian you might be Muslim you might be Catholic you might once have been orthodox but now you are Croatian what you are not what you cannot be is a Serb it's ethnic nationalism at its core at its nub so perhaps it's only fitting that it was a Croat who destroyed it a man offering a completely new identity for the people of the Balkans to consider an identity that smashed through everything that came before it was the East tugging back at the center it was Joseph Rose Tito the right arm of communist Yugoslavia and echoing out from his partisan forest base was the offer of nothing less than the complete disillusion of the Old World Order the schism of religion would be excised by removing religion itself the schism of ethnicity by a greater calling no more Kings no more country's communism would be deeper than blood duty to the state before everything and like all unobtainable utopian ideals it drew in people like moths to a flame young men and women to die for hope and those who heeded his call came from all over the Balkans it was a truly multi-ethnic force Montenegrins Macedonian Slovenes Croats Bosniaks Serbs even the occasional Albanian the mud of the Balkans had been pressed back into stone and squeezed on all sides Tito would hold the line and he would win as the dreams of those Catholic fascists shot themselves in that bunker in Berlin the once Orthodox atheists of the east charged through the independent state of Croatia unleashing a pent-up fury unto those who had purged their families and comrades and with each new atonement forced back upon them the Catholic Church drew of their wedge as much as their new position would allow they were surely terrified by this sweeping a religious atheist now small see away from Rome Empire and the Pope decided to do what he does best he excommunicated Tito but it was for killing Croatian priests involved in the genocide which feels kind of odd a form of holiness I suspect you have to be very developed ly Catholic to understand because it seems to me like God was fine hacking those Serb children to pieces but apparently communism is a step too far it's kind of weird how God plays politics like that but as ever it wasn't just the West the pressure came from both sides United in ideology is not united in practice the reality of communism is not a brotherhood camaraderie is propaganda for the plebs the USSR wanted Yugoslavia not as an equal but as a glorified colony they wanted to steal their factories they wanted to their resources they've done it to all the other satellite states there's no reason to suspect that's not what they wanted here before Tito even got the bearings of his new position Stalin had already started his plans to kill him because after all you can't have two leaders of the same personality cult Tito was everything that Stalin feared Tito was ruthless and he had the pedigree he came from a working-class background where he had to leave school in the second grade to do metal work to help his single mother I mean can you get a better origin story he was an international war hero he even fought for Lenin in Russia he organized what was considered the most successful resistance against the Nazis anywhere on earth and he fought against the imperialists the Nationalists the fascists and the church and won every single time he was the picture-perfect communist he even had all the fancy suits to prove it then in turn naturally many people did love him or at least the image that he projected of himself in his day it would not be wrong to say that his cult of personality was built just as much on deep affection as it was fear yet fear still played a valuable role he may have been a brilliant leader and I don't question if he truly loved the concept of Yugoslavia but he was still a flawed human at the helm of a post-war communist state he was still a man who would imprison or kill any enemies who threatened his rule he wasn't the worst of communism his cruelty was definitely not that of Stalin or Mao or even that of Pavel äj-- but that said the people dying in his work camps probably weren't too concerned about the nuance when Stalin did come to kill him it was as plain as day by the time they removed Yugoslavia from the Soviet Brotherhood Tito was already in talks with the West to rekindle those flames as any true Yugoslavia must he and neatly understood what it took to survive living on a fault line he would not be pulled too far in either direction but instead find a way to tie these ropes together and he correctly guessed that the West would forgive his transgressions for a seat back at the table the feeling of splitting apart communist unity meaning much more to them than just a few dead priests and so Yugoslavia would become the knot that kept the world balanced with American support it would boast the 4th largest army in the world and Stalin's invasion would never come Tito would protect his people and yet even with this power secured Tito was still a soldier and he saw enemies all around him real or imagined so for nearly a decade Yugoslavia would undergo a covert campaign of silencing dissent through force well on paper it was aimed at Nazi collaborators and Stalinists and extreme nationalists and all the other great propaganda in reality it extended to a number of people who simply believed differently than he did innocent people who were imprisoned or even killed for nothing more than a small-time political grudge from some local official with too much power and not enough oversight and well it would be a stretch to say that he was more brutal than those who came before or after him he was undeniably brutal but just as with Khrushchev in the Soviet Union eventually he recognized that fear can only get so far in pacifying a mob and with Stalin in the ground and NATO and the kinder softer Soviet Union on his side he turned a new leaf fear was replaced by promise and from 1955 forward political prisons would be closed and torn down and the media would be given a slate relaxation on rates and people would be on the road to individual personal freedom at least from their point of view just the communist version of individual personal freedom well actually not even the communist version the Tito aspersion but socialized society which is thus latest hint of this free market capitalism a whiff to make America feel like the pie was baking even if it wasn't at least on paper he walked the line between hemispheres sort of like the Communist reflection of the Nordic model but in reality Tito's Yugoslavia