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I've had goons quote Sleepwalkers at me in a "Serbs had the genocide coming" way. Which generally shapes how I think of that book. Haven't read it.
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Mar 3, 2022 13:07
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 23:35 |
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AnimeIsTrash posted:Half of what i've read about Yugoslavia has a pretty obvious anti serb bias. A bit late on this, but outside of xenophobic inertia of the propaganda campaigns in the past decades, it's generally less anti-Serb bias, and more just generally being completely off the mark about a bunch of stuff. Years ago while I still posted in the military history threads, I brought up bunch of straight up invented poo poo that gets passed on everywhere because it's rarely challenged and confirms preexisting beliefs. A historical tidbit: Judah Alkalai was an influential proto-Zionist thinker, and a lot of his writing about what he imagined future Israel should be was based off of what he perceived liberal revolutionary Serbia to be. It went on to influence how a lot of other people in Austria etc perceived Serbia... Here's the problem: He was full of poo poo and was basically writing utopian (from a nationalist point of view) fanfics that had little to do with the actually existing Serbia at the time. Like, something about 19th century Serbia broke a lot of brains in Europe, and we're still reading words that were written using leaking brain goo instead of ink as history. And then people writing later histories went on to quote that, extrapolated unrelated things to Yugoslavia, and round and round we go. my dad has issued a correction as of 20:53 on Mar 9, 2022 |
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Mar 9, 2022 20:49
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Unfortunately no, sorry.
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Mar 9, 2022 22:25
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City storming/sacking. Can't die of disease if you're already dead.
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May 11, 2022 05:54
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The impression I got from what (little) I've read from Yugoslav veterans of the Spanish Civil War is basically "The Soviet Union was not exactly an ideal ally, and we had to play hide and seek with overzealous NKVD idiots way too much, but it was an ally none-the-less, the only one we had" I kinda have to temper the above note on NKVD with a note that the Yugoslav communists were also settling grudges over there, and that the NKVD (and anarchists, too) made for a convenient scapegoat sometimes. The civil war veterans seemed to have extremely polarized views of anarchists, depending on which ones they ended up having to rely on during the war. It's pretty much either "killemallkillemallkillemall" or positive enough to later straight up risk their lives to help Yugoslav anarchists leave Yugoslavia safely when the Communist Party started the crackdown on them.
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May 15, 2022 18:40
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Is the book from a library?
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Sep 23, 2022 09:53
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Then not only should you highlight important bits, you should also leave comments on the margins. 
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Sep 23, 2022 11:26
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For whatever reason, a bunch of women from USA and Britain came to the Balkans for the same reason. I used to remember the names of a bunch, there was one who kept joining various guerillas and flip-flopping between wanting Serbs genocided to 'solve' the Balkans and wanting Albanians genocided to 'solve' the Balkans. The ones I do remember are relatively recent in comparison: Flora Sandes, who is probably the sanest of the bunch (probably due to not actually being a weirdo war tourist adventurer for the most part), she was deployed here as a nurse during WW1 and joined the army of Serbia as a combatant at the request of a Serbian commander. Ruth Mitchell (her brother was USA brigadier general Billy Mitchell, and her granddad was a robber baron), who joined the Chetniks in WW2 Tankbuster posted:The portuguese literally fought an alliance of the Ottoman empire, Mughal empire and the Venetian republic to secure their toehold in southern and western india. Fun fact: The Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire during the Ottoman campaign to Sumatra (to support the Aceh Sultanate in the conflict with the Portugese) was a Serbian janissary, Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic. my dad has issued a correction as of 10:40 on Sep 24, 2022 |
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Sep 24, 2022 10:26
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AnimeIsTrash posted:What the hell, she was a hardcore royalist, she also married an officer of the whites. That's how low the bar is for "sanest of the bunch". e: Like, just the fact that she was in the Serbian army at the request of the Serbian army instead of "yeeeehaw, adventure time, let's shoot up some locals" puts her waaaaay above the rest the pack. e2: I really lack a sufficient vocabulary to adequately describe just how nuts the victorian era psychos showing up here were. my dad has issued a correction as of 17:11 on Sep 24, 2022 |
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Sep 24, 2022 17:01
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Already filmed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-XPxlVuMJU&t=160s Timestamped for some genuine Orson Welles.
