Everyone wanted examples, here are your examples. See the chapters 28 31 36 and 37 of Irrepresible Rothbard for the context.
it’s just that the Serbs have been better fighters in this civil war
Wrong. The Serbs were no “better fighters”, but they had inherited the military hardware of the federal army by the virtue of everyone else abandoning that army.
Serbia, a nation on Austria-Hungary’s southern border, which had set off World War I by contriving to assassinate Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914
Serbia did no such thing, and actually no a war can not be made inevitable by an assassination, so it must be said it was Austria-Hungary who set off the war by actually launching it.
by suckering the intellectual leaders of the Croats and the Slovenes into adopting a phony and artificial “South Slav” (Yugoslav) ideology
That would have been rather difficult seeing how Yugoslavism originated with Croats and spread from Austro-Hungary. Yugoslavism both in its unitarist and in its federalist strands were the brainchilds of Croats. The former by one Ljudevit Gaj the central personality of Croatian national awekening and the latter by one Josip Juraj Strossmayer the central personality of Croatian liberalism. Also while Yugoslavism was widely accepted among the South Slavs in Austria-Hungary where all political currents of all the three peoples paid homage to it to one degree or another, except for a conservative current of the Croats, it held far less sway in Serbia. Stjepan Radić himself was a Yugoslavist but of the federalist strand (The first Yugoslavia was unitarist.). Nor was there anything particularly “phony” or artificial about the pan-South Slavist ideology, it was legitimate as any other ideology of this type.
When the Serbs assassinated the great Croat peasant leader Stefan Radic in 1928,
Stjepan Radić was not assassinated. He was murdered in the assembly by a fellow assembly member who after giving a speech was heckled by members of Radić`s party and loosing composure produced a revolver, shouting for an apology and when one was not forthcoming moved on a shooting spree killing three and wounding one other. The shooting spree was not planned in advance (he always had a revolver on him, not just that day) and the shooter acted alone. Therefore no, “the Serbs” did not assassinate Radić, there was no Serb conspiracy to assassinate Radić, it was an act of one person.
in 1928, the Croats moved to form a separate Croatia
What move? There was no „move“. The only „move“ that fits is the founding of the Ustaše. But they can not be simply equated with „the Croats“, they were a small extremist fringe. The Ustaše at the time were a small terrorist organisation founded in Vienna with a few hundred members, based in Austria and in Italy and subsidised by them that carried out a few attacks in Yugoslavia, most notoriously planting a bomb in a Belgrade cinema.
Bulgaria, … was aced out by unfortunately picking the losing side of the last Balkan War and of World War I.
I don`t see how Bulgaria could have “picked” the wrong side of the Second Balkan War, seeing how she launched that war and fought it without a single ally.
Macedonians forced into Yugoslavia formed the militant revolutionary organization, IMRO (International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), which assassinated the tyrant King Alexander in 1934
One, actually IMRO Stands for Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation. (It was called that because it was styling itself after earlier Bulgarian revolutionaries of the IRO. Now IRO had „Internal“ in its name because earlier on Bulgarian patriots were based in Bulgarian legions based externally in Serbia, Romania and Russia, but IRO was formed as an underground organisation in Bulgaria itself so this was a big thing.)
Two, IMRO was not formed in any reaction to Yugoslavia, it was actually formed much earlier when Macedonia was stil under the Ottomans.
Three, the Macedonians were not claimed as “western Bulgars”, they were claimed as Bulgarians seeing how “Bulgar” is a word that reffers to a Turkic people now extinct.
Four, there was nothing particularly “arrogant” about their claim seeing how Slavic Macedonians at the time did in fact see themselves as Bulgarians. IMRO itself battled both the Serb and the Greek authorities in Macedonia but not the Bulgarian authorities in Bulgarian owned Pirin Macedonia and had a counterpart in IDRO battling Romanian authorities in Bulgarian areas of Dobruja and ITRO battling Greek authorities in Bulgarian settled Western Thrace.
Paul also followed a neutral policy in World War II.
The regent had Yugoslavia join the Tripartite Pact. That is not a neutral policy, or else Bulgaria could also be said to have been neutral in World War II.
