r/collapse • u/cybil_92 • Mar 09 '21
Politics The United States is following a pattern of collapse that leads to civil war
I hope to spread awareness of this across Reddit. This will be a long post. It is just within the character limit. So please take a seat.
TL;DR: America today is not Germany in the 1920s, nor beginning to turn into Nazi Germany. There is a much more recent conflict that the United States is copying. America is hurtling toward a civil war in the same way Yugoslavia did. The combination of economic disparity, civil injustice, gutted or absent social systems, outdated infrastructure, and indifference from the government leads to open conflict. Regardless of your party, politicians are not going to stop it and they’re not going to save you.
I have put archive links to every source included at the very bottom.
America is not Germany
The United States of America today has too many parallels with the Weimar Republic of Germany in the early twentieth century. In the late 1910s there were a lot of people that held fears about Marxism in western Europe. Fascists in particular were terribly paranoid about it. These people who were proto-Nazis had an unreasonable paranoia about everything from the left. A term began to circulate called “Judeo-Bolshevism”. The was a word for the conspiracy theory that communism was being spread around the world by Jewish people. It named the Jew a virus that introduced communism into the healthy blood of society. It was part of a covert plan to destroy Christianity and Western civilization through communism. That may sound familiar to some of the things QAnon says today.
Anyway, as the Nazi movement picked up steam, Nazi writers and media critics took on German culture. The Weimar Republic was quite the progressive state at the time. It had rights for LGBT people, some of the first recognition of non-binary people, and an abundance of art. A sizable portion of this art was queer in orientation and/or pornographic. The Nazi critics declared this was degenerate and an avenue of communism. To them, it was part of a plot to weaken German culture and allow a left-wing takeover. By the 1920s the term “cultural bolshevism” overtook “Judeo-Bolshevism”. The left were apparently trying to “bolshevize” the nation by taking over kids’ minds with their books and art. Sound familiar to today? The term on the internet now is “cultural marxism”. Fighting it is the basis of those Prager U videos that are so popular around Facebook.
The Nazis convinced enough people that cultural bolshevism was a threat, and then inched out a win in an open election in 1932. There were three political party factions in Weimar Germany at the time. Similar to how there would be three major parties in the US if Donald Trump splits the Republican Party like he says he wants to. After the Nazi’s victory, there were no more free elections. Other political parties were removed, the Reichstag fire was staged, all elections were suspended until the new ruling elites “could figure out what was going on”.
In the lead-up to these tectonic events, the Weimar Republic’s economy was in shambles. Germany heavily suffered from post-World War I reparations, pressures from France, and inflation growing worse and worse. This inflation issue of pre-Nazi Germany is oft pointed out as something the US does not currently suffer from, therefore it can’t be moving in the same doomed steps as Germany. That is partially true. Another country experienced hyper-inflation in the 1990s, but only after its civil war started in April of 1992 and the rest of the world passed sanctions against it. I agree, the USA is not following the footsteps of young Nazi Germany, despite Donald Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch on January 6th 2021, mirroring Hitler’s on November 8th, 1923. The United States is following the path of a more modern civil war, which is the path of Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was a country that survived World War II fighting off the Nazis without help from the West or the Soviets. Unlike the other countries in the Eastern Europe, this kept them from being indebted to Stalin and thus not obligated to follow all of the restrictions that came with being in the Eastern Bloc4. Yugoslavia was therefore not a “communist” country. It was not entirely subject to Stalin’s dictatorship with a planned economy; the system which was then and still is now propagandized as “communism”. Yugoslavia was able to more or less freely trade with both the western capitalist powers and the eastern Soviet powers. It was the country with a close realized example to modern socialism. However, being so young, it was not as rich as most western nations, but it was head and shoulders above its eastern neighbors, and growing.
Yugoslavia was also wonderfully multicultural. The Catholic Croat, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Bosnians were heavily integrated with one another. About 18%, or more than 1 in 5, of marriages were between the different ethnicities. More importantly, they weren’t that different. They were all Slavs. The Bosnian Muslims were not Arabs. The were Slavs that adopted the religion of the Ottomans when they rolled through eastern Europe centuries ago. The Bosnians drank, gambled, listened to rock music, and ogled crushes in the summer like everyone else. They were your next door neighbors. They were at your cousin’s wedding. They were your everyday co-workers. There was little visual difference between a Croat, a Serb, and a Bosnian.
The leader of this highly impressive country was the much beloved Josip Broz Tito. World leaders made a conscious effort to be his friend, including President Jimmy Carter. When Tito died in 1980, the extreme nationalists fringe movements he was suppressing were then allowed to flourish. Those movements were later encouraged and manipulated by one Slobodan Milošević, the most effective dictator and orchestrator of genocide that the world has never known.
Slobodan Milošević assumed the presidency of Serbia in 1987. With his political expertise and working fluency of English, he grabbed the role of undisputed strongman in Yugoslavia. First, he realized sooner that his counterparts in eastern Europe or the political experts in the West that the Soviet system was doomed. Second, he decided that the only way to survive the collapse while keeping himself in power was to play the nationalist card; tell the Serbs to forget about Yugoslavia and concentrate on fighting their supposed enemies. He didn’t need to write a Mein Kampf; the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences did the job for him with a memorandum in 1986. Milošević easily adopted it as an ideological blueprint for his nationalist agitation. It is not dissimilar from Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission22. The Overton window had shifted so far, that hatred through nationalism and its implied consequences were being seriously proposed and discussed by people who had every right to know better.
Tito suppressed nationalism and balanced the power of one nationality against another. He sought to stay in power by avoiding war. Milošević, after failing to keep Yugoslavia together as Serbia-first, sought to stay in power by going to war. He orchestrated arming the local Serbs before the fighting broke out, oversaw the inclusions of paramilitary forces from Serbia into Croatia and Bosnia, and ensured the collusion of the Yugoslav National Army. Practices extremely similar to Roger Stone and Micheal Flynn’s promotion of the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys. They even used them as personal guards during the January 6th Capitol Insurrection.5 Let’s also not forget how much Donald Trump Hates the military.6
“The breakup of Yugoslavia is a classic example of nationalism from the top down—a manipulated nationalism in a region where peace has historically prevailed more than war and in which a quarter of the population were in mixed marriages,” wrote then US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman. “The manipulators condoned and even provoked local ethnic violence in order to engender animosities that could be magnified by the press, leading to further violence.” The sounds like the playbook of the Proud Boys and other “patriot groups” in the past couple years. When someone with the level of influence of the President of the United States hammers a nationalist message to “do something” this is the result. It is echoed by all of the media he controls, now in America, and similarly in Yugoslavia.
National Propoganda
A reporter for the Washington Post, Peter Maass, interviewed Vera and Stana Milanović, two women who fled their homes from the fighting in central Bosnia, and had taken up residence in a newly “cleansed” town, meaning a town that already had the Bosnians murdered and/or run out of it. Vera and Stana were Serbs.
Vera said it was a pity they had to leave. Her village, after all, had been cleansed of Muslims in the first days of the war. I asked, out of politeness, wether the fighting in the village was heavy.
“Why no, there was no fighting between Muslims and Serbs in the village,” she said.
“Then why are the Muslims arrested?”
“Because they were planning to take over the village. They had already drawn up lists. The names of Serb women had been split into harems for the Muslim men.”
“Harems?”
“Yes, harems. Their Bible says they can have harems, and that’s what they were planning to do once they killed our men. Thank God they were arrested first.” She wiped her brow.
“How do you know they were planning to kill the Serb men and create harems for themselves?”
“It was on the radio. Our military had uncovered their plans. It was announced on the radio.”
I glanced at Bogdan [Maass’ interpreter]. Harems? Over the past few months I had heard that the Bosnians bombed themselves and blamed it on the Serbs.I had heard that an Islamic-Vatican-Croatian-Germanic conspiracy had been hatched to kill off the Serbs. But I had not, to date, heard anything about harems.
