Chetniks

I mean, they they they had a victory of death like.

Like absolutely like Chetnik sensibility on, you know, the path forward for Serbia.

Black George was ultimately driven into exile in Austria decades subsequent, uh, right around the time of Waterloo, 1813.

This was after this massive Ottoman counteroffensive.

It was a radical party.

It was a party of peasants.

If there's Serbs watching this, and I hope they'll contribute in the comments if they are, I don't want to speak In an incomplete sense, this is kind of the beginning of the modern Chetnik movement, okay? Like, when you think about the radical parties, you think of them as like Chetniks as we know them, okay? I know that the roots of the Chetnik identity and movement go way, way, way deeper than that, and I don't speak Serbo-Croatian or anything like that.

But with the limited time we have, and just to make things kind of conceptually, you know, clearer, think of the radicals as like very, very game Chetniks, okay? They This kind of ongoing paralysis of government and this kind of like permanent divide between the executive and the parliamentary organs is something that dramatically kind of aggravated it.

Because it was a highly fractured environment.

You had Tito's communist partisans fighting on one side and the royalist Chetniks led by General Mihailovic on the other.

Right.

And we need to be explicitly clear to the listener here.

Mm

... complicated participants in the fighting were the Chetniks.

The Chetniks are essentially a Serb-dominated royalist militia.

They are fighting.

They want independence from the Nazis, who have invaded their country, but they want independence to put the ousted royal family back in power.

And the royal family are not nice people, as royal families generally are not.

And the Chetniks-

Sure

This, along with the fact that, again, as we know, the whole Balkan peninsula is covered with rough terrain and poor infrastructure, helps explain why Serbia quickly developed the most powerful insurgent movement in Europe, and why these insurgents were, you know, were and became exceptionally skilled at avoiding detection and, you know, mounting these little attacks everywhere and just not being destroyed by the Germans as hard as they tried.

But despite all this growing strength, you know, more recruits and everything, the overall partisan movement was still divided between those two factions, the communists and the royalist Chetniks.

And they at best kind of tolerate each other.

Sometimes they work together and at worst they would outright fight each other.

In fact, in mid-September, Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav communists, and Mikhailovich, leader of the, again, more ideologically diverse, but more Serbian, more royalist partisans, met to discuss the overall movement.

By now, the partisans controlled enough territory that they had their own postal system and operated over 145 kilometers of railways.

But the Chetniks were no pushovers either.

At their meeting, Tito was clearly in a stronger position, and he offered Mikhailovich the position of chief of staff for the overall movement, but Mikhailovich refused.

He said it became clear to me that their intentions were hostile when they immediately opened up diplomatic channels with the coup in Yugoslavia in 1941. which Yugoslavia was key to Germany's ability to deploy in depth, obviously.

And the coup was, for all practical purposes, was a Chetnik coup.

And Hitler said subsequently, the Red Army is deployed offensively on our frontier.

He said only a fool wouldn't realize the implications of 20,000 tanks and dozens of divisions arrayed um, on the Eastern frontier.