The Bosnian War happened because a man with a second grade education became
one of the most respected leaders in all history.
In this video, the fourth in our five part series, I intend to show you how.
Josip Broz Tito believed in Yugoslavia.
He believed in the unity of his people.
Well, so long as those people were communist, anyway.
The story of his rise is the story of a battle against a fellow Croat for the very souls of Yugoslavia.
A fascist so deeply perverse he made Himmler feel disgust.
His name was Ante Pavelic, and he didn’t just inflict horror, he reveled in it.
He famously said that “knives, pistols, machine guns and bombs; these were the idols,
the bells that would announce the dawn of the resurrection of an independent Croatia.”
And the one thing that he and Tito and shared in common was an unapologetic justification
for whatever deaths were required to achieve their goals.
It's just that Pavelic seemed to enjoy it.
It can be hard to see how a man like him comes to power.
He was no pulpit for the glory of his people.
He wasn't personification of charisma, he was fear.
A man so terrified of what might come to his door that he was willing to burn down
his entire house just to avoid it.
He was a psychopath aiming for a purity that doesn’t exist.
That can't exist.
But while he would open the lock, it was Italy who gave him that key.
Mussolini saw in him a way to recolonize the Venetian Adriatic, and in turn
he saw in Mussolini a way to purge the lands that he claimed as his.
Hitler objected.
He was no more a fan of Serbs than Pavelic, but it was in his interest to keep Yugoslavia united,
at least for the time being.
Their workforce was better spent providing resources for his war machine than in turmoil killing themselves.
But as the years progressed, his hand was forced and in 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
was invaded by the Axis and split apart into many little rump states.
In ten days it was completely overrun and destroyed.
The Germans felt that the Serbs, due to their natural alignment with Russia, were not really trustworthy allies,
and Italy had been working for years to install their puppet fascists in Zagreb anyway.
So they just focused on them.
And with a few promises that they’d kill Jews alongside,
the newly formed Independent Croatia became a mass grave into which they sank their Serbs.
The German propaganda machine began aligning their national pseudoscience to confirm
the superiority of the Croatians alongside them.
It isn't just their unique history, they'd say, it was their bloodline.
Croats were clearly Germans, they're not Slavs.
Their blood is Aryan.
They're different.
So long as they fought with the Nazis, everybody who knew what was good for them would agree
they're different.
And for his part, Pavelic was certainly different.
The brutality that he’d inflict would be among the worst of the war anywhere in the world.
His stated aim out loud, his public goal was to leave a third of the Serbs exiled,
a third converted, and a third dead.
In four years, his Ustashe fanatically killed over a quarter million people towards that aim.
To fulfill promises made to Hitler, now his military and political benefactor,
he killed over 80% of Croatia’s Jews.
This had nothing to do with war.
War was just a cover.
An unshackling of the humanity that binds these monsters' hands.
Elderly women and children were hacked to death with machetes.
Religious leaders were slaughtered and their churches were burnt to the ground.
For no other reason than who they were.
Innocent men had their heads cut off with their farm equipment.
Nobody was spared.
Nobody was meant to be spared.
They purged down the old lines.
Religion.
Language.
Identity.
In an Independent Croatian State, the genocide would continue until everyone felt united.
Until everyone said that they were Croatian.
You might be Muslim, you might be Catholic.
You might have once been Orthodox.
But now you're Croatian.
What you are not, what you cannot be is a Serb.
It's ethnic nationalism at its core, at its nub.
So perhaps it’s fitting that it was a Croat who destroyed it.
A man offering a completely new identity for the people of the Balkans to consider.
An identity that smashed through everything that came before.
It was the East, tugging back at the centre.
It was Josip Broz Tito.
The right arm of Communist Yugoslavia.
And echoing out from his partisan forest base was the offer of nothing less than the complete
dissolution of the old world order.
The schism of religion would be excised by removing religion itself.
The schism of ethnicity by a greater calling.
No more kings.
No more countries.
Communism would be deeper than blood.
Duty to the state before everything.
And like all unobtainable utopian ideals, it drew in people like moths to a flame.
Young men and women to die for hope.
And those who heeded his call came from all over the Balkans.
It was a truly multi-ethnic force.
Montenegrins, Macedonians, Slovenes, Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, even the occasional Albanian.
The mud of the Balkans had been pressed back into stone.
And squeezed on all sides, Tito would hold the line.
And he would win.
As the dreams of those Catholic fascists shot themselves in that bunker in Berlin,
the once Orthodox atheists of the East charged through the independent state of Croatia,
unleashing a pent up fury onto those who had purged their families and comrades.
And with each atonement forced back upon them, the Catholic church drove their wedge in
as much as their new position would allow.
They were surely terrified by the sweeping areligiousness, atheist now small sea away
from Rome empire.
And the pope decided to do what he does best, he excommunicated Tito.
But it was for killing Croatian priests involved in the genocide.
Which feels kind of odd.
A form of holiness I suspect you’d have to be very devoutly Catholic to understand.
Because it seems to me like God was fine hacking those Serb children to pieces,
but apparently Communism is a step too far.
It's kind of weird how God plays politics like that.
But as ever, it wasn’t just the West.
The pressure came from both sides.
United in ideology is not united in practice.
The reality of Communism is not a brotherhood.
Comradery is propaganda for the plebs.
The USSR would have wanted Yugoslavia.