started collapsing the day it began it was essentially structured as a nation sized Ponzi scheme where every year things got worse but nobody in the organization could possibly admit it the pre-war economic backbones of Slovenia and Croatia would be forced to carry the burden of communism failures like overweighted mules for decades and eventually it would have to come to a head there was just no money left by the 1980s as unemployment reached a full quarter of the population Yugoslavia entered a spiral of bankruptcy that it could never hope to return from but to his credit it wasn't as if Tito wanted a bad economy he just didn't know how to fix it he wasn't some genius scholar he was a vain soldier who didn't make it at a great school he was doing everything he could with the tools he understood himself to have it's just mostly what he had was charisma statistically tito ism would do no better than soviet-style communism it just got better press yet despite its failures in the region where it lingered the longest it's still often spoken of positively today well nations like Slovenia have been glorifying his name unconstitutional there are still many people willing to sing his praises between their walls they were willing to put up with the hardship because to them the beauty of Tito's Yugoslavia was in the identity it provided not the economy it was in the peace it restored it was an end to the genocide it was an end to Pavelec it held a respected place at the International table for generations and provided a connection to something larger than the petty squabbles of home for many socialists tegus lobbyists power wasn't its military it wasn't its economy it wasn't even its people it was Tito and when that guy dies what can you do the nation was bankrupt and it had started fraying on all sides despite two full generations together the mud that had hardened in that world war was starting to dissolve again before his funeral people in Sarajevo started passing around the joke when we put him in the ground we're gonna start shooting each other again it's probably funny at the time it broke the tension I sincerely doubt anybody is laughing now Rock'em laddish did not believe in Yugoslavia but he did believe in the unity of his people at least as he saw them and in his attempt to get to that natural dead end he would destroy the dream of Gavrilo Princip he would destroy all the work of tito because just like those confident killers of the past he was absolutely certain that he was right but he was a monster and the actions that he would take in Schreber Anisa and Sarajevo would earn him a spot in the history of war crime of course in his mind he's no monster in many Bosnian Serb Minds he's actually considered a hero to the ethnically hyper nationalists he did exactly what they wanted he murdered a bunch of Muslims and fought for a greater Serbia after all they say he was only doing with huge Stasi and bozniak Ottomans that done to them in their own time but the problem with that was this wasn't their own time they hadn't done it someone in the past head this was a new time a post Tito time a time when it would not be wrong to say that a majority of people still prefer national unity over sub ethnic division it's one thing to want more autonomy it's another entirely for an extremist minority to want to genocide innocent neutral civilians to get it when talking about Yugoslavia collapse it's important to remember that most of its citizens didn't want it to happen few wanted to dissolve least of all the man who set it in motion after 50 years of Tito most people were Yugoslavia stir stand ethnic nationalist second and those who did complain tended to do so within a framework of a still unified nation it's just because they go to prison if they didn't although they probably would but more that they simply just wanted more autonomy for their states they wanted more rights for minorities in other states a bit like the way they delineate rights in the United States today except with a bit less nuanced ethnic and religious differences but the problem with nationalism in a multicultural Empire is that once you start thumping those drums everybody hears the beat differently the same fire that had burned down the 'var the Austrian and the Ottoman Empire's would soon bring down theirs as well the dream of Yugoslavia collapsed because men like melodic were willing to kill the wounded animal just so they could get an early start on eating its corpse although he'd once been all those things as soon as the war broke out he was no longer a communist he was no longer EU his sloth he was no longer a Bosnian he was just a Serb and because that's what he chose to be it was only inevitable that he would bring a genocide to the people of Sarajevo how do you even describe it a war against civilians against innocent people children I think we don't like to talk about this stuff because we're civilians and as soon as we realize how easy it was for it to happen to them we know it can happen to us but that's precisely why we should look at it these were real people I know they may serve as examples of horror now but they were real people and I think that's really important to remember I can make this finale about Milazzo vicha can make it about mulatto CH but those guys they all get the fame they're not the real story they're the monsters the story I care about are the people who this cycle of violence destroyed because Sarajevo was everybody they mixed here there were Muslims Jews Christians atheists it was a society of people of Yugoslavia who suffered the most so I want to talk about some of them Jurgen Martin Savidge was a Bosnian Serb but he's no ethnic nationalist he was a Bosnian first and perhaps due to having fallen in love with a Bosniak woman he'd realized that other people deserve to be Bosnian - what would his three-year-old child be if not Bosnian his dream was of a people united a nation that prided itself on its history rather than divided itself by it which is exactly what the paramilitaries mocked him for when they tortured him eight months they held him eight months away from his child speaking of children Nermin div ovitch was five Bosnian Serbs started bombing his city they set up in a ring on the mountains around town mountains he was too young to remember playing in mountains he would never touch again it was two years into the siege when a sniper put a bullet through his brain so it goes same bullet ripped through his mother it was enough to draw his father back from