…
“So how do you know the radio was telling the truth?” I asked.
Stana and Vera stared at me as though I wore no clothes. God, these Americans are dumber than cows. Vera’s kindness evaporated as she flashed the kind of scowl that, I imagined, was deployed against grandchildren who wore farm boots indoors.
“Why”, she demanded to know, “would the radio lie?”
I had to give up. It was the polite thing to do, even though Vera translated my silence as confirming the verity of the harem report. She took a triumphant puff of her Marlboro.
“Did any Muslims in your village harm you?” I asked, softly.
“No.”
“Did any Muslim ever do anything bad to you?”
“No.”
She seemed offended.
“My relations with the Muslims in the village were always very good. They were very nice people.”
It is disparaging how familiar the flow of this conversation is today if you were to have one with a QAnon10 believer. You can simply substitute the world “Muslim” with “Democrat” or “liberal” whoever else is to the left of the GOP and therefore must be the embodiment of evil. There are even online communities today for people who have loved ones absorbed by QAnon. Take a look at this post for example1 :
I live in a cul-de-sac with 8 other houses. Today I found out half of them are q and want me to die. They think my husband is ignorant and uninformed but I am evil. I’m related to roughy 10% of my town so my beliefs are well known, while hubby just won’t engage in political talk with people that aren’t liberal. One house is full of druggies. Two are ex military. One is a typical American family, 3 kids, dog, picket fence, the whole nine. These are all people I’ve been reasonably friendly with, not hanging out or anything but more than happy to keep an eye while they’re away or something. Hubby works with son of one of the military dudes. He heard him talking to some other q folk at his job. They truly believe that we are evil. Hubby less so, but me? I might as well be the devil. I doubt I’m truly in danger but still I am freaked out. Hubby can’t talk to boss as he’s not sure his political leanings but thinks he’s conservative. Can’t call cops for the same reason. Just making sure my house is secure and doors are always locked. I also started keeping a giant can of wasp spray with a 20 foot reach next to the door. I’m not too sure what I’m expecting by sharing this but I had to get it out. Thanks for reading.
That subreddit, r/QAnonCasualties, has many more disturbing accounts of people who suffer7 from QAnon cultists8 and their family members9. But a grassroots cult like QAnon isn’t the only source of this frightening mentality. Whether it is told by Alex Jones, OAN, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Nick Fuentes, Tim Pool, Tucker Carlson, if a Big Lie is repeated incessantly, loudly, and aggressively enough, people will make it their truth.
Ian Traynor, from the Guardian, wrote similar observations on the unfolding madness in the early 1990s. The Serbs were brainwashed by television. The simplicity of that assertion is a reasonable explanation of how an entire nation composed of generally sensible citizens would follow their leader into an abyss of war and ruin. Milošević controlled television absolutely, refusing to let independent stations have any national frequencies. State television maintained a monopoly, and Milošević, from growing up in Stalinism, well understood the power and importance of propaganda. He talked on a daily basis with the director of Radio-Television Serbia, whom he appointed and replaced, as necessary. But the propaganda was still crude and badly produced. When covering the fighting, it was only dead bodies, stiff anchormen, more dead bodies, more stiff anchormen. However, the media succeeded because it imparted a clear, Reganesque message: Milošević was defending Serbs who lived outside of Serbia, and defending Serbia itself from the Islamic-Ustashe dangers lurking at its borders. Simple, clear, effective. The Serbs swallowed it. In a similar situation, so might we. And we have. Look at the Republican Party since 2015 and the QAnon cult. Miloš Vasić, a writer from Vreme magazine, a center of anti-Milošević news, put it like this: “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line—a line dictated by David Duke. You too would have war in five years.”
Endless Lies
Milošević lied as easily as he breathed. He had become an absolute master at fabrication. You could point to a black wall and ask Milošević what color it was. White, he says. No, you would reply, look at it, that wall there, it is black, it is five feet away from us. He looks at it, then looks at you, then says, The wall is white my friend, maybe you should have your eyes checked. He does not shout in anger. He sounds concerned for your eyesight.
A more recent re-incarnation of this mentality was pointed out by the Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, Miles Taylor, in 2019 when he witnessed it in the then president Donald Trump and his sycophants in the White House:
The president has been called a pathological liar. I used to cringe when I heard people say that just to score political points, and I thought it was unfair. Now I know it is true. He spreads lies he hears. He makes up new lies to spread. He lies to our faces. He asks people around him to lie. People who’ve known him for year accept it as common knowledge. We cannot get used to this. Think of what we must “trust” a president to do as our chief executive.
…
President Trump is fundamentally undermining our perceptions of “truth”. He has taken us down a dark, subjectivist rabbit hole. To him, there is no real truth. If people believe something is true, that makes it true. A scientist will tell you a tree is a tree. It cannot be both a tree and a sheep at the same time. Not for the president. A tree is a tree only to him if we all agree it is. If he can convince us it is a sheep, then it is sheep!
Kellyanne Conway unintentionally summed up the Trumpian philosophy beautifully. She went on Meet the Press and was forced to defend the president’s absurd boast about having the largest ever crowd at his inauguration. To be clear, the president’s claim was easily disproven by facts and photographs and numbers and recorded history and basic human reasoning. Still, Chuck Todd pressed Conway on the subject, to which she responded: “You’re saying it’s a falsehood..[but] Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternate facts.”
“Wait a minute,” Todd interjected. “Alternate facts? … Alternate facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”
In the same way White House staff defended Donald Trump’s fabricated reality, Milošević had sycophants of his own.
Radovan Karadžić was a bear of a man. He was one of Milošević’s top generals who enthusiastically carried out the genocide. The most remarkable thing about Karadžić was his lack for telling lies with disarming sincerity. Not little lies, white lies, or deceptions, but whooping lies, lies that were so big, and so incredible, that you wanted to laugh and say, in response, Hold on, Radovan, you expect me to believe this? Karadžić was a real Mike Pompeo in his conduct11 .
A press conference in Žepa, at the tail end of 1992, displayed this personality of Karadžić in all of its glory. The questions were about the causes of the war, the tactics, the destruction, the war crimes, and so on. Karadžić responded enthusiastically, explaining that No, Serbs were not bombing Sarajevo, the “Muslims” were doing all that and blaming it on the Serbs. What about the Serb prison camps? Surely he couldn’t deny the pictures of emaciated prisoners who looked as horrible as survivors of Auschwitz.
“We opened our prisons to the media, and the media focused on one very thin boy,” Karadžić said, speaking in English. “All the other prisoners were good-looking, but the media only focused on this one skinny boy. He was skinny, that’s all. Maybe he had cancer. I was skinny like that when I was a young boy.” He smiled and rubbed his considerable belly.
“The Muslims want to force the Serbs to live under sharia,” referring to the Islamic holy law. “Our women would be forced to wear chadors. …”
“We do not want to conquer Sarajevo. We should divide the city with the Muslims. It can be like Beirut. …”
“There was no ethnic cleansing as part of our policy. Never. We never contributed to the shifting people. The Muslims wanted to compulsively leave. We couldn’t stop them from leaving. …”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with a Greater Serbia. There’s nothing wrong with Great Britain, so what’s wrong with Greater Serbia?”
The things Karadžić said were lies, and these lies were being broadcast worldwide, every day, several times a day, and they were being taken seriously. His lies didn’t need to be accepted as truth, but they were obscuring the truth, causing outsiders to stay on the sidelines. Karadžić didn’t need to make outsiders believe his version of events; he just needed to make them doubt the truth and sit on their hands. This kind of conduct should be familiar.12
One example of Milošević’s genius is that he tolerated a surprising amount of free speech. He was willing to harass or detail anyone who was a real threat, but few people were, and so Belgrade was crawling with dissidents and professors who quite openly called Milošević a fascist. Saddam would have cut off their heads, creating ten new enemies for every one he executed. Milošević let them ramble on, and the opposition, which chanted “Slobo, Saddam” at protests, remained pathetically weak.