Not as an equal, but as a glorified colony.
They wanted to steal their factories, they wanted to steal their resources
they’d done it to all the other satellite states.
There's no reason to suspect that's not what they wanted here.
Before Tito had even got the bearings of his new position, Stalin had already started his plans to kill him.
Because after all, you can’t have two leaders of the same personality cult.
Tito was everything that Stalin feared.
Tito was ruthless.
And he had the pedigree.
He came from a working class background where he had to leave school in the second grade
to do metal work to help his single mother.
I mean can you get a better origin story.
He was an international war hero who had even fought for Lenin in Russia.
He had organized what was considered the most successful resistance against the Nazis
anywhere on Earth.
And he had fought against imperialists, the nationalists, the fascists and the church.
And won every single time.
He was the picture perfect Communist.
He even had all the fancy suits to prove it.
Then in turn, naturally, many people did love him.
Or at least the image that he projected of himself.
In his day, it would not be wrong to say that his cult of personality was built
just as much on deep affection as it was fear.
Yet fear still played a valuable role.
He may have been a brilliant leader, and I don’t question if he truly loved the concept of Yugoslavia,
but he was still a flawed human at the helm of a post-war Communist state.
He was still a man who would imprison or kill any enemies who threatened his rule.
He wasn't the worst of Communism.
His cruelty was definitely not that of Stalin, or Mao, or even that of Pavelic, but that said,
the people dying in his work camps probably weren’t too concerned about the nuance.
When Stalin did come to kill him, it was as plain as day.
By the time they removed Yugoslavia from the Soviet Brotherhood,
Tito was already in talks with the West to rekindle those flames.
As any true Yugoslav leader must, he innately understood what it took
to survive living on a fault line.
He would not be pulled too far in either direction, but instead find a way to tie these ropes together.
He correctly guessed that the West would forgive his transgressions for a seat back at the table.
The feeling of splitting apart Communist unity meaning much more to them than just a few dead priests.
And so, Yugoslavia would become the knot that kept the world balanced.
With American support, it would boast the fourth largest army in the world.
And Stalin’s invasion would never come.
Tito would protect his people.
And yet even with his power secured, Tito was still a soldier, and he saw enemies all around him.
Real or imagined.
So for nearly a decade, Yugoslavia would undergo a covert campaign of silencing dissent through force.
While on paper it was aimed at Nazi collaborators, and Stalinists and extreme nationalists,
and all the other great propaganda, in reality, it extended to a number of people
who simply believed differently than he did.
Innocent people who were imprisoned or even killed for nothing more than a small-time political grudge
from some local official with too much power and not enough oversight.
And while it would be a stretch to say that he was more brutal than those who came before or after him,
he was undeniably brutal.
But just as with Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, eventually he recognized
that fear could only go so far in pacifying the mob.
And with Stalin in the ground and NATO and the kinder, softer Soviet Union on his side,
he turned a new leaf.
Fear was replaced by promise.
And from 1955 forward, political prisons would be closed and torn down.
And the media would be given a slight relaxation on rights.
And people would be on a road to individual personal freedom.
At least from their point of view.
Just the communist version of individual personal freedom.
Well, actually, not even the communist version.
The Titoist version.
A socialized society with just the slightest hint of this free market capitalism.
A whiff to make America feel like the pie was baking, even if it wasn’t.
At least on paper, he walked the line between hemispheres.
Sort of like the communist reflection of the Nordic model.
But in reality, Tito’s Yugoslavia started collapsing the day it began.
It was essentially structured as a nation-sized ponzi scheme where every year things got worse
but nobody in the organization could possibly admit it.
The prewar economic backbones of Slovenia and Croatia would be forced
to carry the burden of Communism’s failures like overweighted mules for decades.
And eventually it would have to come to a head.
There was just no money left.
By the 1980s, as unemployment reached a full quarter of the population, Yugoslavia entered spiral of bankruptcy
that it could never hope to return from.
But to his credit, it wasn’t as if Tito wanted a bad economy.
He just didn’t know how to fix it.
He wasn’t some genius scholar, he was a vain soldier who didn’t make it out of grade school.
He was doing everything he could with the tools he understood himself to have.
It’s just mostly what he had was charisma.
Statistically, Titoism would do no better than Soviet-style Communism.
It just got better press.
Yet, despite its failures, in the region where it lingered the longest,
it’s still often spoken of positively today.
While nations like Slovenia have made glorifying his name unconstitutional, there are still
many people still willing to sing his praises between their walls.
They were willing to put up with the hardship.
Because to them, the beauty of Tito’s Yugoslavia was in the identity it provided.
Not the economy.
It was in the peace it restored.
It was an end to the genocide.
It was an end to Pavelic.
It held a respected place at the international table for generations and provided a connection
to something larger than the petty squabbles of home.
For many, Socialist Yugoslavia’s power wasn’t its military.
It wasn’t its economy.
It wasn’t even its people.
It was Tito.
And when that guy dies, what can you do?
The nation was bankrupt and it had started fraying on all sides.
Despite two full generations together, the mud that had hardened in that world war
was starting to dissolve again.
Before his funeral, people in Sarajevo started passing around the joke
“when we put him in the ground, we’re gonna just start shooting each other?”
It was probably funny at the time.
It broke the tension.
But I sincerely doubt anybody is laughing now.
More on that next time.
This is Rare Earth.
And that is Tito.