Customer Reviews

The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Second Edition (Nota Bene)

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Tim Judah is a journalist who has lived in Yugoslavia and has had plenty of time to observe that country's disintegration and the subsequent wars in Croatia and Bosnia. This book is his attempt to explain why these wars took place and what the results were to both Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia.

I was a bit intimidated at first by this book. I've taken a class on Balkan history (which wasn't very good) but didn't think I was well prepared to dive into dense explanations of Serbian history. I'm much more familiar with Albanian history, which does overlap with Serb history somewhat, but not enough to make me an expert on Yugoslavia. I had no need to worry, as Mr. Judah made this book easy to follow. He keeps the information flowing and only focuses on major figures, which helps keep events in perspective. I would expect that even someone with zero knowledge of the region would be able to keep pace with this book.

Judah's main argument is that the wars in fractured Yugoslavia aren't due exclusively to nationalism, but mostly to greedy, powerful politicians that are exploiting the Serbian people to make themselves wealthy. Judah does acknowledge that the Serbian people have a long history of nationalistic tendencies, and he explains this tendency in some detail in the first part of the book. This nationalism was carried down through time by the Serbian Orthodox Church,which acted as both a preserver of culture and a bulwark during the long occupation of Serbia by the Ottoman Turks. Judah also shows how Serbian epic poetry that retold the tales of Serb martyrs Milos Obilic and Prince Lazar reinforced the idea of the Serbian people as victims who would one day receive their just rewards. Politicians such as Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic used this victimhood to launch wars against Croatia and Bosnia. Behind the scenes, politicians, in league with mafia-type gangs, were looting the country. Judah even reveals that some Serb military officers were selling weapons to the enemy during these fierce wars.

Judah is at his best when he is describing the Bosnian Serb government in Pale during the Bosnian war. He shows how ineffective they were in conducting a war, and also how corrupt they were. He also exposes the atrocities that were committed by Serbian militias that detained Muslims in camps and carried out mass executions.

I had several problems with this book. First, Judah has a definite bias against the Serbs. Judah sees the Serbs as the major destructive force behind all of the conflicts in the region. But the Serbs weren't operating in a vacuum. Croatians and Muslims also committed atrocities and should be held in equal contempt if one wants to start throwing human rights charges about. Also, Mr. Judah doesn't seem to grasp the concept of war very well. War is an ugly thing, and atrocities are always committed by everyone involved. That's why it's called war. Also, war profiteering always occurs during a conflict. The Serbs by no means have a lock on this particular bit of unpleasant behavior. To try and paint them as such is irreponsible, in my opinion. Also, Judah heaps much scorn on Sonja Karadzic. Judah says that she hurt the Bosnian Serb cause by refusing journalists access to areas the journalists wanted to see. This is an error. Sonja didn't hurt the cause. The journalists did. This is a standard media trick. When the media doesn't get what they want, they throw a fit and the next thing you know, they start smearing people. In the final analysis, it's important to remember that the vast majority of Serbs only want to live and raise their families like everyone else. If anything, Judah proves the old truth that it is always politicians that start wars, and it is the people who suffer from them. Finally, I wish this book had better maps! The ones that are included aren't sufficient. Hopefully, future reprints will repair this deficiency.

I really shouldn't bash the book too much, though. It inspired me enough to go out and by a biography on Tito. I'd also like to read Judah's book on Kosova. I recommend this book for its reader friendly, if somewhat misguided, introduction to Serbia and her wonderful people.

Judah's little polemic would lead us to believe that Serbs are genocidal mythomaniac Orthodox zealots. This has required a lot of historical revisionism and tailoring bits and pieces to fit a pre-set biased agenda: the Serbs are to be blamed for the Balkan wars of the 1990s and much of the past history and their martyrdom complex stemming from historical delusions and myths allowed them to be manipulated to genocide by a tawdry dictator, the ubiquitous Milosevic. Unfortunately, this sort of reasoning does not suit a historian but a simpleton.