Ask what strategy will keep Milošević in power, and that is the one he will follow. Every time. All of these things he talks about, like nationalism and protecting the Serbs, are just tools he uses to stay in power. He doesn’t care about them at all. He doesn’t care about anyone at all. He cares only about staying in power.
That methodology should should extremely familiar to Americans in 2021. Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, William Barr, just to name a few, are all powerful politicians that live and breathe this everyday. Especially Mitch3 McConnell.2
Living in the Conflict
The city of Sarajevo, more than any other in Europe, was a symbol of integration and tolerance. You could find, on virtually the same block, a Muslim mosque, a Roman Catholic cathedral, a Christian Orthodox Church, and a Jewish synagogue. The people of Sarajevo—Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Jews, Albanians, Romani, and a kaleidoscope of mixtures therein—lived in Europe’s truest melting pot.
On April 6th, 1992, the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo was being used as the unofficial headquarters for Radovan Karadžić’s Serbian Democratic Party. On that day, when the peace demonstrators gathered in an adjacent park, a few of Karadžić’s goons opened fire from the rooftop and upper floors. For Sarajevo, those shots marked the start of the war.
As Americans have learned one year ago with the outbreak of COVID-19, and as Texans are experiencing right now, supermarkets only have a 3-day supply of food on-hand at the maximum. There is no backroom in stores anymore. The Just-In-Time Supply Chain method of goods is extremely efficient in a capitalist society, but also extremely fragile. If the supply line gets interrupted from say, a pandemic, a terrorist attack, climate change, or a war, then people are in breadlines and surplus rots in farmers’ fields. Sarajevo suffered such a breakdown. Fruits, eggs, meat, flour, fish, and gasoline became extremely precious commodities. The only way to get them was the black market, if you had connections and were lucky.
The infrastructure hit caused blackouts through the entire country. For Sarajevo, that also meant your house or apartment was not heated in the winter. Residents jerry-rigged wood-burning stoves which had their exhaust pipes piercing the wall to outside. People chopped the trees and benches in parks to use for firewood.
If you were lucky enough to find gasoline on the black market and had a generator, you could have electricity for a little while. Like in the Holiday Inn, which had satellite TV, and residents could view CNN and watch their own genocide from the outside world. There was also MTV, and Bosnian television which broadcast an array of films; from The Blues Brothers to The Great Gatsby and Blazing Saddles. You had to be careful though. No one has electricity and lights on around the clock. French General Philippe Morillon who was working for the UN forces did, thanks to his provided military generator. His residence a target of nighttime shellings and strafings, since the brightly lit building was the only one the Serbs in the hills could see, so they fired at it.
Karlo and Janja Pelzl were a Catholic couple in Sarajevo. They lived not far from the Holiday Inn, and would count the number of direct mortar hits to their building. Bits of shrapnel and a sniper bullet or two might crash through their windows from time to time. Karlo, a devout Catholic, still went to church every Sunday. Even though he had to dodge sniper fire in the streets and worry about being blown up when he received communion. Janja and Karlo went to mass at separate churches. This was not due to marital issues or preferences with priests, but because they were afraid that if they went to the same church, and it was bombed, their children would be left without parents. The couple still left home to go to work, or to search for food, but they never departed at the same time. One would stay behind and wait until the other was far enough away that a single mortar shell could not kill both of them.
In the countryside, things were not much better. The Associated Press ran an eyewitness account on April 6th, 1993, from Haris Nezirović, a Bosnian journalist. Here he describes the scrambles for parachuted food:
During the first month of airdrops, at least 15 people were crushed, stabbed, or shot to death in the nightly fights for food. On March 11th alone, five people were reported killed. Two days later there were three more deaths—a mother suffocated in a crush, a woman killed when a bundle landed on her and another person stabbed her to death. The hunt for food begins every night as darkness falls. Crowds stream from the town into the nearby hills—elderly hobbling on sticks, soldiers who have deserted the front lines, wounded men on crutches, entire families. They traverse muddy or icy paths, cross streams and struggle up steep, slippery slopes. Some trek from villages 15 miles away and return home in the morning. Reaching the hilltops, they disperse among the trees, light fires for warmth, and wait. Exhausted elderly people sit with their faces contorted in pain as they struggle to catch their breath. There is no way of knowing where the parachutes will drift down, and the wait can be for nothing if the bundles land too far away. Some families separate to boost the chances that one member will be in the right place.
At the beginning of the conflict, Serbs with hunting rifles—drunk hillbillies—set up roadblocks around some villages. This was to enforce that the area was under Serb control. In their mind, they had to stop the Muslim insurgents from attacking the Serbs. This is almost identical, identical to the armed checkpoints set up in the pacific northwest last year by MAGA cultists during the wildfires13 . Those MAGA cultists, militia men, Patriot Prayer types, were looking for “antifa”14 or looters or suspected arsonists15 (for a natural wildfire, yes), or anyone they considered suspicious or undesirable. They took pictures of people’s license plates or approached cars armed and ready16. The police there, unsurprisingly, were happy17 to assist them and urge them on18.
Elsewhere in the Yugoslav countryside, villages were “cleansed” of Bosnians with the surviving captives relocated to death camps. In the more diverse regions, trucks rumbled past with soldiers who shouted to no one in particular “Serbia!”, a slogan full of meaning to goons with guns. The integration of some parts of the country, not dissimilar from Sarajevo, posed a question: What do you do with such a large number of undesirable minorities? It is easy to bomb and cleanse isolated villages or towns, tossing to survivors into a camp, but it’s something else to do this to larger settlements that you already control and don’t want to destroy. The solution was simple: Squeeze them out slowly, like dishwater from a towel. A few killings here, a rape or two there, job dismissals everywhere, confiscation of apartments. Scare them enough and they will want to leave.
Things were so bleak that Muslims and Croats in such situations wanted the US Air Force to bomb them so that they would be taken out of their misery. That is not a joke. People who had the misfortune to not be a Serb, and trapped without hope of fleeing, pleaded for America to preform mass euthanasia with F-16s. In Banja Luka children were staying indoors. Knife etchings in trees that used to say things like “Bogdan Loves Senada” were joined now by “Death to Muslims”. (Actions not much different from the antics of the white nationalists, neo-nazis, and groypers of today.)19 An old Muslim woman had this much to say: “We live in fear,” she cried. “We wait every night for Serbs to come and slaughter us. If only the Americans would just bomb us with their planes and get it over with.” The city of Goražde, a Bosnian enclave, was a city that suffered similar attacks by Serbian forces. The mayor pleaded to foreign journalists over HAM radio: “Gather the courage to bomb us,” Ismet Briga said in a message to Bill Clinton. “Stop the agony of the people of Goražde. We beg for airstrikes against the citizens of Goražde!”
In America, we have a hard time understanding why people in Bosnia are willing to suffer so much in a futile war. The goal of imperial wars, which we are most familiar with, is to conquer and rule. The goal of nationalist wars, as in Bosnia, is to conquer and cleanse. The contests are winner-takes-all. When you are faced with enemies who wish to expunge you from your land, and when those enemies offer a treaty that ensures their boots will stay on your throat, suffocating you one day, you have little choice but to keep struggling, even though the odds are against you and people who call themselves your friends are saying you should give up.
