This is a very special day for me, because the topics I will be covering are all very dear to my heart and to my entire family. Following the Bolshevik revolution my family and another 1.5 million Russians fled their beloved motherland at the end of the civil war. All our so-called European “allies” immediately betrayed us (what else is new?), organized an intervention and backed the Russophobic Bolshevik regime (yes, helping both side in turn, like the Empire today in, say, the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Syria). All except one: the Serbs which, at the time, were triumphant (WWI) but also had to rebuild a war ravaged Serbia, with most of its infrastructure destroyed, and coping with the death of nearly 30% of its entire population.
They welcomed us with open arms and generous hearts, they recognized all the former Russian officials and officers in their pre-1917 capacity, and they gave refuge to the bishops, priests and faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile whose birthplace became the city of Sremski Karlovci in Serbia.
My family lived in Belgrade and my mother was born in the Topčidersko Brdo neighborhood of Belgrade. All her life she spoke a perfect Serbian, like a native; as for my Godmother, she was a pure Serb (and she also spoke Russian to perfection). I want to mention that to explain that the ties between my family and the Serbian nation were both strong and deep.
I strongly believe that all Russians owe a great debt of gratitude to the Serbian people, even those who don’t know about this (more about that later). And not just for how they accepted our refugees, but for many other instances of Russian-Serbian friendship in history.
The contrast between the Serbs and our so-called “Orthodox” or, even more so, Slavic brothers could not be greater. We even have a special word for that: the Serbs we call “братья” (meaning “brothers”) whereas the rest of them many of us simply call “братушки” which is hard to translate but I suppose “one-way-brothers” or even “pretend brothers” is adequate. We all know how many times our “one-way-brothers” have betrayed us, even if they owe the existence of their countries to Russia (I personally an ancestor who died while liberating Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke!). In fact, they are still at it nowadays (not every single individual, of course, but taken as a nation, this is true beyond any doubt – just look how they allow their national territories to be used by NATO to try to threaten Russia) . Next time they have a problem with their neighbors, they can ask NATO (good luck with that!) – because we sure ain’t coming again. Ever!
One of the greatest Serbian heroes of all times: Chetnik General Draza Mihailovich (1943)
But today, I want to touch on a very special kind of Serb, the much vilified, slandered and otherwise hated Serbian Chetniks of the Yugoslav army and their leader, the Serbian hero Draza Mihailovich (Дража Михаиловић).
I had the rare fortune of meeting a few Serbian officers in my life, from those who fought against NATO during the AngloZionist aggression against Bosnia, Serbia and its Kosovo province to the old Chetnik officers and soldiers who created the most effective and by far the biggest resistance movement to Hitler prior to the invasion of the USSR. I also met quite a few Russian, pre-1917 imperial officers and their families (mostly in Argentina) and I vividly remember how these old soldiers spoke with a heartfelt admiration and gratitude about Mihailovich himself and his men. So close were the Russians and Serbians in exile that they often inter-married (like my uncle and my Godmother).
My purpose here is not to write a bio of Mihailovich, or even to introduce him. For that purpose I will post a truly exceptionally well made film which is now freely available on YouTube (for how long? Download and make copies, folks!) and which pretty much explains it all, in fascinating details.
No, what I want to do today is much more modest. To share with you the reasons for my belief that any future Serbia worthy of being called Serbia can only be and will be founded on the memory of Draza Mihailovich and on the centuries of honored Serbian heroes that he epitomized.
[Sidebar: I know that I have a lot of communist readers and friends, and I ask them for their patience and understanding. The truth is that those calling themselves Communists in 2019 are very different from the type of Communists which would be found in the Europe of 1900-1946. In some way this is very bad, since most modern so-called “communists” have never read Marx or Engels, never-mind Lenin or Hegel. But in other ways, this is very good, since modern communists do not consider patriotism as “bourgeois” or religion the “opium of the people”. Friends, a long time ago I wrote that the “Whites” and the “Reds” (using Russian categories but which can, I think, be transposed to the Serbian reality) will never agree on the past, even if they could agree on the future. What comes next is about the past, so let’s simply agree to disagree and not let this difference in opinion affect us okay?]
