Part One: Radovan Karadžić: The Genocidal Dictator Who Became a New-Age Guru

uh never forget 9-11 and never forget to listen to behind the bastards the podcast that you are all listening to now this is our 9-11 episode extravaganza even though you'll be hearing it probably several weeks after 9-11 so i don't even know why i'm like temporalizing this because it's gonna feel old when it hits you you will already have had your 9-11 cake you'll have opened all of your 9-11 presents i'm feeling a little somber so if you feel a tinge of sadness in my voice just that's me not forgetting i that's jay be remembering i forget yeah i'm always remembering the the like discourse today online was like the worst of the right being like oh did you see mom donnie and aoc having a giggle during the during the 9-11 tribute in new york during the sacred night of 9-11 yeah you're like did you see that donald trump wasn't there i don't care i don't care about any of these things i don't care about any of these things it's fine just it is it is it is bizarre that like of of all of the days uh that we the thousands of days we've been very insincere about it we're like we're gonna do we're gonna do just we're gonna remember we're gonna remember and today we're gonna remember for real for real for real for real um and what i remember on 9-11 is the film big trouble which was tragically delayed as a result of 9-11 because it featured a plot line in which a nuclear weapon was set off in a commercial airliner uh and so tragically tim allen lost what would have been one of his better comedy releases and we and we won't forget that i'll never i will never forget that jamie i'll never forget they changed the climax of lilo and stitch stitch hijacked a plane and then they said not be having we can't have stitch be doing al-qaeda activity yeah yeah you know what i'm really really really really really really really really really really really excited about see sophie that's not the century i was going to say you know how there were two towers on 9-11 oh that's better jamie loftus has a book coming out called the tower wow what a plug you want to tell people about it see i'm ready i was ready to plug wow you're like okay uh yeah there's a secret thing about the tower it's a secret thing about the tower it's a secret thing about the tower third tower and uh what if that what if it was a 9-11 book and i really have been i've been secretly remembering for years you have no idea um yeah no my my first novel's coming out it's about just just one tower but uh a beautiful tower um it's about uh it's a novel about an architect who falls in love with her own blueprint and then spends 20 years trying to get the love of her life uh built so she's going to be in love with her own blueprint and then she's going to be in love with her own she can leave her husband for the building awesome i'm excited to read it the highs are high the lows are low because the lows of writing a book are very low it's uh the hardest thing in the world that said i i'm sure i'm sure by the time you hear this i've figured it out jamie it's very appropriate that you said writing a book is the hardest thing in the world because the subject the bastard that we're talking about this week is an author and i think would agree with you writing a book is the hardest thing in the world because the subject the bastard that we're talking about is the hardest thing in the world which is impressive because he also committed a genocide so wow okay maybe not the best way to talk about it but we're talking about the balkans this week and there's no easy way to lead into a story about the balkans if you are if you are talking about the balkans you're talking about a lot of people dying that's just that's just history in the balkans yeah there's always a part of me that thinks someday you're gonna come in hot with saddam too you know like there's always just a little like there's another novel that's been found they made a novel about saddam too saddam's lost novel like tupac he keeps dropping novels like every 15 years after his death yeah on the centennial we're gonna get a new romance novel all right r.i.p saddam you would have loved the romantic trend going on right now we are talking about a dictator unlike saddam he was not a novelist but he was a poet um kind of like uh joseph stalin and he also did commit a genocide and in addition to that he was a poet and he was a poet and he was a poet and he was a poet he lived as a new age healer for years after committing a genocide this guy goes so many places you are not ready for the radovan karajic story uh that's who we're talking about this week have you heard about okay radovan karajic no i have not i just want to before we get there i just want to highlight for the netflix viewers jamie's fantastic john lock t-shirt that she's wearing and uh that's for you sophie the one from from uh the show with the island the bald one yeah okay that is for me that is bald king from lost that's from lost okay yeah no it's low culture john lock okay we're not going we're not going high today it would have been really funny if it was the same aesthetic like fan cam shirt but it was like john lock the philosopher i am a thousand percent sure that shirt exists some it does yes all my philosophy girlies out there are are just absolutely losing their minds um and all of my balkans girlies are going to be losing their minds this week because again we're talking about radovan karajic one of the people most responsible for the bosnian genocide also a poet and an energy healer who was really in deriki so we're gonna cover a lot of ground sinister what a sinister multi-hyphenate situation that is yeah yeah i mean because in our country we're seeing like the weird woo you know bullshit medicine stuff kind of as a prelude to the fascism right where it kind of leads in and helps bring it for this guy he goes full fascist and then he becomes an energy healer it's an amazing journey so i can't wait to talk to you about radovan that's how i always i always think about like uh george w as like a reverse hitler where he like got the war crimes out of the way and then retreated into painting afterwards oh man i think hitler would have done better painting if he'd taken the opposite route but then again that what i mean is if he'd never painted because he just shot himself first because he was a bad painter i guess what i'm saying is george w bush is a better artist than hitler you know i gotta give bush that i i mean if if we absolutely have to give if we have flowers on 9 11 i guess he's top of mind look hitler's a better hitler than george w bush was i'll say that you know so that's it's not 100 either way yeah i mean geez what a rough lead it doesn't george w like doesn't he paint like he's a better painter than george w bush war he like paints injured veterans he paints a lot he's painted some injured veterans that's not really a war crime that's just him being a shitty leader i don't know but he also painted like putin's face he does a lot of weird shit i don't know this is an iheart podcast guaranteed human summer me let's host people outside more reality the patio furniture is still in the box the ac just started making a weird noise and the pool flamingo still needs to be inflated so i open air tasker post the task set my budget and pick a tasker to help suddenly the furniture's assembled the ac is fixed and the flamingo's floating which means i am too go to airtasker.com or download the app airtasker get anything done you may not remember every time you toss turn or wake up hot but your body does that's why you wake up tired before the day even starts that's exactly what ghost bed is built to help solve when your mattress creates pressure points your body shifts to get comfortable when it traps heat you kick off the covers ghost bed is designed to help relieve pressure regulate temperature and support your body so your sleep has fewer reasons to be interrupted plus their 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This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Michael Imperioli. I want to tell you about my new podcast, Underground Zero. We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the other families. It's about the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. What's in the tunnels? Gold bars, silver ingots. It could be worth half a billion. Starring Steve Sciarrappa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperioli. How far are you prepared to go? Depends how far you are. Listen to Underground Zero on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I talk to actor Steven Root. I'm a people watcher. You see that guy going down the drain, go, yeah, I can use that. And Open Igloo co-founder, Alia Mohammed. I love staying on top of what is going on in our city, what is on renters' minds, and taking all of that knowledge to build a platform that hopefully is going to make New York City better in the long run. Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, anyway. Speaking of war crimes, let's talk a little bit about Balkan history, right? Okay. Um, because you gotta, we can't just, like, start talking about this guy's life. There's too much, and too much complicated shit going on in the Balkans that leads into this. So, if you, if you're not a map person, the Balkans are, like, kind of a chunk of Southeast Europe, like, leading up into Eastern Europe, but also, like, that southern flank that includes, like, you've got Slovenia, you've got, uh, Croatia, you've got Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, like, all these different areas are, like, parts of the Balkans. Um, that's, and it's, it's historically this, like, the most quarrelsome part of Europe in the early modern era, right? And a big reason for that is that because of geography, the Balkans are the major European battleground for most of the fighting between, like, the Muslims and the Christians, right? When you get the Ottoman Empire trying to make their way into Europe, there's, they take a lot of the Balkans, and for a lot of, like, the early modern period, much of the Balkans are, like, the Balkans are the Balkans. The Balkans is, like, governed from Constantinople, right? It's, like, part of the Ottoman Empire. And that doesn't, that, that leads to a lot of fucking conflicts, right? Because people in, like, modern day Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia are subjects of the Ottoman Sultan for a very long time. And some of these people convert to Islam. And, of course, a lot of Muslims from Anatolia and elsewhere migrate to the Balkans, uh, particularly Bosnia, right? They're, they, Bosnia develops a very sizable Muslim population. They're called Bosniaks. Those are, like, the Bosnian Muslims. Um, and obviously, there's also a lot of Christians. Quite a few Serbian Christians specifically say, fuck you, to the idea of serving a sultan. Uh, and the mountainous highlands, particularly around Montenegro, the term they use is, like, a shatter zone, right? It's this area on the edge of an empire and in between other empires or kingdoms where usually it's very mountainous. And so it's hard to, like, govern in the pre-modern period. Before you have helicopters, you can't really govern these highland regions because, like, if you have an army and guys just go up 2,000 feet, it's, like, well, your army will die before they reach them. You can't, you can't march them into the mountains. Um, so you, you wind up with this big shatter zone in, like, kind of Montenegro where there's all these Serb clans who wish to escape the sultan's law would, like, flee and fight. Modern historians tend to emphasize their primary issue with the Ottomans was not even religion as much as it was taxation, which is usually the case. With stuff like this, even if it gets written up as a big holy wars because, well, no, that guy wants to tax us and we have mountains so we don't have to pay taxes. Yeah, there's, yeah, there's always a secret. There's, there's always a back alley reason for actually doing it. And it's usually taxes, right? Um, that's a big part of it, at least. Still, these mountain Serbs develop a reputation among other Europeans as they're primitives, right? They're these very savage, like, you know, warriors who don't build big cities because they live up in these highland areas. But they're also these noble warriors. Defending Christendom against the Islamic hordes. They're like the shield of Europe, too. So they develop both of those kinds of reputations. During this period of time, Montenegrin Serbs largely clustered in small clan and tribal groups under the leadership of people called dukes. These aren't royalty in the traditional sense. They're often from, like, the same families, prominent families. But the leaders are, like, you don't tend to get, like, super hierarchical by, like, birth, like, governance structures in these mountainous areas where it's just kind of. Who's best at killing, right? Because if, like, someone's shithead son tries to rule everybody and they're not great at killing, they're going to get killed. They're going to get killed. No one's going to follow them. We really got to bring that back. We should bring that back. They had some things right. We could kill the Nepo baby discourse once and for all if we were just allowed to kill people. Yes, the mountain Serbs have much to teach us about governance structures. I'm always saying this. So it's not, like, an electoral system and it's not. It's certainly not electoral. Okay. Okay. Often by, like, who will the most people, like, follow into battle because, like, they know you're not an idiot. You won't get them killed pointlessly, right? Okay. So it's, like, it's Instagram rules. Yeah. Largest following rules. It's Instagram rules. Exactly. Yes. The Bosnian. Instagram is actually based off of the way the Montenegrin Serbs, you know, handle politics in this period of time. My friend Mark is always telling me about that. The birth of influencer culture. Yeah. And one of the one of the families and kind of this part, this, like, part of. Modern-day Montenegro where there's all these clans, one of the families that produces a lot of Dukes are the Karajiks, right? The Karajiks are, like, this kind of, when I say family, it's almost more of, like, a clan or a tribal group. And in around the 13th century, the Karajik families moved to a village called Pejika and develop a reputation for producing an outsized number of these military leaders. In her pseudo biography of Radovan Karajik, My War Criminal, Jessica, and we'll talk about that title a little bit later. Jessica Stern interviewed several members of the Karajik. She was told many stories about, like, one of the most famous early members of the family, this Duke named Sujo Karajik, who was a Duke who assassinated the local Turkish leader and had this epic poem written about, like, him killing, assassinating this guy, right? The Balkans in general are big epic. It's a big epic poem place, right? There's a lot of oral traditions, particularly among, like, the Serbs. And that's how they tend to, like, pass on stories. You make a mixtape about a cool guy who, like, does cool shit, right? You know, you got to put that shit on wax. Sometimes you kill a guy so well that your friend writes an EP about it. I am excited after, like, several rounds of nuclear war and stuff for, like, what the story of that guy who blasted Shinzo Abe becomes, like, a thousand years in the future when people don't know what, like, a 3D printed gun was or whatever. Yes. Looking forward to it. Looking forward to what people say about that one. So the Karajik family, and Radovan as a kid, is going to grow up being weaned on stories of, like, his famous, you know, relative who was this great war leader. He was also told a lot about another one of his ancestors, Vuk Karajik, who was a writer and folklorist born in 1787. And Vuk is credited with helping to form and shape a lot of modern, the modern, he helps invent Serbian grammar to a significant extent. This is one of those languages where people have been. I've been speaking it for a while, but once we start, like, writing books and publishing them, there's, like, a couple dudes who figure out, like, how are we going to write stuff? Like, what are the rules of our language? No one sat down and decided that, really. That is, like, such a great hack into getting your random story kind of, like, codified into history, is if you can, like, write something down that is actually desperately needed to preserve the culture, it doesn't even matter if the story is good. Is a good story not important? What matters? Is that somebody wrote it down? Yeah. We figured out. Flew perfect. And he also writes, Vuk writes a collection of Balkan fairy tales that are some of the first Grimm stories. Like, Jacob Grimm takes a lot of those, is inspired to do a lot of the Grimm's fairy tales. Whoa. If you think about a lot of really dark Grimm fairy tales, some of them are Serbian in origin. You know, you're so right. Not a lot of happy stories told by the Serbs. No, I never put that together. The Grimm's lifted stuff like crazy. I just didn't know from here specifically. Some of it's from the ancestor of this weird genocide guy we're going to be talking about this week. The Grimm's a little Grimm. It was right there. Sorry. Yeah. That's very true, Sophie. So, in the centuries to come, many Serbs would need the distraction of fairy tales, even dark ones, because their life was even darker, right? World War I, as you might remember, was kicked off by a Serb partisan. And Sarajevo, who shot the Archduke of Austria-Hungary. When the Central Powers invaded Serbia to get revenge, Serbia lost more than 265,000 soldiers in the war, which was a quarter of their mobilized army. And in comparison, France and Germany both lost, like, I think France loses like 16% of their mobilized army. Germany loses like 15%. And you know how horrible the casualties are for France and Germany in World War I. Serbia loses a quarter of their mobilized army, right? So, it's even worse. And between half a million and 800,000-ish civilians are also killed. Now, there has been and still is a great deal of debate. over, like, how many Serbs die in World War I. But in a 2021 paper for the University of Belgrade, Slobodan Markovic estimated that between 21 and 27.65% of the entire Serbian population dies in that war. It kills a quarter of all of the Serbs that exist, right? That's a pretty good estimate. That's not good. That's pretty rough, right? No, no, that's putting up genocide numbers. That is really scary. It is. And there's genocidal elements to that war. Yeah. So it's pretty bleak. It's a dark time. And it's got to get even darker, because on March 27, 1941, pro-fascist elements within the – World War II starts, obviously, just as a little bit of a prelude, right? Sure, sure, sure. And kind of after World War I, because Austria-Hungary breaks up, you have the establishment, I think, of the 20s of Yugoslavia, right? That's when it becomes a thing. And it's independent for a while. And at the outbreak of World War I, Germany attempts to kind of co-opt the government of Yugoslavia. And there's pro-fascist elements within the government who agree to sign an armistice with Germany, right? So initially, it looks like Yugoslavia is going to be kind of on the Axis side of things. Not as like a full member of the Axis, obviously, but as like one of kind of their allied states. But then, per History.com, quote, Yugoslav air officers, aided by the British Secret Services, toppled the