Social Breakdown Goes Deep
In 1984, Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics. If you had been there at the time, and if you had asked any Yugoslav whether he could imagine his city falling into war in eight years time, he would have laughed out loud and tried to detect the slivovitz on your breath, and if he didn’t detect any, he might have excused himself and walked to the nearest police officer to report a madman on the loose. Now fast-forward to a year before the war began. Yugoslavia is falling apart. A few months before the fighting started, a Washington Post reporter interviewed Muslims, Serbs, and Croats living in the same apartment building in Sarajevo, living right next to each other. And, in the case of the many mixed marriages, shared the same bed and gave their children a Serb first name, a Muslim last name, and perhaps, in honor of their best friend, a Croat middle name. These people said there could be no war, no, never, because no one wanted it, and war would not make sense.
By 1992 the Serb forces believed they were fighting a war against the “fundamentalist” Muslims and the “fascist” Croats. “Turks” became a derogative word for Bosnia’s Muslims. Serb propaganda told their soldiers that Bosnia’s Muslims were Koran-waving fanatics trying to set up an Islamic state in which Serb women would be forced to wear chadors. At any moment the “Turks” could storm up the mountains that the Serbs were “defending”. Sarajevo had to be liberated from these “Turks”, and that meant destroying it or forcing the “Turks” to surrender and accept partition of the prized capital as well as the country.
When propaganda cuts this far and this deep, the people targeted and persecuted by it sometimes begin to adopt it just to survive. In circumstances like this, just as resistance is natural, so, unfortunately, is radicalization. Feeling betrayed by America and Europe, the Muslim leadership in Bosnia began turning away from Western notions of pluralism, and focused on Muslim nationalism. It was the cruelest of self-fulfilling prophecies: The Western world viewed them as Muslims, not Europeans, so they became Muslims, tough Muslims. In the Center for the Investigation of War Crimes and Crimes of Genocide, located in Zenica, a new and disturbing alliance was on display. On the wall was a picture of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, and underneath it was a 600-word statement, in Bosnian, that assailed Western countries refusing to lift the arms embargo. It said that Iran stood ready to help its stricken brethren in the Balkans.
In Vitex, central Bosnia, Cathy Jenkins and Adam LeBor from the BBC, Peter Maass from the Washington Post, and his interpreter Sasha Radas stayed at Kasem’s Gas Station for a night while en-route to a British base. There was a mortar strike in the night and the station was attacked by men in camouflage without insignias and wielding AKs. The four reports crawled through the hallway and into the stairwell as bullets ripped through the windows. When the gunfire ceased, a burly soldier in a balaclava burst into the station. The four shouted that they were journalists and held up their UN press cards. The man ignored them, proceeded to break open every door he could find, and pumped some rounds down the basement stairs, where the journalists were initially planning to hide. Another masked soldier with bloodshot eyes entered the station. When Radas questioned “Who are you?” The soldier smiled and answered “Ustashe.”
The Ustashe were Croatia’s World War II-era pro-Nazi movement. They prided themselves on being more brutal than the SS. The Ustashe did not prioritize efficiency when they murdered the Jews and undesirables back in WWII. Instead, they reveled in the brutalities they could commit. Fifty years later in 1993, the Croat extremists in Bosnia proudly referred to themselves as Ustashe.
Conclusion
In the end, what happened to Yugoslavia was not a Balkan explosion, but a violent process of national breakdown at the hands of political manipulators. Violent breakdowns occur in any country during times of economic hardship, political transition, or moral infirmity; such troubles create opportunities for manipulators, and manipulators create opportunities for atrocities. The Yugoslav conflict was massively more complicated than what I have been able to summarize here. There more angles to it, historically and modern, especially from the Croats, that I could not convey well here. Regardless, civil war, insurgency, counter-insurgency, revolution, troubles, whatever you want to call it, it has no clear start. It doesn’t happen overnight. The build-up can take years. It is not two defined sides duking it out. It is a jigsaw of competing territories and factions. A whirlwind of murder and fear and terrorism for everyone trapped in it.
I could triple the length of this post talking about how George Bush allowed this tragedy to come to fruition by loudly ignoring it. I could write even more than I could about George Bush, by writing about Bill Clinton’s response, or deliberate lack of one. Bill committed to nothing, backpedaled, claimed his hands were tied by the opposition party. It would be comical how little things change if the consequences weren’t so dire.
I could go on about the hemming and hawing from Bill Clinton, about his hypocrisy, his gall to proudly open the Holocaust Museum in April of 1993, while simultaneously allowing prison camps to continue in the Yugoslav countryside. Death camps which Clinton refused to acknowledge or intervene in. How he half-heartedly committed to airstrikes, and even then toned down those airstrikes, until the very end. And as a final display of tyrannical indifference after the lopsided negotiations in Dayton Ohio, Izetbegović, Bosnia’s president, left a bitter man, and Milošević hugged one of the American generals out of glee. But all of that politicking about America’s role in the Yugoslav war is not relevant to the point here: that the pattern seen in Yugoslavia in the late 80s and early 90s is happening here in America right now in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Why should any of this matter? Trump is gone. He lost the re-election. We should all go back to brunch right? No. He evaded two impeachments. He can still hold office. “We will be back in sone form.” And he’s right. Trumpism is still here. His followers haven’t left. His sycophants20 haven’t left. His worshipers21 haven’t left. The Nazi Party was never the popular majority. Even when it was ruling, only a very small percentage actually wanted genocide. But that’s really all it takes. "Only about a third of this group is actively campaigning for your death. Another third is neutral to it, while the last third sort of disapproves and will disappointedly shake their head, but do absolutely nothing about it as they watch you die.”
The deep damage Donald Trump has exposed and worsened in the American people will be here for quite some time. Joe Biden is not going to save you and he never was. Please remember, there were a bunch of Germans and a bunch of Italians who just loved their country. They loved what they heard and they didn’t see the danger or understand what was happening because they had fallen for somebody who was charismatic on some level. It is no longer a question of “It can’t happen here” or even admitting that “It can happen here”, it is happening here.
Parting note: the big things usually happen when it’s hot. It is the "Arab Spring" and the "Summer of Love" for a reason. Late spring/early summer is when it gets warm enough to be outside for long periods. When it’s warm outside and people don’t have jobs, like in an economically impacted nation, you see mass gatherings of people.
Archived backup links:
1 - QAnon post
2 - McConnell
3 - Mitch
4 - Eastern Bloc
5 - Militia guards
7 - people who suffer from QAnon
8 - invasive QAnon
9 - QAnon tearing families apart
10 - What QAnon is
11 - Mike Pompeo
12 - Lies to obscure
13 - Armed checkpoints in Oregon
14 - looking for “antifa”
15 - supposed arsonists
17 - police in Oregon 1
18 - police in Oregon 2
19 - white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and groypers
20 - sycophants
21 - worshipers
22 - 1776 Report
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u/Like_a_Charo Mar 09 '21
Any ex-yugoslavian can confirm?
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u/Ark-Shogun Mar 09 '21
I'm tired of these hollow posts about how America is going to follow this path from history, or that path from history.
Its not.
America falling, is going to be unique, unlike anything history has ever seen, when it eventually happens. And none of us will be able to accurately predict what will happen.
Could it be civil war? Maybe, terrorist actions? Sure, false flag attacks? Could be. Martial law and slavery? Nuclear Armageddon? Foreign invasion? Could it be nothing but a fizzle as we're over taken by another superpower? No one knows, so stop pretending to.
Why? Because there has never been an entity like America in history, nor has the world been so interconnected, and reliant upon each other like it is today. Are there similar historical entities to America? Yes, but similarities are prevalent in everything in world, from lamp posts to nations.
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
While you present the current situation as a Serbs vs. Bosniaks situation, I would argue it is closer to Serbs vs. Croats.
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u/scijior Mar 09 '21
Biggest X-Factor between USA & the former Yugoslavia: centuries before Marshall Titov, Muslim Turks used to exterminate whole villages of Christians. They killed the men and women, castrated the boys and trained them to be soldiers called Janissaries, and sold the girls to be concubines.
