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> C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted. In retrospect. At the time it was taught as real history at s

by Swizec 9y ago

> C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted. In retrospect. At the time it was taught as real history at schools. At least according to my mum, she never even found out about all the mass graves and other attrocities until after Yugoslavia fell apart. Partisans being the absolute good guys was just the accepted default.

jerry40 9y ago
It was a war, wasn't it? Millions and millions have died, we just can't imagine what was happening at that horrible period. Now it is very easy to say "I would never do THAT!", but who knows.
llukas 9y ago
At least in Poland there was "official" truth (taught at shools/media) and one that was a bit closer to reality that was taught at (most) homes. I think this may be related to slightly different history - Poland was invaded in '39 by Russians as well and suffered fair deal of their atrocities - it wasn't possible just to eradicate knowledge about that.
- Swizec 9y ago
  Yeah the tricky part of Yugoslavia is that when our king announced alliance with Hitler, we executed a civil coup and forced the king to flee to the UK. Hitler then invaded when the new government said they were not going to collaborate. Then as part of fighting off axis powers, we also fought an internal civil war between the communists and the ... I don't know if they had a real name, we call them the whites. It's details of that civil war that communist propaganda liked to sweep under the rug and talk only about how they singlehandedly saved the country from the nazis. What kind of history you were taught at home depended primarily on whether your parents were Red or White. My dad for example was told a lot about the bad things the Partisans did because of his family's alignment to the religious, white, side.
  - pandaman 9y ago
    "Whites" are loyalists. In Slavic languages "white" stands for "pristine, unsullied" and in the context of a revolutionary civil war refers to the side, which remained loyal to the government being overthrown.

by Swizec 9y ago

jerry40 9y ago

It was a war, wasn't it? Millions and millions have died, we just can't imagine what was happening at that horrible period. Now it is very easy to say "I would never do THAT!", but who knows.

llukas 9y ago

At least in Poland there was "official" truth (taught at shools/media) and one that was a bit closer to reality that was taught at (most) homes. I think this may be related to slightly different history - Poland was invaded in '39 by Russians as well and suffered fair deal of their atrocities - it wasn't possible just to eradicate knowledge about that.

Swizec 9y ago
Yeah the tricky part of Yugoslavia is that when our king announced alliance with Hitler, we executed a civil coup and forced the king to flee to the UK. Hitler then invaded when the new government said they were not going to collaborate. Then as part of fighting off axis powers, we also fought an internal civil war between the communists and the ... I don't know if they had a real name, we call them the whites. It's details of that civil war that communist propaganda liked to sweep under the rug and talk only about how they singlehandedly saved the country from the nazis. What kind of history you were taught at home depended primarily on whether your parents were Red or White. My dad for example was told a lot about the bad things the Partisans did because of his family's alignment to the religious, white, side.
- pandaman 9y ago
  "Whites" are loyalists. In Slavic languages "white" stands for "pristine, unsullied" and in the context of a revolutionary civil war refers to the side, which remained loyal to the government being overthrown.