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

and we're back this is part two of behind the bastards on radovan karadzic and i know what everyone's been asking at least everyone watching on the netflix since the first episode probably on the subreddit who's been going crazy over like robert's in a new room why is robert in a new room and like guys look it's nothing crazy i'm not on the run from anywhere right obviously i haven't committed a series of horrible crimes like jamie that i've had to go into hiding over you know it's i'm just in a different room this is okay jamie you're deflecting you're deflecting you're deflecting and now and what happens when you deflect and accuse me of your crimes is that i don't hear the end of it for i know i think this might be for years for years decade not not a week goes by that there isn't some neckbeard side eyeing me in the grocery store because that thing and i and i and i love each and every one of them and i'm so sorry oh man i think i weirdly got it the worst in pittsburgh somehow yeah that makes sense actually i got a lot of pittsburgh fans a lot of people standing up for the show in pittsburgh the yinzers were really shaking in their boots when when i came around look where you know the so where's your where's your secret room at i think it's underneath the denver airport yeah yeah it's underneath okay yeah yeah i bought actually own the denver airport now power bills are eating me alive yeah it was a lot cheaper than you'd expect yeah love your horse love the horse thank you thank you yeah i do that's that's that's what really sold me on it too actually yeah this is an iheart podcast guaranteed human you may not remember every time you toss turn or wake up hot but your body does that's why i'm here to help you out 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 cooling technology is built into every mattress and ghost bed comes with a 101 night sleep trial you can try it at home and feel free to check it out at ghostbed.com the difference for yourself because the real test of a mattress is how you feel in the morning if you're waking up hot sore or tired before the day even starts you need to check out ghost bed and right now get an extra 10 off their lowest prices of the season go to ghostbed.com behind the bastards and use promo code btb that's ghostbed.com behind the bastards promo code btb i decided to do some cleaning this weekend step one open the closet step two immediately regret opening the closet behind the coats wedding gifts we still haven't sorted our wedding was three years ago so i posted a task on air tasker a tasker organized the closet tackled the garage and even hand wrote the thank you notes post your 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with free to play slots blackjack keno roulette and more experience all the thrills of vegas without leaving your couch legends has it all legends is a free-to-play social casino avoid prohibited must be 18 plus play responsibly visit legends.com for full details get in the game now and score a 100 match on your first purchase only at legends with a z.com didn't catch the latest roland martin unfiltered podcast here's what you missed there should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras it's real black farmers have been under attack this is just the latest example of them just slapping dei on anything it's raw and i'm sitting here going they are playing with me they're playing with me they're playing with me they're playing with me and y'all for fools catch roland martin's daily commentary on the black information network and download roland martin unfiltered on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts you broke me you do not deserve happiness i'm andrea gunning on this season of betrayal carl thought he was living a normal drama free life until the messages started someone's not going to make it out of this alive every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy he was not going to stop unless we stopped him listen to betrayal season six on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts we've been talking about radovan karadzic who at this point in the story is a psychiatrist who has been slightly disgraced for his criminal activity may be informed on his friends for the regime uh and yeah is uh is is eyeing the the coming disillusion of uh yugoslavia and being like how can i make this work for me right it is interesting that he he ends um he ends part one basically just as kind of like a white collar criminal um he's starting to get some ideas yeah yeah yeah he's like flopped at a couple things it's i i'm i'm curious he's a fed but many such white collar criminals yeah but i'm yeah if you had to guess what political party in our system a guy like this who like believes some weird things about like natural healing and like magic and has committed a series of white collar crimes and may be informed on people for the government if you wanted to guess what what party in like the u.s he would join right to start his political career what what would you guess oh gosh there's i mean there's a strong whiff of uh upper middle class centrist to that kind of behavior not a centrist not a well i know well yeah he's a dictator what's the i don't know kiki the what what party is he like a libertarian kind of no no no i'm getting like vibes he he joins the green party there's an actual green party like it is the green party in yugoslavia that he joins and it's kind of the same as our green party as far as i can tell and that it's all the people who are into like weird woo bullshit right like okay they love trees and not taking medicine that works like that's those are the two big uniting factors of the green party both here and over there knowing that he loves trees is kind of the one sincere thing i feel like i truly know about this man yeah he was pissed about those oaks and you know what i think he was right yeah and he would have been a jill stein voter so uh i don't know why having a nutty green party is endemic to democracy but as soon as yugoslavia starts to get the slightest bit of democracy they're like well we got to have a party for the kooks right we gotta have our crank party they gotta go somewhere they gotta go somewhere and it's gonna be a fucking green party so he joins the green party at first um okay now as historian robert donia explains in late 1980s before communism fell yugoslavians began experimenting with political parties and this quote represented more of an artistic performance than a practical party because again you don't really have democracy yet but people are allowed to play act it and and it is kind of play acting at this point there's sort of in the same way that like kids play with guns before they're old enough to join the army right like they're playing with politics before they get to have their first elections in yugoslavia a little bit right but he's he's getting i mean he's not super young at this point right like i mean he's a middle-aged man yeah yeah he's he's had a full career pretty much and done some crimes and i was like eddie's served time yeah he's done some time there's there's a really depressing like one of those like memes in there where it's like it's never too late it's never too late you could be a dictator julius caesar was just some dipshit like fucking side act in roman politics until he was a middle-aged man you know there are late bloomers out what i'm saying is if you're 45 and you're thinking life has passed you by you could still commit a genocide my friend i believe in you i believe in you probably don't but you could is what i'm saying i'm not saying you should okay but you could you know you you could i mean you tried hard look i did did we think 10 years ago you would own the denver airport certainly not but here we are anyway so yeah the greens become line to this this holding place in early party politics in yugoslavia for the counterculture they were environmentalists first and foremost one of the first activist campaigns radovan participated in was they they go out and they cover the limbs of acacia trees with plastic bags as like a test against plastics right it's a very 80s environmentalist campaign that's kind of sweet sweet yeah yeah hearts are in the right place yeah you're like okay yeah so far seems pretty far from genocide uh radavan and his fellow greens were also bound together by an interest in what we might call folk medicine right this includes a mix of like these traditional remedies that people like the karajiks grew up with in the mountains as well as weird spiritual beliefs about like nature that were pretty rooted in serbian identity but in a failing communist state belief in what i prefer to call quack remedies was also political so the the people who believe in natural medicine and shit are also kind of dissidents to the communist regime because that's very much not a not a communist sort of thing in this period of time right uh i want to quote from a 2009 new york times article by jack hitt who writes quote in communist yugoslavia alternative medicine was suppressed along with all anti-science superstitions including in the eyes of the communists the serbian orthodox church in serbia then the politics of alternative medicine became a haven for right-wing anti-communists an expression of ancient balkan heritage right so the fact that they're into this stuff does i mean we've seen today that there's a lot of interplay between our fascists and the alternative health movement because if you yeah if you're willing to discard a big chunk of modernity you might be willing to discard other parts of it right and and it's interesting how uh you know for for at least the people at the top of that movement they'll always have access to modernity when it when it suits when they really want to when they need a vaccine yeah how unfortunate that we can sort of like tell the story of american fascism at least in the last 25 years through the lens of gwyneth paltrow you we don't love to think about it this way but it could be done and it's on the table if you just have a loose three years to write that dissertation and this also is there's kind of a dark lesson in here for some of us on the left because i hear a lot of like people talking about what is to be done about maha and like all of the hot the millions that are going to die because this bullshit and like well this needs to be the government needs to crack down more on this and i i agree like you shouldn't be