Dear hoi.polloi, and All,
here is part 2.
nonhocapito says:
It was necessary to make of the Serbs "monsters" because they were the ones that were going to oppose the division of the nation more than everyone else.
While I agree that Serbs were monsterized in the '90s, I highlighted the word
nation for a reason. Was there ever a Yugoslavian nation? Hardly.
Yugoslavia was a kind of federal state, of semi-autonomius local states: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia-Hertzegovina, Macedonia, etc... The "nation" was of different ethnicities with different religions: Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks (who were originally Serbs and Croats who took up Islam during the Ottoman Turk occupation of the Middle Ages), etc... Using today's phraseology, it was a Multikultural Society, where "different ethnicities and religions live together in harmony and understanding, respecting each other...(or not
...)"-which should be a warning sign number 1. to all who want to enforce Multikulturalism in our societies: this is how it works in practice and this is what it will result in on the long run!
While at the end of WW1, even for some locals it may seemed like a good idea to unite all Southern Slavs in one state, but for example not all Croats approved of exchanging the Habsburgs ruling over them from Vienna to a Serb Monarch ruling over them from Belgrade. This later led to the forming of for example the Croatian Ustaša movement.
I won't delve on the pre-WW2 history; suffice it to say that when Uncle Wolf sent in his Nazi troops to occupy Yugoslavia in 1941, the Croats were happy to form their independent Croatian state, and were quite un-happy when the Communist partisans of Comrade Tito "liberated" them.
For some reason, Hungary was considered the "jackal of Hitler" for taking part in the war against Yugoslavia in 1941 and accepting the "Yugoslavian" territories of Délvidék from Hitler's hands, as if those territories were not ours in the first place. Because, the Hungarian army stopped at the pre-Trianon Hungarian borders: we wanted nothing more than what is ours, and only took part in that war to that limit. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Teleki Pál always wanted a revision of the Trianon Treaty with Western approval, and this was just the opposite with the looming tragedy of getting into war status with the Allied powers; but on the other hand it was morally impossible for a Hungarian patriot to refuse co-operation with the Germans to take back our lands. He did not see the way out of this dilemma: that great, noble Hungarian politician shot himself in the head, God rest his soul in peace.
In the Western history books, you mostly learn that in Yugoslavia there was a partisan warfare to kick out the Germans. The situation was much more complex: it was an all-out civil war, everybody along the dividing lines of the ethnical, religious and political paletta trying to cut the throats of everybody else. The Ustaša went with the Germans, and there was even a Bosniak Muslim SS-Division fighting. The Serb Chetniks were decidedly anti-German, some of them Communist, but some of them Monarchist. We all know Tito and the Commies won at the end, but the emnity and hatered remained.
At the end of WW2, there was serious ethnic cleansing. The German minority ceased to exist, also 40,000 Hungarian civilians went into mass-graves. They were all considered fascists, "war criminals" and collectively guilty. The West did not give a fuck, and what is more, the non-Communist "Yugoslavs" like the Croats who escaped to the West were sent back to Tito: most of these people were executed soon as they stepped onto their Yugoslav homeland.
Under Communism everybody had to be internationalist and Communist officially or else. So the hatred simmered under the surface, waiting for the next round of free-for-all to come.
There were no Soviet troops in Yugoslavia, so Tito decided to follow his own Communist way as he pleases, which led to a break-up with Uncle Joe Stalin who believed that only the Soviet path leads to real Communism. As Hungary was next-door neighbour, with Comrade Rákosi (Rosenfeld) Mátyás leading the Hungarian Communist Party, this led to border-conflicts (of course, these border conflicts were
NOT based on Hungarian territorial claims: nothing would be further from Hungarian Communists than such "fascist" considerations.
Trianon was one of the greatest taboo topics in Communist Hungary) , and the risk of a war with Yugoslavia was very real, even up to a WW3-scare. Tito was considered the running dog of capitalists, and Rákosi and Stalin decided to kick Tito's ass with an organised show trial against some Hungarian Communists. Rajk László and his cronies (all bloody-handed Reds by the way) were falsely accused with conspiring with Tito to murder Rákosi and his cronies. The "Rajk-gang" was hanged.
Now, I still do not understand what is the point of such show-trials when all parties know that it's fake... Rákosi knew it's fake, Stalin knew it's fake, Tito knew it's fake, Rajk knew it's fake (Kádár János told Rajk László that Rákosi knows Rajk is innocent, and if he co-operates, they will send him to the Sovietunion in secret, which was of course a lie). This only resulted in the death of faithful Commies, but these how things were going in Bolshevik circles. But what is the point escapes me...
Under Tito, the Yugoslav Socialism was a-compared to the Stalinist countries-relatively saner and more "free" society. In 1956, the Communist reformers in Hungary wanted partly to kind of copy the Yugoslavian way of Socialism (everybody else just wanted to forget the whole Commie shit once and for all
) or rather, wanted a national, Hungarian Communism and viewed Yugoslavia as an example of a working version of national Communism. The rehabilitation and re-burial of Rajk by the Communist Party!! was an important prelude on the path to the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The innocence of Rajk shook the honest Communists (strange, but it seems like there were some such people, though not that very many) to the core.
Khruschev crushed the revolution with Tito's approval, and it was Tito who suggested that instead of the blood-thirsty Münnich Ferenc, the new leader of Hungary should be Kádár János who was relatively sane. It was the Yugoslavian Embassy where Nagy Imre, the Hungarian Prime Minister of the revolution and his group of reform-Communist followers took asylum, and it was from where the Russians and Kádár kidnapped the "Nagy-group", among whom Nagy Imre and others were hanged, the others imprisoned.
Now, fast-forward, or rather, back to the future: Yugoslavia went on her separate Communist ways, they were more free and economically better off than the rest of the Communist countries. They could travel to the West, lots of Yugo workers went to Germany to work for example. They were the envy of the Eastern-bloc, for example they had jeans!! (wearing decadent clothing like jeans was a big thing among Eastern-block kids, who wanted nothing more that wallowing in Coca-Cola-"high" while listening to beat-music vinyls smuggled in from Yugoslavia
).
Of course, Yugoslav kids were brought up on official stories and films of the brave WW2 Chetniks and Partisans kicking German ass (and Croat kids listened to their Grandpa's secret stories of the glorious times when Grandpa was Ustasa...), and the Southern Slavs were always warlike, macho people... But peace and prosperity reigned, everybody was officially Yugoslav and living conditions were improving, so it was almost as if a happy ending was near.
Almost.
But in 1980 Comrade Tito died (though some may consider this as a happy ending, too...) and his life's work started to crumbling.
This is where I will pick up the thread in my next comment: that will be really about the '90s, I promise! So, stay tuned...