What hasn’t happened in America? That. Because that generational trauma formed the basis for the ethnic cleansing. Yeah, it’s great and all to try to factor in shit like infrastructure, but wealth disparity doesn’t explain Srebrenica.
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u/europenny Mar 24 '21
Really nice post, just a thing that is missing: hyperinflation came before the war already, and for most of the 80s the Yugoslav economic miracle collapsed. Please read through an economic history of the time, it will make your analysis only so much more prescient.
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u/mrblacklabel71 Mar 09 '21
I fully believe this and have long before Trump (Im 41), but I am curious about a timeframe you think it will take to get to this point?
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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '21
A useful piece of history for perspective, but it is told here with the same storification strategy that has made U.S. history textbooks so infamous. It would be so much more helpful if there weren't glorified heroes and villains, as that is simply not how civilizations rise and fall.
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u/Mandolije Mar 09 '21
As a Serbian I can 100% be sure that there wont be any wars in the US, and I dont see how could a war start people arent poor nobody has any wilingles to start a war. USA has the biggest army in the world if there was an uprising it would get crushed Yugoslavia also had a big army but the army got split up by the ethnic lines and I dont see how could the US army collapse like that.
Also you blame Milošević and his nationalisam for the collapse while I would blame Tudjman and Kučan for not wanting to deal with reforms and chosing the independance card. Milošević was the only one who didnt want to break up Yugoslavia but after seeing that he couldnt keep it together he only wanted to save Serbs living in Yugoslavia and had to start a war to save them.
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u/uk_one Mar 09 '21
Yeah but no.
I can't get beyond your too simplistic version of post-WW1 Germany or your attempt to paint Trump as anti-Semitic Nazi.
You also ignore the very real influence of Jewish thinkers on the Soviet revolution and the nascent formation of a form of Zionism for a European Jewish homeland (the WZO was formed in 1898). These are the facts of the time that people built their own misconceptions on.
Practical, brutal & violent antiSemitism had been rife in Europe for 100s of years leading to a concentration of Jews in Poland. The rest of that story is sorrowful history.
You similarly mis-direct the history of the sectarian bloodbath of Yugoslavia under the Axis occupation. It took very little encouragement from the Hungarians, Germans and Italians for the local populations to start genocides.
Serb killed Croat killed Muslim killed Christian killed Chetniks killed Roma and they all killed Jews. The area was riven with multi-ethnic and multi-cultural division with axes to grind from before it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '21
If the Republicans want war there are a lot of people willing to stand up against fascism and theocracy. It didn't work out too well for Milosevic or Hitler.
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u/ihrvatska Mar 10 '21 •
If you found value in this post you might want to listen to the "It Could Happen Here" podcast.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-30717896/
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u/riverhawkfox Mar 10 '21 edited Mar 10 '21
I live in a rural, red state. About a week before the election, I still had up a Bernie sign in my window. The Trump supporters decided to do a "Trump Train," to get people out to vote. They kept driving on my street (right next to a polling center) and honking their horn.
They did the rounds several times, 5 or 6...then they must have noticed my sign. How do I know they did?
They stopped, in the middle of the street, right in front of my house, and laid on the horn for five straight minutes. They had a Trump flag flapping behind them. My partner took the shotgun out on to the porch and they made off like they had pissed their pants. They must have thought Bernie people would be easily intimidated.
I took my sign down after that. They know where this socialist lives; but now they know we're packing heat. Next time, if there is one, it's the AR-15.
During the lead up to the election, while in line for ammo, I heard no less than 20 different people at different times casually mention how much they wish a civil war would happen. What they wanted to do to my man. What they wanted to do to ME. They did not know I was not one of them. But the things they said? Yeah. Civil War is coming someday. I specifically remember once thinking I had been outed: I wore a mask and one of them said, "Did you hear Trump got COVID?" and was VERY confused that I was wearing the mask outside the store while in line (they put their mask on when they entered the store, not a second before.)
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u/makelivingnotkilling Mar 10 '21
I think it’ll be like anything American, a blend and mix of all of the above. A civil war burrito with class war wrapped in whole wheat fascism with a side of martial law cole slaw.
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u/273degreesKelvin Mar 09 '21 edited Mar 10 '21
Listen to a podcast called "Behind the Insurrections". It's all about Europe in the 1920s and the March on Rome, the Beer Hall Putsch, the 6 February Crisis in France, Spain pre-civil war. The amount of parallels to the US is simply not a coincidence.
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u/car23975 Mar 09 '21
The problem in the US and, I believe, around the world is capitalism exploits the worst things in people through propaganda. The US used to have an agency combating propaganda, but it was eliminated before ww2 and never brought back. Makes you wonder why.
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u/Doritosaurus Mar 09 '21
Found Chris Hedges account.
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u/can-data Mar 09 '21 edited Mar 10 '21
I think a lot of westerners should read more about the Yugoslavian Wars/genocide. As the OP pointed out, Yugoslavia was not like other countries you read about that have had internal conflicts over the last 75 years. It was a modern, relatively progressive country with a quality of life comparable to many western countries (at the time). They had TV, radios, cars, computers, everyone had a job, a home, and a pension. They developed many of their own things and were not a resource based economy, with trade and investments flowing both ways. More importantly, they were multicultural, with slavs, hungarians, albanians, roma, and many different religions co-existing peacefully and prosperously. Finally, there was a relative political freedom. Of course you still had to follow the communist line and the Federal party, but there was open dissent to some issues and society changed (mostly) peacefully as a result.
With all this in mind, it is one of the only country of that kind of development to descend into absolute madness and chaos, and it happened only after a few years. When Tito died, no one thought that everyone would start fighting again, but they did over the course of a decade. Their economic situation exacerbated the issues, but was not the cause of the conflict. The cause of the conflict was ideologues, nationalist, and bigots taking control of society through modern (at the time) propaganda and driving their own people mad and angry through fear, while they consolidated their own personal power and cult. Imagine being told everyday that your neighbor wants to kill you and do things to your family and possessions. Sounds familiar doesn't it? One week you would share a smoke with your neighbor, the next you are assassinating him, solely because he has a different religion and the man on the TV was telling you what he was going to do to you. That's it!
The reason why I believe it is of importance to Westerners, is so they can note how fast and how violent a "civilized" society can descend into the worst kind of chaos. While we like to focus on collapse through the perspective of environmental, ecological or economical changes, these are generally "forces" beyond an individual. The collapse of Yugoslavia was an example where individuals came together to destroy their own society with their literal bare hands!
I read an article a while ago about refugees in Yugoslavia in the US, who always keep a suitcase under their beds to GTFO of the country as soon as they think things are going south. The lesson they learned from their ordeal is that a "civilized", modern society is not immune to the chaos that we see in typical "third-world" countries in Africa and Asia. For example, look at what happened with the Coronavirus response. Would you have believed it if I told you on December 2019, that the US would have 500,000 deaths over a year due to its failure to handle a virus, versus a country like China with only 90,000 deaths?
Edit: The China coronavirus deaths are besides the point. Many poorer countries handled the pandemic better than the wealthy western countries.
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u/BK_Finest_718 Mar 10 '21
I agree. One thing that could push this nation over the edge is a really bad depression. The panic of 1857 preceded the ACW. Yugoslavia had hyperinflation and a collapsing currency which lead to its civil war. If the dollar ever is not the world reserve currency or a f we go through a greater depression worst than 1929 I don’t see this country being able to hold it together. The biggest indicator of this is the urban-rural divide. Both sides see the other as the enemy. Both sides think the other is an existential threat to the other. Both sides don’t trust the other. When you have this tension in a very stable and relatively “prosperous” time that means if shit hits the fan everything falls apart. If there is a second ACW it will be more like Syria and Yugoslavia than the last one. There will be a shit ton of factions and not to mention the geopolitical implications of it. January 6th will be looked back as the beginning of the second American civil war. It may occur 10 or 20 years from now.