able to market things as medicine that aren't medicine but the story of yugoslavia shows even when you've got a really like very strong like state that is capable of repressing stuff like this it doesn't last as soon as the repression ends people go right back to it and it and it becomes stronger than it had been before so it's there's not an easy fix in terms of people believing nonsense we've never really figured out how to make people believe in reality uh you can't force it so i don't know what we're supposed to do actually no so i i i i wish i knew how many how many more family members we have if we if we knew that answer yeah but so in yugoslavia they're they're very against this so this is this is counterculture basically counterculture and it's specifically anti-communist counterculture right i see okay um karajic begins bringing in you know while he's in the green party he starts organizing with them first but he also starts gathering with some of his friends some of the people who hadn't you know cut bait with him after the 1968 protest movement i guess the guys who didn't think he'd been an informer um and he starts gathering together some of these serb nationalists to him too and and they start talking about like maybe the green party and then they start talking about like maybe the green party and then they start talking about like maybe the green party isn't going to take us all that much further and the thing that binds how many times have we had that conversation how many times has that happened the thing that kind of binds i don't think jill's gonna gonna make it yeah yeah i don't know if this is gonna do the trick i don't know if this is gonna work yeah the thing that kind of kind of binds them all together is a rejection of yugoslav nationalism and of communism and these men are serbian ethno-nationalists or at least that's what they can't become over the start there but they are going to get really pilled on that i think as they all start hanging out and realizing the things they have in common they get increasingly violent towards the idea of anyone else existing in the area right um and increasingly they start getting angry again too about world war ii they never stopped being angry about the genocide in world war ii right but there's a lot of sure we never paid the muslims back we never paid the croats back for what they did to us right that's also bubbling up here so there's some ugly stuff being said about the discussed um in in that way was it like the time that tito was in power did that sort of like stave back that sort of eventual processing okay that makes sense okay but again it it's it's it suppresses it it doesn't get rid of it right yeah and now it's like you're a generation removed from that as well so yep yep uh so in 1990 a group of bosniak these are again the the bosnian muslims party of democratic action and this is a majority muslim party the sda um but they're also a secular party right they get described a lot as like islamists they were not um are not because they're still around that's this is a they support a broadly secular state um and they support an independent bosnia right that wants to get closer to nato and to the eu right that's that's sort of like what the sda wants okay they're they're supportive of the right that and they are muslim but they're not they're not looking to start like a heart a strict like theocratic regime now radovan would not interpret things this way he would later claimed his biographer jessica stern that the sda were quote a bunch of muslim extremists creating a militant islamic party again that's not really true right there might be there's some bits of that at the edges but that's not really largely accurate but it is true that a lot of serb for the same reason that a lot of a lot of people in texas think that like sharia law is right around the corner if they let there be a mosque in town right right racism yeah yeah i was like there's a word for that yeah there's a word for that uh it's also true that like radovan is working tirelessly at this point to convince them that the sda are radical islamists right and he is successful in creating what he called a sense of paranoia that allows him and his friends to leave the greens and create a new political party the sd s which jessica stern describes as not only pro-serb but anti-muslim and anti-croat right so now we've got a party that's not just you know in favor of some of these like traditional serb values but we're specifically hate the the bosniaks and the croats right how quickly is this happening because it's like this is um yeah because they're i mean they're a part of what it is is they're looking at what's going to happen next when we all split up and if you're a serb who lives in bosnia and you see these bosniak muslims who live in bosnia and you see these bosniak muslims creating a party that represents the majority of the people in the area and they're not serb you're like well they're going to oppress us right maybe there will be another genocide like so we have to get ready to take power to stop them from fucking us over right right there's a lot of that going on a lot of that in the air not just with the and there's other ethnic groups i'm very much simplifying the breakup of yugoslavia um and this is where i get into an issue i have with jessica's book my war criminal beyond the title uh because it is the of more detail on radovan's family and personal life than anyone else has right but she also by her own admission falls for his spell several times and she does not push back on him enough she doesn't really push back the title yeah yeah she spends a lot of time talking to this guy she doesn't push back on him describing the sds as an islamist party and she also describes him as such uh writing karajic did not seem to have a personal animus to muslims prior to the war even though by his admission the party he formed in 1990 was framed in opposition to muslims and croats it's also true that he was as she points out the godfather to the son of a celebrated bosniak poet and that pre-war he had extensive personal connections to muslims but my read is that by the end of the 80s he has decided the road to serb political power requires framing muslims as the enemy and as the other right he just tries to keep this hidden at first but and so he's he's not fully admitting to this but it seems pretty clear to me um i think the follow-up questions kind of write themselves right yeah yeah and i there's there's a couple of issues i i have with some of her framing she she does this because there will be this claim that like well you know al-qaeda got started there were like proto early al-qaeda offshoots in uh in bosnia and the truth is that like well some mujahideen wound up fighting there because the things that are going to happen during this genocide and people mistakenly believe the mujahideen were the it's the same thing people wrong we stayed about like afghanistan like oh you know we actually really like funded and built al-qaeda and it's like no we built a different group of people who got overthrown by the taliban and then invited al-qaeda in bay it's more complicated than that right it's not it's not that right hey everyone robert here and at the risk of being accused of like being an apologist for stuff i wanted to make sure i i made it a little bit more of an extensive note about some of the extremist islamist groups that that swarmed into bosnia because a number did including al-qaeda al-qaeda had like a regional uh franchise in bosnia as a result of the war and the genocide although even some of these guys who are with al-qaeda should not all be seen as like the same as the al-qaeda that would come later uh one influential person who's in bosnia during this time fighting with the mujahideen is a dude named ayman dean um dean was part of a mujahideen brigade that is accused of a number of pretty horrible war crimes after the After the war, he was recruited by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and wound up going and being a part of al-Qaeda. But then he got sort of pilled against al-Qaeda as a result of their justification of attacks that killed civilian bystanders. And he became a double agent for MI6 and spent years infiltrating al-Qaeda before he was exposed. So, you know, even when we're talking about some of these extremist figures who do come to Bosnia, they're all not, you can't all paint anyone who is like an extremist Islamist fighting against a genocide as the same as the different kind of extremist groups that came after because they're just not identical. But there are some people who are also like Islamist, like Mujahideen types who wind up fighting in Bosnia because Muslims are being slaughtered, right? So there is, it's messy, but it's wrong to say that like, well, you know, the Serbs were trying to stop al-Qaeda because they fucking weren't. But that is how some people will like, depict that today, right? Okay. So he does try to keep things hidden, his biases hidden, initially. In the summer of 1990, when he's, he's organizing and still trying to like reach political power, he tells the journalists, the Serbs and Muslims do not have conflicting interests. And he denies the existence of Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia. But within his party, anti-Muslim rhetoric is already prevalent. And after Yugoslavia holds ill-fated elections in November of 1990, and the Bosniaks start pushing for Bosnian independence, Karadzic starts holding large public speeches warning about the coming Islamic threat. Now, because we're talking about the Balkans, we're talking about the Balkans. We're talking about the Balkans. Shit's a lot more complex than this. One thing that's happening is that over in Croatia, there's also a nationalist movement. The Serbian Democratic Party had been created in Croatia by a Serb nationalist who was also a psychiatrist named Raskovic. And he and Raskovic- What is with this psychiatrist? I don't know. Block of power. And they form like identical parties, one in Bosnia and one in Croatia, right? And Raskovic and Radovan Karadzic are like friends and are very much like working together. These are movements that are allied, right? And the SDS, as it came to be known, was born under the guns of the thing that they're protesting in Croatia is this fascist adjacent Croatian nationalist party has risen up in Croatia to advocate for Croatian independence. And they're using a lot of symbols and like, like, even like