A COLD WAR

The Jasenovac concentration camp, established in Slavonia, aka "the Auschwitz of the Balkans", "specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind" and prisoners were primarily murdered manually with the use of blunt objects such as knives, hammers and axes. In the words of the Nazi general, von Horstenau, "The greatest of all evils must be Jasenovac, which no ordinary mortal can gli...

In 1941, after the creation of the NDH, Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Catholic fascist Ustasha, went to Rome to receive the blessing of Pope Pius XII - while his administration was publicly saying they were going to kill a third of the Croatian Orthodox. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1941 Roman Catholic priests, attended by armed Ustasha, carried out mass baptisms in Orthodox village...

On this episode we talk about the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, lead by Ante Pavelić, and his Catholic fascist group, the Ustasha. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As caretaker secretary of the Yugoslav Party from 1937 to 1940, Tito first moved the Central Committee from Paris to Zagreb, then built up a new, young leadership loyal to him. These guys would be his inner circle for decades to come. When, in February 1941, the Yugoslav regent Prince Paul did a deal with Hitler to avoid an invasion of Yugoslavia, the Serbian Orthodox went nuts and overthrew Paul'...

Back to Tito and Yugoslavia. In 1934, the Croat Catholics rose up against the Serb King Alexander, leading to his assassination by a Ustasha agent while visiting France. Meanwhile Stalin purged the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party, opening the door to a new generation of younger, more radical leadership, with Tito becoming the General Secretary. While living in Paris, he loved to visit t...

My guest today is Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he served as a professor of politics and director of St Antony's Russian and East European Centre. He has written widely on Soviet and Russian politics, on communist politics more generally, on the Cold War, and on political leadership. His new boo...

By the time Tito got back to his home country in 1920, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman empires had all been broken up. In their place were the independent states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, commonly known as Yugoslavia. It was then that Tito began his career as a revolutionary. Le...

In order to understand the career of Josip Broz Tito, we need to understand the religious and political history of the Balkans. As historian Richard West says: anyone who approaches the Yugoslavs without some knowledge of their religious history is like a chicken trying to understand a ladder. So on this episode, we do a quick review of the region from the fall of Rome through to the assassination...

Josip Broz Tito grew up in poverty on a small farm in Croatia. He dropped out of school at 13, and apprenticed as a locksmith and mechanic. In 1913 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and ended up in WWI, where he was injured and captured by Russians. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he became a Bolshevik and fought with them against the White Army. Learn more about you...

After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviets work their asses off to get their own nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, despite the enormous financial commitment it required and the other, more pressing social and economic problems the country was facing after WWII. They saw it as a matter of self-defence against the USA. In 1947, Andrei Zhdanov introduced the 'two-camps doctrine’. And finally,...

When Stalin and Molotov heard what Truman had said at Potsdam about the USA having a new bomb ready, they saw it as a direct threat to the Soviet Union and increased their support for Soviet scientists. They might have been further advanced if it hadn't been for the purge of Soviet military strategists like Mikhail Tukhachevskii, aka "The Red Napoleon". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega...

It’s commonly thought in the West that the Soviet Union stole all of the secrets for building a bomb from their spies in the West. Not exactly correct. When nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin in December 1938, the Soviets were as quick to react as the West. But their economy wasn't as strong, and they had many more problems to contend with, so it didn't get a high priority. And then 4 millio...

When WWII broke out, the Zionists declared their support for Britain. It's not like they were going to throw their lot in with the Nazis. For the Arabs, the choice was trickier. The British were seen by the Arabs as the protectors of Zionism while the Nazis were against the Jews - and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And for the first few years, the Nazis looked like the favourites to win. Then...

After The Peel Commission recommending moving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land by force, the Arab Revolt re-emerged with hundreds of terrorist attacks during 1937-38 against the British and Jews - and even against Arab collaborators. The British cracked down and deported many of their leaders. Irgun, the Jewish militant group, met this threat with their own terrorism. Hitler us...

After the Great Arab Revolt of 1936, the British pretended not to understand the causes of Arab anger and held The Peel Commission to get to the bottom of it. Peel recommended partitioning the land, giving one-fifth to the Jews - forcing 225,000 Arabs to move off their land. HOW TO LISTEN If you are seeing this message, it means you aren't a subscriber (or aren't logged in). If you haven't heard a...

While the Jews were trying to get close to Mussolini, the Arabs modelled themselves after Hitler. The Husseinis, led by Amin al-Husseini, aka Hajj Amin, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in 1935 set up the Palestinian Arab Party which had its own youth corp, al-Futuwwa, similar to the Hitler Youth and was even officially called the “Nazi Scouts”. Another Arab terrorist group in 1935 was run by Syrian-...

On 15 August 1929, a rowdy group of Jewish Revisionist activists marched to the Western Wall proclaiming "The Wall is ours". They insulted the Prophet, Islam, and the Muslim community at large. It lead to large scale riots and violence. The British were powerless to stop it. This lead a band of Haganah officers set up their own group, called “Haganah Bet” or “Haganah B.” It would later be called I...

From 1921 - 29, there was mostly peace in Palestine. But the Zionist immigration continued unabated. And the larger they got, the more politically aggressive they became. In 1925, a new Jewish right-wing political party, Betar, was created, aligning itself with Mussolini - making them fascist Jews. They urged the Palestine Jews to demand full control of the Temple Mount, the site of the old Jewish...

In the early 1920s, violence between Muslims and the Jews continued to escalate. Because they didn't trust the British to defend their interests, the newly formed (and illegal) Jewish self-defense organization, the Haganah, was formed. Churchill came to visit Palestine - and made things worse. Without a doubt, the British military continued to favor the Arabs. General Sir Walter Congreve, commande...

When the British finally captured the Middle East from the Ottomans in October 1918, under the command of General Edmund Allenby, with the support of TE Lawrence and his Sharifians, Hussein and Faisal, the British immediately tried to walk back on the Sykes-Picot agreement. They figured they did all the hard work, so fuck the French. Most British officials believed that the Arabs could be persuade...

The Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter, dated November 2, 1917, from the foreign secretary to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a British banker and zoologist, who headed Britain’s Zionist Federation. In this episode we explore the Rothschilds and their relationship with Zionism. HOW TO LISTEN If you are seeing this message, it means you aren't a subscriber (or aren't logged in). If you ha...

Things in Palestine really started to heat up in 1908 - the year of The Young Turk Revolution. It was around this time that the violence between the Jews and the Arabs started to escalate beyond what was mostly localised troubles over property rights. And it took on a nationalist feel. The Jews started to arm themselves. The governor of Jerusalem, Azmi Bey, wrote: “We are not xenophobes; we welcom...

Americans were SHOCKED to discover that Russia had interfered in their 2016 Presidential elections. How dare they interfere with the democratic process of a sovereign nation! Of course, those same Americans probably have no idea that their own country has, according to the research done by my guest today, done the same thing over 80 times since the end of WWII. Today I interview Dov H. Levin Ph. D...

Quite soon after the first Zionist emigration to Palestine, tensions between the Jews and the Muslims started to erupt in small scale violence. Zionist settler Ahad Ha’Am wrote that the other Zionist colonists “behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass without justification, beat them shamefully without sufficient cause and then boast about it.” Another early settler, Vladimir...

One fascinating witness of early zionism is Sir Ronald Storrs, who, in 1917 became, in his own words "the first military governor of Jerusalem since Pontius Pilate”. In 1940 he wrote a terrific little book, "Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism and Palestine." This episode explain the roles of Chaim Weizmann, Herbert Samuel and World War I on Britain's support for the zionist agenda in Palestine. The Briti...