Part One: Radovan Karadžić: The Genocidal Dictator Who Became a New-Age Guru

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to discuss a bastard who really did it all: started his own country and became dictator, carried out a genocide, and matured to quack energy healer using magic to improve men's sperm count. Preorder Jamie's new novel, The Tower: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250480422/thetower/ Sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19960285 https://www.npr.org/2008/07/22/92775717/timeline-the-political-life-of-radovan-karadzic https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/22/the-hunt-for-radovan-karadzic-ruthless-warlord-turned-spiritual-healer https://www.npr.org/2008/07/23/92809597/karadzics-dual-life-war-fugitive-new-age-mystic Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure - The New York Times https://archive.is/UqP2i https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-23-fg-warcrime23-story.html https://calivita.com/webshop https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/01/radovan-karadzic-war-crimes-trial-no-ethnic-cleansing-bosnia https://www.npr.org/2005/11/19/5020196/the-poetry-of-an-indicted-war-criminal https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/karadzic/radovan/poems.html https://jaapl.org/content/jaapl/25/4/485.full.pdf https://www.jessicasternbooks.com/my-war-criminal See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Ah, never forget 9/11 and never forget to listen to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you are all listening to now. This is our 9/11 episode extravaganza, even though you'll be hearing it probably several weeks after 9/11. So I don't even know why I'm like temporalizing this because it's just gonna feel old when it hits you. You will already have had your 9/11 cake. You'll have opened all of your 9/11 presents.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  I'm feeling a little somber. So if you feel a tinge of sadness in my voice, just that's me not forgetting.

• 0:35Robert Evans?

  That's Jamie remembering.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Forget.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  I'm always remembering.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  The like discourse today online was like the worst of the right being like, ah, did you see Mom Donnie and AOC having a giggle during the during the 9/11 tribute in New York?

• 0:57Robert Evans?

  The sacred 9/11 tribute.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  You're like, did you see that Donald Trump wasn't there?

• 1:02Robert Evans?

  I don't care.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  I don't care about any of these things. I don't care about any of these things.

• 1:07Robert Evans?

  It's fine.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Just.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  It is, it is, it is bizarre that like of all of the days that we, the thousands of days, we've been very insincere about it. We're like, we're gonna do, we're gonna do just one.

• 1:21Robert Evans?

  We're gonna remember.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  And today we're gonna remember for real, for real.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  For real, for real.

• 1:27Robert Evans?

  What I remember on 9/11 is the film Big Trouble, which was tragically delayed as a result of 9/11 because it featured a plotline in which a nuclear weapon was set off in a commercial airliner. And so tragically, Tim Allen lost what would have been one of his better comedy releases.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  And we, and we won't forget that.

• 1:46Robert Evans?

  I will never forget that, Jamie.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I'll never forget, they changed the climax of Lilo and Stitch. Stitch hijacked a plane and then they said, we cannot be having, we can't have Stitch be doing Al Qaeda activity.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You know what I'm really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really excited about?

• 2:07Robert Evans?

  See, Sophie, that's not how you lead into this. I was going to say, you know how there were two towers on 9/11?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Oh, that's better.

• 2:15Robert Evans?

  Jamie Loftus has a book coming out called The Tower.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Wow, what a plug.

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  Jamie, you wanna tell people about it? See, I'm ready, I was ready to plug.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Wow, you're, okay, yeah, there's a secret third tower. And what if that, what if it was a 9/11 book? And I really have been, I've been secretly remembering for years. You have no idea. Um, yeah, no, my, my first novel's coming out. It's about just, just one tower, but a beautiful tower. It's about, it's a novel about an architect who falls in love with her own blueprint and then spends 20 years trying to get the love of her life built so she can leave her husband for the building.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  Awesome. I'm excited to read it.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  The highs are high, the lows are low.

• 3:04Robert Evans?

  The lows of writing a book are very low.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  It's the hardest thing in the world. That said, I'm sure, I'm sure by the time you hear this, I've, I've figured it out.

• 3:16Robert Evans?

  Jamie, it's very appropriate that you've said writing a book is the hardest thing in the world because the subject, the bastard that we're talking about this week, is an author and I think would agree with you, writing a book is the hardest thing in the world, which is impressive because he also committed a genocide. So.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 3:32Robert Evans?