The national consciousness is an average of the individual feelings of each member of the nation. What is obvious at once is that when most Serbs think of Serbian victimhood or martyrdom, practically no-one thinks of Prince Lazar and the battle of Kosovo, not even the Kosovo Serbs. This event is not even embraced as merely a symbol of greater Serbian victimhood. A Serbian sense of victimhood inherent in most but not all Serbs is not a function of epics and myths, as Judah and many in the West have been claiming: rather, it is a function of the personal experiences of that particular Serb.

What do I mean by this? When my grandfather thinks of Serbian victimhood, he recalls how in WWI, when he was 5 years old, Bulgarian troops entered his village and tried to execute the entire village. He was barely saved by 2 Serbian generals in the Austrian army, but then the Bulgarians came back later, raped and killed his aunt, burned down the entire village, and massacred all those Serbian civilians who had not fled, dumping their bodies in the Morava. Or he might think of how, during WWII, he personally witnessed Hungarians tossing Serbs and Jews into the freezing Tisza and Danube to drown them. What does my grandmother recall when considering Serbian victimhood? She remembers hundreds of Serbian refugees flocking to her village, fleeing from the Ustasa genocide during WWII, or how in the 1960s, hundreds more were fleeing from the Kosovo Albanian repression, or how the Germans collected 7000 Serbian men, women, and children in the nearby town of Kragujevac in 1941 and executed them because of the death of a few German officers. And finally, what does my father think of? He thinks of how his mother's friend saw at the age of 6 Croatian and Moslem Ustase burn her entire family alive in the local Serbian Orthodox church; or he thinks of how his best friend was abducted in 1992 by Sarajevo Moslems, forced into a Moslem-run camp, and killed.

I could say so much more, but Judah's thesis completely crumbles in light of these facts. These are not myths or fairytales. These are family members and friends murdered because they were Serbs, whether by burning or drowning or execution or being raped and killed; most of some 10,000,000 Serbs have similar stories to tell. No one, absolutely no one today, is thinking of the long list of other Serbian suffering in history: the Kosovo battle, the Western Crusades, the Turkish oppression, the Austrian oppression, the Serbs fleeing Kosovo under Patriarch Arsenije, forced conversion to Islam and the Uniate church, etc. And most don't even consider events that don't impact them personally (Kosovo Serbs are not very likely to think about Krajina when considering national victimhood). They think of what happened 10 or 50 or 80 years ago and that makes them consider themselves and their people victims. Are they wrong? Sadly, they're not, and no writer, least of all a biased creature like Judah, can distort history to such an extent as to reverse these personal losses. Serbian victimhood is real, it is not a myth, nor is it based on myths. It is based on personal experience, whether it be WWI, or Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska, or Krajina, or Kosovo or any one of a myriad of instances of Serbian suffering in history, and the national consciousness is merely the mean of these perceptions.

And lastly, I do not think the Serbs are at all obsessed with their victimhood compared to other national victims of genocide. Armenians have a day of remembrance, April 24, a memorial in Yerevan, and are actively demanding Turkish recognition. Jews have an extensive museum, Yad Vashem, which all foreign dignitaries see; they also have the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., and numerous books and movies about their tragedy. This is all as it should be. But the Serbs have no remembrance day, no monument to the victims of WWII in Belgrade, no Serbian genocide museum, and their tragedy is not even mentioned in a standard American textbook or history book. Instead, the Serbs intermarried with their former oppressors the Croats and Moslems and lived in harmony until 10 years ago. No, this is not at all a people suffering from an obsession.........rather, it is one that all too soon forgets its tragedies and suffers for this forgetfulness.

This book has taken a beating from some reviewers, and for good reason. Appearing at a time when the mere word "Serbs" was synonomous with "Nazi" in the media, the book poses itself as a fair look at this nationality.

Once again we have a slanted book depicting Serbs in a less than favorable light. Once again, the Serbs are strictly the bad guys of the Balkan Wars through and through, and the actions of their neighbors are not afforded a similar taint.