country's pro-Axis regime. In response, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, launched a massive invasion of the country that began on April 6th with the bombing of Belgrade. The Yugoslav defenders, made up of various politically unstable nationalities, were routed by the hordes of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops invading their country. On April 17th, Yugoslavia surrendered and was divided, except for the puppet state of Croatia, between the four invading Axis powers. The occupying troops aggravated the traditional religious and national differences in the region, and the Serbs were especially brutalized. And this is, things get so ugly. And, and the Balkans and Serbia in particular during World War II. This might be the place that has like the ugliest war in world, all of World War II, in terms of like the actual crimes against the civilian population. Right? That's hard to say, right? Is it, if it's uglier than Poland, it's by like a fraction of a degree, right? They're both nightmares. Yeah. But we don't, it's also that the degree to which what happens in the Balkans during World War II is horrific and not talked about, is, it's much more extreme. I was going to say. Because everyone knows. I was going to say. Yes, I was going to say that this is yet another sort of glaring gap in my American public schooling where. We do not talk about this. Yeah, absolutely bashed over the head with World War II. We absolutely don't. And the entire regions are just completely. No. Ignored. And there's an argument to be made. If you're talking about like what things are, are why the Germans lost the war. Well, one possible argument is because Germany has to invade the Balkans, right? Yugoslavia. Is that that? Because that's one of the things that delays in Greece to that delays them invading Russia, right? The, they have to push back until later in the year operation Barbarossa. And that, that is part of why operation Barbara, I don't think it would have worked either way. Right. But because they're later, that means they don't get as far before the winter hits, right? It's one of these things that delays Hitler that he didn't want to do. He wanted to not have to invade. So it is really important to the overall progress of the war too. Now there's a lot of ugly things. Things going on in Yugoslavia during all time or bleak start to the episode. Thank you for letting me have my George Bush moment earlier. I guess I won't say it gets bleaker, but this is a Serbian story. So it stays at a pretty high level of bleak the entire time. Right? Sure. Sure. Thanks for the George Bush joke for me. Now the worst of all of the different bad actors, and there's a lot of them. Uh, in world war two was the fascist in the Balkans was the fascist independent state of Croatia. As I said, Croatia gets to be independent because like the people in charge of Croatia are basically Nazis, right? Uh, they have a militant movement that winds up in charge over there and is active in other parts of the Balkans called the Ustashi. And they do, they're like, they're like the fucking Nazis with like a little bit of extra pep in their fucking step, right? Obviously they're targeting Jews and Roma and that's who they massacre first. And they, the, the massacre of, of Jews in Yugoslavia is like pretty nightmarishly like extensive. Um, but they don't stop there. Also, they're also a massacring Serbs. As I said, there's a genocide against the Serbs during world war two, or at least an attempted one. And the Bosniaks, these Bosnian Muslims are, they wind up on both sides, right? Because a big chunk, like the leadership of the independent state of Croatia, uh, sees the Bosnia, the Bosniak Muslims as Muslim Croats, right? So like they're, they're, they're, they're Muslim, but they're like part of their Aryan, right? And they're offered Aryan status and a big chunk of like leaders within the Bosniak community kind of take up and work, agree to work alongside and fight alongside the independent state of Croatia. Um, and particularly in some heavily Muslim areas like Bosnia, the Astasha are something like 50% Muslim, right? Now this has been twisted by racists in the present. And you'll hear claims that the Astasha were like 90% Muslim and that the Nazis in Yugoslavia were Muslim. They have these, you know, Muslim genocide in Yugoslavia. And that 90% of the Muslims fought alongside the Astasha. This is all nonsense, right? The Astasha are primarily clerical fascists and they are Catholics, right? That is the primary religion behind the Astasha, right? Uh, and the Astasha do offer tolerance to Islam for a variety of complex reasons, but mostly out of military necessity. More to the point, the Astasha also massacre Muslims, right? A lot of Muslims fight against them. A lot of Muslims get put in concentration camps and wiped out. Uh, I want to read, I want to read a quote from an article, uh, for the Yasinovitz concentration camp memorial quote. The first Muslims were imprisoned in Astasha camps in 1941. There are mostly communists or opponents of the Astasha regime who would grow significantly in number. The first group of Muslims was deported to camp three brickworks in mid November, 1941. The group consisted of 116 Jews and communists from the Sarajevo area amongst whom there were 16 Muslims over the next few years. The number of imprisoned Muslims grew. They were communists and members of the people's liberation movement from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially from Sarajevo, Banja Luka and parts of Bosnia and Posavina and central Bosnia. Only a few managed to evade death. So they wipe out a lot of Muslims too. You know, it's, it's not a, it's not as simple as like, Oh, the Astashi, the Muslims fought for the Astashi. A bunch of them fought against it. A bunch of them were genocided, but this is going to get twisted in kind of a lot of modern day right-wing historiography about the period. Um, sure, sure. I mean, we're so invested in Islamophobia. Uh, people will take it wherever they can find it. And there's, there's a lot of complicated reasons for why like a big chunk of Muslims thought the Astashi were the people to back. Um, and there's also other stuff. So as I said, there's a lot of different horrible groups fighting in Yugoslavia in this period. One of the more complicated participants in the fighting were the Chetniks. The Chetniks are essentially a Serb dominated royalist militia. They are fighting. They want independence from the Nazis who have invaded their country, but they want independence, to put the ousted royal family back in power and the royal family are not nice people as royal families generally are not. And the Chetniks become known for their use of brutal insurgent and terrorist tactics, which they do use against the Ustasha who had it coming, but also against any Croats they could get their hands on Bosniaks and Muslims and Herzegovina and elsewhere were also slaughtered. The nationalistic goals of the Chetniks set them against the axis long-term, but they also fought alongside the axis to strategically supporting Nazi efforts, particularly when the Nazis wanted to wipe out a group of people that the Chetniks wanted, wanted slaughtered, right? Because they're kind of thinking about the post-war period. It's horrible. It's a horrible nightmare. This is it. Cause I mean, you just, you hear this many, uh, this many horrible motivations and you're just like, well, civilians are not going to be doing well. There's no civilians in this war. No. Yeah. So it doesn't sound like it's just, Oh God. The other thing you'll get, so generally as a rule, when you hear about like German soldiers and like their opinion on like where they were stationed during world war two, the worst place you can get is the East. You want to be anywhere but the East German soldiers who wind up in the, in the Balkans are like asking to go East sometimes. Cause it's so bad. Cause I will take my fucking chances with the Russians. Like get me away from these people. Like one of the, one of the chief weapons that, uh, the Astasha are using to like do their job. Their genocide is just this like glove with like a razor blade on the hand that they just jab into people's necks hundreds at a time. And they just throw them down in front of me. I'll cut their fucking necks with this hand knife thing. Like it's awful stuff. Like I cannot exaggerate how fucking ugly the war in the Balkans is. Yeah. That's, that's, uh, that's pretty fucking horrible. It's pretty bad. Such a, such a simple device that would also, that also sounds like it would be, it would take so long to kill. It would take a lot of time to get through a lot of people doing it that way. But bullets are expensive, you know? But yeah, sure. And this, you can just make at home. Well, and that's, you know, the Nazis have that problem too. They're like shooting a whole bunch of people is really bad for our troops. They're like brains break after a while. If they're just killing civilians with guns. And also we don't have unlimited bullets. That's why like gas chambers and shit become popular. Part of why the Astasha are just like, what about hand knife? What if it was harder? And we're like, that sounds like the quickest route to breaking your brain. as having to, like, kitchen glove knife someone repeatedly. Nobody fighting for that particular group had a soul by the time the war started. They had already seen thousands of deaths. Yeah, I guess it's like that's not, you don't put that glove on for your first kill, I suppose. No, no. That's gonna haunt me. You don't start with the knife glove. Yeah, it's pretty haunting stuff. The Balkans. So the whole ethic. Wow, you just made a t-shirt. Yeah. And I love the Balkans. I've spent a lot of time there. It's a wonderful part of the