  Maybe not the best way to talk about it, but we're talking about the Balkans this week and there's no easy way to lead into a story about the Balkans. If you are, if you are talking about the Balkans, you're talking about a lot of people dying. That's just, that's just history in the Balkans. Yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  There's always a part of me that thinks someday you're gonna come in hot with Saddam 2. You know, like there's always just a little, like there's another novel that's been found.

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  They made another. Saddam's lost novel like Tupac? He keeps dropping novels like every 15 years after his death?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, on the centennial, we're gonna get a new romance novel. Oh, RIP Saddam. You would have loved the romanticy trend going on right now.

• 4:14Robert Evans?

  We are talking about a dictator. Unlike Saddam, he was not a novelist, but he was a poet, um, kinda like, uh, Joseph Stalin. And he also did commit a genocide. And in addition to that, he lived as a new age healer for years after committing a genocide? This guy goes so many places. You are not ready for the Radovan Karajic story. Uh, that's who we're talking about this week. Have you heard about Radovan Karajic?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  No, I have not.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  I just wanna, before we get there, I just wanna highlight for the Netflix viewers, Jamie's fantastic John Locke t-shirt that she's wearing and.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  That's for you, Sophie.

• 4:54Robert Evans?

  The one from, from, uh, the show?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  The boss, the bald one.

• 4:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, okay.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Bald king from Lost.

• 5:00Robert Evans?

  That's from Lost, okay.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's low culture John Locke. We're not going, we're not going high today.

• 5:07Robert Evans?

  It would have been really funny if it was the same aesthetic, like fan cam shirt, but it was like John Locke, the philosopher?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  I am a thousand percent sure that shirt exists somewhere.

• 5:17Robert Evans?

  It must.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:19Robert Evans?

  All my philosophy girlies out there are, are just absolutely losing their minds. Um, and all of my Balkans girlies are gonna be losing their minds this week because again, we're talking about Radovan Karajic, one of the people most responsible for the Bosnian genocide, also a poet and an energy healer who was sorely into Ricky. So we're gonna cover a lot of ground.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Sinister, what a sinister multi-hyphenate situation that is.

• 5:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, cause in our country, we're seeing like the weird woo, you know, bullshit medicine stuff kind of as a prelude to the fascism, right? Where it kind of leads in and helps bring it. For this guy, he goes full fascist and then he becomes an energy healer. It's an amazing journey. So I can't wait to talk to you about Radovan.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  That's how I always, I always think about like, uh, George W. as like a reverse Hitler, where he like got the war crimes out of the way and then retreated into painting afterwards.

• 6:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. I think Hitler would have done better painting if he'd taken the opposite route. But then again, that, what I mean is if he'd never painted because he just shot himself first because he was a bad painter. I guess what I'm saying is George W. Bush is a better artist than Hitler, you know? I gotta give Bush that.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I, I mean, if, if we absolutely have to give George W. flowers on 9/11, I guess so. I guess he's top of mind.

• 6:41Robert Evans?

  Look, Hitler's a better Hitler than George W. Bush was. I'll say that, you know? So it's not 100% either way. Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  I mean, doesn't, doesn't George, doesn't George W., like, doesn't he paint like his war, he like paints injured veterans that are injured as his fault?

• 7:01Robert Evans?

  He's painted some injured veterans. That's not really a war crime. That's just him being a shitty leader.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 7:07Robert Evans?

  But he also painted like Putin's face. He does a lot of weird shit. I don't know.

• 7:11Speaker 03

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• 7:19Robert Evans?

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• 8:18Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 8:38Speaker 05

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• 8:56Speaker 07

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body, but soon they'll find it.

• 9:07Speaker 06

  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff and they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  I saw him violent, backhanded her, pow.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, season two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 9:40Robert Evans?

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life, until the messages started.

• 9:52Robert Evans?

  Someone's not gonna make it out of this alive.

• 9:55Speaker 05

  Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy.

• 9:59Robert Evans?

  He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Listen to Betrayal, season six, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 10:09Speaker 01

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• 10:39Speaker 02

  Detectives said he had stalked her before she died. Years later, they said he remained the person they continued to focus on.

• 10:46Speaker 01

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• 11:14Robert Evans?