The resemblances between the fate of the Russian nation and the Serbs are many, as are the differences. But one thing which we sure have in common: the communists who took power over us did all they could to deprive us from our historical memory. Worse, they slandered our nations, our traditions, our cultures and our faiths for two very basic reasons:
- They absolutely hated us, both Russians and Serbs
- They had to justify not only their reforms (forced social engineering, really), but the terror they unleashed
By this mechanism Czar Nicholas II became a weak imbecile, his wife a mistress of Rasputin and an agent of the Germans, pre-1917 Russia a “prison of the people” (btw – (pre-war Yugoslavia in communist propaganda was also called a “prison of peoples”, with the Serbs as jailers), Russian Orthodoxy “retrograde” and “ritualistic”, the Russian people “chauvinists” and the Russian ruling classes (old nobility, Petrine aristocracy, merchants, industrialists, clergy, philosophers, intelligentsia, etc.) all became “class enemies” of the people (in 1922 the Bolsheviks even managed to expel Russia’s leading intellectuals in the infamous “Philosopher’s ship“! These were the lucky ones, by the way, the others died in the Soviet Gulag or were simply shot ). Furthermore, the role of the US, Germany and the UK in financing the subversion of Russia was totally obfuscated.
In Serbia a very similar thing happened, only later. You will see in the movie itself to what degree the true story of Draza Mihailovich and the Chetniks was corrupted and perverted in the (new) official doxa of the AngloZionist Empire.
I ask you to please watch this movie before reading on.
Personally, I am deeply moved by this film, especially by the old Chetnik shown at the end.
I had the fortune of meeting the “tail end” of the world this old Chetnik soldier knew.
His tears are my tears.
***
In 2015, the high court of Serbia officially rehabilitated General Dragoljub “Draza” Mihailovic, repudiating the farcical trial staged by the communist regime in 1946. “The court established that the controversial ruling was made in an illegitimate trial for political and ideological reasons, and, under the law on rehabilitation, the decision cannot be appealed”. –inserbia.info.
While this was an important first step in repudiating the communist falsification of history, the quisling government and educational system of Serbia, continues to be guided by old communists and the foreign successors of Vatican/Vienna school, who’ve spent centuries appropriating Serbian achievements and rewriting several millennia of Serbian/Slavic history.
***
I find personalities like Czar Nicholas II or Draza Mihailovich extremely important because they are what I call “polarizers”, that is personalities who have been both despised and hated as well as revered and loved. Why is that important? Because if you pick the right “polarizing personality” you can very quickly establish how much your interlocutor knows and what his real values are. There are many more such personalities, beginning even with Christ our Lord Himself, of course (I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled? But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished! Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law; Luke 12: 49-53). Of course, this is not about dividing families or creating strife, but about showing “your true face” and how much you are willing to sacrifice for your values. By the way, in my usage “polarizing personality” is value neutral. Thus Hitler would be a very good example of an evil polarizing personality.
In fact, Czar Nicholas II and Draza Mihailovich have many things in common, but I want to mention two: they both refused to leave their people even though it meant sure death, and their murderers were so afraid of their MORAL (not legal or, even less so, military) authority that they not only massacred them (in the case of Czar Nicholas with his entire family, children included) and concealed the place where their bodies were destroyed and dumped. Personally, I even see a degree of resemblance between the two men, especially in their eyes: they are both filled with a special sad kindness, a kind of Christ-like meek resignation. They both perfectly knew that they would not only be murdered, but smeared, vilified by many clueless generations. I can only hope that they also knew that the historical truth would one day be restored!
Why is that so important? Because you cannot rebuild a civilization on fuzzy, lukewarm and otherwise uninspiring models. I would even argue that any action needs to be predicated on a solid spiritual/ideological basis to be meaningful (you just don’t do meaningful things just to do them, our most important actions are often just means towards a higher goal). This is, by the way, a great weakness of the current AngloZionist empire: while it does inspire plenty of derision and hate, it probably stopped truly inspiring anybody decades ago – yet another sure sign of decay.
