Yugoslavia

The Western Allies remained in place.

In 1948, Yugoslavia broke away.

The Soviet common form condemned Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia's leader, for straying from Marxism-Leninism.

This was the first crack in in the Soviet bloc.

In order to dissuade others from straying, Stalin tightened his grip on Eastern Europe.

Predictor of future world events in the history of the world.

The one that is about to come true and has not yet is the prediction that I made that the United States would send troops to Yugoslavia.

And it appears that that is going to happen in the very near future.

Let's move on.

My father was one of the architects of socialism, and as such, we were launched into the inner circle of its feared, revered leader, Marshall Tito.

This was Yugoslavia in the 1950s.

Communism had reared its ugly head.

I was born in Washington, D.C., but when I was four months old, my family returned to Yugoslavia, where my father was Minister Plenipotentiary of Foreign Affairs under Tito, Marshall Tito.

An icon of his time and for generations to come, he was masterful in his ability to manipulate and control.

Like all great despots, he had his way with people.

Since that time, the Tesla engineers have been in close touch with spaceships.

The space people have visited the Tesla engineers many times and have told us that Tesla was a Venusian, brought to this planet as a baby in 1856, and left with Mr. and Mr. Tesla in a remote mountain province in what is now Yugoslavia.

That's incredible.

I mean, that makes the modern disclosure we're getting now seem like small potatoes.

Paula is a PhD candidate within our research training group specializing in Southeast European history and in Romani history.

She is currently working on a thesis provisionally titled Between Fascination and Disdain, Roma in Interwar Yugoslavia.

Paula, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for the kind introduction.

Those are some very valuable explanations for our audience as well.

Now, as you have mentioned, there is an interest in Romani studies, both in the stereotypes that other people bring to this population group, but also in the lived experiences.

My next question concerns your sources for your research on interwar Yugoslavia.

Do the sources mostly represent external views of the Serbian Roma or can you also recover the voices of Romani people themselves?

I can remember well the Irish media at the time cheerleading it at home.

I remember a Fianna Fáil government telling the FBI not to play Yugoslavia in a football match, despite the fact that it was NATO that was bombing.

For 78 days, NATO bombed.

residential buildings in Belgrade.

But, you know, the casting of Slobodan Milošević as this mass-murdering nationalist, uh, extremist, he was the State Department's guy, and he was the guy who was viewed as the moderate they could work with by Washington.

And Bush very much wanted to keep Yugoslavia together.

What happened was Helmut Kohl, who I think was about as, as, as nationalist as, as any, as any, uh, chancellor of the Buddhist Republic could be or can be, when, uh, Tudjman's Croatia declared independence, Kohl recognized them immediately, and then the die was cast.

There was gonna be war in the Balkans.

My father was one of the architects of socialism, and as such we were launched into the inner circle of its feared, revered leader, Marshall Tito.

This was Yugoslavia in the 1950s.

Communism had reared its ugly head.

I was born in Washington, D.C., but when I was four months old, my family returned to Yugoslavia, where my father was Minister Plenipotentiary of Foreign Affairs under Tito, Marshall Tito.

An icon of his time

and for generations to come, he was masterful in his ability to manipulate and control.

I'm incredibly careful with my money, way more so than Taylor, to be honest.

I was born in former Yugoslavia and came to the U.S. with my parents in the early 90s.

Because of the war, we arrived with absolutely nothing.

We struggled a lot during our first few years here.