  Uh, anyway, speaking of war crimes, let's talk a little bit about Balkan history, right?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  Um, cuz you gotta, we can't just like, start talking about this guy's life. There's too much, and too much complicated shit going on in the Balkans that leads into this. So, if you, if you're not a map person, the Balkans are like, kind of a chunk of southeast Europe, like, leading up into Eastern Europe, but also in like, that southern flank that includes, like, you've got Slovenia, you've got Croatia, you've got Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, like, all these different areas are like, parts of the Balkans. Um, that's, and it's historically this, like, the most quarrelsome part of Europe in the early modern era, right? And a big reason for that is that because of geography, the Balkans are the major European

• 12:01Robert Evans?

  battleground for most of the fighting between like, the Muslims and the Christians, right? When you get the Ottoman Empire trying to make their way into Europe, there, they take a lot of the Balkans. And for a lot of, like, the early modern period, much of the Balkans is like, governed from Constantinople, right? It's like, part of the Ottoman Empire. And that doesn't, that, that leads to a lot of fucking conflicts, right? Because people in like, modern day Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia are subjects of the Ottoman Sultan for a very long time. And some of these people convert to Islam. And of course, a lot of Muslims from Anatolia and elsewhere migrate to the Balkans, particularly Bosnia, right? They, Bosnia develops a very sizable Muslim population. They're called Bosniaks. Those

• 12:43Robert Evans?

  are like, the Bosnian Muslims. Um, and obviously, there's also a lot of Christians. Quite a few Serbian Christians specifically say fuck you to the idea of serving a Sultan. Uh, and the mountainous highlands, particularly around Montenegro, the term they use is like, a shatter zone, right? It's this area on the edge of an empire and in between other empires or kingdoms, where usually it's very mountainous, and so it's hard to like, govern in the pre-modern period. Before you have helicopters, you can't really govern these highland regions, because like, if you have an army and guys just go up 2,000 feet, it's like, well, your army will die before they reach them. You can't, you can't march them into the mountains. Um, so you, you wind up with this big shatter zone, and like, kind

• 13:25Robert Evans?

  of Montenegro, where there's all these Serb clans who wish to escape the Sultan's law, would like, flee and fight. Modern historians tend to emphasize their primary issue with the Ottomans was not even religion as much as it was taxation, which is usually the case with stuff like this, even if it gets written up as a big holy wars, because, oh no, that guy wants to tax us, and we have mountains, so we don't have to pay taxes. Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  There's, yeah, there's always a secret, there, there's always a back alley reason for actually doing it.

• 13:52Robert Evans?

  And it's usually taxes, right? Um, that's a big part of it, at least. Still, these mountain Serbs develop a reputation among other Europeans as they're primitives, right? They're these very savage, like, you know, warriors who don't build big cities because they live up in these highland areas. But they're also these noble warriors defending Christendom against the Islamic hordes. They're like, the shield of Europe, too. So they develop both of those kinds of reputations. During this period of time, Montenegrin Serbs largely clustered in small clan and tribal groups under the leadership of people called dukes. These aren't royalty in the traditional sense. They're often from like, the same families, prominent families. But the leaders are like, so, you don't tend to get like, super hierarchical by like, birth, like, governance structures in these mountainous

• 14:37Robert Evans?

  areas where it's just kind of, who's best at killing, right? Because if like, someone's shithead son tries to rule everybody, and they're not great at killing, they're gonna get killed.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  They're gonna get killed. We gotta bring that back.

• 14:48Robert Evans?

  We should bring that back. They had some things, right?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  We could, we could kill the nepo baby discourse once and for all, if we were just allowed to kill people.

• 14:57Robert Evans?

  The mountain Serbs have much to teach us about governance structures. I'm always saying this.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  So, so it's not like, an electoral system, and it's not, it's

• 15:06Robert Evans?

  It's certainly not electoral.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 15:09Robert Evans?

  Often by like, who, who will the most people like, follow into battle? Because like, they know you're not an idiot, you won't get them killed pointlessly, right?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's like, it's Instagram rules.

• 15:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Largest following.

• 15:21Robert Evans?

  It's Instagram rules, exactly. Yes, the Bosnia, Instagram is actually based off of the way the Montenegrin Serbs, you know, handle, handle politics in this period of time.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  My friend Mark is always telling me about that.

• 15:31Robert Evans?