British intelligence therefore engineered a military coup on March 27, 1941. The sudden British coup in Yugoslavia in March 1941
Thats not true. The coup was pro-Bitish and British supported but it was not “engineered” by them. It was down to dynamics within the country itself. It followed a massive public outcry and massive demonstrations against Yugoslavia`s entering of the Tripartite Pact.
whereas the Germans and Italians treated the Croats as fellow enemies of the Serbian Yugoslav regime
Actually, while they had subsidies the Ustaše for their purposes, Italians did not treat Croats as “fellow” anything but instead directly annexed a good portion of Croatia and actually thought of Croats as a bigger obstacle to their aspirations than the Serbs.
Croatia was allowed to form a separate national state, naming the Italian Duke of Spoleto as its king.
Nope. WWII Croatia is counted by the Croats as an illegitimate puppet state carved out by the occupier and not as a legitimate example of Croatian statehood. It is never even simply reffered to as “Croatia” in textbooks and in croatian historiography, but only by the its official name or the initials of it, the “NDH”.
The new Croat kingdom was run by Ante Pavelic and his Ustasha movement. Every time any newspaper account speaks of Croat nationalism or Croat-Serb rivalry nowadays, the writer invariably raises the spectre of Croatia’s “pro-Nazi” regime. But it should be clear that the Croats were not pro-Nazi; they were, simply, anti-Serb, while neutral in more remote European affairs, and the genesis of this attitude should now be clear.
This is rubbish. Ustaše were clero-fascists and their regime was about as pro-Nazi as it gets, it enacted all the racial laws the Nazi Germany did and carried them out zealously and ran their own local death camp. However what Rothbard refuses to acknowledge or more likely doesn`t know about is that there was a disconnect between the regime and the Croats at large, manifest in the fact that the regular army (ie not the ideological Ustaša formations) of the puppet state was notoriously unreliable and of no real value as a fighting force.
It is true that during the war, the Croat Ustasha killed a lot of Serbs, but so too did Serb forces kill a great many Croats.
BS relativisation. The Ustaše used the state to systematicaly enact terror specificaly targeted an ethnic group (Serbs, Jews, Gypsies), there is no counterpart for that in Yugoslavia`s history.
Because the Croats had their own state during World War II, there was no need for them to engage in partisan activities.
As explained before the Croats did not have their own state during World War II. The reason there was less of a need for them to engage in partisan activities was that terror was not being inflicted upon them.
The Serbs, on the other hand, were impelled to resist the direct military rule of the Germans.
Actually the resistance was much stronger in the areas within the puppet NDH than under areas under direct German occupation. This because the Germans inflicted terror “only” as a means of collective reprisals following partisan activity while the Ustaše would carry it out wheter they were given “cause” or not.
A Serb guerrilla force, the Chetniks, arose under Draza Milhailovic, paying more attention to the killing of Croats than of Germans.
Some fantasy stuff from Rothbard. The royalists were only a big factor in Serbia, where there weren`t any Croats to kill. And whatever the fault of the Karađorđević loyalists they did not go around killing Croats for being Croats. In reality most of their time was spent battling the communists.
Look, Rothbard is totally wrong in this section. There is a legitimate way to counter the assertion that because Croats “have a pro-Nazi past” they somehow do not have the right to seceede. This is by correctly stating that the Ustaše were a small extremist minority that were installed by the Germans and were not representative of the Croatian people at large, that a whole people can not be held hostage because of a regime that did not represent them and was not put in power by them. And then to add that actually even had they been pro-Nazis that wouldnt had changed anything because political orientation (of fifty years ago) doesnt change the inherent rights someone may have. Instead of that Rothbard goes down some weird road explaining how this puppet regime that was trying to emulate Nazi Germany wasn`t actually all that bad considering.
Although a Communist, Tito was able to win out over a Milhailovic because Tito, being a Croat, was able to appeal far more strongly to all the non-Serb groups in Yugoslavia.
Nonsene. Tito being a Croat was never of any consequence. (Did not stop him from killing more Croats than anyone else ever did.) The Partisans were a more appealing choice to non-Serbs because the Communist Party had adopted the federalist strain of Yugoslavism. But no, actually that was not the reason why the communists won out over the royalists.