the frontlines some mission accomplished I guess 1500 children would be killed in this city almost 15% of all dead target the kids don't target the kids who knows what they were told to do but those kids they all died they killed them all anyway nobody imagined this was going to happen this was an incredible cosmopolitan happily multicultural city the nation had been United for 50 years and this was its heart the heart of both Bosnia and Yugoslavia a place where people quite simply just got along it was beautiful so incredibly beautiful with a mix of Turkish and European influence that created one of the most unique city escapes on the planet they called it the Jerusalem of Europe and they were right but in the hills above this city on that ridge line on every Ridgeline those soldiers stood and they bombed the heart out of Sarajevo for for years for years they stood up there and just rain hell on the civilians of this city they killed children standing in the street they killed people on their balconies they bombed grandmothers in their homes they put this place into such a position that people here would end up using cigarettes as currency for nearly half a decade this city was no longer part of the rest of the world it was a prison surrounded by murderers other than a few tunnels they dug to get the bare necessities of life it was nothing more than a shooting gallery a way to make their military submit by murdering families back home but they couldn't submit they had every reason to believe that if they did they would just kill them all look at this rubber Nitze to the north they'd walked an entire town into a mass grave Radko Milotic walked 8,000 people into a mass grave rounded up everyone and just shot him dust they hadn't fled town because they thought they were safe they weren't in the war they didn't want to be in the war why would anyone kill them they were Yugoslavia say you have historical right to a bit of land or whatever it's an easy thing to say that this is just how politics works but to stand in front of a piece of military hardware and just kill children because you want more power because someone in the past did it to someone who shares your personal form of identity that's evil ethnic nationalism is the lowest form of nationalism because it doesn't stop until everyone's in their corners burying their dead again and again and again they call Radko Milotic the butcher of bosnia and they're not wrong but the real butcher was always the divide the gyre had moved so far from the center that despite everyone looking back with hope they knew they would never reach it again in my eyes Bosnia was always the land the best defined Yugoslavia its entire history is that of a hard to define uniqueness of trying to prove identity against neighbors who disagree with it it's always been the perfect recipe for unrest so it should come as no surprise that after the stalemate that brought the end of its most recent conflict very little has changed there Bosnia's disparate people still remain at each other's throats the fault lines of religion identity and history remain as they always did except with an ever increasing feeling of distance just another fresh set of lines on the map to add to the arguments of future ideologues but little else yet the cycle continues in both directions because despite the tension the bloodshed the history and the pain they've already started to reunite except now instead of a pen Yugoslavia identity they're trying for a pan-european one after all within 20 years of their ethnically genocide 'el civil war every one of the respective governments involved have intentionally pushed for an attachment to an even larger less ethnically based Union the European Union it's probably the continents last hope for international preeminence in an increasingly Asian world and most politicians understand that so despite their history they know that for their nation to survive to have the influence and power to allow it to stay independent it can't really be independent you cannot have your cake and eat it too if politics was a Hydra one of the heads would be the cold hard light of reality the reality that bloc's exist because other blocks exist and you can wish until the end of time that every self-defined people's could live in their own lands peacefully and without malice it's a utopian dream but that's not this world a small people are a crushed people Nermin div avec was seven years old he was small Milica rakish was three she was small too but just because unity is strength doesn't mean that we can all just live united either that's another utopian fantasy it's not this world Britain already left the EU in a confused stumble and there's no reason to suspect that they'll be the last humans are human independence is a very tough concept because identity has always been ours to choose and the tides of history may ever round us but we're always the ones holding the oars if a person chooses to feel Serbian Bosnian Slovak European or simply human each one of those comes with a natural end something to fight for and someone to fight against but no matter which you choose there's going to be a trade-off nothing ever comes for free Yugoslavia failed when people wanted it to fail when they let their smaller identities take power from their larger and who am I to say that they weren't right that they didn't have their reasons who doesn't want to feel more in control of their destiny it's just that undeniably as soon as they were made small again the fear of the other drove them back together humans may hate each other but at the end of the day we know or stronger United that's why we unite this was once Yugoslavia and now it's rare earth you [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Rare Earth

Views: 317,283

Keywords: Hadfield, YouTube Documentary, Documentary, History Documentary, History, Evan Hadfield, Rare Earth, BBC, Natgeo, National Geographic, balkans, serbia, montenegro, macedonia, bosnia, slovenia, kosovo, bosnian war, yugoslavia, balkan history, history of yugoslavia, rare earth, srebrenica, sarajevo, croatia, republika srpska, herzegovina, zagreb

Id: u5tgASe-DmA

Length: 51min 14sec (3074 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/lietuvis10LTU]

This is such a great series, I wish everyone would watch it.

Also, highly recommend watching the new outro starting at 47:10.

!ping FOREIGN-POLICY

[u/Goatf00t]

!ping BALKAN

Nitpick: the title continues the trend of conflating Yugoslavia and the Balkans. *sigh*