And, of course, we go through nationalism, treated like a poisonous word. An inevitable outcome of the fall of Communist Yugoslavia, nationalism was the most readily available tool politicians could use to move and shake the country. Of course it didn't move and shake in the right direction all the time, but nationalism is not the poison, per se. Go and find me a more nationalistic country than the USA for starters.

The book did not appear in time to cover the Kosovo war, but Judah would approach this topic with another book entitled, oddly enough, Kosovo. It's a better bit of work than this book, which is packed full of information as Judah struggles to run through an entire people from beginning to end, stringing selective facts to hammer home a point Judah had long before he penned this, which is to confirm that the Serbs are misguided, and are, in fact, the bad guys. Naturally, ancient history and myths are given mighty weight as reasons behind the quest for a
Greater Serbia. Trying to hold on to provinces like Kosovo are not part of some Greater Serbia pipe dream. Imagine a Mexican-dominated southern state trying to secede in the future.

And as one reviewer has pointed out, one of the most offensive bits is the real working over that Judah gives Orthodox Christianity. I'd like to see Judaism or Islam put through such a ringer, with major figures undermined and traditions marked as bizarre and strange. Real nice.

All three major Balkan leaders of the 1990s should share some blame for the carnage of those wars, but it's only the pesty Milosevic who gets the brunt of it.

Thankfully, enough time has passed for a wider array of accounts to appear on the Serbs and the Balkan Wars. Judah bites off quite a bit, but it's clear that he's already decided how to digest it.

Judah has captured the pathos of Serbia without all the cliche reference to genocide and wanton murder which so many people who call themselves historians like to use to simplify their subjects for Western readers. This is an insightful work, and the author has done his homework. He does not come down with his own personal agenda, but simply relates with powerful clarity the history of Serbia/Yugoslavia from 1389 to the present. I have not encountered a more thorough, accurate, well-written, and sensitive account of the history of this region. He has found the courage to thoroughly explain the painful past in a manner which serves to give the Serbs human faces and hearts. Absolutely a must read for anyone who is unfamiliar with the region, or who is tired of hearing the black and white rhetoric on CNN.

It is necessary to correct the current trend of public commentary, which tends, systematically, not to understand events in the former Yugoslavia but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan rivalries, designed to validate the existing post-modern myths and prejudices. This book faithfully reflects the post-modern blinkers that its author has helped first create and then perpetuate in his "coverage" of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession. This book reflects his (and their) belief that the Orthodox nations of Southeast Europe - embodied in "the Serbs" - are The Other vis-a-vis "The West" in the Huntingtonian sense. The author's assumptions are prejudiced in a coarse, primordial manner.

Judah's mindset helps us understand why the problem of the Balkans under UN/EU/NATO/UNMIK/KFOR/SFOR. . . is inseparable from the quandary of America under the bipartisan regime inside the Beltway, or that of Europe "united" under the Leviathan of Brussels. This book unintentionally poses many questions, and answers none. Can any meaningful unity of nations sharing European heritage be restored? To what extent, how, and why has the modern, secular, "post-Christian" West inherited the antipathy of West to the carriers of the Byzantine tradition? How do those two traditions converge, and how do they diverge, amidst the continuing onslaught of globalized secularism? Such issues are not merely political. They are as much "cultural" as theological, and they have been political all along. It is on the way we deal with them today that the future of our civilization will depend, and it that endeavor Judah has decided to side with the bad guys.

A book is badly needed to counter Judah's prejudice and ignorance about an area of the Old Continent which need never be the "powder keg of Europe." Though the Balkans, however delineated, contain many states and even more nations, they have one thing in common: for most of history they have not been masters of their own fate, but objects of policy by dominant outside powers. Though depicted by Judah as aggressing against their neighbors and generating wider conflicts, the Serbs in most cases had these conflicts foisted upon them by powerful outsiders and their local minions.

In particular Judah's attempt to relativize the Ustasha genocide of some 500-700,000 Serbs is scandalous. Had the same apparatus of quasi-historical whitewash been applied to the victims of Treblinka, such book surely would not have seen the light of day - and rightly so.