repeating some of the politics of the old fascist Croatian state that had existed in World War Two, which scares a lot of Serbs for reasons that are very understandable, right? well yeah due to recent history yeah that makes sense and so this is not just a matter of like oh radovan's inventing stuff to scare them no they lived through a genocide a lot of the survivors are still alive and they see people organizing in croatia who are trying to like using like the logos and shit of the old fascist party and that provides a lot of fear and a lot of motivation to believe oh we may have to clear them out of all these areas right to defend ourselves right so there are real reasons to be afraid and he is very much drumming up additional fear right you know and what would always have been any time a country is breaking apart and going to be dividing along ethnic lines there's going to be a lot of fear of horrible ethnic i don't know of any case where something like that's happened and a lot of people haven't died look at the partition of india right in pakistan you know like it is always a pretty fucked up thing when shit like this goes down so it's not weird and nobody i don't want to i don't want to act like the serbs have no reason to be like on edge right there's a very good reason to be on edge like yeah one ish generations removed from yeah a quarter of the population being wiped out like yeah yeah i too would be on edge uh yeah what is it what sounds and it's maybe it's like me not understanding the region well enough but it's just it is fascinating that i i guess so but like yeah but that it ends up being like a lot of people are seeing this guy feels very like you know this is a role that was going to be taken by someone and it ends up being him because it's like it's more of a like a circumstance that requires a bad actor like this yeah and my read is that he knew someone like this is going to wind up existing it just has to why not me it's inevitable it might as well be me because then i can make a buck off right that's kind of what i think right right right and and raskovic the other psychiatrist who's organizing the serb nationalists in croatia is a bit different right and his argument because he he has a real fear he thinks he's trying to stop he would say he was trying to stop ethno-nationalist violence because his belief was that the years of communist rule had just suppressed the trauma left over from the war which i think is accurate and he feared that if the state suddenly fell as it was about to there would be ethnic madness that's the term he used as stern explains the sudden release of these memories could lead serbs to submit to the will of the mob and massive acts of revenge raskovic warned even a dangerous and genocidal campaign of vengeance against the croats and muslims a tendency that could be monitored and controlled only by a skilled psychiatrist in touch with the serb collective unconsciousness so that's why he's like we need a psychiatrist like i can stop the genocide he's doing the homer simpson thing where he's like maybe if i'm part of the mob i can lead it in positive directions that is so weak god they must do that's how you know like no way no one is in their right state of mind where they're like yeah the psychiatrist yeah totally yeah yeah he has no skills he has no applicable skills not an out of it skill and raskovic is not going to succeed in using his psychiatrist powers to stop a genocide uh as a spoiler it's going to be another psychiatrist who helps cause the genocide but you know who's never caused a genocide that you can prove uh they were declared innocent in court of all those killings is all i'm going to say okay the sponsors of our podcast i was i was volunteering until the court part but i got scared yeah yeah look did they did they have a couple of a couple of whistleblowers assassinated who hasn't you know blueberries are gonna have shards robert that's right that's right yeah that's right here's some ads 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 cooling technology is built into every mattress and ghost bed comes with a 101 night sleep trial you can try it at home and feel the difference for yourself because the real test of a mattress is how you feel in the morning if you're waking up hot sore or tired before the day even starts you need to check out ghost bed and right now get an extra 10 off their lowest prices of the season go to ghostbed.com slash behind the bastards and use promo code btb that's ghostbed.com slash behind the bastards promo code btb moving days going great until the couch won't fit through the door that's when i turn to air tasker your task and find local help for packing cleaning furniture assembly errands and more go to airtasker.com or download the app airtasker get anything done wait this is a soda yeah and it has protein 10 grams no sugar zero and it actually tastes good it's sky pop sky pop protein soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein zero sugar and just 45 calories so you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits you're getting both in every sip sky pop protein soda reach for the sky get your sky pop protein soda now at target or walmart warning the following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups a b c d in the morning brush your teeth e f g h hurry up and don't be late lingo kids only suitable for kids if it gets stuck in mom's head that's not our problem everything kids love download now for free your night in just got legendary get ready to chase the rush spin win and redeem instantly straight to your bank account at legends with a z.com with free to play slots blackjack keno roulette and more experience all the thrills of vegas without leaving your couch legends has it all legends is a free-to-play social casino void prohibited must be 18 plus play responsibly visit legends.com for full details get in the game now and score a 100 match on your first purchase only at legends with a z.com didn't catch the latest roland martin unfiltered podcast here's what you missed and the argument is do you want to win if you don't win you have no power it's real those are the very people who i always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing they're doing and they're not going to win it's raw i knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not 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And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would change if you stopped letting money stress run your life, sis? I'm Mandy Money, host of Brown Ambition, the podcast. And right now, I'm taking you through my six-part money reboot series. This is your chance to hit reset, break the debt cycle, get honest about where your money's going, build a savings plan that actually sticks, and start making financial choices that support the life you want, not just the bills you have. Because wealth building is not about being perfect. It's about having a plan, knowing your numbers, and making your next move with confidence with a community that cares like we do on Brown Ambition. Each episode gives you practical steps, real talk, and the motivation to stop putting your financial goals on hold. So if you've been saying, I'll get serious about money next month, this is your sign. Start now. Listen to Brown Ambition. That's Brown Ambition. And begin your money reboot today. Listen to Brown Ambition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So after Tito's death and an inter-party coup, the guy in charge of Yugoslavia by the late 80s, during this period of declining communist state power, was it? We'll cover him in the future. Slobodan Milosevic, right? That's the guy who winds up running things in Belgrade. And he's running all of Yugoslavia, right? He had been kind of a communist apparatchik. He's one of these like upper mid-level figures when the decline starts after Tito's death. Okay, so at least he has some credentials. I thought you were going to be like, he's just kind of this like therapist who thought like, why the hell not? Okay. And we're, we're gonna have to yada yada a lot of Milosevic. I'll cover him in the future. Please forgive the fact that we're not going into detail here. But basically, part of his, one thing he really hates is Milosevic does not like the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, which gives these individual republics a right to secede. Because he knows that Bosnia and Croatia at least are about to secede along with other places. And he's like, I don't want that. Because I want to be in charge of Yugoslavia, right? Milosevic represents his base of power are a bunch of conservative factions within the crumbling communist state. And he had been largely responsible for purging the institution. So first off, before he, when he starts being in power, he purges a lot of these communist institutions that had kept Tito's Yugoslavia functioning. Because he is one of these like, guys who wants to be able to make more money and stuff. So we got to get rid of some of the state supported shit. Oh, I mean, we can't, we can't really with that at all. Decimating? Longstanding? Yeah, yeah, decimating the parts of the state that like, make people feel like they're the same thing. Yeah, maybe not a great move. Yeah, kill the libraries and stuff. Sure. Yeah. In 1987, when Gorbachev and the USSR started opening things up, nationalists in Yugoslavia get inspired. And that same year, Milosevic, who was again, a middling communist apparatchik in 87, is sent to Kosovo, because there's a bunch of Serb nationalist protests that start up and things get pretty ugly. And he's sent to calm things down, like stop this, you know, uprising campaign. And he kind of does the opposite by turning himself into a mouthpiece for Serb grievances and funneling that into personal power. Right, he declares himself protector of the Serbian nation, and then embarks on a campaign to win power, which he does by 1989. So that's how he comes to be in charge of the state is by being like, I'll protect the Serbs. And I think part of what he's doing is, Serbs are the most powerful group in the country, more or less, at least within like the military. So if I declare myself protector of the Serbs, we can kind of crack down on these other nationalist movements by sort of and stop the Serbs from wanting to secede. And that will be how I maintain things, right. Right. So that's kind of I think his idea. So it is so wild how hard it is to track his thinking. And because