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Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy

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This is a work of historiosphical musings on evils embedded in what is the matrix of the Western civilization. The leftist-liberal veil is rent and all the horror of the Greater Serbia project ( which was tacitly approved by Western leftist "intelligentsia" ): gross distortions of historical events ( the Jasenovac megahoax ), plus conspiracy of silence hiding the dimensions of Croat victimology ( any new edition must incorporate and expand on that issue )-all this is exposed glaringly in ex-Yu wars culminating now in the Kosovo massacres. A few reviewers have noticed that the book presents a major revision of history. They're right. A brainwashing they've been submitted to ( and, I suspect, grew fond of) has matured for the revision. Just like the reality has undergone a drastic "revision" with the collapse of communism and the exposition of red genocides.

Of course, Tudjman writes from a very Croat perspective. But this doesn't make his book less worthwile for study and reading. For any people interested into backgrounds of recent events in former Yugoslovia it contains a lot of very interesting insights and documentation. This not only, because Tudjman reveals the secretly holden (official) statistics of victims during the time of occupation of Yugoslavia during Nazi times and the parallel ongoing inter-Yugoslav civil war. Debunking mythological inflated numbers never gains friends of interested parties. The fact, Croats made up the relative majority of members within the partizans, the Bosniaks relatively to their population might take some people by surprise. Foremost them, who believe into the myth the Serbs had been the strongest force. Tudjman, who had finished World War 2 as captain with the communist partizan forces and later was promoted to general's rank within Tito's People's Army, gained a lot of insight during his time for being director of the institute of history of Worker's Movement in Zagreb. So he had access to documents, not accessible to other historians, not to say non-communist one. His past as a learned Marxist-Leninist historian he can not deny, too, as a reader might find out in some chapters. In his book he gives also a lot of insight into the working and mechanism for silencing unwanted revelations within the communist nomenclatura in communist Yugoslavia. His antagonism against the (Greater) Serb run central bureaucracy in Belgrade is one of the focal point in this book and never veiled. The quotations and comments have a lot of topic actuality. Reading this book, together with Milovan Djilas' Wartime and New Class, might give the interested reader far from the propaganda since ten years a valuable background why the Yugoslav system was doomed to fail.

This book while boring is an exhaustive review of 20th century history. He has done an exhaustive research on the facts of the issues he covers and offers an insightful perspective. When you remember that he experienced what he was writing about. For this author, the histoty he writes about is the history he lived through. He chalenges many of the pre-concieved notion of the so-caled experts of the Balkans. He offers proof to back his opinion. It is interesting to note that all attacks on this book are not on the facts he presents but the conclusions he makes of them. But when you read the facts he presents, one can't argue with his conclusions. Those that due argue against him never present facts to back their arguments. He has done a masterfull analysis of the reality and philosophy of war.

In short- unparalleled rendering of the 20th century's "Sound and Fury". Whilst some readers, especially in the West, may be repelled by a pessimistic approach ( better, a crossbreed of cynical and hopeful ), this book certainly remains a lighthouse in contemporary political and spiritual darkness.

Croatian version of this book shows real Mr. Tudjman who uses words and phrases that nobody understands (probably including himself, too). His ideas are at least disputable. However, English version is significantly revised to be acceptable for the world.

After reading this book it is not hard to understand why Tudjman is considered the foremost ideological hardliner among the multitude of former-Communist-turned-nationalist leaders. Facts are often doubtful and interpretations have frequently been ammended or changed to suit current conveniences.

Tudjman is the president of the Republic of Croatia and a former dissident of the communist regime that ruled Yugoslavia. In this book he sets out to debunk the former communist propaganda that would assert that Croatia's war crimes would delegitimize it as an independent country.

This book is about World War 2, and not about philosophy, as the title could be mislead someone into believing. Most of the book's 500 pages is about war crimes and anti-fascism in Yugoslavia during World War 2. Tudjman's main points are that Croatia did not do worse than others (in his opinion) and that its anti-fascist movement was one of the strongest one. All this goes contrary to the established ideas that came from the post-war communist propaganda, as Tudjman explains, and used to make of him a political dissident.

I am in no way well read about the subject of Yugoslavia during Word War 2 and the crimes of the Ustasha regime, and having not read a detailed book arguing for the "authorized" version, I can't say whether Tudjman is right, even though he seems convincing. My main critic is his double standard about historical revisionism. For Mr. Tudjman entirely follows the "authorized" version of the war and post-war propaganda of demonizing the Germans so to clean the many war crimes of the Allies. Even a Jewish professor like Alfred Lindemann (in his book Esau's Tears) never lowers himself to the cheap propaganda of Hitler's regime "diabolical", but on the contrary gives quite a different image. Now I expect Tudjman to have known that the Nuremberg Trial was a farce, that its regulations required no proof, that the movie about Dachau gazing's chamber was produced by the CIA, that the many Jewish witness about gazing were proven false when it turned out there were no gas chambers in camps in Western Germany, that Gerstein was tortured, etc. This was all well known before the first edition of the book in 1989. And then after the Glasnot, the research access was granted to Auschwitz, where people could see that the famous, gas chamber was a fake built after the war by the Russian and the Russians opened up their archives : from the countless photographs of Auschwitz there is no trace of a gazing building ; and three independent sources showed that there had been only 74 000 dead at Auschwitz (the Auschwitz holocaust museum replaced the plate showing up the numbers of 4 millions, revising it with a plate showing 1,5 millions, still much higher than 74 000.) And there are so many more myths concerning World War 2 and the Third Reich. My point is that I can't find Tudjman very credible as a revisionist historian, when he applies this double standard of allowing revisionism for Croatia, but not for the rest, where he sticks to political correctness and even of low-level bashing. Probably this is politically motivated, as after the opening of Auschwitz and of the Russian archives to researchers , and the discovery that the major World War 2 myths could be so easily disproved by hard evidence, the governments of Western continental Europe were pressurized by a certain lobby to hastily pass laws forbidding free speech and fee research in these areas. With the translation of Tudjman's book in German (1993) and in English (1996), Tudjman chooses the easy way of not infringing Western Europe's laws censoring free history, nor enraging the powerful US lobby that might have be offended. But then his books looks mainly like a piece of propaganda aimed at justifying the existence of Croatia in a way that is as pleasing as possible to the Western establishment, and this raises serious doubts about his objectivity. I would have preferred him to either follow entirely the line of free history and revisionism or the line of political correctness, but not the dubious path he followed for this apology of Croatia.

With Milosevic defending himself in the Hague for years, literally, one wonders what a Franjo Tudjman trial would have been like.

Perhaps he would have cited this book, which reads like a prescient defense of himself in court for his own war crimes, though this never happened as Franjo checked out in 1999, while Slobo was still in power.

What he is explores is of merit though. It's mostly history, not as much philosophy, on WWII, Croatian atrocities, demonizatoin and propaganda, and the attempt to recognize the horrors on all sides. And his policies would seem to follow right along. Too bad Milosevic didn't pen his own academic ode to the horrors of war, but he doesn't seem to need it.

Interesting document from the late Croatian figure who led his country to independence, and got some pretty clean hands and some US help. And good PR. And good timing. He died before all sides could finally come to the table and admit that, yes, we committed some horrendous atrocities. That some of Franjo's cronies are flying to the Hague shows the luster is fading a bit.