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Oct 22, 2022 03:19
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A more serious answer: Probably the life and adventures of Sokollu Mehmed-Pasha, ideally not made by Turkey.
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Oct 22, 2022 12:28
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One of my aunts (a branch further on the family tree, my great-grandparents are her grandparents) married a dude who is a son of a German couple from Vojvodina. During WW2, the couple in question was literally offered their own plot of land and some I have my opinions on the expulsion of Germans from Vojvodina after WW2 (I believe my exact words when I mentioned it in the map thread years ago were "An insufficient number of Nazis was shot, but I'm not fond of compensating with 6 year olds") but generally the actions of the ones who shared the risks everyone else (except collaborators ofc) in Yugoslavia faced stand in sharp contrast to the ones who... didn't. As a funny sidenote, one of that aunt's sons looks like some chizeled out blonde blue eyed Hans on a Nazi propaganda poster (admittedly with longer hair), and is also a bog standard Serbian Orthodox Christian dude who happens to have a German surname. On a less funny note, their other son works as a professional diver, and was at one point sent to South Africe by the company he works for. At first, he was quarted with a bunch of black workers who kept making him the butt of every joke, and asked to be transferred. Then he got quartered with a white South African work crew, and immediattely regretted it and kept asking to be transfered back because, and I quote "Literally every single one of them had a swastika tattoo". If you're wondering why I have so many cousin anecdotes over the years without ever running out - all my great-grandparents were hicks who had nothing to do in their spare time but gently caress. I have a lot of cousins. Like, a lot of cousins. Also, since the hicks I descend from have one of the strongest taboos against incest on the planet, it's an expansive tree with no overlap even for several generations beyond my great-grandparents. e: I also have a lot of military people in the family tree. Father is a veteran, maternal grandfather a retired military officer, one of my great-aunts married into a big name Serbian military family, etc. My childhood playground was a semi-abandoned military barracks where I was allowed to hang out in because my best childhood friend is the son of a colonel. my dad has issued a correction as of 14:00 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 13:53
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I've talked about it before in the military history threads, but one of my great-uncles spent several years during WW2 as a slave laborer near Klagenfurt, and that's only after the Hungarian dude he worked for back home/whose daughter he was dating spent his entire saving bribing fascist officials to keep him out of a death camp. I'm considering sharing something from my hometown to explain just what sort of local guys were running the show for the Nazis (this one in particular was a local Serb dude), but it's kind of dark, and involved a lot of dead kids. Kinda... not wanting to ruin my day by writing it up right now? my dad has issued a correction as of 15:52 on Dec 13, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2022 15:50
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Serbia has a black licorice candy named 'Negro', after the surname of the Italian dude who made the recipe for that specific mix and the color of the mix (being the Italian word for black), and the advertising slogan was "the chimney sweeper for your throat" causing the mascot to be... uh... As far as I'm aware, it's genuinely just a coincidence.
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Dec 23, 2022 00:46
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Yeah, absolutely vile tasting. For the non-Yugo audience: The mascot doesn't look like it did before, obv.
