Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History by Philip Cohen, a dentist, and Dr. David Riesman was dissected early in 1991 when this dentist, without a shred of education in Balkan history and who would have had to comb through... thousands of documents written in Serbo-Croatian provides for us a fairy tale of unbelievable distortions, Riesman a Jew, should have been ashamed of putting his name on such a book, but like Cohen the both defecate on historical accuracy.
From my book Jasenovac Then & Now: A Conspiracy of Silence I present here some excerpts by Dr. J.P. Maher, a linguistic professor in Chicago...Reading Dr. Cohen’s book and some rave reviews took this old Fulbrighter right back to the time of Chairman Mao. His Great Cultural Revolution was in full hue and cry in the Winter Semester of 1966 when I was teaching in Sofia. “This book,” as we are told by the Series Editor, Stjepan (Stipe) Mestrovic, scion of the famed Yugoslav clan, is “... the second in a series on Eastern European Studies. Dr. Cohen has, we are to believe, mastered in the brief span of a couple years, the skill of writing a reasonable facsimile of academic historians’ prose, and has metabolized reams of Balkan chronicles.
Already in 1992 our dentist served as expert on the Clinton-Gore transition team. What talent scout deserves the credit? Dr. Cohen’s Balkanological achievements are the more remarkable for his inability to read Serbo-Croatian, not to speak of the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian languages. To overcome this handicap Dr. Cohen “headed,” one reviewer tells us, “a team of translators.” — How, I ask, does one go about “heading” a team of translators, especially when one is not a translator? For those interested in consulting such a valuable research resource, there is no indication of the identity of the translators nor of the archive in which the translations have been deposited. Typographically, too, the Cohen book is anomalous. Its over-generous margins and spacing increase the bulk of the book by about a third over a normally produced book. School kids call it “padding.”
There is a laudatory foreword from the pen of David Riesman, not a dentist, but Professor Emeritus of the Harvard University Department of Sociology and author of the best-seller, The Lonely Crowd. Like Dr. Cohen, Professor Riesman, is unfettered by a preparation in Balkan studies. He even, Mestrovic tells us, skipped sociology, for he “came to Sociology from Law.” Lawyer-sociologist Riesman writes of Serb backwardness: Serbia is a country in which “illiterates could rise to leadership and even to the monarchy.” Dr. Riesman may have had in mind the likes of Milos Obrenovic, but leaves the impression that his illiteracy was the fruit of autochthonous Serb culture, when it was really the necessary consequence of Islamic precept, the Turkish Kaun i Raya — “Law for the Slaves.” Muslim policy towards infidels was—and still is— take Sudan, for example — identical to the English Penal Laws in Ireland, but it seems to have slipped Mr. Riesman’s mind that 14th century Serbia’s Tsar Dusan Silni stood out among contemporary West European monarchs in that Dusan “the Mighty” knew how to read and write. In a wee oversight Dr. Riesman has omitted Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, from whom Goethe learnt, unlike Dr. Cohen, to read Serbian. Eighteenth century Dubrovnik, Iying far from authentic Croatia, which was then a few counties in Great(er) Hungary, boasted the polymath Rudjer Boskovic, like Tesla, son of an Orthodox priest. Since then the Serbs have also produced the likes of Mihajlo Pupin, Nikola Tesla, Einstein’s wife Mileva Maric etc. etc.
From my book Jasenovac Then & Now: A Conspiracy of Silence I present here some excerpts by Dr. J.P. Maher, a linguistic professor in Chicago...Reading Dr. Cohen’s book and some rave reviews took this old Fulbrighter right back to the time of Chairman Mao. His Great Cultural Revolution was in full hue and cry in the Winter Semester of 1966 when I was teaching in Sofia. “This book,” as we are told by the Series Editor, Stjepan (Stipe) Mestrovic, scion of the famed Yugoslav clan, is “... the second in a series on Eastern European Studies. Dr. Cohen has, we are to believe, mastered in the brief span of a couple years, the skill of writing a reasonable facsimile of academic historians’ prose, and has metabolized reams of Balkan chronicles.
Already in 1992 our dentist served as expert on the Clinton-Gore transition team. What talent scout deserves the credit? Dr. Cohen’s Balkanological achievements are the more remarkable for his inability to read Serbo-Croatian, not to speak of the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian languages. To overcome this handicap Dr. Cohen “headed,” one reviewer tells us, “a team of translators.” — How, I ask, does one go about “heading” a team of translators, especially when one is not a translator? For those interested in consulting such a valuable research resource, there is no indication of the identity of the translators nor of the archive in which the translations have been deposited. Typographically, too, the Cohen book is anomalous. Its over-generous margins and spacing increase the bulk of the book by about a third over a normally produced book. School kids call it “padding.”
There is a laudatory foreword from the pen of David Riesman, not a dentist, but Professor Emeritus of the Harvard University Department of Sociology and author of the best-seller, The Lonely Crowd. Like Dr. Cohen, Professor Riesman, is unfettered by a preparation in Balkan studies. He even, Mestrovic tells us, skipped sociology, for he “came to Sociology from Law.” Lawyer-sociologist Riesman writes of Serb backwardness: Serbia is a country in which “illiterates could rise to leadership and even to the monarchy.” Dr. Riesman may have had in mind the likes of Milos Obrenovic, but leaves the impression that his illiteracy was the fruit of autochthonous Serb culture, when it was really the necessary consequence of Islamic precept, the Turkish Kaun i Raya — “Law for the Slaves.” Muslim policy towards infidels was—and still is— take Sudan, for example — identical to the English Penal Laws in Ireland, but it seems to have slipped Mr. Riesman’s mind that 14th century Serbia’s Tsar Dusan Silni stood out among contemporary West European monarchs in that Dusan “the Mighty” knew how to read and write. In a wee oversight Dr. Riesman has omitted Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, from whom Goethe learnt, unlike Dr. Cohen, to read Serbian. Eighteenth century Dubrovnik, Iying far from authentic Croatia, which was then a few counties in Great(er) Hungary, boasted the polymath Rudjer Boskovic, like Tesla, son of an Orthodox priest. Since then the Serbs have also produced the likes of Mihajlo Pupin, Nikola Tesla, Einstein’s wife Mileva Maric etc. etc.
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