The Empire Never Ended

To wrap up their second arc of episodes, the TENE Crüe analyzes an extremely interesting Bulgarian documentary / travelogue from 2003 called Whose is this Song? (Chia e tazi pesen? / Чия е тази песен?) which follows the director, Adela Peeva, as she follows the multiple claims on and origin stories for a single song from her childhood. Beginning in Turkey, Peeva travels to Greece, Albania, Macedon...

In many ways, VMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) is a quintessential Balkan nationalist group. It not only encompassed a great variety of ideological forms of nationalism, from liberalism, through socialism (including even anarchism) to Stalinism and fascism, they were also the original Chetniks, as well as the group that trained Ustashas to become efficient terrorists. VMRO pre...

Boris leads TENE through the rise of the Bosniak national idea in the 19th and early 20th centuries to Muslim collaboration in the Second World War. Despite a multiplicity of identities and politics among Musilms in Bosnia, shifting imperial borders and modernizing land reforms spur a nationalist turn among Bosnian Muslim landowners. Enter Mehmed Spaho who attempts to create a single national iden...

In this hybrid between the first and second arc, TENE crew ventures into to the world Yugoslav war music of the 1990s so loved by the edgy memelords of the more smooth-brained corners of the internet. DJ Boris gets on the 1s and 2s and subjects Rey and Fritz to some of the "hits" of the genre while trying to figure out what is so appealing about Ustaša cock rock and genocidal carnival music. This...

TENE welcomes friend of the show, Pinto, to take them on a detour from their usual theme of fascists and Nazis and explore a fascinating period in the history of Jews in the Balkans. Hear about Sabbatai Zvi, the false prophet who bucked Kosher law, advocated polygamy, and changed Jewish history. Learn the Serbian connection to proto-Zionism with Rabbi Alkalai who called for 19th century Jews to re...

For those of you who haven't had enough of the Chetniks, the Dude abides! TENE welcomes historian Stevan Bozanich to dig even deeper into the 'movement' which, despite remaining at the forefront of ideological struggles in the Balkans today nonetheless remains riddled with questions. Boris, Fritz, and Rey ask Stevan about the early Chetniks and their relationship to the Black Hand and the Internal...

Rey returns to the UDBA archives to unearth some more tales of dumb Nazi shit from wartime Yugoslavia: the misadventures of Serbian Nazi 'Stay-Behind' units! Meet Branko Gašparević, a singing school teacher for refugee children and inept saboteur for the Nazis who can't seem to pull off a successful mission to save his life (literally). Rey tells the story of Gašparević's trajectory from an ideolo...

Rey begrudgingly guides TENE through wartime-Yugoslavia's own Jerky Boys, the infamous Chetniks! Renowned in Serbia and beyond as a 'monarchist anti-fascist resistance group', Rey ruins Chetniks for everyone by revealing them to be murderous collaborators on the one hand, and ridiculous clowns on the other. The boys elaborate on figures like Draža Mihailović, the Chetnik high commander with little...

Jumping forward a bit in time to the post-war Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), Boris takes The Empire Never Ended on a quick tour of Partisan Cinema and its historical context. Boris, Fritz, and Rey discuss some of the genre's most iconic films: Slavica (1947), Kozara (1962), Battle of Neretva (1969), Battle of Sutjeska (1973), and the epic Nazi-slaughter romp, Walter Defends Saraj...

TENE pod welcomes back Kemal to narrate some truly crazy shit that went down in the port town of Fiume, also known as Rijeka in today's Croatia, a little more than a century ago. Watch the fundaments of fascism flower from the cocaine-addled brain of celebrated war hero, poet, and daredevil, Gabriele D'Annunzio! Marvel at the sense-defying stunts of his nudist right-hand man and pig-thieving air p...

Boris, Fritz, and Rey get loose to talk about their recent collision with the Astral Bone Gnawer's Lodge and TENE's bizarre but expected premier in Balkan tabloids. In order to avoid wrongly appearing like they're taking sides in an ecumenical battle by exposing the O9A's infiltration in the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, the fellas excoriate the rest of the major nationalist projects and their reli...

In a very special episode of TENE, the fellas summarize and discuss their recent Medium article exposing Nazi Satanists in the Montenegrin Orthodox Church (MoC), Civil Society, and the Ministry of the Interior. The episode focuses on the Astral Bone Gnawers Lodge and their troublingly successful "insight roles", paying special attention to a particular MoC deacon who moonlights as a prominent repr...

