Zagreb to Ljubljana
Neat farmhouses, productive farms, some heavy industry (a Renault plant), stable EU (Euro zone) member, 5% unemployment, a relatively homogeneous population, Slovenia is a horse of a different color.
Maybe their distance from Serbia accounts for the Slovenians' quick establishment of independence but you've got to give some credit to their smarts. They saw an invasion by the Yugoslavia National Army (of which they were a part) coming and prepared plans to transfer all the Slovenes in the YNA to an old, neglected National Guard, locally commanded. On the day of the invasion, surprise, they transferred everybody and had a ready-made army with command structure (which they had filled out and modernized) in place. They fought efficiently and won in ten days.
So, relatively tame politics and from us, by now connoisseurs (if not voyeurs) of violence, more or less a yawn. Can't help it. It's late in the tour, we've seen so much, we're a little tired. OK, let's see the buildings and hear the culture spiel.
We expected a routine bus and walking tour, and it was, except for the fine Austrian-era buildings and then wham, the great interior of this cathedral, St. Nicholas, with a mass going on, celebrating Ljubljana’s patron saint. A knockout.
But with the heat and the walking Mary Anne and I, dying for a beer, decided to get permission from Julia to drop out. Our request, though, opened the tap for half the group, and so back to the hotel en masse, not stopping because we, their leaders, wanted our beer time for ourselves. We had it nicely, in the hotel bar, after a nap and shower.
Slovenia is the place where you catch your breath and start having imaginary conversations with people you met earlier. "You. Your Serbs. They believed those stories about thousands of Croatian soldiers in Dubrovnik getting ready to attack you. Didn't anybody ask, 'Is it true?' Why didn't they check Wikipedia?"
There wasn't any such thing then.
"But there's always something like it, some upholder of academic standards of inquiry. They could check with their profs. Or their profs' students, or former students, their good students."
But even our profs were deceived. A lot of them went along. The potential enemy — the one that produced the Ustashe, you know — was so close. Listen to those profs now and you have to feel sorry for them. "I was confused after hearing about 30,000 Ustashas on the move! TV Belgrade and Montenegrin TV provided the news and I, like a child, was frightened... Imagine how others felt when even I, a university professor, fell for it." (Prof. Novak Kilibarda, quoted in Wikipedia, "Siege of Dubrovnik" — I looked it up.) So he was all for the attack on Croatia. That happens to smart profs, you know. In the excitement of nationalism. Think of all those brainy German professors who went along with Hitler and Goebbels.
If the question had been asked I would not have been ready with an answer. Prevent a prof from holding a view? Who in America can do that? Only, only (it took me a while) other profs. By putting the credulous prof down. 'Definitely not cool.' Politicians, statesmen, preachers, journalists, they don't have a chance of putting a prof down. Profs are too arrogant. Only other profs can do it. In the faculty lounge. "Frosting their ass," as the WWII veterans used to say. You want to know, Serbian friend, the secret of a culture? Look to see whose ass is getting frosted.
Smart profs, the smartest of all, falling for Hitler. And here it is again, the same kind of thing. We've had some of it in the U.S. It's a puzzle. "What prevents smart profs from going jingo?"
What are we going to do tomorrow? Play bridge all morning with our New York lawyer and his partner. It's scheduled free time. And we've done our last washing.
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ReplyDeleteFirst off, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and it has a lot of untrue propaganda, as well as missing many things. There are many Serbs who lost their property in Dubrovnik - who had their homes or summer houses burned down and/or their Croat neighbors who'd overtaken it.
I knew of one such man a 1/2 Croat 1/2 Serb named Branislav who with his Croat mother (widow) had a summer home in Dubrovnik. The house was burnt down and when his mother went to visit it years later, she found the yard/garden of that house was taken over by the neighbor lady - a widow who'd been their friend (and who they did a lot for) but turned on them during the war.
There was Serbian religious property in Dubrovnik which was damaged and destroyed as well - you won't find that on Wikipedia as it will be persistently edited out.
Also, how can you say the Yugoslav army INVADED Slovenia when Slovenia was a part of Yugoslavia and ALREADY had Yugoslavian soldiers stationed there in their barracks up until the Slovenes hastily and illegally declared secession.
The Slovenes didn't even give time for the soldiers to leave their barracks, and the leadership at this time was confused and didn't know what to do.
The Slovenes cut power to these barracks and also forced their civilians around them, so this would look bad if the soldiers tried to force their way out.
The soldiers became sick and hungry. To get them food, helicopters were sent but these were shot down by the Slovenian TO (territorial defense). There is some photo of the wreckage with the downed helicopter, bodies and bread strewn everywhere along with the Slovenes grinning - in Newsweek or some U.S. publication like that.
But ironically the pilots killed were ethnic Slovenes.
Actually Slovenes had a lot of the top air force positions in the Yugoslav military and not all of them immediately deserted the army with the sudden and hasty declaration of "independence".
But you don't want to listen nor learn anything but the propaganda for the masses. You are just being trained to be an 'ol cog in the wheel anyway and to continue U.S. hegemony and subterfuge all the world over.
Do you even thing of all the civilians U.S. drones kill almost every week. A wedding was bombed again, just last week, killing many civilians, including children. Being from the U.S. means getting away with constant murders and lies. Why in Vietnam alone, millions of civilians were killed because of the U.S. and not one soldier ever served a day in jail for that. And of course the support for death squads all over South America.