the people who it's complicated. Yeah, it is very complicated. And I know that that that's also just like, part and parcel to this story. But it's I cannot I cannot track this man. He saved my life. He's got a lot of fucking balls. He's got to keep in the air, right? Because yeah, he's he's both got he's this protector of the Serbs. Right. And he's also an anti nationalist. And so he has to describe everyone who isn't to serve as the bad kind of nationalist. He is backed by the old guard of the Yugoslavian army, right, which is heavily Serb dominated, and also by the old communist hardliners. These are the people who think any if Yugoslavia breaks up my entire power base is held up in the state maintaining. So these are all the different kind of sometimes conflicting interests that he's trying to balance in order to keep power for himself. Per the Institute for War and War, and peace reporting, quote, Milosevic sought to placate orthodox communists and nationalists. He promised continuity to the former while the latter saw him as the brave and bellicose leader who would eventually deliver something resembling a greater Serbia. But he was actually promising the impossible to both yet they desperately wanted to believe him. Some saw him as a genuine communist masked as a nationalist for tactical reasons. Others thought the situation was the other way around. So you're not alone and being like, where the fuck is this guy coming from? Milosevic is doing trying to do a very complicated dance. You know, there's just a random soccer player being like that. Is that the guy that made us play bumblebees? He's in charge. And he's doing a lot of like one of his big things. He's holding these rallies for truth, where footage of Serbs being victimized by Muslims or Croats are played to outraged crowds, right? That's like a thing that Milosevic, which is helping to drum up this like violent nationalist sentiment that's going to become eliminationist, right? In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Bosnia and Herzegovina follow in 1992. And throughout this period, Radovan had become increasingly radical and militantly pro-Serb and he's risen to command the SDS. He's not initially the leader of the party, but kind of by this point in time, the early 90s, he is running things. And his success mirrors Milosevic's, right? As political scientists Gerard Toll and Adis Maksic explained to Stern, quote, Karadzic was an effective public speaker with an effective makeup that allowed him to connect with rural Serb mores and habits of thought. One of his friends, another poet named Milosevic described Radovan's behavior as changing overnight. He starts carrying a pistol at all times and he wants it to be visible. And he starts playing down his like backstory as a psychiatrist and a poet by remaking himself as like militant leader who is like, I'm the historically ordained leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Like I'm almost like our kind of fascist Christ figure come to redeem the Serbs. And he's like, I'm the historically ordained leader of the Serb nation. That's how he starts talking in a lot of ways. He's literally, he's like on like a fascist eras tour. This is like, so yeah. He's speed running a lot of it. Yeah. Now, almost as soon as Bosnia and Herzegovina have their referendum for independence, Bosnian Serb militias, so they have this referendum and it becomes clear Bosnia is going to become independent. And the Bosniacs have the most powerful political bloc in the country. But the Serbs have more weapons in part because the Yugoslav militaries, giving a bunch of arms to these Bosnian Serb militias who are being led by the SDS and under Radovan's control. And after this, this referendum, these militias seize land, they lead a bunch of assaults and they conquer most of Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? So they use the fact that they have the guns to take political power for themselves. And they declare an independent state, the Republica Srpska. So you get Bosnia has this referendum for independence and like, okay, we'll be independent. But because we have the guns, we'll, we'll overthrow everyone else. And we'll, we'll make it our state, the Republica Srpska, right? Yeah, so there's, there's this independent now Serbian, like controlled state, but that's still mostly Bosniak, right? And the SDS, because it had been the embryo around which the military and state formed, Radovan Karadzic becomes the first head of the Republic, right? So he is, he is now the dictator of this, like, Serbian kind of militant Republic that's taken over a bunch of Bosnia. I mean, it's always bad. It's always bad to have a dictator. But this is I just like a dictator that has kind of an identity crisis every half decade or so. Just Yeah, you're not on steady ground with this guy. No, he could go anywhere, right? Yeah, he's gonna he's gonna like pivot to become a jewelry maker. In the middle of everything. That's a cool job, though. That's a fun I love I'm a big fan of that pivot. I agree. Same. Yeah. So immediately pre war, the population of the area that becomes the Republic had been about 44% Bosniak and 17% Croat and only about 33% Serbian. So you got about a third of the populace are Serbs, but Serbs are the only people really represented under the government headed by Radovan. And this has all been done. The guy who's like endorsing all of this is Milosevic, right? He is he's very much in favor. And he's often guiding like what's happening here. And Radovan comes to almost mythic terms, as a man brought forward to defend his people in their moment of need. And their main need is to commit genocide because you can't you can't have this country just be a third Serbian. And we're not going to get a bunch more Serbs to move here. So we got to do is get rid of the people who aren't right. That's who we're gonna pump the how we're gonna pump those numbers up. It's so fucking bleak. Yeah, it Yeah, it's it's very ugly. Psychiatrists writing for the American Journal of Psychiatric Law analyzed the language that Radovan used to describe the words used in his speeches around this time. Quote, Karadzic language bespeaks his grandiose sense of imbued with a collective sense of myth and sacrifice. Karadzic speaks of being a servant of the people, and his language of myth merges with that of sacrifice. I am willing to sacrifice this generation if it means that future generations of Serbs will live better. Karadzic rediscovered a mythical, primordial language identifying with Petar Petrovic Nergos, Montenegro's 19th century Prince Bishopette, in which he evokes themes of blood, soil, and hallowed ground. Group therapist to his wounded nation, Karadzic was someone who, according to his wife, understands the depths of a person's soul, set himself to the task of healing the collective sorrow of the Serbian people. And he's going to heal it by getting revenge for the violence that was done against them, right? This is, I mean, this is all, you know, both obviously horrifying and also just feels so in step with what a dictator with an identity crisis would be. He'd be like, oh, so I'm actually God. And it kind of harkens back to all of his, his father problems, right? Like his father, the mythic storyteller. So he's just. We never escape our parents, Foley. Now, Radovan's chief military leader, the guy who's going to be carrying out all of the things that he once done, is General Ratko Mladic. He just died recently, a couple of weeks ago. He was prosecuted for war crimes after all this and literally just passed on the same week as Dahlia Parton. And Ratko leads this, this army of the Serbs, the Republic is about 100,000 man Serbian army that he's able to use to consolidate power with tremendous brutality. And this write-up by the BBC describes what happened next. A vicious war ensued in which Serbs besieged Sarajevo for 44 months, shelling Bosniak forces, but also terrorizing the civilian population with a relentless bombardment and sniper fire. Thousands of civilians died, many of them deliberately targeted. Bosnian Serb forces assisted by paramilitaries from Serbia proper, also expelled hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats from their homes in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Numerous atrocities were documented, including the widespread rape of Bosniak women and girls so that their kids won't be, will have Serb blood, right? That's the idea behind that sort of thing, right? Yeah. So this is, I mean, it's hard to exaggerate how bad things are in Sarajevo. When I was there in like 2015, and I went to, I was in Ukraine, which was actually at war. I was in like part, like a city under siege in, Ukraine. And then I go to Sarajevo. And decades after the war ends, Sarajevo still looked about as bad as the places that were actively being shelled. Like in turn, because there's, and obviously it's much more built up, but they kept a lot of the bullet holes. It's like, and a lot of the shell holes and stuff as a memorial, right? So you can tell by how much is left, how bad things would have been at the end of the fighting. Like I can't exaggerate how fucked Sarajevo gets as a result of all this. It is a nightmare. As close as I can remember. I mean, this is like, this is the period of- We're kids when this is happening. Yeah. Right. I was like, this is, I actually do remember, do you remember Zlata's diary? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. Yeah. I remember there was like an old copy of Zlata's diary that I read. I probably too young, but I remember seeing it at the library and reading it and that being sort of kind of my only education on the Balkan area at all. And certainly on Sarajevo, growing up entirely was that book. And it is, I mean, there's all sorts of horrible shit. It's just come out that they were basically, some of the Serb forces were taking money to lead like people from South Africa and shit on sniper tours where you would just get to kill people, like shoot random Muslims and whoever in the streets of Sarajevo with sniper rifles. There, Sarajevo's in like a big bowl depression. Like you've got like mountain valleys and stuff around it. So because the city's in the low part and the heights surrounding it, if you can just get a bunch of tanks and artillery in the heights around the city, you can just shoot into Sarajevo endlessly. And that's what they do for like four years. Like it's just awful. Radaban had written a poem about Sarajevo drowning in blood in 1971. And he sees this poem and the war he helped start as preordained. And he's almost like, well, these visions came to me because it was what I was going to need to do. My own artistic visions are proof that me and Ratko are doing the right thing. By just massacring people in this city. The resulting violence. What is it with these fucking people and their college age art projects being seen as a prophecy? They can never get over this shit. Never get over this shit. Almost without exception. It is like, it is remarkable. I mean, I'll say this, Jamie. In my first novel, I did nuke the city of Dallas. And if I ever gain political power, I might. I'm not going to say I wouldn't because I had to live. I would have lived there for 20-something years. That's good. I mean, as is your right. As is my right. Every Texan has the right to nuke the high five. I mean, I guess my version of this, I came up with the idea for Santa University when I was 19. Which I do see as kind of a grand prophecy. If you become a fascist dictator, that's what we'll have. I mean, and there are some pretty violent ideas inside of Santa University. I mean, It's right there. It's mostly that. It's mostly, it's a lot of killing. Yeah. Yeah. A Santa story. So the resultant violence would kill more than 100,000 people. And Radovan personally helped to plan mass deportations and mass murders. During the years-long siege of Sarajevo, Mladic, acting under Radovan's orders, flattened much of the city with artillery and tank fire. Snipers massacred women and children and men trying to gather food or simply walking down the street. The Serb army murdered more than 10,000, 10,000 people there. Here's how the CBC described the behavior of the army of Radovan and Mladic. Quote, The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was a model of ruthlessness. In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners suffocated in the heat after being forced to eat salt and denied water. They were starved and raped in prison camps, were made to jump off a bridge and shot, and were gunned down at night by the hundreds after being driven out of detention with chemical gas. So this is just a, just a war crimey army. There is not, any, any getting around that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like truly that, that impossible to avoid growing, growing up. And, but still, I mean, it is just, I mean, and we can talk about, you know, three different genocides that are treated much the same in, in Western media, basically, that are like all but ignored, probably so that we don't know what a genocide looks like when our government is participating in one. One of the really frustrating things, too, about this genocide is that because it does get stopped, like NATO and the UN, like take action, and it is, and the perpetrators are punished. And then that part's good that they go after the perpetrators. And it's good that it is eventually stopped. One of the most like iconic pieces of graffiti from Sarajevo is the UN logo with United Nothing underneath it. Because as the victims will say, yeah, but it took you, you took your sweet fucking time. Right? Yeah. Like it, it's, it's always when things are at an average, absolutely desperate point that intervention actually happens. Oh good, finally. After 44 months. Thanks. Right. Right. Glad you got your shit together after my family was killed. So while Radovan was not a soldier or a military leader directly, he was directly involved in operating a string of concentration camps in which thousands of people were tortured and killed. Per a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatric Law, quote, disturbing suggestions have emerged that Karadzic deliberately used his psychiatric training to create military and political policies that would create fear, terror, and extensive post-traumatic stress disorder in civilian populations. Allegations have been made of Karadzic's direct personal complicity in acts of violence and torture, including claims that Karadzic had participated in and witnessed tortures at various Bosnian Serb-run concentration camps. So he's like just showing up at the camps to kind of make sure they're doing the torturing, right? Like he wants it to be the maximum amount of fucking up people's brains. As a psychiatrist, he feels he really knows how to fuck up someone's head. Cool. Cool. Yeah, he really is fully committing to this pivot to being one of history's greatest monsters. He really is. Incredible, right, guys? Yeah. Yeah. And the war culminates in the slaughter of Bosniaks in a town called Srebrenica. This is like just an awful act of genocide. I'm going to read another quote from that CBC article here describing, some of what happens. Mladic had a cameraman film the blitz on the encircled enclave of Srebrenica, haranguing Dutch UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. Srebrenica supposedly had safe area status, meant to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing. We give this town to the Serb people as a gift, Mladic said to the camera, claiming the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who'd once held the area as part of the Ottoman Empire. When NATO tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited airstrikes, Mladic said, his troops defiantly seized UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets. So again, the UN, super effective, really do their job there. Yeah, yeah, no no's for the UN. They're always there right in the nick of time. Yep, right in the nick of too late. As a result of all of this, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys are rounded up and executed by Mladic's men. Another 20,000, I went to Srebrenica and interviewed survivors of the genocide. One of the guys, who was like a boy when it happened was literally it was He was at the bottom of a pile of the corpses of his family members and had to, like, crawl out after it got dark to escape. Like, there's a lot of stories like that. This is the worst single genocidal act of the war. Very soon after, Mladic and Radovan seemed to have known that they had gone too far. Mladic's men were ordered to bulldoze the dead into mass graves and then dig them up and rebury them elsewhere to hide the evidence. NATO and UN pressure was, eventually, far too late, enough to force Radovan and Mladic to step down in November of 1996. In 95, like the end of 95, there's a ceasefire that gets negotiated in Dayton, Ohio. These are the Dayton Accords. And they hold on to power a little bit after that, but they've both been indicted for war crimes, and so they have to step down. Radovan would later claim that U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrook promised him immunity from prosecution if he stepped down. Holbrook has always denied this. Maybe Holbrook lied. I don't think it's bad to actually lie to a genocidal dictator about not prosecuting him to get him to leave power. Like, if Holbrook did that, that actually makes him cooler. Okay. Sure, I don't have an issue with that. Worst things you could do in that situation, sure. Sure. For the first roughly two years after he stepped down, Radovan lived openly in the former capital of the republic and continued something like a normal life, now living as a celebrity among far-right Serbs. But it soon became clear that the U.N. eventually meant business, and Serb war criminals were going to be the first and almost the only genocide perpetrators held to account for their crimes since Nuremberg. Yeah, before and since. Yeah, you will get, every now and then you'll get, because there will be something about like some African warlord who's getting prosecuted for war crimes, and they'll be like, oh, so they prosecute like the non-white war criminals. And it's like, no, no, they did go after a lot of Serbs. Like, that was kind of the first case of it for the ICC. Um, and, you know, they do eventually get their shit together. And so this means that Radovan's going to have to go into hiding if he doesn't want to face the music. And since Radovan considered himself blameless and innocent of any war crimes, he certainly did not want to go into trial. However, he's also not the kind of guy who looks like he would be able to hide very well. And so he's going to show you a picture of him during the war. This is him next to Radko Mladic. I don't know how to describe his hair other than Super Saiyan. Like, he has like a white hair. He has a white shock of straight up, like, I don't, how do you, like, what is happening? Oh my God. What is happening with that man's hair? He looks like fucking Goku. I love it. It's so awful. He does look like an anime villain. This, this sucks. It's amazing. Of all the genocide perpetrators, he has the best hair. Oh, this shuffles. This sucks. Because he looks so good? This sucks, man. You don't want him to be a bad guy looking that cool? I, you don't. You don't want that to be the bad guy. You don't want someone with hair that falls quite like that to be the, to be a monster. This is like, man, I, yeah, this is just like overwhelming. Yeah. There's a lot to cope with here. Yes. So the fact that Radovan was able to escape into hiding was a direct result of NATO and US incompetence. More than 64,000 UN peacekeeper or NATO peacekeepers. Were stationed in the Republic after the war. And everyone knew where Radovan was for like two years. Per an article by the Guardian, quote, there was no political will to risk either peacekeepers or the peace itself on arrest operations. And so they don't do anything when he's living openly. That's just like, that's what NATO does. Who can't have peace if we punish these guys for genocide? They're like, yeah, they're like Wile E. Coyote in these situations without fail. They're just like, I don't know where to go. It is the, yeah, it's the same mistake. Liberals and centrists always make, which is like, once you've had these like monster genocide fascists and you get them caged up, it's like, well, we can't like punish too many people because that won't lead to peace. And it's like, no, no, you actually have to hold people accountable for doing awful things very quickly and viciously. How many years has it been since like the, you know, Netanyahu was declared a war criminal and he's just going around? I mean, the ICC did what it should have done. They don't have an army, right? But yeah, it's it. I'll blame everyone. But they at least did indict him, right? They did. They did. Yeah. So by the time by the where's the end and