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Dec 23, 2022 11:59
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Tankbuster posted:they found the darkest man in serbia to model for it. lmao On a more serious note, you do get color variance here. For one, the Romani people are generally more populous than is acknowledged, and also have a tendency to quitely drop the 'being Romani' part if they're pale enough (A cousin is married to a 'Croatian' guy like that). We're racist as hell against them, but there's a... history of being targeted by the exact same people for the exact same reasons, which does help stop this when brought up, especially if done in an organized manner as the communists did, as temporary as it was. The goon Salty Jesus and I met up IRL (and then we had to run from a tornado, long story), he got mistaken for Romani a couple of times, and speaks fluent enough Spanish that Latino tourists would mistake him for being from that other Latin American country. Generally, southern parts of Serbia are more Meditteranean looking than us lilly-whites from up north. For other darker skinned people: In the NAM days (we're technically still a member but lol) a lot of Africans, Middle Easterners, etc came to Yugoslavia to study - my father's good buddies from his student days were a dude from Ghana and a Palestinian from Jordan. They stayed here after their studies ended, but both eventually left Yugoslavia when it started collapsing, and he never saw them again. He gets really sentimental when he talks about them. Montenegro had a coastal village inhabited by a mix of Arabs and Black Africans, they were Muslim and primarily spoke Albanian - a mix of traders, freed or escaped slaves, sailors, totally-not-pirates, and their descendants. They remained entirely untouched during the wars between Slavic Orthodox Christian tribes in Montenegro and Slavic Muslim tribes backed by the Ottomans (that the Christians eventually won under the leadership of elected warrior poet bishop princes, resulting in the destruction of the local Muslim tribes as coherent entities, and their eventual assimilation into either Muslim Albanian or Christian Slav populations) due to a quirk of Montenegro's weird tribal libertarian culture. Basically, slavery was seen really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad, and breaking free of slavery among the highest signs of honor. Their interactions can be summed up as "Who the gently caress are you guys and what are you doing here?" "I punched my way off a slave ship, dunno about the rest" "Understandable, have a nice day." They suffered pretty badly during WW2 for reasons I'm sure aren't difficult to guess. Quite a few of them ended up joining the communist Partizans (although in absolute numbers their presence was tiny of course). There's a funny anecdote from a Partizan unit. A black dude from that village was stationed in the unit, and one guy, thinking he can't understand him, yelled "Where'd you find Uglješa over there?" (Uglješa is a fairly normal name, but Ugalj means charcoal, with obvious implications. I'm not sure from context if it was playful or bigoted, it's not inherently insulting) To which 'Uglješa' yelled in reply "In Montenegro! (Crna Gora - Black Mountain) - why else do you think it's named that way?", causing an uproar of laughter among the rest of the unit while the wiseguy just stared slack-jawed. The black dude took up 'Uglješa' as a nome-de-guerre afterwards. I know that a dude from the village remained as an actor and iirc a photographer. There's an old movie where he's one of the two lead actors and it's basically just two middle aged blue collar bros hanging out. The village itself wasn't really viable anymore, and the population ended up scattering over Yugoslavia and the NAM countries. Not many of them remain now.
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Dec 23, 2022 13:38
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(Recorded) Serbian epic poetry (and that of a broad continuum of peoples in the Balkans, primarily but not exclusively Slavic - I'll mostly limited myself to Serbian here due to limitations of my knowledge, and will explicitly point out if I'm referring to something else) was passed down in spoken form since (at least) the middle ages (there are poems which are believed to be much older in their base form with part of their content overtaken by a reworked version making it about some more recent event, although there are also poems which were made long after the events they're about, basing themselves on other popular retellings), and was eventually written down in the early 19th century as it was being recited by the various local bards. Serbian literature owes a huge debt to Vuk Karadžić whose systematic work to record oral traditions before they're wiped out gives us a powerful window into popular culture among the illiterate and the poor. (Since I'm bringing him up, I might as well bring up the Slovenian linguist Jernej Kopitar who was of tremendous help to Karadžić's work, as well as the support of Wilhelm and especially Jacob Grimm who had a lot of two way correspondence with him and helped give his work weight in academic circles that were otherwise extremely hostile towards recognition of the art of the lower classes) The final quality of the recorded poetry tends to depend on how much of a chord it struck with its audiences throughout the centuries - a diss that was polished and refined by various bards for eager audiences for half a millenium, all people to whom it meant something, tends to hit quite a bit harder than clever wordplay that didn't leave a lasting impression and was passed down as is. (You can find multiple versions of the same poem recorded in different places, and the oldest form tends to remain in places where people cared about the poem in question a lot less) As an aside, there's a lot of extremely horny popular lyrical poetry that was recorded by Vuk but censored by Serbian and later Yugoslav authorities until after WW2 when the communists finally ended the more than a century of censorship on it, although they didn't exactly go out of their way to publish it much either. Popular culture being horny is very much not just a modern thing, and the 'traditionalist' diatribes about this not being the case are utter idiocy. I was gonna write up a lot more about this, even had the intro for it set up above when I mentioned non-Serbian