I find it amazing how the Russians, who understand pretty much everything else very clearly, get the Yugoslavia war so completely and utterly wrong. I keep hearing how Yugoslavia fell apart after America bombed it. It’s as if the Russians were so involved with their own 1990s situation, they started paying attention to everything else only after NATO bombed Belgrade, decided it’s a terrible thing, and it must have caused all the problems. That’s utter nonsense. How do I know it’s nonsense? I lived here, that’s how. I know the timeline. I’ve seen the events unfold. So let me write the timeline as I remembered it.
In 1980 Tito died. I remember that quite clearly, it was my first year in elementary school. There was great turmoil and uncertainty in Yugoslavia, because the entire system of government was organised around Tito as the cornerstone figure. His death created a power vacuum that was filled by a council of presidents of the constituent republics, and the president of Yugoslavia was rotated between them on an annual basis.
There was a significant tension in Yugoslavia during the 1980s, for two main reasons. First, the economy wasn’t working, and it was clear to the people in general that it wasn’t working, and, specifically, that it wasn’t working because it was socialist. People knew that because a significant number of them went abroad to Western Germany and other countries, and in five or ten years they could earn enough money to build a house. Nobody working in Yugoslavia could earn enough to build a house, and people asked the right question – if this socialism thing is so great for enrichment of the working class masses, how come you can’t earn enough money to build a house in socialism, as a working class man, and you can go to a supposedly exploitative capitalist country and you could do it just fine? Obviously, socialism doesn’t work. Also, since Yugoslavia had a more liberal system than other communist countries, and was in some aspects closer to the capitalist ones, it was interesting to see that economically, we were right in between – better economically than all other communist countries, and worse than all the capitalist ones, proving statistically that the more capitalism you introduce, the better off you are economically. Combined with hyperinflation of the Yugoslav Dinar, this created a strong pressure to reform the system into a fully capitalist one, and the communist party would have to relinquish power in order for that to happen. They weren’t having it, at least not in the central and eastern part of the country. Slovenia and Croatia were all for it, but the others were against it. The other reason for the economic tension was that Slovenia and Croatia were bringing in most of the money into the federal budget, and the Serbs were controlling the spending from Belgrade, and funneling the money basically to themselves, either trying to “mitigate poverty” in Kosovo, or building huge projects in Belgrade, while Croatian infrastructure was neglected; we couldn’t even build the highway connecting north and south until independence. We didn’t like being cash cows for the Serbs, you can bet.
Also, there was an inherent national tension between Serbs and Croats, that was suppressed by the communist party, but basically the Serbs wanted to control the military and the central government, and the Croats wanted to preserve their language and culture, and Tito kept things controlled after extinguishing a Croat national rebellion in the 1970s, by basically rounding up all the rebels and sending them to Goli Otok (Croatian version of Gulag), and then fulfilling all their demands. For good measure, he also rounded up and imprisoned all the Serbian nationalists who contributed to the situation with their “greater Serbia” policies, and the situation seemed to have been resolved until well after his death; the Croats got their culture, the Serbs got control over the military and the federal budget. However, the Serbian nationalists under Slobodan Milošević restarted the greater Serbia project, which essentially planned to turn Yugoslavia into greater Serbia, and use the Serb-controlled military to extinguish any “nationalist” dissent – because, it’s only “nationalism” when non-Serbs do it, and when the Serbs do it it’s Yugoslav “brotherhood and unity”. The Slovenes and Croats weren’t having it; they responded to the surge of Serbian nationalism that instrumentalised the mechanisms of the central government by relinquishing the authority of the communist party and reforming their national governments into a multi-party system, with full agreement of the national branches of the communist party, which agreed to participate in the free elections. In the elections, the nationalist parties won. The Serbs didn’t like this one bit, and threatened Slovenia and Croatia with the federal army. This increased the calls for independence of the republics, culminating in a referendum which was held, the majority of people voted to declare independence, and this is where Yugoslavia was formally dissolved.