world. Great food. Anytime you get a coffee, there's a cigarette with it. It's great nowadays. But yeah, they've had a rough history. The whole ethnic and religious situation in the Balkans in World War II and the details of everything that happened are way too complicated for me to cover in more depth during what is the prelude to a completely different genocide. But there's a myth I do need to bust before we go on because you will hear claims online that the Ustasha were so vileable that even the SS were horrified by their actions, that they went too far for even the SS. And the idea that they went too far for the worst Nazis is very viral and it's also untrue. Most of this rumor is due to the fact that one specific Nazi, an Austrian named Edmund Gleis-Horstenau, did attempt to halt the Ustasha's atrocities. He was like a German diplomat who was stationed there. And he sent a bunch of complaints to Berlin and were like, these guys are going a little bit off, a little bit out of pocket. But. And so. And so. And so. And so. The Nazi was horrified. But Himmler wasn't. Hitler wasn't. Berlin completely ignored his complaints. They were like, yeah, it's fine that they're. We don't give a shit. We're the Nazis. And so you can find SS reports describing the bestial manner that the Ustasha used against, quote, helpless old people, women, and children. But there's no evidence that Himmler himself or anyone high up in the SS gave a shit. And you can also find. You can find similar individual SS men writing about horrifying crimes other SS guys committed. This is also true with Oskar Dürrlwanger. So it's not that the Ustasha were too horrible for the SS. It's that there's always some guys who are like a little bit, like, softer. Well, it's also. Yeah, that it's like, of course there are Nazis who are also, like. Oh, this?. cowardly and can. Yeah, like. I didn't know we were doing this. Yeah. Yeah. That is like a piece of information that's designed to go dishonestly viral. Yes, exactly. Now, at most, what it is fair to say, as I pointed out, is that the brutal hand-to-hand nature with which a lot of the killing gets done in the Balkans does nauseate a lot of SS guys. But even Himmler got sick visiting Auschwitz, and that doesn't mean he wasn't okay with it, right? Right. Anyway, back to the Balkans. So, Balkan World War II history knowers will be livid at me not yet discussing in detail and arguably the most important partisan militia of that period, which is the communists. And this is because our bastard Radovan Karajic's father, Vuko, fought for the chance against the communists. So, he's a member of this kind of right-wing Serbian militia that fights the Nazis sometimes, but also fights alongside the Nazis, especially when they want to kill communists. And the primary people they hate are the communists, right? So, our bastard's dad may have fought the Nazis. I haven't seen any evidence of this. It's probably a lot more likely that he wanted to kill communists and Muslim Croats, right? So, after Yugoslavia fell to the Nazis, Josep Broz Tito formed a resistance group made up of members of the former illegal communist party of Yugoslavia, right? There had been a communist party in Yugoslavia that's illegal. And these guys are like, you know, probably mostly book nerds as communists tended to be at the period. And Tito's just one of the. He's. We'll do an episode on him at some point. He's one of the most interesting men who ever fucking lived. I could easily do a two-part Behind the Bastards on Tito, but I would also have to have Margaret do a two-part episode of Cool People who did cool stuff to accurately depict Tito's life. He's that kind of guy. Where it's like. Dad, he's. Dad, he's. Like, he was a dictator, but he was also pretty amazing. That's. That actually sounds like an incredible game of volleyball. We'll do it one of these days. Nightmare. For this week, we're not talking much about Tito. What you need to know about him is that he turns his former political party into a partisan army strong enough that they win. Yugoslavia is the only nation that gets conquered by the Nazis and independently frees themselves. They don't have to be. Now, obviously, they receive some assistance and stuff, but they don't have to be liberated. There's not foreign troops who have to free. They do it because they're that good. Like, Tito is very, very effective as a partisan leader. Can I ask something? Like, very, very tiny-brained question. Why do we not learn about this area of World War II? What is the function? Because it's way too complicated. Okay. None of this. And afterwards, even, in, like, the Cold War, Yugoslavia doesn't. cleanly slot in to any boxes, right? Because they were communists, so you'd think they cleanly. But also, Tito literally threatened to have Stalin murdered after Stalin. Stalin kept sending assassins to kill Tito because Tito wouldn't do what he wanted. Okay. And Tito eventually was like, So that's fun for the Margaret column. You've sent, like, seven of these guys to kill me. I've killed them all. If you send any more, I'll send one man to kill you and I won't have to send another. Like, this is at the height of Stalin. That's who Tito is. Tito doesn't give a fuck. Like. Okay. You know who won? Who would have hated ads? Probably Tito. I guess anyone in this. Yeah, probably Tito. Yeah, probably most of the communists in this story, but certainly Tito. Yeah, definitely the communists. Yeah, yeah. Basically, yeah. Yeah. Tito would not buy this. He probably wouldn't. Make of that what you will. It's 95 degrees and your air conditioner suddenly starts making a very weird noise. That's when you post your task on Air Tasker. Find local help for repairs, yard work, errands, and more. without losing your cool. Go to airtasker.com or download the app. Air Tasker. Get anything done. You may not remember every time you toss, turn, or wake up hot, but your body does. That's why you wake up tired before the day even starts. That's exactly what GhostBed is built to help solve. When your mattress creates pressure points, your body shifts to get comfortable. When it traps heat, you kick off the covers. GhostBed is designed to help relieve pressure, regulate temperature, and support your body. So your sleep has fewer reasons to be interrupted. Plus, their cooling technology is built into every mattress. 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So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, here's the thing. I'm speaking with more artists, policy makers, and performers like actor Stephen Root. I think for me to be any good or for any character act to be any good, you've got to put enough of yourself and your empathy for people in it. You see that guy going down the street and go, yeah, I can use that. Open. Igloo co-founder Alia Mohamed. I love staying on top of what is going on in our city, what is going on in city politics, what is on renters' minds, and taking all of that knowledge to build a platform that hopefully is going to make New York City better in the long run. And actress and singer Melissa Arrico. Partnership took on a whole other meaning when I started making my own work. It's like you with a great actress or actor. 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He governs for decades Yugoslavia up until like 1980. He's running it from the end of World War II up to I think 1980 is when he dies. And this is the only period of time pretty much that like the Balkans is one united thing. And it's because Tito's very good at keeping this incredibly quarrelsome area together, right? He's going to ultimately be unsuccessful. He tries to create this sense of like Yugoslav nationality, as you might guess by the fact that there's no Yugoslavia today. It doesn't work out in the long run, right? Anyway, that's enough backstory for us to finally turn to the actual subject of these episodes. God, that was a really brutal journey to the beginning of the episode. Kind of an old timer. The last, oh man, sometimes we get some fun ones. Sometimes there's a witch at the beginning. No, millions are already dead. This time millions are dead. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Radovan Karajic was born on June 19th, 1945 in Pejica, which is a tiny Montenegrin village that Wikipedia notes is quote inhabited exclusively by the Karajic families. So everyone's kind of related in this like larger family group in this small town. Okay. Maybe a few dozen people, right? Incest? Question mark? I don't, it's not family quite in the same sense. Like I think these are more like a tri, it's more like a tribal group, but like, yeah, they're all kind of related. Definitely. There is going to be a lot of people. It's like a theater troupe. There's going to be incest in this story. Yes, Sophie. It's like an improv group. There's attempted incest in this story. Not quite Targaryens. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and kind of, again, Radovan comes into the world right at the end of World War II after about a million Yugoslavians die in the war. Mostly like Serbs are the largest number of that. A lot of Serbs get killed in Yugoslavia and a lot of Serbs get killed by Croats in particular. So there's going to be anger over like what was effectively a Serbian genocide that gets committed. By these people who you're now countrymen with some of them. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's just going to simmer. That's that. That has to be like categorically true. Right. Like there just was a massive genocide that it sounds like most of the world was just ignoring because it was World War II. Yeah. There was a lot of genocides going around. The Balkans are complicated. None of it was easy to talk about. So, yeah, Radovan comes into the world in 45 and his father, Vuko, who again had fought with the Chetniks, had been born in 1912 and he was not a nice man. An analysis of Radovan's life published by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law noted after the war that media accounts described Vuko as, quote, a poor tramp and a tender and journeyman with a history of incest and theft. And this is slightly incorrect. Right. But the truth is actually a little worse. He didn't. He didn't. He aspired to incest. He never quite made it happen. Right. Because I do think that's better. I do think that's better. Well, you hear about what happens, Jamie. Oh, maybe I should read this story to you first. What do we mean about failed incest guy? OK. He tries to marry his fifth cousin. Right. Which is legal at the time. Anything further than like third cousins is legal. So it's not like illegal. I know. Anytime you need to pull out the law, it's like when you're talking to someone or like you're in an argument on Twitter and someone's like, actually, it's OK that I said that. And then they send you a picture of a map. You're like, no. Right. Right. Right. No. Yeah. Or they're making a strong point about age of consent law. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. If you need to know the law. Yeah. Yeah. So if you need a map, you're a pervert. There's a couple different versions of the story of like what happens with with Vuko and his fifth cousin in the version told by his family. This this cousin does not love him back. He's in love with her and they're both cowherds. So they kiss her and she pushes him off. And the gun that he was carrying accidentally goes off and hits an artery in her leg. And he tries to they're very specific. He tries to plug the wound with tobacco, which was apparently a folk remedy for cuts. But she bled out. You should not use tobacco as a folk remedy for an arterial wound. Oh. Oh. So he attempted incest and then killed her. Yeah. He definitely killed her. The family version of the story is. Yeah. It was an accident. You go with the other first. The family version is he loved her. She didn't love him back. And his gun just went off by accident as she's like pushing him away. There's a second version of the story. And in the family version of the story, the girl's family, after he kills her, the girl's family understands it's an accident. But because of his negligence, Vuko goes to prison for a year. Now, Jessica Stern, the author of My War Criminal, does not totally buy this story and finds a contemporary news article about the killing. And this news article claimed that Vuko and Gela, who's his fifth cousin, were both in love. Right. So it's different from the family story. But her parents wanted her to wait to marry him until he finished his compulsory military service. As Stern summarizes, quote, Gela promised to marry Vuko, but in keeping with her parents wishes, insisted on delay. Vuko, on the other hand, wanted to get married immediately. One day, Gela asked Vuko to meet her at the top of the large hill above the village. Vuko went to meet his cousin as requested. He brought a revolver as well as the cows. He pressed once again for Gela refused. He shot her. The bullet went through both of her thighs, damaging the blood vessels. She died soon afterwards due to the loss of blood. Vuko did not confess to the crime, but told the court that the shooting was accidental. He testified that his revolver had fallen out of his pocket as he was seating himself next to his cousin Gela. He said that Gela had asked him, why are you carrying that devil with you? Then she grabbed the gun and threw it away from where they were sitting. Vuko testified that the gun hit a rock and accidentally discharged, fatally wounding Gela in the thigh. The court did not accept Vuko's version of what occurred. The court had access to a letter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course they don't. That's the worst lie I've ever heard. He's like, he's like creating like an what you say kind of scenario for what happened with the gun. He really is. That's ridiculous. Stop. He's found with like a letter on his person. That was the most impeccable reference I've ever heard. If someone's dramatically Oh, my God. If you didn't get that reference, message me on blue sky. I'll send you the video. Oh, my God, Jamie. Sorry, Robert. Sorry, Robert. That was amazing. The court actually has access to a letter that Vuko had in his bag when he gets taken into custody in which he threatens to kill Gela and then himself if she doesn't marry him immediately. And it read in part, quote, Dear Gela, if our marriage cannot be proclaimed, then thank you for burying both of us in the black ground. And Vuko is like, well, yeah, I wrote that letter, but it was to scare her into marrying me. I wouldn't have actually killed her. I like the fact that I killed her was a clear accident. No matter what, no matter what, there is no doubt that he great shot her in the thigh and definitely shot her in the thigh and killed her. I like that there is no interpretation of it is like, OK, no, but so he definitely killed her, but it was actually an accident. And he was just trying to trick her into marrying him. Yeah, I. Yeah, I guess not that it doesn't matter which version of the story is true, but I'm going to go with the least charitable killed her. Yeah, probably, probably not the nicest one. And it sounds like he's like kind of it. I mean, a shot to the thigh feels quite personal. I feel. Yeah. Yeah, that is not giving an accident if you if you have just rejected someone's advance. Yeah. Yeah. So, again, not a. Great dude, no matter which version of the story is true. And Vuko gets released from his from prison right at the start of the Axis invasion. Right. That's what gets him out of being locked up. And that's when he joins the Chetniks. And then after the war, right after his son is born, the communists wind up victorious. And he gets arrested and imprisoned for another year because he fought against the communists a bunch. Or another five years. Who did he end up with after he killed his cousin for sexually rejecting him? So everyone will know the woman who becomes Radovan's mother, who he eventually marries, is like illiterate and like comes from a poor family. And so he has to like, he has to go down a couple of steps. He was like, because of his social position that the Karajiks had, he should have been able to marry somebody better. But he's not able to because he murders this woman, right? You know, she, I mean. That's what people say. And so does, so does she. She has to marry a murderer. She has to marry the murderer. Yeah. Yeah. So she, he misses the first five years of his son Radovan's life, which is the happiest years of his son Radovan's life. He is, he's emphatic about the fact that, no. It was great before dad came back from prison. The communist did us a favor by taking him away. And so his earliest memories when he's just with his mom would have been a mix of heroic poems because his mom sings a lot. They usually set their poems to music in this part of the world. So his mom singing him a lot of poems about his valiant ancestors fighting the Muslims and, you know, furiously whispered tales of communist violence against his family. He grows up knowing which oak trees in town had been used as backstops for the communists to execute his family members, right? These are the stories this kid grows up with. Just little boy stuff. It's a very Serbian childhood. It's like every boy knows. Which trees your family members bled to death against? Yes. Wow. My mother would sing it to me as we pass by. Like the family stories that they shoot his dad too. They try to kill him once and he like blocks the bullet with his hand. So they just put him in prison instead. This is hard. It's a harsh. It's yeah. Some hard stories to grow up with. Yeah. His mother, Jovanka, raises Radovan as an only child for five happy years while his dad is away. Now, she's a decade younger than her husband. She's also illiterate. And Radovan later described her as a scrappy, energetic peasant girl. Quote, she used to recite epic poetry for me every night. I learned many of these poems by heart before I learned to read. So for those first few years until his dad came home and started producing what would become four younger siblings, Radovan mostly remembers the songs of his mother and the natural beauty of the rugged land. He grew up with an almost religious appreciation for the ancient oaks. There's this like they're like they form part of like the like religious ceremonies. I mean, they're Christian ceremonies. But in this region, like they are very, very focused on their oak trees. Right. It's like a big deal to these Montenegrin Serbs. And so there's a lot of there's a lot of like both natural folk remedies and kind of like magic, like natural or not natural, but like like folk magic that he's also raised to believe in. This is an important part of it. His childhood and his upbringing. Like the thing when you shoot your cousin in the crotch and then shove tobacco into the wound so that she doesn't die. Into the bleeding wound. Yeah. It's not all very effective folk medicine. It's not 100% effective, but what medicine is. Yeah. His mother was peaceful and never used any corporal punishment on him or his other siblings. He recalled later, in the first five years of my life, I was never beaten. I was never hit. My mother never kicked me. Now, his biographer. Jessica Stern suggest because she's talking to him while he's in prison after he does the things that we're going to talk about. And she's Mrs. My war criminal. Yeah. She's a little weird. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. Yeah. She's like, is it like when the journalist fell in love with Martin Shkreli? Not quite. But she I will talk about this later. I don't want to talk because I rely on her book a lot and she gets a lot of good details in there. She she writes some stuff in there. That I don't fully understand. I'll say that much about a horny journalist, maybe a little. I don't know. Yeah, it's more than she was impressed by his charisma. Let's say that. Oh, come on. Okay. First of all, dare I say, Jamie Loftus at times a horny journalist. Oh, no. I mean, I'm I'm interested to hear her point of view. It's not horny. It's just like weirdly. It's weird. I don't know how else to describe it. I'm excited to hear the weirdness. At one point he does like Reiki on her. She's doing like energy healing and she clearly believes in that stuff, too. So she's like, I could feel his energy. Like, it's weird. It's a weird biography. Great. I don't know how else to say it, guys. Like, hey, they're they're healing each other. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. I'm excited to meet her. Okay. Yeah. Well, she sounds trustworthy. So and she suggests that, like, the reason he emphasizes that his mom never hits him is that his dad beats the shit out of him. Right. And for his part, Radovan more or less agrees, quote, My father was a strict disciplinarian, but he hit me less than he hit my siblings. I was afraid that my father was very harsh with the other children. My father did beat me, but he didn't beat me that much. Okay. I guess that's all you can ask for. Okay. I do feel like a lot of Behind the Bastards episodes kind of start with this dynamic. This is this is feeling familiar. Yeah. So he also grew up hearing poems from his father, who was a great guslar or player of music. He's the player of an indigenous there's this indigenous Serbian instrument, and he plays it a lot, and he sings and singing seems to have been one of the relatively few things that Vuko is both around his kids to do, and also he's tolerable when he's singing. Radovan later recalled to Stern, My friends and I once asked my late father how it was possible to know so many poems by heart, and my father said that if a singer forgets a line, he can substitute a new one. If this new line was better than the old one, other singers will continue to use the to use the old one. And so, yeah, this is he's going to learn a lot about, like, art from this. He becomes like a poet and a musician, and he's also as when he becomes a dictator, he gives all his speeches extemporaneously. So I think this has a big influence on him. Right. Okay. From his parents, it's pretty potent to say, like, well, if you don't know how it goes, just make it up and make some shit up and say, yeah, yeah. So from his parents, Radovan would inherit a love of poetry and an appreciation for being able to make shit up on the spot. I haven't found a lot of detail about how he spent his childhood and adolescence. One BBC article summarizing interviews with his mother put it this way. His mother described her son as loyal and a hard worker who used to help her in the home and in the fields. She said that he was a serious boy who was respectful towards the elderly and helped his school friends with their homework. So that's, you know, maybe. The family left Pechika not long after Vuko gets out of prison and they move to another village, Sovnik, when Radovan was 11, they leave for the big city, Niksik, which is the second city of Montenegro, but he never gets over the village that he's raised in. And he would later complain to interviewers with vehement hatred that the communists destroyed the ancient oak trees to build a highway. And he calls this blasphemy, right? So he takes that very seriously. He does not seem to have held any ire against the communists as a young man, though, and he's going to join the communist party for years. This might be because he hated his father so much. It may have been a, well, my dad hates the communists, so I'm going to like the communists. He's been a communist for a while. I mean, that feels like a safe bet. Many such cases. Yeah. At age 15, he leaves on his own and moves to Sarajevo in nearby Bosnia. And everything in the Balkans is kind of near Bosnia, but still. Sarajevo is a strange choice for a man who would later become a violent Serbian ethno-nationalist. Belgrade, which is like the capital of Yugoslavia, is much larger and it's very Serb. Sarajevo, meanwhile, was and is a melting pot. If you've ever been there. It's a wonderful city. You can see the influence of Turkish and even Arab culture alongside Balkan and European influences. It's a lot like Istanbul, if you've ever been, right? And that it's the city that you can just see has been a crossroads for a bunch of civilizations for forever. It's a beautiful place. I mean, and I can't know why Radovan went to Sarajevo. He would only explain to his biographer most Montenegrins would have gone to Belgrade to study, right? So he's like, most people would not have made the choice that I made. But he doesn't really explain why. Maybe it is because he's attracted to the cosmopolitanism of the city, right? He is initially a pretty cosmopolitan guy. He has a lot of Muslim friends when he's living in Sarajevo. Jessica Stern writes that when he starts college, he's largely seen as a country bumpkin, a bit like a southerner with a strong hillbilly accent who like moves to NYU or something to go to college. Sure. Who knows all of his local trees type of guy. Yeah. Right. All great at trees. One of his friends tries to get him to change his hillbilly haircut when he moves to Sarajevo, but he doesn't. He refuses, despite seeming odd. And despite the fact that he's like a weirdo, he's very charismatic. And so he becomes a popular guy in short order, just as his intelligence makes him a good student. He's going to opt to go to medical school in order to become a psychiatrist. And while he studied, he marries a peer medical student named Liljana Zelen in 1967. They had their daughter that year and a son a couple of years later. And unlike Radovan's family, Liljana's has money. She comes from like an upper class family. She describes her husband as a poetic soul. That's why you go to Sarajevo. Right? Marry a rich girl. Yeah. Now, per that American Academy of Psychiatry Law article, others described Radovan differently. Other accounts note his penchant for drinking, gambling, and spending thousands of dollars over the years in casinos. So he's got a wild side too, right? Well, because I think, not to excuse it, but like he's still in college right now-ish age? Okay. Yeah, he's in college. He's in college, medical school, right? You know, it's like teens to early 20s. Certain casino behaviors we can excuse. Certain casino. So when he's like 23 in 1968, and he's become the president of the school Communist Party by 1968, right? And that's the year that he starts activism, right? He becomes a student activist, and he helps to organize it. There's like a series of protests that culminates in this like big day-long strike, right, of students at the school. Now, everyone protesting are still communists. This is Yugoslavia. So they're protesting the communist government by carrying pictures of Che Guevara. Because like that's just, I guess, a universal protest thing, even if you're a communist. Wow, okay, potent, interesting. He later explained this by saying that the protesters considered the fight against their local elites to be part of the global struggle against capitalism, even though their elites were communists. I don't know what they thought at the time. I didn't grow up in Yugoslavia. That's what he says later, but he is a liar. So maybe that's not how everyone felt. It's so different. Yeah, especially in a—I know so little about Yugoslavia that I'm like, you could tell me anything, and I would have to take you at your word. Yeah, maybe Radovan. And he's, yeah, he's taking advantage of it. Yeah. It is very weird, though, that as a medical student, he's the leader of these protests because he's the only medical student who participates. Most medical students are from privileged backgrounds and rarely become dissidents. So he is kind of unique. And he's also—his style changes during this time. He's said to dress in flower children getup. And wear groovy outfits. So he's dressing like a—he's dressing like the—like a communist impression of a stereotypical hippie, right? Like, you have to assume they don't have access to the same clothes. It's like shittier tie-dye or something. I don't know. Walking around like a Gary Larson character. That's so interesting. Okay. It must have looked fascinating. Okay. Yeah. Especially for a medical student. Yeah. It's like— Yeah. Like, whatever. All right. Long hair, weirdo hippie. During the main day of the protest, he climbs onto— Under the roof of the faculty building to give what will be the first of many political speeches. Now, this is also the year that he becomes a published poet for the first time. And he fights with his publisher to ensure that his first book of poems gets published in Akavian, which is a Serb dialect common in rural areas, as opposed to the Bosnian dialect of the language that was much more common for literary works. Stern sees this as an early example of the fact that this guy has ethno-nationalist leanings. And he does note that during this period, Radovan's— Activism has plugged him in with the Serbian elite in Bosnia. He would later say, Now, it's noteworthy that he specified they're part of the Serbian elite, because the Yugoslav elite at the time were not dissidents. They're communists, right? That's what makes them their elite. The elite in a communist country are not anti-communists, right? So when he says, I was, like, when he's talking about the Serbian elite, he's not talking—he's talking about the ethno-nationalist elite, like, among, kind of, the— people who want independent Serbia. Those are the people