Of course, I am acutely aware that there are many Russians who don’t think highly of Czar Nicholas II or even still despise him for being the superficial, weak and dumb moron the Soviet propaganda machine (and the liberal-democratic Masonic propaganda machine before that!) painted him to be, just as there are no doubt Serbs who either dislike/despise Draza because of the Titoist propaganda. In most cases this is just simple ignorance. Once the freedom to investigate the past is truly restored (like it is in Russia today), the inevitable always happens: those who were orphans of their own history and culture gradually rediscover them and then they operate a radical ideological change (who would have predicted in the 1980s or even 1990s that a Russian defense minister would convert to Orthodoxy and publicly make the sign of the cross before a military parade or that a Russian contingent in Khmeimim would have not one, but two churches built on that base?).
Think of Russia and Serbia as “Petri dishes” in which the bacteria of historical memory have just began to grow and, rather than looking at the current number of “bacteria with a restored historical memory”, look at the nature of these bacteria and the nutrient rich-soup in which they are located.
Our countries are the Petri dish. We are the bacteria.
Bon appétit!
***
I vividly remember how the AngloZionist propaganda machine described the Serbian people in general, and especially the Chetniks, as genocidal murders hell-bent on “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” (Serbs, Croats and Bosnian-Muslims are from the same ethnicity; only their religions are different; “Bosniac” is a term popularized by the US State Department). Most of these lies have long been debunked by numerous authors, the truth is already out there but, just like with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Kennedy assassination, GLADIO or 9/11, the truth is out there, but very few care.
The truth is that the western civilization has decayed to a state which could be described as “truth free”. A simpler way to put it that for most people (alas, most people are still brainwashed) facts simply do not matter. The truly dull ones will only seek “ideological comfort” while most of the rest simply don’t care as long as their current consumption rates can be maintained or, better, increased. The rest, for them, is basically irrelevant.
Inside Yugoslavia a similar process of “induced amnesia” and “historical reprogramming” took place during the Tito years and even after. Even modern Serbian politicians, plenty of which are corrupt and dependent on US or EU “grants”, continue to parrot the Titoist propaganda. But deep inside (some of) the Serbian people the memory of Draza is just as alive as the memory of Czar Nicholas II is alive in the memory of (some of) Russian people. This historical memory has not been restored to our nations, but there is already enough of this memory currently coming out from its clandestinity to worry our “liberals” and “democrats” and to absolutely outrage the western media.
This being said, I don’t believe for one second that Russia or Serbia will ever become a monarchy again (in spite of being a monarchist myself). In fact, I hope this never happens because if it does, it will be a pseudo-monarchy run by some parliament and with a useless parasite à la Queen Elizabeth II totally under the control of Masonic loges. A real Orthodox monarchy can only exist in a truly Orthodox country and with a truly free Orthodox Church, not in a country where the vast majority of Orthodox Christians are truly Orthodox only in name, in a “cultural” sense, and who see Orthodoxy as a national rather than as a spiritual phenomenon. In fact, I believe that we are already well into the “End Times” in which the Church of Christ will shrink down to the “small flock” mentioned in the Gospels and Apocalypse. These are times in which an Orthodox monarchy cannot exist since the τὸ κατέχον (“the [one] who restrains”) has been “taken out of the way” (2 Thes 2:6-7) because Nicholas II was this “katehon” and now the “mystery of iniquity doth already work” (there is also the famous prophecy about Moscow the Third Rome, a status which that city lost in 1917, which concludes with the words “and there shall be no fourth“).
But, assuming we don’t all die in a nuclear war courtesy of the Neocons, neither can the future Russia or Serbia be founded on the values, policies and actions of figures like Lenin or Tito (if only because their countries – the USSR and Yugoslavia – don’t exist anymore; besides, Lenin hated Russia as much as Tito hated Serbia).
A couple of years ago I wrote an essay entitled “Kosovo will be liberated” in which I suggested the following thought experiment:
Imagine for a few minutes that for some reason the Empire collapsed. No more NATO and probably no more EU. Or maybe just a little NATO and just a little EU left in spite of it all. But, more importantly, no Camp Bondsteel. What do you think would happen?