poetry, but then something important crossed my mind so I'm gonna take a break here to talk about something else: To add something that's gonna be relevant in the future, and partially on a personal note Since I'm bringing up some of the many influences that existed in the formation of national sentiment and nationalist movements in the Balkans, and intend to continue doing so after I write up some fun stuff about the popular poetry and broader cultural mileu it interacted with, but aren't going to spend countless hours writing everything up with the entire context provided, and especially not in one go, I feel there is something I need to pre-empt, because it will come up - If I don't spell it out explicitly, I risk some of readers keeping unadressed baggage from what they were previously exposed to that can interact in some rather lovely ways with only a partial depiction of the history in question from the perspective I'm trying to focus on. This is actually going to be significantly longer than the main part of my post above, since I don't want to keep returning to this in the future. There's a weird combination of funny, annoying, and infuriating when I run into 'compassionate conservative' types, usually either some weirdo brand of monarchist Catholic (or in one case a monarchist convert to Orthodox Christianity), or just a super centrist 'why cant we all be friends' liberal from a Germanic country, who are super into Austria-Hungary as some proto-EU or whatever the gently caress, and they always fail to recognize how much their own criticism of the going-ons in the Habsburg domain is shaped and defined by how the culture of the empire perceived itself, since that's what the literature they're shaping and defining their own views was born out of - and said cultural mileu was very much full of poo poo about both itself and everything around it. So they'll look at nationalism in the Balkans and either focus on it as the prime mover of the empire's collapse, with no regard whatsover for the conditions that contributed to its development, within or without the empire, or laser focus in on the Habsburg's actually existing weird anthropologist-imperialist experiments as being far more influencial than they really were, while also seeing them as an unfortunate mistake that was the only possible origin source for nationalist sentiment in the Balkans, because of course the barbarians couldn't just come up with things on their own. (Also, it's loving hilarious how the guys I mentioned would go on about the benevolence of Habsburg administration in a time when said administration was suppressing 19th century uprisings against loving feudalism and doing poo poo like sentencing people to be torn to pieces on a stretching wheel) Austrians desperately wanted to create some sort of a weird cultural Frankenstein in the Balkans that they could control and direct as needed (they tried it with their participation in the Illyrian movement's spread, as one example), but that's not what they created, because they didn't create anything in the first place. They unwittingly opened the door to a process that was already slowly unfolding on its own and it swept away their intented ends like a rushing tide. Generally, they were far more successful when driving religion like a wedge in places where socioeconomic conditions were permissive to creating a divide between populations, but that was a rather blunt tool that they weren't exactly the first to use. Even outside of cultural stuff, their attempts to shape Balkans affairs to their liking failed to result in what they wanted far more often than not. I'll speak about the Serbian revolutions in the Ottoman Empire at some point, as well as the development of the Serbian bourgeoise in the Ottoman Empire, and the similarities between how religious differences preventing the empire's majority population from engaging in certain economic activities influenced Orthodox Christian populations in the empire in similar ways that they influenced Jewish populations in Europe - but on top of these developments, Austria covertly provided Serbian rebels with a limited quantity of weapons as well as means for militias to cross the border during those wars (while also violently crushing Serbian unrest at home at the same time), and despite of that, Serbia's eventual successful negotiations with the Ottomans and the independence-in-all-but-name autonomy Serbia gained and held until the official independence roughly half a century later were primarily driven by "yeah, gently caress you, you know what we think of you, and we're never gonna stop trying to kick your empire out, but we're not idiots who are going to suicide into you for no reason just for the Austrians to walk into the ruins and pick up the pieces." The takes that actually upset me rather than annoy me are the bullshit about how the AH war effort in WW1 wasn't genocidal from the start and instead 'evolved out frustration with failed invasion attempts' - it's the same loving thing every time I have to listen to it - when at the same time the AH was going full crystallnacht on Serbs living in it, converting unused propaganda from other imperialist bullshit (there's an anti-Serb poster I wish I could find again which was clearly reworked from something about the Boxer's Uprising, they removed the braid and changed the eyes, but the hat and moustache were kept as a 'eh close enough' thing, and of course both were conveniently darkened), making plans to replace large areas of Serbian population with German settlers, petty poo poo like intending to rename Belgrade into Prinz Eugenstadt (both of which the Nazis later picked up on and also intended to do after their respective wars were over), and oh there are existing forensic reports from the time period (Serbian government had the foresight to invite Swiss forensic scientists to examine the aftermath of the first invasion, who stuck around for the second, and parts of the third) with lovely stats like (spoilered in case you don't want to read about an actual warcrime) hundreds of women murdered by bleeding to death after breast severing, or being tied to something and set on fire - as separate to the usual 'burned alive' category that artillery fire on inhabeted areas causes sometimes regardless of the intent of the artilleryman. A whole year before the 'frustrated by failed invasions' successful combined invasion happened. gently caress this poo poo.