Even if all history-as a philosopher argued-is in some measure contemporary history, it need not be dominated by the obsessions of the day. The cause of tolerance in a troubled region can never be advanced by misrepresentation or by the sentimental lapse of seriousness which judges one patriotism as admirable and condemns another as inadmissible. This book is found wanting on all fronts.

Tim Judah seems to have some deep-seeded resentment of the Serbs. All the so-called "facts" presented in this book are twisted and peppered with his own personal distortion of the truth. Not only, but he also contradicts events which have been described by noted authorities involved in the various situations that he describes here. The worst of it is that his writing espouses a style that convinces the reader of his point of view, with very few facts or dim allusions to having obtained information from reliable sources. I find this author not at all objective, and wonder if somewhere in his past he doesn't have some kind of skeletons in his closet which would make him so despise a nationality. I would suggest to potential readers that time with this book is not at all well spent, and Tim Judah's otherwise impressive credentials defy the sensationalist nature of this work.

This is non-objective, anti-Serbian propaganda. The readers who are truly interested in a non-bias evaluation of the history of the Balkans in general and Serbian history in particular should not waste their time reading this piece of garbage.

The books starts with the standard history of the Serbs, from ancient times to the Yugoslavia wars. As the time goes by, Judah takes an increasingly hostile opinion of the Serbs and their leaders.

So while the first parts are important and interesting stuff that is not much written about outside Europe, the later parts look like the Usual Serb Bashing writings.

From the book, you could think that Serbia during the 90's was only murderers, thieves and criminals.

The author laments that unlike the Bosnians and the Croats, the Serbs didn't greatly publicize their suffering, and that had a cost at the PR war. Well, unfortunately his research does nothing to compensate for this,as he didn't try to hard to present the Serbian suffering.

Like many Americans, all I knew about Yugoslavia was the blurbs I heard on the news. I picked up this book mainly as a remedy to my ignorance of this area of the world. I must say this book was certainly a great remedy.
This is more than just a history book. I felt a real pathos for these people from the tragedy and suffering they endured. It's amazing what the common people went through (on all sides of the conflict) while the many bankers and politicians pilfered and plundered the wealth of the country and the lives of it's citizens.
I would only suggest that there could have been more maps (for those of us that are not very familiar with the area).
Any person wishing to get some solid information on this subject should read this book.
I thoroughly enjoyed this history.

The predictability with which American media and publishing conglomerates jump on the bandwagon of the latest government propaganda line is truly astounding. Now comes Mr. Judah, and what he says about Serbian Orthodoxy -- which is identical to the Faith of the Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Rumanians, Bulgarians, _et al._ -- is particularly galling. If anyone in American publishing or academia said about Judaism, Roman Catholicism, or Islam the kind of things Judah says about Orthodoxy, he would be ... well, let's ask Rushdie. (I note that when President Clinton decided to side with the Islamo-Bosnians against the Bosnian Serbs, there were no travel warnings in American airports and no calls to close yet more streets in Washington to insure his safety. What if Clinton had come down _against_ Islam?)

Judah's grasp of the history of Christianity is nearly non-existent. Yes, the Serbian Orthodox Church teaches that things were better when the kings were saints and not Communists. Are they wrong, Judah?

St. Savva, the leading Serbian Orthodox saint, comes in for extensive criticism here. Why? He gave up his throne for a monastery. Horrible, unacceptable. He should have put all the money he poured into monasteries into a great Ponzi scheme for the elderly, right? Perhaps sent soldiers to conquer Vietnam?

We "know" that Orthodoxy is horrible, says Judah, because the Orthodox stand, not sit, in their worship services. This is quite a high level of analysis. If Mr. Judah had bothered to look into the question why the Orthodox do not behave as Protestants in Liturgy, he would have found answers all around; any introductory book on Orthodoxy would answer the question. Easier not to know, I guess.

Truly, this book is infuriating. Truckling to the government line, it seems, is very "brave." Did Judah perhaps receive a subvention from the Turks and Iranians, as the Serbs' other enemies did? Or is he a "Christomachos," as the Fathers said?