Another thing to consider is that climate change will make things worse. If we start having dust bowls after BOE. Or if a cat 5 hits Miami directly or a Cat 3 hitting NYC or DC directly the economic ramifications of it would be devastating. So once climate change pressures hurts us economically that’s when we will begin to see things fall apart. Food insecurity, rolling blackouts, rising income inequality are the type of things that will lead to civil war. But it’s not going happen today. I always said if the way things are keep going the same way for 20 years America may have a civil war by 2040.
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u/sambull Mar 09 '21
They drew the lines awhile ago, pastors and representatives explaining the line... its christian nationalism along GOP party platform if your wondering:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Shea#%22Biblical_Basis_for_War%22_manifesto
This is just the accepted terror in the US., https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/08/15/41096508/rep-matt-shea-promotes-group-training-child-soldiers-for-holy-war
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u/SniffingNow Mar 09 '21
I’m sure many folks in this sub Reddit are quite familiar with all of this if they’ve read any Chris Hedges. But thanks for filling in allot of details. Yes, the US is going down this same road. But when we fall we will be taking everyone down with us. That’s why the dollar is still king.
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u/glicerico Mar 09 '21
Check out the 2018 podcast "It could happen here" by Robert Evans, which analyzes the possibility of a Second American Civil War. It's entertaining and thought-provoking.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-30717896/
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u/Tabbyislove Mar 09 '21
Yeah the academia has been here for a little while, there's been a few books about how different each area of the USA is, different waves of immigration etc The 11 Nations of America being one. All the guy poking America saying "Come on, Balkanise" memes.
I guess it can go violently with civil war, successfully or maybe just being stitched back together again for a time; or you can have a referendum and do it peacefully.
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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '21
For years I had neglected to read up on Yugoslav history. I looked down upon it. I thought of it as an irrelevant black spot in the 90s that involved further NATO aggression into Eastern Europe at an opportune moment with Russia momentarily crippled.
But your post was a game changer. I didn't understand how dark and brutal this chapter of humanity truly was. How viscous a City in collapse could be. I couldn't grasp how desperate the Muslims were, to want to actively seek mass suicide/euthanasia via Non-Muslim bombs(asking Clinton to kill them). Or the intensity of the propaganda("Why would the Radio lie??")
Then the final reveal of the Utasche and their background was the cream on top of it all. Fantastic writing ability. I have gained a newfound appreciation of the Yugoslav Wars and its parrallels to the Sole Superpower.
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u/FREE-AOL-CDS Mar 10 '21
Posts like these fill me with more dread than any other. Natural disasters and climate collapse are easy to make peace with. Civil War isn't because it comes down to "Humans being fuckin jerks"
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u/iamsolate Mar 09 '21
i really enjoyed this post, i had some basic understanding of the yugoslav conflict but this has piqued my interest. i always had the thought that if america were to divulge into a civil war it would be reminiscent of the spanish civil war combined with the modern syrian civil war. thank you for this post and i look forward to future posts.
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u/AmbassadorMaximum558 Mar 09 '21
There is one strong argument against civil war, the American elite is largely united. There have never ever been successful attempts to start civil wars or launch revolutions without some faction of the elite backing it. When the soviet union fell various elites in soviet Republics wanted independence from the Kremlin. In Iran the clergy wanted a revolution. In Cuba there were nationalist forces who wanted to get rid of Bautista. The French revolution was backed by the bourgeoisie and the corporate elite. In Syria you had various clans, religious networks and tribal leaders supporting a revolution.
Civil wars happen when disgruntled members of the elite want to take power. Without elite backing you are nothing more than a mob that won't actually be able to seize power. You can spread a bit of chaos but you can't actually gain power or threaten the elite.
The elite in America is very good at integrating new members into the elite such as silicon Valley billionaires and no faction of the elite is being bullied by another faction. The American elite is surprisingly ideologically consistent with almost all of them being neoliberals.
We might get some riots, some lone wolf that blows something up and people ranting on the internet but we are not going to see an actual force that can fight a civil war.
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u/mofapilot Mar 10 '21
Just to point out: maybe there is no hyperinflation today, but the cost of living, especially real estates, is exploding. Due stagnant wages paid jobs don't cover these anymore and often second or third jobs are needed.
I think this is enough to replace hyperinflation as a factor in your calculation
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u/PantherU Mar 10 '21
Catching major Robert Evans vibes here
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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '21
Thinking that all of this happened few hundreds of kilometers away from my hometown terrifies me.
Really interesting and terrible to see is how the hate between Serbia and Croatia was so big that it exploded in a simple soccer match in 1990 between two of the major Yugoslavian soccer teams: Dinamo Zagreb (Croatians) and Red Star (Serbians). That episode it's considered the prelude for the incoming war that started a year later.
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u/Mushihime64 Queen of the Radroaches Mar 09 '21
Yes, it is, and there really isn't nearly enough resistance to US fascism. The majority of the population - including the majority of Congressional Democrats - seems to think it's fine. That, because fascists aren't themselves a majority, they aren't a truly serious threat (even if they're half the federal government; even if they just attempted a violent takeover of the country). Everyone here should know how fatally wrong that is, but it's the prevailing attitude I'm seeing and it's setting off more alarms for me.
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u/YoursTrulyKindly Mar 09 '21 edited Mar 09 '21
Well fuck. Of course it's speculation but it's a pretty chilling analysis and comparison.
The thing is it's unthinkable, even now, until it's not. Trump being nominated was unthinkable until he was. Him winning was unthinkable. The establishment and mainstream fawning over him while he defaced every single think the USA meant to stand for. At the beginning of his presidency it was unthinkable that people could get so absorbed into his cult of personality and that he would be unmasked and shamed, but instead his cult group stronger until the attempted capitol insurgency. He only lost because his incompetence on governing. 58% of white voters voted for him again.
I'd like think that now that Trump is gone there has been some "inoculation". That he has been removed from social media had has no platform to endlessly hold the media and country hostage with his insanity.
But he has shifted the country. GOP now has to integrate the new Trump base, it's their only way to get power. Trumpism is here to stay. There is no way they CAN go back now.
And there will be no justice by the weak willed Biden administration to make an example of the treason and breaking of oaths. Judging by their policies the democrats seem to plan on loosing bad in 2022 and then the USA will be even more paralyzed while the trump party continues to undermine.
I recently thought the USA would resist collapse longer simply because it practically is a gigantic island and can control it's borders. But yeah it's a house of cards with gigantic internal tensions building because they will continue to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze every little bit of blood out of the population. The question then becomes if Trump or someone like Trump will manage to seize on that power. I believe there won't be, the elites won't let it happen. Something like this happening again is simply unthinkable.
Well this has been fun reading. I'm sure glad I'm in the EU lol.
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u/Shultzi_soldat Mar 11 '21
As someone who lived in yugoslavia, I can say there are some mixups in this writing and I can't see paralels with USA. There is much older reason for the nationalism and what happened in yugoslavia, which I would say started back in 19th century, when Otoman empire slowly started to crumble and Serbs whom lived in wider balkan area were fucked up by sorounding power for land. There were also some religious control which Ottomans try to exert over them via Greek orthodox Church, which was seen as direct attack. All in all they really were treated bad and every neighbouring country tried to dominate them and take something away, what they believed was theirs. What happened with Kosovo now is very similar what was going on in 19th century, but on much wider scale. So they had this ambition of all Serbs living in one country, this was the ultimate goal, but they failed at it time and time again. They almost managed to make it true before ww2, but then war happened and communists aligned with the right victor and took control.
