Posted on 09/15/2010 5:52:10 PM PDT by Ravnagora
General Mihailovich at the 1946 trial that would end with his execution.
The hills of Ivanjica, Serbia Photo by Z. Pejovich
In America it is still September 15th. In Serbia the first hours of September 16th are passing through the night. This is an important day in the history of Serbia. This is the day when Serbia has an opportunity to redeem herself.
On this day Serbia must forget blaming others. She must face her own direct accountability in putting to death one of her greatest heroes and most loyal sons and begin the journey to redemption.
On this day, September 16th, General Draza Mihailovich will stand trial again, only he will be absent. On his behalf will be present Serbian patriots for whom justice for the departed is paramount. They believe with all their hearts that General Mihailovich is owed a fair trial, albeit posthumously, and this time around, there in the Belgrade courthouse on Timocka Street, Serbia will be faced with an ultimatum of justice for one of her own.
September has been a significant month in the Mihailovich timeline. It is in September 1916 that he participated in the first offensive on the Salonika Front in World War I as a Second Lieutenant and was wounded. Two years later, in 1918, again in September, he participated in the historic breakthrough on that same front as a Lieutenant. Throughout his military service, which began in 1910 and spanned both Balkan Wars, the First World War, and World War II, Draza Mihailovich was recognized for his intelligence, his insight, his bravery and courage, and was decorated and promoted accordingly. He earned every rank he achieved, and he reached the pinnacle as "General" and "Supreme Commander". Though he would be betrayed and abandoned by the Allies during World War II, it was the abandonment by his own King in September of 1944 that was perhaps the most grievous for him.
Now it is again September many, many years later, and Serbia has the opportunity to remember why her son was so decorated and promoted and so revered, respected and beloved through war after war, having dedicated his life to military service on behalf of the homeland and the people that he loved. The call has been issued to "officially rehabilitate General Mihailovich" and the date has been set for this September 16th day in 2010. You might call it a "Rehabilitation Trial". If the "rehabilitation" is affirmed by the court, perhaps we might be able to upgrade "Rehabilitation" to "Justice Served".
I wish I was in Belgrade today to shake the hands of those patriots who have made it their mission in life to right the wrongs of the past and to give General Mihailovich the due justice he deserves. These patriots, some of whom I can proudly call friends and acquaintances, and others whom I've never met, will make it possible for Serbia to redeem herself on this September 16th day, there on Timocka Street.
I pray that she will see her way to this redemption on behalf of all those who did not live to see this day.
Aleksandra Rebic
September 15, 2010
*****
Serbian Patriots PING!!!!
What’s up with the General? Did Roosevelt abandon him to the Russian Communists like he did all of Eastern Europe?
Yes. The West shamefully betrayed Mihailovic, throwing their support instead to the commie TIto, just as they betrayed many thousands of displaced persons, returning them to the Soviets to be tortured and executed. Thanks a lot, Churchill and Roosevelt.
"What’s up with the General? Did Roosevelt abandon him to the Russian Communists like he did all of Eastern Europe?"
Roosevelt, unfortunately, abandoned Mihailovich into the hands of Churchill, because America left the Balkan theater to the British to "manage". I have always felt that had the Americans been more "in charge" of the Balkan theater in WWII, the fate of Mihailovich and his freedom fighters would have been different.
It was Winston Churchill who abandoned Mihailovich to the Yugoslav communists under the "leadership" of Marshal Tito, who was serving Master Stalin at the time. Tito's ambition was to turn Yugoslavia into his own personal communist "Utopia" after the war. Of course, there was to be no place for a patriot, freedom fighter, Christian Serb like General Mihailovich and his Chetnik forces in postwar Yugoslavia.
Tito was Mihailovich's executioner. He would never have succeeded had it not been for Winston Churchill and the British Establishment giving him everything he needed to commit political genocide against anyone who was not a loyal communist at the end of World War II in Yugoslavia.
Shame on Churchill.
Thanks for the question. It's an important one.
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I went to Wikipedia and had a fine time poring through the information, much of it backed up with references. What an incredible mix of affairs. As for the BBC and it's easily formed division of the good guys and the bad guys, one can get dizzy over this General.
As we all know Churchill said he would befriend the devil if it meant defeating Hitler. This he did, name of Stalin. Now the Chetniks (Draza's boys). seemed to operate against the Fascist forces, so far so good. It was a free Serbia they wanted. In came the partisans to also fight the Germans.
Tito was the leader and the partisans were mainly communists. The United States decided Tito was the strong horse and supplied his forces, with some small aid to Draza's Chetniks. The Chetniks turned on the communist backed partisans and possibly committed war crimes. Sort of like they hated the Fascists and Communists. At the same time the Chetniks rescued many US airmen who were shot down over Jugoslavia. Tragically they accepted aid from the Germans, who also wanted the communist partisans eliminated. The crafty British broke the coded messages by intercept about this collaboration.