  The birth of influencer culture. Um, and one of the, one of the families in kind of this air part, this like, part of modern day Montenegro, where there's all these clans, one of the families that produces a lot of dukes are the Karajics, right? The Karajics are like, this kind of, when I say family, it's almost more of like, a clan or a tribal group. And in around the 13th century, the Karajic families moved to a village called Pejka, and develop a reputation for producing an outsized number of these military leaders. In her pseudo-biography of Radovan Karajic, my war criminal, Jessica, and we'll talk about that title a little bit later, Jessica Stern interviewed several members of the Karajic clan to hunt down family lore behind Radovan. She was told many stories about

• 16:13Robert Evans?

  like, one of the most famous early members of the family, this, this duke named Sujo Karajic, who was a duke who assassinated the local Turkish leader, and had this epic poem written about like, him killing, assassinating this guy, right? The Balkans in general are big epic, it's a big epic poem place, right? There's a lot of oral traditions, particularly among like, the Serbs. Um, and that's how they tend to like, pass on stories. You make, you make a mixtape about a cool guy who like, does cool shit, right?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  You make, you know, you gotta, you gotta put that shit on wax. Sometimes you kill a guy so well, that your, your friend writes, writes an EP about it.

• 16:52Robert Evans?

  I, I am excited, after like, several rounds of nuclear war and stuff, for like, what the story of that guy who blasted Shinzo Abe becomes, like, a thousand years in the future, when people don't know what like, a 3D printed gun was, or whatever. Yes. Um, looking forward to what people say about that one. Uh, so, uh, the, the Karajic family, and Radovan as a kid, is gonna grow up being weaned on stories of like, his famous, you know, relative who was this great war leader. He was also told a lot about another one of his ancestors, Vuk Karajic, who was a writer and folklorist born in 1787. And Vuk is credited with helping to form and shape a lot of modern, the modern, he helps invent

• 17:33Robert Evans?

  Serbian grammar, to a significant extent. This is one of those languages where people have been speaking it for a while, but once we start like, writing books and publishing them, there's like, a couple dudes who figure out like, how are we gonna write stuff? Like, what are, what are the rules of our language? No one, no one sat down and decided that, really?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  That is like, such a great hack into getting your random story kind of like, codified into history, is if you can like, write something down that is actually desperately needed to preserve the culture, it doesn't even matter if the story's good.

• 18:05Robert Evans?

  Is a good story not important? What matters is that somebody wrote it down? Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  We figured out, flew perfect.

• 18:15Robert Evans?

  And he also writes, Vuk writes a collection of Balkan fairy tales that are some of the first Grimm stories, like Jacob Grimm takes a lot of the, is inspired to do a lot of the Grimm's fairy tales.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 18:27Robert Evans?

  If you think about a lot of really dark Grimm fairy tales, some of them are Serbian in origin.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  You know, you're so right.

• 18:35Robert Evans?

  Not a lot of happy stories told by the Serbs.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the Grims, the Grims lifted stuff like crazy. I just didn't know.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  From here specifically.

• 18:46Robert Evans?

  The ancestor of this weird genocide guy we're gonna be talking about this week.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  The Grimm was a little grim. It was, it was, it was right there. Sorry.

• 18:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that's very true, Sophie. So in the centuries to come, many Serbs would need the distraction of fairy tales, even dark ones, because their life was even darker, right? World War I, as you might remember, was kicked off by a Serb partisan in Sarajevo who shot the Archduke of Austria-Hungary. When the Central Powers invaded Serbia to get revenge, Serbia lost more than 265,000 soldiers in the war, which was a quarter of their mobilized army. And in comparison, France and Germany both lost, like, I think it, France loses like 16% of their mobilized army, Germany loses like 15%. And you know how horrible the casualties are for France and Germany in World War I? Serbia loses a quarter of their mobilized army, right?

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  So it's even worse. And between half a million and 800,000-ish civilians are also killed. Now, there has been, and still is, a great deal of debate over like, how many Serbs die in World War I? But in a 2021 paper for the University of Belgrade, Slobodan Markovic estimated that between 21 and 27.65% of the entire Serbian population dies in that war. It kills a quarter of all of the Serbs that exist, right? That's a pretty good estimate.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Lord.

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  That's not good. That's, that's pretty rough, right?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  No, no, that's putting up genocide numbers. That is, that is really scary.

• 20:14Robert Evans?

  And there's, there's genocidal elements to that war. And, yeah, so it's, it's, it's, it's pretty bleak. It's a dark time. And it's gotta get even darker, because on March 27th, 1941, pro-fascist elements within the, World War II starts, obviously, just as a little bit of a prelude, right?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 20:33Robert Evans?