The non-Serbs along with Serbs from Serbia, were simply not a factor in why the communists prevailed. While they all contributed to the resistance their numbers were comparatively low until such a time as the partisans already greatly outnumbered the chetniks. Not because their numbers were low in absolute terms, but because they were low in relative terms compared to the Serbs from Croatia and from Bosnia. Throughout 1943 the partisans were stil predominantly an army made up of Serbs from Croatia and from Bosnia, so the reason why the communists prevailed is to be found by answering why was it that these Serbs went into the bush in such large numbers, why they did so so early, and why were they much more likely to join the partisans rather than the chetniks.
Ethnic devolution proceeded side by side with market reform until the early 1970s, when an evident desire for Croat independence drove Marshal Tito into a counterrevolutionary crackdown and a blockage of further ethnic and economic reform.
False. The Croatian Spring (1971) was followed by the constitution of 1974 that was just about the biggest move towards decentralisation ever.
whereas the Serbs, headed by their Communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, have been strong for both unitary centralism and a communist command economy.
Slobodan Milošević was never a Communist in the ideological sense and was not a Communist in the party sense at the time of the writting of the article, he was a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia. This party was made up of former Communists but so were most parties at the time, Serb or non-Serb.
Nobody in 1991 was for a command economy, Milošević`s economic policy was that of everyone else at the time, neo-liberalism. The only difference was that he was carrying out the reforms at a slower pace.
The stubborn Serb attempt to keep an iron grip on Kosovo is grounded in history: in the fact that centuries ago, Kosovo was the very heartland of the Serbs.
A far more important grounding is that the fact was that while Serbs were made into a small minority by the phenomenal natural growth rate of the Albanian population they in fact still own most of the land in Kosovo.
Why not allow each of these nationalities to go free, to recognize each others’ independence, and then hope for peaceful relations and a free-trade zone among the nationalities of what used to be called Yugoslavia? That would surely be the libertarian aspiration. The major stumbling block is Serb imperialism.
Rothbard talking out of his arse. How come Serb imperialism was not a stumbling block to secession of Macedonia in September 1991? The problem was that from 1990 already there was a standoff inside Croatia between Croats and Croatian Serbs with the Serbs declaring autonomy and signaling that if Croatia moved to secede from Yugoslavia, they would move to counter-secede from Croatia. Croatia and Slovenia based their secession on the provisions of the 1974 constitution and the rights of republics to seceede. The Serbs asserted that it is not the republics that have the right to seceede, but the (constituent) peoples and asserted that if the integrity of the federation can be put under question then so can the integrity of the republics and that therefore no seccession could happen until better delineations than those drawn by the communists in 1943 that left a great deal of Serbs outside Serbia can be established. Slovenia refused to slow down its drive for seccession and declared independence based on the rights as a constituent republic which was opposed by the Serbs because of the implications this held for the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. But actually the actual physical obstacle on the ground had nothing to do with “the Serbs”, it was down to the old federal buerocracies, such as the federal military, doing what buerocracies do - putting up a fight against being scaled back.
Slovenes are going to Make It. Against all odds, against the determined opposition of the United States, the Soviet Union, and all the other European states
Actually they had the behidnd the scenes support of the newly united Germany which very soon translated in backing of the EU and of the self-appointed Badinter Commision.
As staunch defenders of Austria-Hungary against Italian aggression during World War I,
Actually Slovenes were only staunch defenders of Slovene lands, they couldn`t give a rats arse about the Austro-Hungary, but did not want to see their lands partitioned either.
The Slovenes, however, had even less in common with the Serbs than the latter’s ancient enemies, their fellow westerners, the Croats.
Wrong. Croats and Serbs are not “ancient enemies”. The emnity is very recent in origin.
The Slovenes ….. Like the Croats, Catholic in a sea of Eastern Orthodoxy
Slovenians have for their immediate neighbours the Italians, the Austrian Germans, the Hungarians and the Croats. All are predominantely Catholic. So they are actually Catholics in a sea of Catholicism, no?