The TENE guys often talk about nationalist contradictions, and there are historical moments, usually quite obscure(d), in which these contradictions are made very clear and totally bizarre. Today, gather round and hear a tale of three such moments... yes kids, it's the Wacky Adventures of Ustašas! First, in a bid to compete with the far more popular Croatian Peasant Party, the rabidly nationalist...

TENE tackles the Ustaša movement of wartime Croatia and their bloody wake. Boris begins with the establishment of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH) with German tanks in Zagreb and their poglavnik (fuhrer), Ante Paveli ć chilling out of the country... and it pretty much goes right downhill from there. Much to their surprise, creating extermination camps for children did not endear th...

TEASER Straight from the archives of UDBA, Socialist Yugoslavia's state security agency, this episode follows Lazar Prokic (law student turned Nazi intelligence agent) and Strahinja Janić (all-around psychopath and founder of the Serbian Gestapo). Rey explains how Prokić found himself at the confluence of several fascist intelligence streams, returning to Belgrade first as a Nazi propagandist and...

In TENE's 28th episode, Rey gives a detailed look at the collaborationist regime of Nazi-occupied Serbia (1941-1944). The regime was led by Milan Nedić, a former general and Yugoslav government minister, close to the fascist politics of his relative Dimtrije Ljotić, leader of the Zbor movement. The boys discuss various collaborationist armed forces, such as the Serbian Volunteer Corps (Ljotić's id...

Boris guides TENE through the twists and turns of Montenegrin nationalism and fascist collaboration in the 20th century. He tells how politician and general Krsto Popović turned rebel in support of Montenegrin King Nikola, only to be exiled himself in Italy, forms the inept Lovćen Brigade for the fascists. Boris introduces quisling leader of the occupied Montenegrin state, Sekula Drljević and his...

Returning to Croatia once again, Boris fills in the gaps between the invention of Croatian nationalism and the rise of the bloodthirsty Ustaša. He follows the career of Ante Pavelić from devoted legal counsel to arrested nationalists, through his brief stint as a parliamentarian, to his fateful trip to Italy where he developed the Ustaša's paltry ideology. The crew discusses some of the whackier l...

In TENE's effort to "catch 'em all", Rey introduces saint and stench wizard, Nikolaj Velimirović, one of Serbian Orthodoxy's most important bishops and the gray eminence of Serbian Fascism. Once a government emissary beloved by Serbian liberals, he took a turn towards the fashy in the 1920s, catching the eye of Adolf Hitler, whom Velimirović compares to none other than Saint Sava himself. From thi...

Rey takes the Empire Never Ended down an awkward road called 'Early Serbian and Yugoslav Fascism'. This is a period of street fighting that shaped the pan-slavic fascists known as 'ORJUNA', and of the inter-war antifascist battle of Trbovlje in Slovenia. Follow Dimitrije Ljotić (1891-1945), wannabe führer and Bible nerd, as he annoys the shit out of everyone before getting politically stomped on b...

TENE pod welcomes Kemal back to narrate some truly crazy shit that went down in the port town of Fiume, also known as Rijeka in today's Croatia, a little more than a century ago. Watch the fundaments of fascism flower from the cocaine-addled brain of celebrated war hero, poet, and daredevil, Gabriele D'Annunzio! Marvel at the sense-defying stunts of his nudist right-hand man and pig-thieving air p...

The crew calls up their buddy Kemal Madžerak to help explain the Croatian national project of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He introduces Vuk Karadžić's Croatian counterpart Ljudevit Gaj and their dual attempts to define Serbs and Croats linguistically. Kemal discusses Illiryianism and its evolution into the Croatian national project, as well as the impact of 'Hungarianization' in the empire....

The crew slows down for a 'kaffeeklatsch' to elaborate on some themes in the previous episode. Rey expands on some surprising connections of Karađorđe Petrović and Boris brings us up to date on his American and British royal heirs today.  They discuss the origin of vampires in the 'Western' imagination and the effort to invent new traditions during the Serbian national project. The boys then spend...

Welcome to our second arc of episodes! To inaugurate the 'Balkan' side of our 'Amerikanski-Balkan' podcast, we begin with the development of the 'nation state' in Serbia. From the uprising against a group of out-of-control Janissaries in 1804 lead by Karađorđe Petrović, through the rewriting of medieval history by a rising ruling class, to the regicides of the Black Hand, Rey narrates the story of...

Boris, Fritz, and Rey wrap up their first arc of episodes and say, not a "goodbye", but a "see yinz later" to the Order of Nine Angles. Fritz gives some updates on this arc's siegepilled stars and Atomwaffen's great new way to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Shit gets unreal as Rey recounts the recent inclusion of The Empire Never Ended into ONA canon as "antifascist bigots" and Boris joins him to poke f...