still in power? Yeah. By the time that shit changes in 97 and they decide it's actually worth going after these people, Radovan is long gone. He has gone into hiding despite his incredible hair. By 2000, Bill Clinton is on his way out. And one of the things Slick Willy wants is he wants the capture of this legendary war criminal to be part of his legacy. Right. He like. He wants that as like a foreign policy coup. So in kind of his last year in office, he sets he creates a new task force at the NSC to launch the largest and most expensive manhunt in history up to that point, up until we go after Bin Laden. This is the biggest. Yeah. And a lot of the same people who go after Bin Laden, they they learn the ropes of the job going after Radovan. And as a spoiler, they're bad at getting him. So I don't know if we should have used the same guys to go after Bin Laden because they actually suck. They suck at both jobs. So the hunt for Radovan Mladic was the largest deployment of special operations forces anywhere in the world prior to 9-11. Delta Force, SEAL Team 6 and the British SAS were involved, as are a number of CIA units, MI6, the DIA. They're like every fucking intelligence agency and special forces unit you can imagine are hunting after this man who looks like he's got he's got a fucking shock of silver white hair standing up. And they accomplish fuck all. They cannot find him. He is. He's a fucking ghost. The guy in charge of this effort is David Petraeus, who is going to be a future director of the CIA. He's eventually disgraced after he sleeps with his head, the reporter writing a book about him. Wow. I didn't think I didn't. Yeah, I didn't see. I didn't see him coming. Didn't see Petraeus coming. I didn't ever do. Petraeus coming. He was so excited by all the cool toys because this is his first real time getting to work like closely with special agents. Special forces that he forces his way. He like demands to be allowed to attend some night raids with Delta Force. Their commander described him as a kid in a candy store. And again, he sucks at this job. Per the Guardian. And he'll keep sucking. Wait till you hear how bad he sucks at his job, though. Oh, great. Oh, per the Guardian. Petraeus and his men would make unannounced visits in the middle of the night to Liliana Karajic, the fugitive's wife, with the aim of rattling her with a show of bravado about his imminent capture in the hope she would rush to warn him. And give away his location. Petraeus coded his Eddie Murphy routine after Murphy's role as convict turned cop in the movie 24 Hours. However, bulk in reality did not work like Hollywood. Liliana was followed wherever she went and was only one of the first targets of surveillance drones. A new toy U.S. special forces were trying out in Bosnia, but she led them on a wild goose chase. The Manhunters used every trick they could think of, scanning the remote villages along the Bosnia-Montenegro border for signs of unusual activity, internet logons in the middle of the night, TV satellite dishes and other things. The NSA was persuaded to waive normal practice and allow intercept intelligence to be shared, unfiltered and without delay, with the operational units tracking Karajic in Bosnia. In one of the more bizarre episodes of the chase, Delta Force soldiers lay in wait for his convoy on a mountain road, one of them dressed in a guerrilla suit, which had been flown in from the U.S. the previous day. The idea was that Karajic's bodyguards, known as the Preventiva, would be dumbfounded and slow down their vehicle long enough for the Delta Force ambushers to find them. The Delta Force was also the first to fire a specially designed concussion grenade at the car doors to stun the passengers. The daring scheme would have gone. The guerrilla suit! This is like a. What? Who pitched that? We're going to paralyze him with random humor. Random comedy. You won't know what to do. The family guy cutaway gag. Like, what? This is like a fucking Scooby-Doo plan. You thought that was going to work, huh? Who are they putting in the guerrilla suit? And, of course, all of this is pointless. Like, the whole tip-off that a caravan was coming through this area was probably deliberately misleading information, like, fed to them in order to get them to waste their time. Because Karajic and his supporters love the fact that they are able to. They're just dunking on the U.S. and the entire Western world's, like, surveillance and special forces apparatus, unable to find this one man with crazy hair, this psychiatrist. They have, like, five backup guerrilla suits. They're like, don't worry, sir. We don't scare him with the first guerrilla we've got. And, again, this is similar to what happens with Bin Laden, where he, like, goes into hiding and, like, the entire U.S. intelligence and special forces apparatus is hunting him in, like, Tora Bora. And we later realize, like, no, he just, like, went right to Pakistan. He, like, left. He left the country. Yeah, he was watching DVDs for, like, eight years. Yeah, he was watching Looney Tunes. And the thing is, Karajic didn't, like, disappear, really. He, like, shaves his head. Because his hair is distinctive. And he grows a long, crazy Santa beard. But as soon as he can, he just goes to Serbia. He leaves Bosnia. And I guess they hadn't thought of that as a possibility that the Serb might go to Serbia. Like, they're like, well, he's got to be in Montenegro still. Like, no, he just went to Belgrade. Right? Wow. Yeah. He spends some time. He's in rural villages and stuff for a while. But he just, like, crossed the border. And while they're hunting him, he still is writing and publishing poetry specifically to dunk on them. In fact, during the height of Delta Force trying to find this man, he publishes a book of poetry just to humiliate you. special forces one chapter is titled i can look for myself i mean he's a monster but you gotta respect that i mean it he's absolutely unquestionably a monster and like the incredible incredible dunk the u.s is so embarrassing what an embarrassing place we spent all that money on delta force couldn't catch the poet god and it's just and and it's because the pedophile president is like maybe maybe if we put on a gorilla suit people will forget yeah maybe a gorilla suit david petraeus get your brilliant mind down there oh my god he also publishes a novel that sells out and does really well while he's hiding um what is the trail it's amazing the trail goes cold and after 9 11 most of the world moves on from obsessing over serb war crimes as the u.s takes the lessons it had learned failing to capture radovan and applies them towards failing to capture osama bin laden meanwhile radovan was busy reinventing himself in serbia prior to giving up power his intelligence guys had furnished him with the real identity of a real dude to use as his fake identity like the real guy is named dragon dabik and that's the name he takes dragon dabik and the real dragon is a rural peasant who just like doesn't ever leave the small village he leaves lives in so like well no one's gonna notice his identity renting out his identity yeah yeah he's just i don't think he knows yeah okay because they find this guy and he's like i don't know man i'm like a fucking peasant i don't like i don't interact with the government what are you talking about he's like wow that's crazy wild uh so now living under the name dragon dabik uh radovan reinvents himself right and starts living openly in belgrade as an energy healer he reinvents himself as a new rage guru and is like very prominent so he no i yeah no his last chapter is incredible jamie you're not you're not ready for this no you cannot pivot after committing a genocide you cannot pivot he does he has a whole post-genocide career wow as kind of a sex wizard i hate this this is it's it's amazing stuff so radovan i have just wait you're not i i i can't hype this up enough honestly so in order to train up in the ways of woo in 2005 he shows up on the doorstep of mina minik who is a well-known spiritual healer and self-proclaimed clairvoyant she described despite the fact that she is a clairvoyant she does not recognize him as the massively famous war criminal who's just shaved his head oh no that's all part of the plan it's all part of the plan on meeting him she describes him as a long bearded man with white hair who quote looked like a monk who had done something wrong with a nun i guess that's one way to describe it's a great description sure why not sure so radovan as dragon claimed to be a former therapist who just returned from new york city after divorcing his wife and she'd kept his credentials and diplomas so he didn't have them to show but trust him he had them like he has diplomas and stuff he just can't furnish them because of his bitch ex-wife right and minik trusts him minik's like sure that makes sense right she sounds awful man i'm so sorry come on in uh given that minik and everyone in the world of alternative healing in belgrade were the standard kinds of cranks you'd expect his utter lack of credentials and background were not remarked on by anyone in a significant manner per the guardian dabik was eager to learn the ways of a balkan seer including the use of a visak a pendulum that is supposed to identify disturbances in the energy field around sick or troubled patients this is kind of like dowsing right dabik soon acquired his own visak and his career as a mystic healer blossomed he adopted the unserved middle name of david and used it increasingly as a professional moniker he also set up a website called psi help energy which advertised the david well-being program he just renamed himself david well minik suggests the name david right and i'll tell you why because and also minik lets dabik stay in his apartment and like couch surf while he's training this genocide where's luigi can we get luigi in here like how is this guy alive much less rebranding as david like this yeah this is ridiculous great question so from stern's book he explained that minik explained that king david was a seer and the first bioenergetics practitioner when he was very old he used to recover his vital energy by laying down along with young girls all naked but it was completely clear and innocent that david was a seer and david was a seer and david was a seer and innocent he said he's back to the bumblebee shit this is like in this it this in con in the context of his life it makes the whole like the whole genocidal dictator thing seem like a just