I gave my answer about what I believe would happen externally, about how the Serbian nation will inevitably be reunited and Kosovo liberated. Today, I am trying to imagine what would happen inside Serbia, before Kosovo can be liberated.
Internally, the conditio sine qua non for a rebirth of Serbia is the restoration of the historical truth and that means first and foremost to restore the truth about the cowardly slaughter of well over 1,500,000 Serbs by Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Bulgarians and Hungarians (yes, this was a real, full-scale genocide; the original Papist-Croatian (*not* German Nazi!!) plan was to convert 1/3rd of Serbs, expel another 1/3rd and murder the remaining 1/3rd) by an informal but no less toxic combination of *real* Nazi-collaborators (Croats and Bosnian-Muslims), the genocidal policies of the Papacy in the so-called “Independent State of Croatia”, the actions of the Communist Partisans, the typical “grand game” policies and betrayals of the British (who used the Serbs as cannon fodder against elite SS divisions), the active support of the Soviet Union and the total indifference of the US and the self-centered nations of western Europe.
While one WWII genocide is exploited and propagandized, the Genocide of the Serbian people is hideously kept hidden. Their executioners, to this day, celebrated by the empire and aided in their continued attempts to erase the memory of their victims. Dr. Gideon Greiff, Israel’s foremost expert on Auschwitz, whose recently published book “Jasenovac, the Auschwitz of the Balkans”, details the killing of over 800,000 Serbs, in the Jasenovac death camp. According to Dr. Greiff, Jasenovac, one of many Vatican sanctioned death camps, in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, there were “57 different ways of killing the victims”. “I am sure that there weren’t as many in Auschwitz. It’s a world record. There has not been something of the kind in the history of the humankind,” he said, adding that there should be no doubt about the number of the (overall) victims, and recalling that an investigation by a joint Croatian-Serbian commission showed that this number was 1.4 million (all quotes from a television interview with Dr. Greiff on Serbian Television). Finally, to learn of the true horrors faced by the Serbian nation in this monstrous Papist genocide attempt of the Serbian nation, make sure to check out this webpage:
http://www.reformation.org/holocaus.html
It will give you all the details about what the author called “The most horrifying religious massacre of the 20th century“.
As for Dr Greiff’s book “Jasenovac – Auschwitz of the Balkans” is available on Amazon, but at a very steep price (I sure cannot afford and I wish it was available online somewhere).
This restoration of the truth will have to inevitably include Tito’s communists murder of tens of thousands Serbian intellectuals, Orthodox priests, Chetniks and their families, after the end of WWII.
Furthermore, all the countries, public entities and personalities which directed these crimes will have to be exposed. Not to stick them into a Nuremberg-like tribunal (not a bad idea, but it was poorly implemented; besides, for Russia and Serbia, most evil doers are not long dead anyway), but to stick their memory in a “historical tribunal” in which historians will be the defending and prosecuting lawyers and our people the jury (God, obviously, being the only true judge).
Simply put, I will use a metaphor of Alexander Solzhenitsyn here, the relationship of the Russian civilization to the Bolshevik state, and the relationship of the Serbian civilization with the Titoist state is the same one which can be found between a healthy body and a malignant tumor: yes, they definitely share a lot of common DNA (Russia, for example, has always been a collectivistic and “social” society), but they also have enough differences to make the latter a mortal threat to the former. Furthermore, just as with a malignant tumor, it is extremely difficult to fully eradicate just the tumor without affecting the healthy tissues. Solzhenitsyn added that in his opinion the Russian nation will need about two centuries to fully heal from the effects of Bolshevism.
So this is not about doing what the Communists did and trashing our past just from another point of view. There were great heroes and very good people who lived in our Communist past, and great feats were accomplished in numerous fields during these years. It is about restoring the historical truth, something which every honest person should support and even participate in. Otherwise our people will look like prisoners freed from a concentration camp but who continue to wear the prison clothes given to them by their (now former) tormentors.
Truth be told, since 2000 Russia has managed to accomplish a truly miraculous rebirth, especially in the light of the true war (even if this war is currently about 80% informational one, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic) of the AngloZionists against Russia. Serbia is in a much worse situation, in some ways almost as bad as the Russia of the 1990s. But I am confident that a “Serbian Putin” will appear, apparently from “nowhere”, and that the Serbian people will rally around him/her just like the Russians rallied around Putin.