At this point, things started getting bad. The Serbs tried to subdue Slovenia with the military, but since they faced complete opposition from the Slovenian people, this failed and they had to withdraw. In Croatia, they instrumentalised the local Serb minority to declare independence from Croatia, promoting fears that the Croats are some kinds of Nazis who are going to kill them all or something. This was complete nonsense, because the Croats didn’t want to either kill or oppress the Serbs, they just didn’t want the Serbs to keep oppressing them. This later became obvious when the war broke out, and Croats stopped at liberating their own territory; they never struck at Serbia. But let’s return to the beginnings of the war – the national army integrated with the Serb rebellion and occupied parts of Croatia. They repeated this in Bosnia, which fragmented across national lines, starting a very nasty fratricidal war. This lasted several years, during which the Croats built their own army from ground up, and in 1995 they executed two very swift and decisive military operations called “flash” and “storm”, which recovered two out of three Serb-occupied parts of Croatia. Also, they then proceeded to Bosnia and kicked Serbs’ arse so hard that America had to intervene and say “enough is enough, let’s have peace talks now, and whoever continues with this war will have to deal with us”. There was the famous Dayton accord, the third occupied part of Croatia was reintegrated, and Bosnia was basically split into two political units joined under threat of American force: one Serbian, and the other jointly ruled by Muslims and Croats. It seemed that the war was over, but then the Serbs started moving their military to both Kosovo and Macedonia, inflaming the war there. At this point, the Americans decided that Milošević’s Serbia is a rabid dog that needs to be put down if they want to have any peace there, and not have the war spread all the way to Greece, Albania and possibly Bulgaria and what not, so they bombed Serbia into submission, and this, apparently, is the point where Russia woke up and perceived that something bad is going on and Yugoslavia was bombed apart by America. Of course, at that point there was no Yugoslavia any more – the name was only kept by the Serbia-Montenegro entity in order to claim ownership of the formerly federal assets and the significant international reputation of the former country, and the Russians were apparently lethargic enough to have fallen for this piece of trickery, which is not unexpected since this was during the Yeltsin era, and Yeltsin was a drunken and demented fool who couldn’t tell his asshole from a hole in the wall at that point.
So, basically, if you tell a Croat or a Slovenian that Yugoslavia fell apart because NATO bombed Belgrade, they will immediately stop taking you seriously regardless of the merit of your other arguments, because this statement is so obviously and patently false, it’s like stating that the Soviet Union broke apart because Putin came to power. Tell that to a Russian and he will instantly know that you are an idiot. So, dear Russians, please get your knowledge of history up to date. America didn’t break up Yugoslavia; Serbia did, and by the way, it would serve you well not to trust the Serbian propaganda, because that’s what you’ve been hearing – propaganda, consisting of self-serving lies. They broke up Yugoslavia because they tried to dominate and bully the Croats, who are generally very easy going and laid back people, unless you fuck with us, which is the point at which you start wishing you didn’t. They also conveniently forget to tell you that the Ustaše movement in the WW2 era was specifically caused by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s policy of mistreating the Croats in all kinds of nasty and humiliating ways, which ended very badly. Basically, the Croats have a very nasty habit of wiping out everybody who’s fucking with them, and the Serbs historically just can’t help themselves and keep fucking with us, ever since 1918 when the Austria-Hungary empire dissolved, and the Serbs saw this as an opportunity to make up for all the humiliations they suffered by the Ottoman Turks, and decided that conquering and serbifying the neighbours is an excellent thing to do. Also, unlike what the Russians have been told, Serbia is not some kind of a smaller Russia. True, it’s an Orthodox Christian country that writes in Cyrillic scripture and all that, but their mentality is completely different. The Serbs are crybullies, and 500 years under the Ottoman rule left them with a huge chip on their shoulder which makes them a permanent danger to all their neighbours. This is a shame, since I know many Serbs who are nice people, but as a nation they just can’t seem to mind their own business.
That’s not to say that Croats are some kind of angels; unfortunately, they crawled so deeply up America’s arse, they probably reached their tonsils by now, if not sinuses. Both Croatian political class, the press and the educational system are controlled from the American embassy, and are systematically working on destroying our identity and making us into a shapeless colony of the globalist project. Basically, if we had a problem in Yugoslavia, that’s nothing compared to the problem we’re having now.