he's talking about, right? Because Tito, the guy who's the dictator, had been born a Croat, but he really emphasizes that he's Yugoslav, and he tries to build a Yugoslav identity. And some people buy that, and some people don't. And you get the feeling that even when he's with the Communist Party for a while, Radovan is never, like, a Yugoslav identity guy, right? He's always kind of a little bit on the ethno-national. side of things and he resigns from the communist party after these protests right um so uh that's you know it's a it makes sense it does it does and it also feels very like i don't know first of all a lot of intent for someone of his age and also just like i've what is what is his what is the vision at this point i mean it is it i don't think he has a vision yeah yeah i think he's he's just he's got some inclinations towards serbian ethno-nationalism right that are not fully formed yet and i wouldn't want people to think that like he's he's fully the guy he's gonna be but you can see he's on that path a little bit even now and you know what path you're on right now the path to products and services that's right that's right baby that sweet slick slide to products that's right summer me let's host people outside more reality the patio furniture is still in the box the ac just started making a weird noise and the pool flamingo still needs to be inflated so i open air tasker post the task set my budget and pick a tasker to help suddenly the furniture's assembled the ac is fixed and the flamingo's floating which means i am too go to airtasker.com or just go to airtasker.com and subscribe to airtasker.com and subscribe to airtasker.com and subscribe to airtasker.com Yeah. It turns out later, you know, I've just been talking about how maybe he was like sympathetic to Serbian nationalist aims at this period and started to be anti-communist. A lot of people would disagree with that because interviews later, a bunch of his friends who had been part of this activist campaign with him immediately after it ends comes to suspect that he'd been an informer for the regime and had been reporting on their activities to the police. This seems like it could be likely because not long after this, this supposed dissident, this guy who would like led a protest campaign, is granted permission by the government to move to the United States and live in New York City, where he attends Columbia University from 1974 to 75. So, yeah, maybe he did the government assault. Columbia has no history with feds. That's that's so funny. OK, that actually that makes so I feel silly now. Oh, he was dressing like a cartoon hippie. Oh, he was getting on the roof and acting weird. OK, he was a fed. OK, so he's yeah, he studies poetry at Columbia, which is weird because he'd been in medical school. Right. And he's going to finish his his medical degree later. But he's studying poetry while he's at Columbia. This is basically like a hiatus period for him, which suggests that maybe he had some doubts. Yeah. Still the 60s. Are we in the 70s now? This is the 70s, 74 to 75. OK. When he's in Columbia. That's another that's another suspicious move. Poetry majors do not like when a science expat, you know, wanders into their midst. No, no. Stay in your fucking lane. And we do get very different opinions on the quality of his poetry, depending on who we ask. Sometimes the same person will say like, oh, he was good. And they're like, no, he was shitty. I can't judge his poetry. So I'm not going to try. Right. He does. A lot of people do say he was like just kind of like a nickel and dime poet. Like he was he was. He was writing like not high, high art. One of his most noteworthy pieces, though, is a 1971 poem titled Sarajevo, which, despite being set 21 years before the war, seems to describe the horror that Radovan himself would bring on his former home. Here's a selection of the poem. The city lies ablaze like a rough lump of incense, wherein the haze of our awareness twists. The city implodes in that latent emptiness. A stone's crimson death bespeaks the house's blood soaked tide. Plague. Tranquility. Tranquility. Again, this is the guy who's going to order the shell like a Sarajevo for three years. So it's weird that he wrote that 20 something years beforehand. Totally. Yeah. It'd be like if George Bush had written in 1970, like a short story about invading Iraq and it not going well or painted it, I guess. Like, all right. You know, I guess I'll just put this in the back drawer. Yeah. See how it fits with me. I will. I will say very beside the point. But you know what? That was mid. That was a mid. That was a mid poem, I think. I assume it rhymed better in Serb. I'm sure. But you know. Super Croatian. So, you know, the use of language is a little obvious, you know? Yeah. Maybe a little. So while living in the U.S., Radovan was a loud and vocal supporter of Tito, although this may be due to the fact that he had minders regularly checking in and spying on him. His roommate during this period was Barry Farber, who himself grew up to become an influential right wing radio talk show host in the 1990s. It's just kind of weird that they live together. I feel like any time you learn about contemporary name to men who were roommates in New York and you get like the scariest weirdest ever heard, you get like or I mean, just two people. That's how you get like Barry Weiss and Kate McKinnon. You're like, what the fuck are you talking about? You shouldn't be in the same room. Yeah. He later Barry later recalled this of Radovan. I should have seen that Radovan would not remain just a poet. He was much too smart and forceful a character. I could see him running a country. He was formidable. He looked the part. And while I don't have a picture of him from the mid 70s, here's how he looked almost a decade later. These are obviously mug shots. He's going to get arrested. We'll talk about why a little later. But look at that hair. Look at that hair. Amazing. It's great. He looks he looks incredible his entire life. He's an amazing looking man. The hair is hair. It's great. It's like a. It's like a. It's like a gray pompadour. It's insane. It is. And like, you can tell that it kind of just falls that way, which I resent. Yeah. You know, it's a lot of us need to do a lot of work to just get it to fall. Vague. Oh, that's. Yeah. I mean, honestly, he's giving like 2019 Harry Styles here. Oh, wow. Sure, Sophie. You're welcome. I was going to. I was going to say like. Not in the face, but the hair and the suit. And I agree with Antonio Banderas. Yes, I see that as well. Sure. Anyway, I always agree with Antonio Banderas. Look, I'm not going to speak against Harry Styles's hairline today, because I mean, I'm not seeing a hairline struggle from from our back. There you go. No, no, no, no. Harry has a manual. Harry got Harry got Harry got the hair transplant situation. He's open about it. He got the plugs. He got the plugs. He's open about it. Anyways. Bye. Sure. So the differing accounts of Radovan make sense when you learn that he'd been he's been described as a social comedian or as a social chameleon later. Right. He's a guy who's really good at blending. He's good at being whoever he needs to be in the room that he's in. Right. If he wants you to like him, you'll like him. Historian Robert Donia, who testified at his trial and was cross-examined by Radovan, noted he knew exactly what to say. A different story for everyone with perfect knowledge of what people wanted to hear. After returning home, Karajic began to work as a psychiatrist. His mentor, Dr. Sarek, noted that he. That he was not a very good psychiatrist due to the fact that he's not interested in anyone but himself. He does not care about people like. Well, I mean, it's I also just going back to that other comment that there's a world where Karajic is like in court. He's like, Your Honor, I'm a people pleaser. I don't know what to tell you. I'm a people pleaser. I'm just good at being liked. I give the people what they want. Yeah, of course. He's a terrible psychiatrist. I guess that's that stands to reason. That scans to be weird if he was good at it. I mean, most psychiatrists are bad psychiatrists in my experience, you know, most people in most jobs throw a pill bottle at your head and tell you to fuck off. I wish I have. I have the opposite. Anyway, Radovan was very popular and good at charming his colleagues, but he's also lazy. Quote, He tried to find the easy way for everything. Dr. Sarek described him also as having a thousand faces. So again, he's he's a liar. He's a charmer and he's lazy. Radovan spoke highly of his mentor, though, which is weird. Weird because his mentor is a Muslim man, right? And several people who have noted that during this time, many, most of the people in his social circle in Sarajevo are Muslims. He does not have any visible or obvious bias against Muslims. Again, he's going to do a genocide against Bosniaks, but he doesn't seem to have an issue with them socially. This is OK, because Hitler, you can find like, yeah, there was like one Jewish guy he was nice to in his life. But like with Radovan, it's like, no, like most of his friends. We're Muslim. It's kind of weird that he did a genocide. I'm really I'm really I mean, the finding out he was he was a fed for a period of time so far is the thing that it makes the most sense to me about this guy. Everything else is fairly baffling. So he's he's he's a complicated man. That's for sure. He's had like 12 different professions before the age of 25. He's basically on good terms with people. He will later genocide. Like what? What? What do you mean? He spent nearly a decade in the 70s to the 80s. He's not going to a fairly normal life. No, no, Jamie, you're not ready for where this man's hair is in part two. I'm going to say that right now. You are not ready. I cannot prepare you. I'm just not seeing the source of. OK, yeah. Usually I feel like we have the source of anger by college. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's a little hard to understand. I'll be honest. So he spends a decade or so working as a psychiatrist. He's like a successful upper middle class guy based. I mean, I don't know that those terms are super useful for Sarajevo, but he's doing well. Right. Perhaps his greatest professional achievement was that he somehow gets hired as the team psychologist for Red Star, Yugoslavia's premier football team. Per the book, My War Criminal, quote, Karaja constructed team members to lie down together in a darkened room and imagine themselves to be bumblebees flying from flower to flower. Yeah. Captain recalled the player's responses. Someone was sleeping, someone snoring, someone else was farting and someone cursing about bumblebees. The whole bumblebee thing was a huge joke to us. For the Red Star position, he moved to Belgrade, leaving his family behind for a year in 1983. Karajic was as boastful about his skill as team psychologist as he was about everything else. One of his friends recalled that if the team scored a point, Karajic felt that the point was due to his psycho training of the players. He said he could make Red Star the best team in the world. Everyone knows the most important. The most important part of a good football team is the psychiatry. He's like, guys, guys, guys. During the World Cup, we were all competing psychiatrists. We would not be in the semis without the bee thing. No. Oh, okay. It's wild stuff. This is so bizarre. He's a little bit of an egomaniac. He's all like career death. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's like, I mean, he does chase attention. He's a narcissist. Yeah. Anyway, you know, not a lot of like humble, self-effacing men. become dictators. Like, I'm sure even Tito was on that spectrum, but Again, one of the things Tito is known for is he's like really good at like delegating and knowing his strengths from his weaknesses, actually, which is very rare for a dictator, usually a problem for them. Yeah, right. He's a dictator unicorn. Like, I'll say this about Tito. If you were going to have a dictator in Eastern Europe in the postwar period, you'd want it to be Tito. There's no one else you would have wanted it to be. You'd want it to have been if you had to pick a dictator. I think I just I just had to take your word for that. Yeah. I'm taking the word of all of the Yugoslavian people, former Yugoslav people that I met who were like, no, Tito, actually, we kind of miss him. It was it was a lot better in some ways. Say what you will about Tito. But we weren't all killing each other when he was in charge. In 1984, Karadzic is arrested and he's convicted the next year of fraud and misuse of public funds. He spends 11 months in prison, like his dad did for murdering that lady. Right. Radovan would later call himself. Why does he have why does he have public funds? Well, he's because I mean, the soccer team is a public team, I think. Right. Like it's a communist state. Like the team is not there's not like a billionaire that owns Red Star. Right. They're sorry. I forgot that. That. Yeah. That not just like some ugly guy would own the team. I know it wasn't just a billionaire fucking hedge fund asshole. It was. I mean, I'm sure it was some asshole. I don't know. Headed guy who's 26 but looks 70. They hired him to be the team's. Psychiatrist. So he couldn't have been that good. Whoever the owner was. OK. Radovan would later say that this arrest was a he was a political prisoner. Right. And that he was abused by the Muslim secret police who definitely did not exist in Yugoslavia. And this time it was not the Muslim secret police who took him into custody because he was horribly corrupt. So this is him revising it later or he is now. Yeah. OK. OK. This is later. This is later that he would blame it on that. Right. Yeah. No. He just stole money from his. From his bumblebees. Right. Right. He stole money from his bumblebees. That journal write up notes that he claimed he, quote, emerged psychically strengthened following the experience. It further notes allegations have been made of Karasik's corruptibility of his selling fake prescriptions and providing false medical diagnoses to help people collect insurance or pension benefits. So this just sounds many such psychiatrists. That's why. Yeah. Maybe it was more that than the Muslim secret police. Anytime you hear that someone came. I'm out of tax jail feeling psychically strengthened. It's like, I don't. I don't know. I mean, Wesley Snipes. That's true. I mean, it's like then you have you have your Martha Stewart's. The bracelet comes off and all of a sudden she's like, she's more powerful than ever. And Shakira Shakira tax fraud. I just. And if we had to have one of our tax fraud celebrities be a dictator, I think I would pick Wesley Snipes over Martha Stewart. Oh, oh, yeah. No, she would do it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I pick Wesley Snipes over the current president, to be honest. I pick Wesley Snipes over any president because you know what? None of our presidents have been in Blade. That's true. Look it up. And that is. That's a fact. And we can't know what a Blade president would be until we have one. Although I think Barack Obama might have might have been OK. I don't know. He never had a chance. You can tell he really wished he'd been an actor and not the president. That's why he's making movies. Now, is that. Well, and everyone who gets into politics wishes they'd succeeded in Hollywood. Basically, every president from the past, like 40 years. Yes. Ronald's the only one who did it the other way. He's not alone. Yeah. It would have been really funny to watch Joe Biden play Blade. I would watch Joe Biden as Blade. I mean, I'd watch Trump as Blade, to be honest. I don't think it would be as good, but I would watch it. Wait. Biden as Blade is really disgusting to think about. It's just a shot for shot remake of Blade with Joe Biden. But that's really, that's really horrible to think about. I mean, you could say, you know, Obama's kind of doing a bit of a reverse Reagan in some ways. Right. He's kind of going into entertainment after. He's going in entertainment after. I do wish we'd gotten to see Joe Biden and Chris Christopherson opposite each other. You know, the two men who's who's I could just imagine magnetic personal charisma next to each other. Oh, God. If only that movie had happened. Speaking nonsense words to each other. Just gibberish at each other. Just old man speak. Is Joe Biden alive? Is the smell of people rubbed thick in the air? Chris Christopherson's dead, unfortunately. We lost Chris and we kept Joe Biden. I don't know why. So he emerged from prison in the late 1980s. Not Joe Biden. Radovan Karadzic. That would have been, again, weird if Joe Biden had spent prison in the 80s in Yugoslavia. He emerged from prison in the late 1980s to a Yugoslavia that was in the slope. As I said, Tito died in 1980. So before he gets arrested, actually, Tito is dead. And the government continues limping on for a while after him. But Tito's force of personality had held the entire Balkans together for pretty much the only time that happened. And with his death, kind of these nationalist differences that had been really prominent in and after World War II start to reassert themselves. They've been kind of buried during the Tito years. And then the years after his death, it becomes obvious to any intelligent. Observer Communism is not going to last forever. And Yugoslavia is not going to be one state forever. Right. In 1974, late in Tito's life, they had changed the Constitution to give each of these independent, not independent. There's these semi-autonomous states that make up Yugoslavia, like Bosnia and Serbia. They had the right to, like, secede if there was a if enough people wanted to leave. So, like, if Croatia wants to leave, they could potentially. And so once Tito dies, it becomes obvious that's going to happen. At some point. And as this sort of, you have the USSR, Glasnost, and Perestroika around the same time, the Soviet Union's also loosening stuff. Politics starts to come to Yugoslavia in a way that it just hadn't existed there for a while. And a lot of people start looking at what's going to happen next. And Radovan Karadzic is one of these guys. And he starts increasingly thinking about politics and envisioning a future for himself that's very different than his checkered past. A future in which he would hold the kind of power he always hoped for. And we'll talk about that in part two. But, Jamie, why don't you plug your new novel, The Tower, which I just plugged, but you can plug it. I'll do it again. Why the hell not? Yeah, I can't stop you, and I won't. You can preorder The Tower now. Again, it's about a woman making beautiful love to her beautiful building. Yeah. And it comes out in June. And also, the Bechtel cast is on tour. In the East Coast. Damn right it is. Throughout the fall. So if you live in the Northeast, we're going basically everywhere. So come out and see us. Everywhere. That's the only part of the country. The Northeast. And especially Baltimore. Baltimore extra. Baltimore. The Serbia of the United States? Whoa. Almost certainly not. Whoa. Whoa. Wow. What an interesting thing to just throw in. Did you say that? Baltimore, weigh in. Baltimore. Baltimore. Come to the show, and I'll say it to your face. That's the episode, motherfuckers. Yeah. Watch a Serbian film. Don't watch a Serbian film. Actually, you do. It's pretty good. But it's pretty messed up. Anyway, good night. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. 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