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Jan 5, 2023 15:45
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Apologies for the massive run-on sentences. They're the result of me starting to write a longer passage, and then condensing it into a single sentence without adjusting the structure into something easier to read.
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Jan 5, 2023 19:04
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I'll get around to continuing the effortpost I started, it's still Christmas season here with all the associated family stuff (also a bunch of Slavas) which I'm prioritizing a bit more. However, I do have to say that one one hand reading through names of Jewish Partizan volunteers who died in borderline suicidal missions to break non-Jewish people out of Nazi "encircle and exterminate" operations here, on the other hand watching news about Israel's latest adventures in deploying the final solution, and finally listening to our lovely right wing combo of "jews bad israel something to be emulated", I start feeling bile in my throat.
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Jan 9, 2023 17:05
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I will limit my comments on that map to saying that my family mostly originates from blue areas that changed color.gradenko_2000 posted:I'm finding this book quite fascinating because it describes a political dynamic that I was completely unaware of until just yesterday, and if it pleases the forum, I'm going to start posting excerpts Thank you for the post, you have a good eye for finding useful information (and to be completely honest, you're a far more avid reader than I am, which also helps find useful stuff ). It's starting to clarify some things that greatly confused me about the USA civil war. I'm certainly interested in reading any followups you make.
my dad has issued a correction as of 12:18 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 12:14
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Old ethnic/religious maps of Yugoslavia have a tendency of being too... clean and discrete, I guess? Relative to the actual situation. Here's a great one I got linked to that's represents the census data as 100 people dots instead, showing a much more accurate picture. https://twitter.com/mapsareamazing/status/1702648890363666813 e: Sadly, it lacks a depiction of the Jewish population. Vojvodina in particular would have them in noticeable number, alongside a few cities like Belgrade and Sarajevo. my dad has issued a correction as of 19:40 on Sep 17, 2023 |
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Sep 17, 2023 19:36
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Since the account is dead for some reason, lemme repost the map.
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Sep 18, 2023 11:50
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One of the concentration camp guards in Jasenovac had a therapist, who was an inmate, because reality has a sick sense of humor sometimes. Said inmate survived the war, and (for obvious reasons) didn't hold his patient's privacy in high regards. The guard complained to the therapist that during a prisoner killing contest (recorded and confirmed as a thing to have existed by multiple people), he ran into an old man who lost his entire family, who was still lucid but couldn't be intimidated no matter how much the guard tortured and humiliated him. This made the guard very depressed, so he quit the contest after killing the man, and then kept complaining how he lost the sense of euphoria from the killings and wants the therapist to help him to get it back. Dude got traumatized from the torture he was inflicting, and wanted to get it out of the way so he could torture some more. The winner of the above contest successfully fled to USA and was never found, by the way.
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Nov 9, 2023 09:58
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I hope the vacation was fun. And yeah, would not want to have to waddle up turkey shoot beach.
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Mar 27, 2024 17:53
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 23:35 |
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Huh. "Tama" is "darkness" in Serbian. Didn't know about the paralel in Sanskrit. Neat.
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May 1, 2024 23:05
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