The New Republic

 To the Editors:
It is strange indeed that The New Republic would publish an article which reduces Eastern European Nazi slaughter of minorities to a mere propaganda narrative used by Orthodox Christian Russians and Serbs for their own nefarious purposes. That is the claim made by Vera Mironova and Maria Snegovaya, in their article “Putin is Behaving in Ukraine like Milosevic Did in Serbia”, in your June 19 issue.

The authors use preposterous distortions and falsehoods to portray well-documented Ukrainian and Croatian fascist slaughter of Jews and fellow Slavs (Russians and Serbs in particular) as an “understandable” patriotic reaction to aggression… by the Orthodox Church!
The authors claim that: “The story begins in the early twentieth century, when the USSR and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia were established. In both cases, the metropolises of Russia and Serbia—both countries of Eastern Orthodox religion that considered themselves alternative, non-Western civilizations—imposed their rule upon the Catholic and much more pro-Western Croatia and Ukraine.”

This is untrue. It should be noted that the Orthodox churches are national churches, and as such are not expansive, contrary to the Vatican, whose historic policy is to impose the authority of the Bishop of Rome on all of Christendom – notably in contested Eastern European borderlands.
In reality, far from “imposing” the Serbian Orthodox religion on Croatia, the Yugoslav Kingdom negotiated with difficulty a Concordat with the Catholic Church which preserved the rights of Catholics. Under Tito, the Catholic bishop Stepanac was kept in house arrest and died a natural death while the Serb Orthodox anti-Nazi guerilla leader Mihailovic was executed. Catholic clergy were better treated under Tito than Orthodox clergy, no doubt because of strong international support for the former.

The Serbs never considered themselves an “alternative, non-Western civilization”. Serbia’s last king, Peter I (died 1921), while in exile fought with the French army in the Franco-Prussian War and translated John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” into Serbo-Croatian for his compatriots.
It should be recalled that after World War II, many Croatian pro-Nazis, and even more Ukrainian Nazis were welcomed into the United States and Canada for their ardent anti-Communism. They readily spread their own version of events and with U.S. support, many have returned triumphant to their homeland, having forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

This article is disinformation aimed at readers who are unaware of history. It is totally preposterous to claim that Vladimir Putin would “imitate” the disaster imposed on Slobodan Milosevic. Rather, what appears increasingly obvious is that the United States used the disintegration of Yugoslavia to practice various techniques, from bombing to “color revolutions”, accompanied by massive propaganda, which would subsequently be used to accomplish “regime change”. The primary target of these techniques appears to be Russia, whose current elected President (elected like Milosevic, and not a “dictator”) is doing his best not to fall into the trap set for him in Ukraine.
Diana Johnstone, Ph.D.

Author of “Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions” (PlutoPress/Monthly Review Press 2002).
Paris, France.