The Web of Disinformation / The Rape of Serbia
Martin, David & Lees, Michael
THE WEB OF DISINFORMATION: CHURCHILL'S YUGOSLAV BLUNDER David Martin/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/425 pp. $29.95 THE RAPE OF SERBIA: THE BRITISH ROLE IN TITO'S GRAB FOR POWER Michael Lees/Harcourt...
...Instead, Tito, with official British backing, became the resistance leader of preference, his accomplishments inflated in the British press, while Mihailovie became a non-person, his supplies cut to a dribble...
...Until his death in 1980, Marshal Titomanaged to hold Yugoslavia together through a cunning mixture of Russophobe nationalism, police-state brutality, and a cult of personality that combined elements of Stalinism and Peron-ism in a uniquely Balkan context...
...In some ways, Tito, whose nom de guerre and entire biography had been fabricated, genuinely embodied Yugoslavia—an artificial nation with an invented history and name ("Land of the South Slays...
...The situation was lightly summed up by Guillaume Apollinaire (niWilhelm Kostrowitzky) in an aside in The Debauched Hospodar, an otherwise forgettable ribald novella he wrote in turn-of-the-century Paris...
...While they overlap, their two books are complementary: The Web of Disinformation is a broad, lengthy narrative by an experienced journalist and political analyst, while The Rape of Serbia is the work of a man who, as a youthful British liaison officer with Mihailovie's Cetniks, again and again saw his own and other dispatches suppressed or distorted by higher-ups determined to divert support from Mihailovie to Tito...
...Having bored a local with the endless glories of his motherland, he boasts about his capital: "As for Bucharest, Bucharest is a little Paris...
...Hellenes have been followed by Hellenists, Romans by Byzantines, Ottomans by Russians, in between outbursts of tribalism or nationalism and, latterly, a veneer of European cosmopolitanism...
...What a curious band they were, these effete Cambridge dilettantes who managed to deceive the Churchill government into one of the most cynical Allied betrayals of World War II...
...Much of this disinformational dirty work was done by one James Klugmann, a less well-known member of the Cambridge Communist clique who, Martin argues, may have been the elusive "Fifth Man...
...Like most poor relations, the Balkan peoples are quicker to claim kinship with the mainstream West than vice versa...
...William Deakin and Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean...
...Tito, Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt, and Klugmann all died in their beds—or in someone else's...
...It was our duty . . . to do our best to insure that the weapons so lavishly bestowed were used for their proper purpose of fighting the enemy, and not simply stockpiled against an eventual post-war seizure of power in the state This task proved to be beyond our powers...
...This plump, affable little traitor, always smiling, always glad to put in overtime in the file room, and generally well liked, even as he went about his murderous and deceitful work, is a reminder of how much more dangerous sincere, dedicated, selfless people can be than routine scoundrels, once they have taken the Devil's shilling...
...Much has been made in recent years of real or alleged state persecution of homosexuals in the forties and fifties, especially for security reasons...
...The Federation's Croatian (20 percent), Bosnian Muslim (9 percent), Slovene (8 percent), Macedonian (6 percent) and Albanian (8 percent) minorities have all expressed a desire for genuine autonomy, if not outright independence...
...in his eighty-eighth year, in a desperate attempt to save the failing dictator, his doctors amputated a gangrenous leg, prompting one Croatian wag to declare: "Today they're partitioning Tito...
...There is, however, an unhappy microcosm of the Balkans: the involuntarily assembled and fast unraveling Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia...
...tomorrow it'll be Yugoslavia...
...Alas, poor Nicu...
...29.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...A bumptious Roumanian (to use the contemporaneous spelling) is visiting the City of Lights...
...Like Apollinaire's fictitious Parisian, we can all be grateful that, while the Balkans may pass for a mini-Europe, Europe is not a macro-Balkans...
...Churchill later acknowledged that this switch was one of his "biggest mistakes of the war...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991...
...In two valuable new books, David Martin and Michael Lees chronicle not only the treachery of such well-known double agents as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, but also the tragic self-delusion of better men, like Lt...
...The truth should have been obvious to everyone...
...the last time I used this anecdote was in a 1975 conversation with Nicu Ceausescu, son of the late dictator, who was trying to convince me to visit his capital...
...Tito's post-war break with Moscow was a reflection less of nationalism than of an egotistical desire to be his own Stalin rather than a flunky of the Kremlin original...
...Yugoslavia continues to pay the price of their perfidy...
...IV et, for all his personal dynamism, Tito's seizure of power in Yugoslavia was as much the work of a small band of British traitors and their dupes as it was the fruit of his own considerable talents...
...A bloodstained crazy quilt of a nation, Yugoslavia is politically and militarily dominated by its Serbian plurality (36 percent of the population...
...Mihailovie, abandoned by the allies, struggled on...
...Evelyn Waugh, who served with Deakin in the Balkans, would later (1954) write to a mutual friend: "Bill Deakin is a very lovable & complicated man...
...The national victim was Yugoslavia, the personal victim General Draza Mihailovie, a brave and honest soldier who led the pro-Western "Cetnik" resistance forces loyal to Yugoslavia'slegitimate government-in-exile...
...oth Martin and Lees have re-Be searched rigorously and written well...
...Their involuntary servitude to a bankrupt Communist authority is the grim legacy of one man, Josip Broz Tito...
...He can't decide whether to be proud or ashamed of his collaboration with Tito . . ." A curious subtext of the British betrayal of Yugoslavia was a particularly nasty variation of sexual politics...
...There were, however, two sides to the coin, both addressed in a recent biography of British artist Duncan Grant by Douglas Blair Thrnbaugh: "Many brilliant homosexual men had become Soviet agents . . . not so much because of an enthusiasm for communism but for a kind of revenge" So it was that, in a grim, real-life fairy tale, a free, pro-Western constitutional monarchy was murdered in its cradle by a handful of vengeful queens—a case, pace Hannah Arendt, of the anality of evil...
...29.95 THE RAPE OF SERBIA: THE BRITISH ROLE IN TITO'S GRAB FOR POWER Michael Lees/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/384 pp...
...His enthusiasm for all things Romanian is hardly likely to survive his current prison sentence in the land he and his family pillaged for a quarter of a century...
...The winners were Tito's Moscow-backed Partisans...
...As the second Lord Birkenhead, who served as a liaison with Tito's Partisan forces, would later recall: [Their] blind adoration of the Soviet Union was extremely irritating, as we soon discovered that the Russians were supplying practically no arms to them, whereas the British aid was immense and ever-increasing...
...Even in the throes of death Tito symbolized his disintegrating creation...
...A s often happens with peripheral regions of a major civilization, the peoples of the Balkan peninsula have been shaken and scrambled by wave after wave of conquest...
...Aram Bakshian, Jr has written foreign policy speeches for Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan and has traveled extensively in Central and Eastern Europe I quote from imprecise memory...
...He was ultimately hunted down and murdered, along with thousands of his followers, after Communist show trials in the best Stalinist tradition...
...The Parisian pauses, shrugs, and replies, "Perhaps, monsieur, but thank God Paris is not a big Bucharest...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