And so the Slovenes, like the Croats, wanted out of Yugoslavia, and particularly wanted out from under the domination of the imperialist, and still strongly Communist, Serbs. And yet of course the Serbs were not about to let go.
Already addressed.
Unfortunately, the agent of triumph was not devotion to abstract justice. What did it was the force of Slovenian arms.
Force of arms, in a „war“ that lasted ten days and claimed the lives of 62 people?
its mighty tank corps was fought to a standstill by the heroic Slovene guerrillas,
No it was not. Whatever the armored columns were sent they all reached their objectives (the airport and the border crossings), not one of the columns was halted.
Nor were they opposed by any „guerrillas“. They were opposed by the police and by the Territorial Defense, two armed buerocracies controlled localy by the republics.
…. who beat back the Yugoslav army and inflicted unacceptable losses
That would be the unacceptable loses of 44 killed over ten days? The army was not “beaten back”. There were army units stationed all over the country, including in Slovenia. Once independence was declared these bases were encircled and the existing international border crossings were taken over. Now since the declaration was deemed invalid by the federal authorities it was the job of the federal military to re-establish control over the borders. They did so, but in the course of doing so saw just how far gonne things are and called it quits. Specifically because the military itself was impotent in the face of 19-year old conscripts it was made of didn`t understand what are they even doing and what “the war” was about when the state was obviously dysfunctional and disintegrating and therefore had very little inclination to fight it. In this context the Slovenian “force of arms” was actually counter productive. On the ground itself, in various stand offs and barricade situations the Slovenians were actually the more zealous and trigger happy of the two parties, evident also from the fact they killed 44 soldiers compared to 18 people killed by the soldiers, despite the federal army having many times the firepower of the slovene police. Had they been less willing to escalate they would have achieved their goal just the same, but with less bloodshed and perhaps even sooner.
who before the battle had been willing to settle for sovereignty within a loose Yugoslav confederation
That`s not true. The confederation was a word that was thrown around a lot but no one actually bought it or expected anyone to.
an area of intense and ancient ethnic hatreds
Another Balkanism. The Balkans are no more and no less an area of „intense and ancient ethnic hatreds“ than any other place in the world. No phenomena you can find in the Balkans is particularly unique to it.
Also the most hatred the Balkans ever produced was for outsiders, the Germans and the Turks.
For the Bosnian Muslims were once the hated Bogomil heretics, a Manichaean heresy with horrifying implications, and there is much evidence that the Muslims still practice their Bogomil rites in secret, engraving its symbols on their tombstones.
This is up there with the aliens built the pyramids sort of stuff. This is totally proposterous. People who until 1993 went around calling themselves „Moslem by nationality“ are actually secretly practitioners of some middle age heresy nobody actually knows anymore for certain what was it about? (There is no consensus to the effect that the heresy was Manichean.) You don`t think that would have gotten out by now? This is simply looney world…
Even more than the Croat “Communist” economists, the Slovene economists led the country as early as the 1960s, in calling for free markets and privatization. I well remember meeting, long ago, the cheery Slovene economist Alexander Bajt, I suppose nominally Communist, at the University of Virginia campus, who was even then writing on behalf of capitalism and free markets.
This is so very ironic that Murray should mention Bajt in such positive terms in a piece going on about “Serb imperialism”. Aleksander Bajt after the fall of Communism and the Slovenian independence came out with a 1300 pages long book Bermanov Dosje which is part autobiography, part a work of history where he writes he had been a Karađorđević loyalist and a Draža Mihajlović supporter and spews fire against the communist partisans and calls for the chetniks among which he counts himself and for whom he was an agent while in Rome during the war to be rehabilitated. The guy had been a life-long serbophile and an anti-communist.
If you think Rothbard was actually right on a certain point (he wasn`t) I called false say so and I will conceede without arguing. But there is like 30 things Rothbard wrote for background information that are wrong. Even if you challange a bunch of them, enough of the important ones will remain to make my point, that yes, Rothbard could be irresponsible in his rants, writting down stuff that was not true and that he sometimes in his enthusiasm and combativeness wrote about things he knew very little about but in a tone as if he knew much more than he actually did.