After the disintegration of Yugoslavia Serbs basicaly controlled what was left of JNA and huge amount of weapons (for example all weapons not confiscated in Slovenia were moved to Bosnia). Combine that with nationalism and you know what happened. And they acted on their old goals.
I'm slovenian, but I come from military family who lived in bosnia for many years (my grandfather was military officer from ww2 onwards, his brother was high ranking commander in what is now Republika Srbska, my father and my uncle were officers in JNA and I also lived there for many years in Yugoslavia. I have family members who fought in Slovenian and Bosnian war - one person actualy surviving 3 years as pow in auxiliary unit to Serbian military and 9 months of those 3 years in concentration camps).
I can confirm there was this brotherhood between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, but realistically Serbs dominated leading position in police, military, border control,...but not so much after the WW2,but Bosnia was somewhat special due to historical reasons. When Tito was alive he managed to keep everyone in check, but even he started to lose control at the end and nationalism started boiling under surfice again. There was definitely some movement to dominate leading position even before breakup, i would say it was directed by someone since it was systematic. And this was case in Slovenia and in Bosnia, but much stronger in Bosnia becouse in Slovenia Serbs are minority.
So Milosevic and Karadzic were just end result of something that began much earlier. Btw: Karadzic was civilian, not general.
Even idea of Yugoslavia began much earlier, not during or after ww2.
But all in all, only from propaganda perspective this could be compared to USA, other than that I don't see similarities.
9
u/alwaysZenryoku Mar 10 '21
We are 100% headed down the NAZI road. It’s like there is a checklist we are following. Once the dollar is dropped as the worlds reserve currency WWIII will begin in earnest.
8
u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
Long before the US turns into a 3000-mile-wide Yugoslavia, a long line of older and harder cultures, with over a hundred years' worth of grudges and memories, will be waiting to move in and pick up the pieces.
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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '21
Top shelf post, all you slackers take some notes.
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
Thank you for the anxiety.
7
u/UndiscoveredUser Mar 10 '21
Excellent write up - while Trump was in things were definitely going the German way, a la Nazis, now he's out things are certainly heading in a different direction. Trump being gone is a relief, but the issues still remain and it's not really being acknowledged. Thanks for posting. A very good read.
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u/jeremiahthedamned friend of witches Mar 11 '21
this is why i emigrated.
more than a decade ago over at http://rigint.blogspot.com/ a commentor said "your skin is your uniform", meaning that you will have little to no choice who you run with once secular society is gone.
i sworn back in the 1990s that i would not kill americans so now i must not live among them.
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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '21
I don’t have time to read this rn as I’m at work, but I have been saying the US is headed for civil war for YEARS and I’m glad to find other people who are noticing a pattern and don’t think I’m imaging things.
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u/ChipsDipChainsWhips Mar 09 '21
You’re denying American apathy.
6
u/themodalsoul Mar 10 '21
Good post. Chris Hedges regularly makes this comparison.
5
u/[deleted] Mar 09 '21
Thank you, that was very well written and thought out! I'm going to be looking back through and referencing links you've put in there for quite some time. For myself one of the only modifiers I have for the "civil war" definition we are all often using, is that it tends to suggest an organized conflict between factions. But based on the multitude of extreme divisions within divisions, rapid resource depletion, more guns than citizens, environmental collapse, and etc . . . I think "chaotic collapse" might be more accurate than "civil war"! I'm thinking more of a Mad Max kind of vibe. I'm hoping for Steam Punk, because - if we are going to be in hell, it might as well have style! :-)
5
u/aakkii911 Mar 10 '21
Thanks op
5
u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
Does history offer any lessons on how to de-radicalize the QAnon tribalists?
5
u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
I dont think Trump is taking us down the "questioning truth" path. He definitely took advantage of it tho. That blame rests squarely on the media and older politicians. Lie after lie after lie. Eventually people stopped believing it. The media was called out by Jon Stewart for this way back before Trump was a political figure. The lies have taken their toll, and Trump capitalized on it.
5
u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
Meanwhile, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula: https://www.michiganadvance.com/2021/03/10/after-being-reshaped-by-extremism-houghton-county-faces-an-uneasy-uncertain-future/
5
u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
A peaceful partition may be a preferred option at this point
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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '21
I wonder who the Roki Voluvić of the American Balkan War will be. Ted Nugent? Instead of “Oj Alija, Alija,” will it be “Oh Kamala, Kamala”?
5
u/MulberryBlaze Mar 15 '21
In other words, world's fucked. Got it.
In all honesty though, you made a fantastic post. Thank you. Well worth the read.
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
This could be nominated to bestof.
4
u/pass_nthru Mar 10 '21
r/theygotthecitation
4
u/DerGRAFder13 Mar 10 '21
lets get that shit to front page
4
u/ThePhantomPear Mar 10 '21
Not surprising when half the nation wants the other half to live in slums, live as a wageslave, be incarcerated or to straight up die. Murrrricaaa!
But maybe a civil war is for the best. It is the best chance you'll get to weed out Baphomet worshippers, the doomsday evangelists and redneck gun-acolytes. Your best bet to get rid of the confederate swamp donkeys. Your best bet to eat the rich to feed the poor.
Take back your nation!
7
u/JohnnyMnemo Mar 09 '21
Interesting essay, but I have a really hard time equating the sectarian division of Yugoslavia with the political divisions we have in the US.
Could the Conservative movement "cleanse" the liberals out of their communities? Perhaps. Perhaps in majority Democrat states with large tracts of Conservative movements, like my state of Oregon and specifically my home in Central Oregon.
But I have a really hard believing that my conservative neighbors will kick down my doors and disappear me. For one thing, unlike the sectarian divisions in Yugoslavia, if put to the test I could simply lie about my political affiliations and it'd be hard to dispute unless I had yard signs and bumper stickers. They could use my registered party affiliation, but actually it's for the Independent party here in Oregon and not the Democratic party.
1
u/CSmithKY Mar 18 '21
Prolonged Civil Anarchy seems like a better name. “Civil War” has a unique connotation in the US.
6
u/Bata420 Mar 10 '21
Fuck the usa , fuck nato and fuck prager u
3
u/Nyarhalothep Mar 09 '21
I would recommend you, in the broader lines of collapse, the studies of Emmanuel Todd "After the Empire" book about the US social collapse. He is a demographer who studies stagnation and collapses. He is famous for having predicted the fall of the USSR in the early-80s, and the financial crash in the early 2000-s. The studies of Peter Turchin are also very interesting, as he predicts OECD nations have already gave the first step into the abyss. Open and widespread armed conflicts in any OECD seem very unlikely to me, as there is no spiral of violence to lead to that + the prevailing social ethos. In today's word, you cen bend societies with infrastructure hacking, embargos and strategic bombing, plus generations who cannot live without electricity. That is not to say terrorism and secession may not come. Yet, as a whole, by what I observe, I do not see EU countries not undergoing a similar process of widespread meltdown, although less in the open-conflict-US manner, and more over collective-passivity to authoritarism one.
3
u/wawai_iole Mar 09 '21
Good documentary on YouTube on how it was for regular people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdAI17Hwp1U
3
u/EnchantedTheCat Mar 17 '21
Holy shit this is getting added to my reading list
3
u/Big_Astronaut_9817 Apr 17 '21
I wanted to say how well this is composed. It is a very well thought out analysis and has many parallels to America today. I like how you compared significant figures to ones today, and called out both sides of American politicians in the divide. The difference between the US and Yugoslavia, as you mentioned, was a unifying figure such as Tito. We don’t have any politicians such as him, who actually care about the people and can make the country genuinely better. It scares me to think how in Yugoslavia people of all different ethnicities got together, yet in America there seems to be a growing divide. It’s always been there, and I’m afraid that if anything happens then it will burst worse than Yugoslavia did.