a weird detour for him yeah it is it is for him a detour and minik is also a fucking amazing crank because he's telling stern like yeah i told him to name himself after king david because he would lie down with naked girls to recharge his energy but it was totally innocent and then she writes he told me i would find this story in the psalms but i was unable to find it that's because it's not in there it's it's not in there jessica that's just nonsense jessica um jessica jessica she's not seeing out yeah over the years karajic became a noted reiki practitioner and consulted in a private fertility clinic at one point russia today before he's found out russia today films a documentary about his miraculous healings at the office of a doctor that he worked at for right so he's like going to this doctor's office to do energy healings on actual sick people and he like heals a sick kid and he's a he's an adult well he's a wanted one of those wanted men in the world no he doesn't catches it yes no one notices this and the only thing any of his fellow energy healers noted as odd about their new friend was that dragon slash radavan always had at least five cell phones on him that rang constantly and he would never take the calls he would just like say i'll call you back and like put them up and they're like that's weird must just love cell phones he's like nothing to do with that he's moving like robert durst man alive like this is it's so funny it's so funny over the years rata except for the genocide it's really funny though what he does with the second act let's not forget the genocide and he just shaves his head grows a beard how many santa beard needs to yeah to literally cosplay as santa and call yourself david yeah and then other than that act as guilty as you fucking want the most sketchy man alive it doesn't seem like it's going to be much of an effort yeah yeah he's barely hiding over the years rather than expanded his offerings to include acupuncture homeopathy and something he repeatedly refers to but never explains called quantum medicine he also sold magical amulets uh he partners up at one point with a that's crazy that's crazy as somebody who's so funny as somebody who loves who gets acupuncture and loves it my acupuncture doctor had to do so maybe he did a genocide no way to know she did so much schooling and like how much blood is on her hands sophie that's what i want to know how much blood is on her hands she had to do so much schooling and has so many student loans no yeah schooling she was leading a militia sophie wake up no david is a great acupuncturist no he isn't better known for his other work um he also partnered up with a sex therapist named savo boshevik uh with whom he works on several different i'm scared i'm scared it's not going where you think does everyone have their behind the bastards bingo cards out because we just hit mysterious sex therapist we did it all it's like i'm scared oh my god like white collar criminal political leader medical crank genocide committer and fake doctor of every imaginable kind like just yeah he this is he pitched a no hitter in terms of bastards ball in case you you're doing the bingo and you didn't get your space robert no okay now now everybody's in there yeah oh and we and you you you hit grand rapids today too we really uh we did we already mentioned grand rapids this is an all-timer already wow oh my god this this i gotta tell you about this sex therapist because he works with savo boshevik on several inventions and theories to cure sexual dysfunction and i found a new york times article by a reporter who interviewed savo after rod after radovan was caught because like a couple of a lot of these healers get interviewed not just by jessica stern but and they're like did you not notice like anything and they never did but this article is incredible because he's talking to all these cranks who were like partnered with a genocide guy and didn't know it here's one quote from that when he's talking about the sex therapist he the sex therapist explained that his current work is a study of his nation's penises before he would discuss dabic he insisted on walking me and my interpreter through a scrapbook with some 2000 polaroid close-ups of middle-aged mainly serbian penises and look we all have a book middle-aged Serbian men's penises somewhere in the house but you don't take it out immediately as soon as a journalist shows up you make them earn it a little bit right I don't I don't I think maybe the only thing we can say for him here is he has a fantastic eye for credulous dipshits like that can spot him from a mile away he's like oh the guy with a 2,000 pictures of cocks in his house middle-aged dicks wow and every line in that New York Times article is funnier than the other because immediately after that is Bojovic said he had recently proved that Serbian men can have active sex until the age of 102 and Serbian women until 84 sir what okay sir sexist sir fuck you fuck you fuck you sorry that sorry that nobody wanted to see your old man dick yeah you know who who else can 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vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving it's raw i knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men roland martin unfiltered i went off i said this is exactly what i'm talking about y'all gonna scream at chanel but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein catch roland martin's daily commentary on the black information network 12 seats those are moving south so if you democrats you don't wait to 2030 you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now and download roland martin unfiltered on the iheart radio app apple podcast wherever you get your podcasts what would change if you stopped letting money stress run your life sis i'm mandy money host of brown ambition the podcast and right now i'm taking you through my six-part money reboot series this is your chance to hit reset break the debt cycle get honest about where your money's going build a savings plan that actually sticks and start making financial choices that support the life you want not just the bills you have because wealth building is not about being perfect it's about having a plan knowing your numbers and making your next move with confidence with a community that cares like we do on brown ambition each episode gives you practical steps real talk and the motivation to stop putting your financial goals on hold so if you've been saying i'll get serious about money next month this is your sign start now listen to brown ambition that's brown ambition and begin your money reboot today listen to brown ambition on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts we're back and i have to continue reading from that amazing new york times article talking about this sex therapist who partnered with radovan he seemed especially interested in treating strong-blooded women who cannot live without sex for them he has invented a special device called an applicator which can bring on a gentle orgasm and which can also be marketed he insisted on telling me just he insisted on telling me despite my best efforts to stop him yeah and this journalist is like i don't want to know about this i want to talk about the genocide guys like no no no we are going through the sex stuff first he said you can't really understand the orgasm torture machine if you don't look at all 2 000 penises first you need to read the text dragon slash radovan worked with this guy to cure impotent men by putting his hands on his hands and putting his hands on his hands and putting his hands on his on their junk right because he has healing hands to continue from that article and this is the sex therapist again he put his hands close to my cheeks and i felt a terrible energy of warmth bozhevik said dabik's warm hands gave bozhevik an idea he put some sluggish sperm on a microscope slide i was holding the glass slide and he was putting his hands above and below bozhevik said he kept them there for some time and then i put the slide under the microscope and i was nicely surprised to see the sperm really moving faster so bozhevik and dabik successfully repeat this slide experiment 10 times i had the intention of developing a method in which davit could heal our patients holding one hand under the testicles and one on the top of the testicles bozhevik explained that's this that's what radovan's doing he's cupping old men's balls to use his magical powers to make their sperm life here amazing he's my favorite i'm sorry and not of gen i not the genocide stuff but that's great because when i heard he was doing sex the therapy work i was like oh he must have committed some horrible sex crimes no he's just cupping old men's balls to shoot energy into their sperm i'm i like i think i kind of fully left my body at sluggish just disassociate i think i kind of went somewhere else for a while i don't know what i think i'm back when you said sluggish sperm with like absolute like certainty of like you're i mean what do you mean some of the funniest shit i've read in my life that new york times article should have won a pulitzer like it should win every pulitzer every year keep giving it to that journalist like i i i couldn't be happier like what kind of damages do you even ask for having reported that yeah like just give him a year's salary as a as an apology for making him talk to these people my goodness that's like it yeah i yeah he he he's just sort of it seems like he's been like he's receiving some sort of i mean obviously he should not be uh loose but it does feel like in some in some way he's serving a life sentence in this like fever dream maybe yeah he i think he loves this i think he's way happier doing this than being a dictator yeah i wish he had found his passion for cupping old men's balls earlier younger yeah yeah yeah i'm pretty sure you can do that and he lived in new york city come on yeah if he hadn't done a genocide he would have just been on my podcast behind the guys who cup old men's balls for strange reasons that's that's behind the paywall yeah launching in december everybody yeah so one of the things i find most interesting about this story is how easy it was for the most wanted man in all of europe to hide in a fairly high profile way working closely with a whole community of people who would have seen him on television and they would have seen him on tv constantly during the war years and that new york times investigation has a great theory as to