Finally, when the time comes for the Serbian nation to rise up and liberate itself, I am confident that the recent examples of Russians fighting for Serbia in Bosnia and Serbs fighting for Russia in the Donbass will inspire not just volunteers, but whoever sits in the Kremlin.
Serbian volunteers in Novorussia and their Russian comrades in arms.
To illustrate just how much the truth has been distorted, regarding the Serbs, whose honor and courage, have been documented, both by allies and enemies, throughout history, I strongly encourage you to read the last sermon of pastor Freidrich Griesendorf, published in the Eversburg (German) newspaper: “Last sermon of a German clergymen” (reposted and translated here)
I now leave you with the two videos mentioned in the main film.
First, the interview of US vets about their experience with the Chetniks:
and, finally, the Hollywood movie made about this war:
And, last but most definitely not least, there is now an extremely valuable website fully dedicated to the memory of Draza Mihailovich:
In conclusion, I want to address all those who have a very different view of Draza, the Serbs or anything else. What I presented here is my personal, absolutely sincere, point of view. But, of course, I may be wrong (I often am!).
I not only have no problem with fact-based and logically-constructed criticisms, I sincerely INVITE THEM! However, I have to warn you that any attempts to simply spew a load the garden variety hatred towards Draza, the Serbs or anything else will be intercepted and sent to where it belongs: the trash bin of our servers and of history! We have already heard it all, courtesy of the legacy AngloZionist media, we don’t need that repeated here.
The Saker
*******
ADDENDUM: since Draza, the Chetniks and the Serbs have now been described as monsters, I decided to add a number of quotes which not only show that in the past they were considered as heroes, but also show what some prominent historical figures had to say about them.
_____________________________________________________________________________
1. The Hero Whom You Gave to History Has Not His Like in Our Time
“Twenty years after the death of Draza Mihailovich he is undimmed in his glory as a defender of liberty against the Fascist terror, who defended it also against the Communist terror. He had no moment of weakness, nor of bitterness. I know no instance where he reproached those who were guilty of his betrayal.
Twenty years ago I knew he was innocent of all charges against him, and since then I have had many further proofs of his innocence. His abandonment was a crime, and like all crimes it brought no real profit to the criminals.
I loved your nation before the war, I have loved and honored it more and more as the years have gone by and I have seen that the hero whom you gave to history has not his like in our time.”
__ Dame Rebecca West ( to the Serbs July 8, 1966)
2. As I sit writing these lines in the early dawn before a motionless sea, Mihailovich is facing the firing squad. I am not concerned with what the first of the Maquisards is supposed to have done or not done; what worries me is that nobody bothers about him
__ George Bernanos, 1946
3. The British press ‘splashed’ the German reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich: and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued.
__George Orwell, 1946
4. General Dragoljub Mihailovich distinguished himself in an outstanding manner as Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslavian Army Forces and later as Minister of War by organizing and leading important resistance forces against the enemy which occupied Yugoslavia, from December 1941 to December 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States airmen were rescued and returned safely to friendly control. General Mihailovich and his forces, although lacking adequate supplies, and fighting under extreme hardships, contributed materially to the Allied cause, and were instrumental in obtaining a final Allied victory.
— Harry S. Truman, March 29, 1948
5. The ultimate tragedy of Draza Mihailovic cannot erase the memory of his heroic and often lonely struggle against the twin tyrannies that afflicted his people, Nazism and Communism. He knew that totalitarianism, whatever name it might take, is the death of freedom. He thus became a symbol of resistance to all those across the world who have had to fight a similar heroic and lonely struggle against totalitarianism. Mihailovic belonged to Yugoslavia; his spirit now belongs to all those who are willing to fight for freedom.
— Ronald Reagan, September 8, 1979
6.“The unparalleled rescue of over 500 American Airmen from capture by the Enemy Occupation Forces in Yugoslavia during World War II by General Dragoljub Mihailovich and his Chetnik Freedom Fighters for which this “Legion of Merit” medal was awarded by President Harry S. Truman, also represents a token of deep personal appreciation and respect by all those rescued American Airmen and their descendants, who will be forever grateful.”