President Truman posthumously awarded Draza with the Legion of Merit. This on behalf of the US flyers he saved. This was kept from the Tito government to avoid offence. In short the Communists won, as they did in the Ukraine. The more I read about WW2, the more complicated the whole thing was.
Yep, old Sir Winston has not yet been held to account for all he had ordered. I believe he conceded he had been forced to do much of which was not in the Geneva convention. Still that is war.
save
The USA shed a lot of blood and treasure to make the world safe for communism.
Thanks for your post.
Just so you know, “Wikipedia” is a bad source, in my opinion, on General Mihailovich. Lots of disinformation there. They paint him as a Nazi collaborator. The communist party line still influences a lot of information on WWII “good guys and bad guys”, even to this day. They were the BEST at disinformation. The Titoists and their admirers made Joseph Goebbels look like an amateur.
You’re right. It’s very complicated. Yugoslavia is one hell of a convoluted “subject” to study. What makes it all the more complicated is all the external interference (which continues as we speak) in the internal affairs of the people who actually live on that territory.
*****
Sadly, the wikipedia article on Draza Mihailovic is still full of commie, muzzie, and ustashe lies!!!!
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=draza+mihajlovic&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
[Sorry—I had to post the URL for the whole Google search, since this site’s HTML program does not work with the special characters in the wikipedia URL.]
It is also still being “mediated”, with no end in sight.
What I will have to do is to research further. This with regard as to what the Chetniks actually did. Luckily for the Ukranians who fought the Russians and were prisoners of war, Atlee was the British Prime Minister. They were not sent to Russia.
I am a believer in the phrase "Unindicted War Criminals" which applies to the NATO attack on Serbia. Never since Goebels, have I seen a wicked wash job on that attack. The deliberate bombing of civilians.
Roosevelt is as much to blame as Churchill. He was a commie symp, and SHOULD have given Stalin little aid and had Patton meet the Russian army in Russia somewhere West of Moscow. Instead he destroyed every Eastern European culture on the altar of Communism.
Stalin routinely murdered the non Communist leaders in those nations and placed commies in authority, so I suspected Stalin.
But it's no surprise that the British allowed Tito (possibly the most violent commie that ever lived, even other commies were afraid of him) to pull the same stunt as Stalin, they regularly mismanaged nations in their care. And a show trial to boot, that must have hurt.
The General certainly was courageous.
War crimes against Communists,.......hummmmm, I'm not sure it is possible to commit a war crime against a communist, useful idiot or not. I spent three years fightin' commies, too.
It's a sad comment on US and UK anti communist leadership, a bunch of wusses.
Thanks for the “civilized” dialogue, Peter Libra. If you are British, no offense meant.
It’s actually perfect that you bring up George Orwell in this context. I will post here a great analysis of the “censored” preface to his classic “Animal Farm” which specifically deals with General Mihailovich. The analysis was written by Carl Savich in 2008 and it was initially posted on Free Republic in November of that year. It’s well worth repeating here, and I think you might find it interesting. I know that I was quite amazed when I discovered this “secret” part of “Animal Farm” that had been “edited” all the way out of the book.
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GEORGE ORWELL ON GENERAL DRAZA MIHAILOVICH
By Carl Savich
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell, “1984” (1949)
When George Orwell published his political satire “Animal Farm” in 1945, he wrote a preface to the book that was deleted and censored from the rest of the text. In the preface, Orwell criticized the censorship and suppression that were endemic in Western countries.
The censored, deleted, and suppressed preface to Animal farm was first published in The Times Literary Supplement on September 15, 1972 as an essay entitled “The Freedom of the Press”. In the preface, Orwell analyzed and deconstructed government and media censorship in Britain during World War II. In particular, Orwell discussed and criticized the British government’s censorship of his book Animal Farm. Orwell analyzed self-imposed media self-censorship and how events and facts were censored and distorted in British society where the government and media suppressed uncomfortable or unpopular truths. In the dystopian satire 1984 (1949), Orwell would term this “duckspeak”, which in Newspeak meant literally to quack like a duck or to speak without thinking.
In 1984, duckspeak is defined:
“’There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to talk like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. ...
Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.”
George Orwell, whose birth name was Eric Arthur Blair, was a socialist himself throughout his life and career. This is a fact usually censored and detailed in any biographical profile of Orwell. Orwell criticized Soviet Communistic socialism because he was a socialist himself. It took one to know one. The fact that Orwell was a socialist was de-emphasized because the British government and the U.S. government sought o use his writings against the Soviet Union and against communism and socialism during the Cold War.
Orwell became a primary source in the ideological conflict between the Western countries such as Britain and the U.S. and the Eastern countries represented by the Soviet Union and China. So his writings were invariably exploited and prostituted as propaganda in the ideological conflict of the Cold War. Propaganda and ideology are black and white. There is no room for any shades of gray. This is why his criticisms and examination of Western media censorship and suppression were themselves suppressed and omitted. The preface to Animal farm itself was suppressed and censored and deleted from the book. Orwell warned that media suppression in the West represented a “slide towards Fascist ways of thought”.