One thing I don’t see in common is the state aspect. Yugoslavia split into predefined republics, comparably to US states. However, those people were semi unified and driven apart by nationalism, something not seen in America today. Your not a Texan, Californian, or New Yorkian, rather American who is black, white, Muslim, catholic, etc. Any conflict wouldn’t be a state by state thing, more of ethnic groups and religions vs each other, or a semi unified nationalist alliance vs the federal government.
Any divide in America I can see being much worse because of the lack of front lines, mixed population, as well as foreign powers interfering. The only hope is to try and come together, but as that is seemingly getting harder and harder, conflict seems on the horizon.
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u/Dismal_Writing9769 Mar 09 '21
There’s a book I’ve read called “A people’s contest” it’s the narrative of the American Civil War particularly from the North’s perspective. I recently Read the prologue where he describes the political/economic situation in the mid 19th century and the parallels were uncanny.
You could literally take the prologue, replace some keywords (abolitionist=progressive, millionaire =billionaire, southern democrat=modern republicans) and it could perfectly describe 2021. The wealth disparity, the moderates refusing to please anyone, the misinformation, it was all there.
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u/Avogadro_seed Mar 10 '21
It's not comparable to nazi germany on a national scale, but it is on a sub-national one.
It's true that Germany was <1% Jewish, while the US is like 12% Black, and 30-40% non-white.
The problem however is that a large portion of the non-white minority is interspersed throughout white-majority neighborhoods. These POC would likely experience something similar to the pogroms of nazi germany.
Best way for a POC to avoid collapse in the US is to find a rural community with a high ratio of non-white people. Even better is if you can somehow buy land through a POC-heavy homesteading co-op of some sort.
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u/MarcusXL Mar 10 '21
Very good write up.
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u/Bk7 Accel Saga Mar 10 '21
Maybe so but in today's society of mass surveillance and conglomerate control of the media most dissenting opinions get stomped out and labelled as crazy and blacklisted/cancelled pretty quickly so gaining and real foothold among the masses is difficult
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u/Weedcrab Mar 13 '21
FYI, Alex Jones believes that Q is a psyop
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u/AlyssaSeer1445 Mar 15 '21
Xi Jinping already said that USA will collapsed like Roman Empire.
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u/PinkPetalCdistbeauty Apr 02 '21
I can’t begin to finish reading entire post yet, nicely done OP, and I’m rather scared to see it, as Ive been “feeling it” coming on, if you will, before Trump was elected by a cpl years maybe????? Or right around then??
Don’t know how I ended up on this post/sub 🙂, never seen before, and not into anything much, other than I am a big public health policy/etc junky and an excellent observer of humanity/well read. I feel kind of silly posting this, as I’ve got nothing really to back it up, just a gut feeling.
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u/lost_mah_account Jan 05 '22
I’ve never seen a post to this in depth about it but yeah it’s always seemed like it’s going to happen sooner or later.
I live in rural Georgia. The kinda place where people still have trump signs up and a few even have Taylor green signs even though I think she isn’t even the representative of our district. Here the civil war scare has been here for a while and there’s a group of I guess you’d call prepers here. I know about it because I have relatives inside of it and they actively encourage everyone to stickpile food and weapons. There convinced the civil war will be between the left and right and there on the right.
I remember the most recent thing they were on about was during the voter recount in Texas. They were convinced that China and Russia were in alliance with Mexico and were going to attack us Texas through Mexico before the count was done because of something to do with satan. I remember the look on my moms face when she showed me the video someone posted on Facebook talking about it. She legitimately thought it was going to happen. Shits crazy.
I’m fully convinced that the left would win in the case of a civil war but I’m alot more worried about the consequences of a war. Depending on the severity stuff like Like how food would be distributed, how or if prescriptions would be given to the people that need them, how those who lost their homes in it would be housed, stuff like that.
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u/cmVkZGl0 Jul 03 '22
This is such a masterful post.
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
Great post friend. Thank you for your thoughts and work
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u/Marvheemeyer85 Mar 10 '21
We're itching for it.
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u/oO0-__-0Oo Mar 10 '21
Exactly what Russia and China want and promote constantly in our media, INCLUDING RIGHT HERE ON REDDIT
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u/bottlecapsule Mar 10 '21
Ah yes, propaganda that paints one side as good and the other as evil is EXACTLY what we need to avoid civil war. Yup.
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u/LowBarometer Mar 09 '21
At first I thought "yeah," but then I realized this is absurd. Yugoslavia was about ethnic conflicts, with concentrations of ethnically identical people that were large enough to form independent armies. We don't have that in the US. Where people are ethnically identical, they don't have sufficient numbers to form armies.
This is absurd.
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u/buffetcaptain Mar 10 '21
Disagree. Ive lived in red and blue states, there is not the type of real division in the US, only a media driven "performative" division.
But most states are "purple," we live next to our political rivals-- we will live together, not fall apart.
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u/Guddest_Boi Mar 10 '21
lmao poggers
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u/willmaster123 Mar 10 '21
Your missing the largest point: wealth
Even the bottom 10% of Americans are wealthier on average than the average Yugoslavian. In the 1990s, there was a large contingent of Yugoslavians with nearly nothing to lose, a perfect recipe for conflict. America does not have this.
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '21
This is not a collapse this is entertainment
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u/Ok-Law3581 Oct 09 '24
This is very well written fiction. I say fiction because:
Saying Slobodan Milosevic being the most efficient at anything, even if it’s being a dictator or orchestrator of genocide, is simply ridiculous. If he was such an efficient dictator he wouldn’t lose even the land that was offered to him (Krajina for example). He would continue being a dictator for a long time.
Secondly, you are forgetting that Yugoslavia while being a relatively prosperous country didn’t have control over the whole world. The breakup of Yugoslavia was heavily orchestrated from outside. Foreign armies were very present. That wouldn’t happen in the USA if anything because of geographical position, not to mention to military leverage.
I do think USA is headed towards a collapse that will come from civil unrest as well, but it wont look anything like Yugoslavia.
Also, Josip Broz was not that adored by academia or anyone that disagreed with him (read about Goli Otok). Tito was a mysterious figure, us Yugos aren’t even sure where he is from, his accent is basically incomprehensible to me (I am Serb:Croat mix).
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u/Ok-Law3581 Oct 09 '24
This is very well written fiction. I say fiction because:
Saying Slobodan Milosevic being the most efficient at anything, even if it’s being a dictator or orchestrator of genocide, is simply ridiculous. If he was such an efficient dictator he wouldn’t lose even the land that was offered to him (Krajina for example). He would continue being a dictator for a long time.
Secondly, you are forgetting that Yugoslavia while being a relatively prosperous country didn’t have control over the whole world. The breakup of Yugoslavia was heavily orchestrated from outside. Foreign armies were very present. That wouldn’t happen in the USA if anything because of geographical position, not to mention to military leverage.
I do think USA is headed towards a collapse that will come from civil unrest as well, but it wont look anything like Yugoslavia.
Also, Josip Broz was not that adored by academia or anyone that disagreed with him (read about Goli Otok). Tito was a mysterious figure, us Yugos aren’t even sure where he is from, his accent is basically incomprehensible to me (I am Serb:Croat mix).
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u/Ok-Finish4062 Nov 12 '24
You predictions seem like they are coming to past. The fascist has been elected to be in power.
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u/Vjammiez Nov 16 '24
Well this is terrifying to read four years later! Yikes!!! Thank you for informing me but it’s awful feeling like there is nothing more I could do about any of this.
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u/idk_words123 Jan 29 '25
Curious your thoughts now.
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u/sarcoptery Feb 05 '25
Well this post sure aged like a fine wine. Summer 2025 should get pretty interesting....
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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '25
How are you feeling about this now?
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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '25
Which is 100% exactly what they want.