___ (NATIONAL COMMITTEE OF AMERICAN AIRMEN RESCUED BY GENERAL MihailovićH – 1985)
7. “General Draza Mihailovic was a patriot, a brave soldier and a gallant ally of the United States and every nation that went to war in the early forties to destroy the tyrannies that sought to enslave our world. Hundreds of American pilots owe their lives to General Mihailovic and his forces and the American people will never forget that debt. As long as there are patriots in any nation, the name of General Draza Mihailovic will be remembered and revered”
– President Richard Nixon (April 21, 1966).
8. WHY MIHAILOVICH MATTERS
“As an American, I bow my head in shame whenever I think of the terribly mistaken policy which led the Allied leaders in World War II to abandon General Draza Mihailovich and throw their support instead to the communist cohorts of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. It was an unbelievable aberration of policy and of justice perpetrated by the Allies.
Mihailovich was the first insurgent in Europe. It was he who raised the flag of resistance to the Nazi occupier – and by his action he inspired the formation of resistance movements in all the subjugated countries.
He resisted the Nazis at the time when the Soviet Union and the communists were still collaborating with them – and his early resistance, by slowing down the Nazi timetable, was probably responsible for preventing the fall of Moscow.
The contributions of Mihailovich to the Allied cause were the subject of tributes by General Eisenhower, General De Gaulle, Field Marshal Lord Alexander, Admiral Harwood, Anthony Eden, President Truman, and, at later date of President Richard Nixon. For example, on August 16, 1942, three top ranking British officers, Admiral Harwood, General Auchinleck, and Air Marshal Tedder, sent the following joint wire to Mihailovich: “With admiration we are following your directed operations which are of inestimable value to the Allied cause.”
Today, no informed person takes seriously the communist charges that Mihailovich collaborated with the Germans, or the proceedings of the communist show trial in Belgrade which resulted in his execution. The communists made the nature of their injustice clear when they announced in advance of the trial, that Mihailovich would be executed after a ‘fair’ trial. And they also made it clear when they refused to take the evidence of the American officers who served with him or of the American airmen who were rescued by him.
Colonel Robert H. McDowell, chief of the last American mission to General Mihailovich, and perhaps the most experienced intelligence officer to serve with either side in Yugoslavia during World War II, took the time after the War to go through the German intelligence files on Yugoslavia. Not only did he find no evidence that Mihailovich collaborated with the Nazis, but he found numerous statements establishing that Hitler feared the Mihailovich movement far more than he feared the Tito movement.
The communists also feared Mihailovich more than they did any other man. And that is why, when they executed him, they disposed of his shattered body in a secret burial place, so that those who followed him and revered him would not be able to come at night to drop tears and flowers on his grave and tenderly offer a few words of prayer in gratitude to General Mihailovich for his heroism and sacrifice.
But despite all of the abuse and all the precautions of the communists, the truth about Mihailovich – now grown to the proportions of a legend – still persists among the Serbian people. Evidence of this is the remarkable article on Mihailovich which Mihajlo Mihajlov wrote for The New Leader, just before Tito’s courts sentenced him to seven years of hard labor in early March of this year.
I think that it is fitting that we in the free world who are aware of the truth should also do everything in our power to set the record straight and to bring about the ultimate vindication before the bar of history – of one of the noblest figures of World War II.
Draza Mihailovich, in addition to being an outstanding soldier and a great national leader, was a man who stood for everything that we in America believe in. He was a true believer in the rights enshrined in our own Declaration of Independence – the right to think and speak and pray in accordance with one’s own religious, political, economic and social beliefs, without government restraint or repression.
…the United States Congress should accede to the petition of the American airmen that they be authorized to erect in Washington with publicly subscribed funds, a monument which they would dedicate, in gratitude, to “General Draza Mihailovich, Savior of American Airmen.”
Beyond this, there is still a larger debt which the free world owes to the memory of General Draza Mihailovich. It is my hope that this debt will some day be repaid in full through the liberation of his people from communist tyranny.”