In the deleted proposed preface to Animal Farm, re-titled “The Freedom of the Press”, George Orwell analyzed the role of censorship in Britain. Animal Farm was written in the form of an allegory or as “a fairy story”. But there was no doubt at all that is was based on and directed against the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. In the deleted preface, Orwell analyzed British self-censorship. In particular, Orwell examined the case of Draza Mihailovich:
“In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihailovich, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav protege in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans. This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihailovich’s supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were simply kept out of print. In July of 1943 the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mihailovich. The British press ‘splashed’ the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich: and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued.”
Orwell also noted instances of censorship during the civil war in Spain from 1936 to 1939:
“Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war. Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libeled in the English leftwing press, and any statement in their defense even in letter form, was refused publication. At present, not only is serious criticism of the USSR considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trotsky had written a biography of Stalin. One may assume that it was not an altogether unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable. An American publisher had arranged to issue it and the book was in print — 1 believe the review copies had been sent out — when the USSR entered the war. The book was immediately withdrawn. Not a word about this has ever appeared in the British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its suppression, was a news item worth a few paragraphs.”
Orwell analyzed how censorship in the Western countries differed from that in the totalitarian states. In the totalitarian states, censorship was outright and open. In the Western countries, however, censorship was more subtle and covert in nature. Censorship existed in both states, but in the Western state censorship was perceived as benign and innocuous and self-imposed. In Western countries, censorship thus becomes self-censorship.
Orwell analyzed British self-censorship:
“We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news - things which on their own merits would get the big headlines - being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia.
Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.
It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of ‘vested interests’.
The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular - however foolish, even - entitled to a hearing?
Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it’.
If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
In the January 12, 1945 “As I Please” series in the Tribune, George Orwell discussed censorship and media manipulation and deception in the case of Draza Mihailovich:
“I invite attention to an article entitled ‘The Truth about Mihailovich?’ (the author of it also writes for Tribune, by the way) in the current World Review. It deals with the campaign in the British press and the B.B.C. to brand Mihailovich as a German agent. Jugoslav politics are very complicated and I make no pretence of being an expert on them. For all I know it was entirely right on the part of Britain as well as the U.S.S.R. to drop Mihailovich and support Tito. But what interests me is the readiness, once this decision had been taken, of reputable British newspapers to connive at what amounted to forgery in order to discredit the man whom they had been backing a few months earlier. There is no doubt that this happened. The author of the article gives details of one out of a number of instances in which material facts were suppressed in the most impudent way. Presented with very strong evidence to show that Mihailovich was not a German agent, the majority of our newspapers simply refused to print it, while repeating the charges of treachery just as before.”
Self-censorship and media suppression and manipulation are endemic threats in a democratic society. The censorship and suppression of the facts in the Draza Mihailovich case allowed a Communist dictatorship to be established in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell showed that for democracy to be viable and legitimate, self-censorship and media suppression must be understood and examined.
Carl Savich
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Wow. So I’m not the only one, then, who doesn’t buy the “accident” theory about that recent plane crash that took out the Polish elite.
And weren’t they on their way to Katyn, when the plane went down?
Britain and France committed a war crime, as far as I’m concerned, with regards to Poland. They didn’t just leave the Poles to the wolves, they FED the Poles to the wolves.
Just my humble (and Pat’s) opinion.
I wouldn’t trade geography with Eastern Europe for anything.
*****
Yes, the Poles were lured to a conciliatory “memorial” ceremony for the poor officer corps; Vladimir Putin is a thug, a career KGB officer. The KGB has killed more innocent people than any organization on earth, except the Chinese Communist Party. The fatal error of the brief rule of the Russian anti-Soviets, and of the post-Soviet satellite govts., was that they did not hold trials leading to the execution of the entire Soviet nomenklatura, or at least their banishment for life from politics. Let that be a lesson to us. If we ever rescue the USA from our own soviets, there must be no mercy. Up against the wall, m-frs, as the Left loved to say. That means you, Billie Ayers. That means you, treasonous John Kerry. And so with the rest of them.
Interestingly, Churchill, and the Communist et all, most likely learned this little trick FROM the Germans. German intelligence successfully conned Stalin into executing some of his best generals by letting it "slip" that they worked for the Germans (they didn't).
Britain and France were infested with commies and socialists, whose main goal during WW 2 was saving Uncle Joe from the Germans. British commies fed nuclear secrets to the Russians. Meanwhile American commies surrounded the FDR, telling him what to do. When is it going to dawn on free people that rich punks like FDR or the Bushes, and scum recruited from “elite” universities like Harvard and Yale, are exactly the folks most likely to betray us? Never choose one of these creeps again. That means you, Mitt Romney.
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