why none of these weird energy healer freaks recognize the genocide guy in their midst Quote, the world of alternative medicine turns out to be a brilliant refuge for a man with something to hide. Every so-called healer I met in Belgrade seemed curious about just one thing, his own healing method. Expressing the mildest interest in Visak technique or energy fields would set off hours of one way conversation. John Sick, the man who mastered energy fields, remembered Dobik as someone who was always asking after John Sick's work, but rarely spoke about himself. He would never sit down and eat with us, John Sick recalled. And so the theory is that none of them noticed this guy was the most famous dude in the country because they're all narcissist fucking woo weirdos who are only interested in their own grifts. And as long as he never talked about himself, they didn't ask. I was going to say, I mean, it is like he just had to find kind of a dozen credulous weirdos and you can kind of move. Oh, man, I've really. The perfect place to hide. It's genius, really. As a. As a. Former woo dabbler. It's just it's it's it's a bad look. It's a bad look. It's a bad look. It's a bad look. When when when the when the Santa looking motherfucker cupping your balls turns out to be a genocide architect. I'll say this, Jamie, if Hitler had escaped the war and lived in like peace in another country for like another 20 or 30 years and had decent health, which he wouldn't have. He was very sick by the end of the war anyway. But if he had. He would have done something like this. I think he would have become some sort of weird energy healer or some shit. I mean, I think that genuinely, again, not to bring it back to fucking W, but, you know, if if you if you serve if you if you outlive your war crimes, it seems like you kind of go to this like kind of creepy retirement. Yeah. This creepy little side quest. I think the one ethical use I could find for generative A.I. would be if we could identify the people who have like. The genocide dictator thing. And you could create like a fake like army of fans that are just bots to encourage their side career so they never get into politics. Like we might really avoid some horrors. Incredible. Can we just make like a shell Juilliard for mid. Yeah, fake Juilliard for people who might do genocide. Yeah, for mid genocide. Yeah. Might help. I don't know. All right. That's it. Yeah. He also, I should note, held. Hid very well, even outside the confines of the energy healing subculture, per The Guardian. Quote, He also started visiting his local bar, the Luda Kuka Madhouse, a smoke filled, rough edged place that appealed to a shifting crowd of impoverished war veterans, Bosnian Serbs and Montenegrins. It served country wine, plum brandy and pungent, undiluted nationalism on the wood paneled walls where pictures of the Serb modern nationalist pantheon with pride of place reserved for Rada von Karadzic. On at least one occasion, he was persuaded to pick up a gusla. The single stringed fiddle of the region and perform an epic Serb ballad under a framed portrait of himself at the height of his power. Yet no one recognized him. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, yes, but also you could say you could say you could say zero cultural impact. Yeah. Cultural impact. Sure. OK, sure. You could say that or you could say we all owe the writers of Superman an apology because maybe Clark Kent could really successfully hide just by putting on glasses. Maybe it is that simple. Yeah, it doesn't take. Most people are not paying attention. As I say, you really do kind of forget, you know, how how foolish a person can be. We spend 90 percent of our days asleep pretty much. Right. Like everyone's zooming through on autopilot. So Rada von slash Dragon was having a fine time as an energy healer in General Cook. But in 2007. Yeah. Oh, there's more. In mid 2007, one of his doctor friends introduced. Him to executives at Cali Vita, which, despite its name and California centric branding, is a Connecticut based MLM that sells health supplements. He became their first sales representative in Belgrade and was for a time quite. So he gets into the MLM like every bastard thing I did. It's amazing. He he became a Lululemon girl. But yeah, it's just this guy. He did it all. He did it all. Unfortunately, that includes genocide. But he did it all. He's on his second post-genocide pivot. Yeah. On the evening of. And he would have pivoted further. I'm sure. What do they sell? What do they sell? It's like supplements. They're selling supplements. Oh, it's like a lot of stock photos of California people and pills. Yeah. On the evening of July 18th, 2008, Dragan Dobik was forced to go on the run again. Pro-Western reformers had started winning elections in Serbia and the people who'd protected him are not going to be in power anymore. Or at least not. And they warn him like, we can't keep hiding you in the Capitol. So and these people were unaware that he had actually already been tracked down. And what what what finally blows his spot is not the fact that he's living a public life as a famous healer. It's that his younger brother, Luca, kills a lady with his car and like calls his brother on a on a burner phone and is like, hey, I need advice. And people like, why is the brother of the guy who did this genocide calling this random energy healer who looks kind of like the guy who did the genocide? And people like, why is the brother of the guy who did the genocide calling this random energy healer who looks kind of like the guy who did the genocide? Right. That's sort of how it comes together. David. Yeah. So as he attempted to flee, he was taken into custody and brought to the Hague. And I'm not going to cover the blow by blow of the trial, but it brought a ton of evidence to light that made Radovan's guilt even clearer. He and his top general, Ratko Mladic, were placed on trial for charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. And the resultant trial took years. But on March 24th, 2016, he was convicted of all of these things and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He is incarcerated today at a U.K. prison in the Isle of Wight. And that's the Radovan Karadzic story. It's finally over. My goodness. An amazing amount of ground, though. It's what a life. The the the denouement of that story was so. It's insane. I was not expecting. You had no right. Yeah. The penises of it all. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I did not expect 2000 middle-aged Serb penises to take a role in the part two of this episode. That does sound like one of those Reddit. What would you do? Prompts. Yeah. I don't know, folks. If you have 2000 pictures of middle-aged Serbian men's penises, send them to our email. You know, I'll take. Yeah. Not not all men who have. Please don't do that to me. 2000 pictures of Serbian penises. Please don't do that to Jamie. That's the same. This is a sequel to a Serbian film. Please, please. No, no dick pics. We've suffered enough. Oh, man. Yeah. Especially that Times reporter. My God. Oh, yeah. I still have questions about Jessica. Like, this is just all I mean, I am thrilled. I am thrilled. I do remember him. His sentencing. Yeah. But I. But I really feel like we kind of culturally skipped over the, not just the genocide, but the MLM and the 2000 Serbian penises. No, it's not in. No one who is involved in the U.S. defense and intelligence wants to admit that the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, the CIA, MI6, fucking every agency that existed in the West got outsmarted by a guy who's like primary pivot after getting done with a genocide was cupping old men's balls. To make their sperm livelier. Like. It's pretty embarrassing. It's literally like a Count Olaf gray disguise. Yeah. It's pretty ridiculous. I. Yeah. And that however many like millions, maybe billions of dollars that went into that search, the best they could come up with was like a 2001 guerrilla. How could we have known he left the country? How could we have known the Serb went to Serbia? Who could have guessed? Great work, Petraeus. Good. Best of luck in the future, you fucking dipshit. God. Well. Funny stuff. Good to know. You know, glad he's rotting. Hope you, you know, and. Yeah. But Jesus Christ. My goodness. My goodness. Jamie, tell the audience here about your new upcoming novel, The Tower. It's so hard to plug at the end of this fucking show. That's why I had you plug it up top. Baby. It's true. You know, and keep in mind, he did go. He did get sentenced in the Hague. Truman. Truman. Truman in the background was like Auntie Jamie talking about book. Must listen. I mean, she's a great reader. Our sweet Truman. You can preorder my first novel, The Tower. It comes out in June, but I'm going to beg you to preorder it anyways. And it is about a an architect who falls in love with her own blueprint. And tries for years to, I guess I'll reveal an additional detail I didn't in the previous episode. She spends, she's trying to get financing from this, this very wealthy New England, like family to, to have the building built. And the family's name is the Van Sullivans, which I think is very funny. It is. So you can preorder it now and come see the Bechtel cast on tour in October. Buy it twice, you know. And, and, and also, you know, listeners, before we go, I just want you to spend a little bit of time. each day, directing some mental energy to the hope that when Andrew Tate and his brother go to prison in the UK, they're sent to the Isle of White and wind up getting their balls cupped by Radovan Karadzic. That's my dream for the Tates. It's that he manages to convince them he can hear their sperm. That is manifestation for evil. I'm working on it, baby. I want it to happen. Who told Robert about this secret? This sucks. Manifest, baby. We can make this happen. This is doable. This is doable. Alright. Alright. Alright. We're good. We're done. Bye. 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 in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. 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. 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Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh damn, wait a minute, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes. It's real. 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. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life. Until the messages started. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.