-Senator Frank J. Lausche, March 27, 1975
9. A Thanksgiving Tribute to the Americans from the General. An American Officer Remembers…
”As we proceeded out over the Adriatic my mind flashed back to one incident which will always have great meaning for me. Before I was leaving for my tour of Serbia, the Minister [General Mihailovich] had expressed a desire to do something to honor America saying “Here we have Slava, the day of our patron saint. What is America’s slava? ”
I thought for a moment and said, ‘We have four great days, Christmas, New Year, Independence Day and Thanksgiving. Christmas we love because it is the day of Christ. New Years we enjoy because we look with hope to it, but on its Eve we celebrate, sometimes not too wisely but too well, and often the day itself finds us with aching heads. Independence day would be wonderful except for the sadness of sacrifice and mourning that sweeps the South from the cause of our Civil War. Thanksgiving is our day, our Slava, because that day we give Thanks to God for our founding Fathers and the beginning of our country and freedom.’
Mihailovich replied, ‘Good, we would honor America and on the Eve of that day each mountaintop of Serbia will have a fire lighted by our peasants.’
On Thanksgiving Eve, three Americans standing in a tiny village high in the Serbian mountains, saw a huge fiery “A” come into being. Then another, and one after the other fires appeared until eleven peaks were outlined.
This I remember. A magnificent tribute to America from a truly great man.”
Colonel Albert B. Seitz, American Liaison Officer with General Mihailovich
10. “The United States must insist on a fair and open trial for General Mihailovich, anti-Red Chetnik hero, now in the hands of the Communist regime of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia if our future allies are to have any confidence in our pledged word as a nation.
There is no real question about the fact that General Mihailovich took up arms against the German invaders of his country in April, 1941, at a time when Soviet Russia was an ally of National Socialist Germany.
At that time the present dictator of Yugoslavia, Marshal Josip Broz, called Tito, was an expatriate, studying in Moscow as a faithful adherent of the Third International – the Comintern – which had adopted the alliance with Hitler’s Germany as an internal program of aggression for mutual benefit. For two and one half years, during the darkest days of the struggle against Germany, Italy and Japan, Mihailovich, former minister of war in Yugoslavia, fought on our side.
No question was raised as to his loyalty or valor while there was real doubt about the outcome of the war. Only after our victory was seen as to be certain did other elements in Yugoslavia flock to the well-equipped and well-provisioned ranks of Tito, who then began to receive from the United States and Britain all that had been promised – but not delivered – to Mihailovich.
This request has been categorically refused by Tito, whose supporters in the Kremlin now openly demand that all Tito’s claims be ratified without argument.
From every point of view of American law, customs and instinct, these proposals go against the grain. They contravene our basic conception of fair play, honest dealing and of the right of every man accused to be allowed witnesses in his defense.”
The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce (R) Connecticut, April 20, 1946
American playwright, editor, journalist, ambassador, and first woman elected to U.S. Congress
11. “No people in Europe have a more heroic record in this war than the Serbs. Among them, no hero is more glorious than General Draza Mihailovic.”
– Watson Kirkconnell
12. Where are the thunderers who once could speak
The Language of the Prophets, when the weak
Were broken and the good oppressed? Where are those
Whose words were cleansing fire, till there arose
the phoenix-armies from the martyrs’ dust
To make the word the deed, oppose the lust
Of tyrants and proclaim the prophets true?
Where is the gratitude our fathers knew
And sanctuary and penance for wrong power?
Did Milton fail the martyrs, Gladstone cower
Before the ruthless? Was the public pen
careful of epithet? And public men —
Were they afraid to say: “Alas we erred
And now confess our error. Let the word
Go out, perhaps to save a soul and save
Our souls”? Today the coward and the knave
Are kings. These are mean times. If it be doom,
Our tongues, at least, are free and there is room
For utterance that salves us if not saves.
Why should we ape the silence of graves?
And even these have epitaphs as tongues.
Since power is dumb before the powerful wrongs
Let one small voice salute the Serbian.
With shame at first, then prayer for that brave man.
“I.M. Draza Mihailovich (Murdered July 16, 1946)
by L. Aaronson, British Poet, July 1946