  And kind of after World War I, you, because Austria-Hungary breaks up, you have the establishment, I think in the 20s, of Yugoslavia, right? That's when it becomes a thing. And it's independent for a while. And at the outbreak of World War I, Germany attempts to kind of co-opt the government of Yugoslavia. And, and there's pro-fascist elements within the government who's agreed to sign an armistice with Germany, right? So initially, it looks like Yugoslavia is gonna be kind of on the Axis side of things. Not as like a full member of the Axis, obviously, but it's like one of kind of their allied states. But then, per history.com, quote, "Yugoslav air officers aided by the British Secret Services toppled the country's pro-Axis regime. In response, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler launched a massive invasion of the country

• 21:16Robert Evans?

  that began on April 6th with the bombing of Belgrade. The Yugoslav defenders, made up of various politically unstable nationalities, were routed by the hordes of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops invading their country. On April 17, Yugoslavia surrendered and was divided, except for the puppet state of Croatia between the four invading Axis powers. The occupying troops aggravated the traditional religious and national differences in the region, and the Serbs were especially brutalized." And this is, things get so ugly in, in the Balkans and Serbia in particular during World War II. This might be the place that has like the ugliest war in world, all of World War II, in terms of like the actual crimes against the civilian population, right? That's hard

• 21:58Robert Evans?

  to say, right? Is it, if it's uglier than Poland, it's by like a fraction of a degree, right? They're both nightmares.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:06Robert Evans?

  But we don't, it's also that the degree to which what happens in the Balkans during World War II is horrific and not talked about is, is much more extreme.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  I was going to say.

• 22:14Robert Evans?

  Because everyone knows Poland.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yes, I was going to say that this is yet another sort of glaring gap in my American public schooling where.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  We do not talk about this.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely bashed over the head with World War II.

• 22:27Robert Evans?

  Absolutely don't.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And then entire regions are just completely ignored.

• 22:33Robert Evans?

  And there's an argument to be made. If you're talking about like what things are, are, are, are why the Germans lost the war, well, one possible argument is because Germany has to invade the Balkans, right? Yugoslavia is that, that, because that's one of the things that delays in Greece too, that delays them invading Russia, right? They have to push back until later in the year, Operation Barbarossa. And that, that is part of why Operation Barbar- I don't think it would have worked either way, right? But because they're later, that means they don't get as far before the winter hits, right? It's one of these things that delays Hitler, that he didn't want to do. He wanted to not have to invade. So it is really important to the overall progress of the war too. Now, there's a lot of ugly things going on in Yugoslavia during World War II.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  This is maybe an all-timer bleak start to the episode.

• 23:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it only, well.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Thank you for letting me have my George Bush moment earlier, I guess.

• 23:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I won't say it gets bleaker, but this is a Serbian story, so it stays at a pretty high level of bleak the entire time, right?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Thanks for the George Bush joke for me.

• 23:40Robert Evans?

  Now, the worst of all of the different bad actors, and there's a lot of them in World War II, was the fascist, in the Balkans, was the fascist independent state of Croatia. As I said, Croatia gets to be independent, because like the people in charge of Croatia are basically Nazis, right? They have a militant movement that winds up in charge over there and is active in other parts of the Balkans called the Ustashi. And they do, they're like, they're like the fucking Nazis with like a little bit of extra pep in their fucking step, right? Obviously, they're targeting Jews and Roma, and that's who they massacre first. And they, the massacre of, of Jews in Yugoslavia is like pretty nightmarishly, like extensive. But they don't stop there. Also, they're also massacring Serbs. As I

• 24:24Robert Evans?

  said, there's a genocide against the Serbs during World War II, or at least an attempted one. And the Bosniaks, these Bosnian Muslims are, they wind up on both sides, right? Because a, a big chunk, like the leadership of the independent state of Croatia sees the Bosnia, the Bosniak Muslims as Muslim Croats, right? So like, they're, they're, they're Muslim, but they're like part of, they're Aryan, right? And they're offered Aryan status. And a big chunk of like leaders within the Bosniak community kind of take up and work, agree to work alongside and fight alongside the independent state of Croatia. And particularly in some heavily Muslim areas like Bosnia, the Ustashi are something like 50% Muslim, right? Now, this has been twisted by racists in the present. And you'll hear claims that

• 25:07Robert Evans?

  the Ustashi were like 90% Muslim and that the Nazis in Yugoslavia were Muslim, they have these, you know, Muslim genocide in Yugoslavia, and that 90% of the Muslims fought alongside the Ustashi. This is all nonsense, right? The Ustashi are primarily clerical fascists, and they are Catholics, right? That is the primary religion behind the Ustashi, right? And the Ustashi do offer tolerance to Islam for a variety of complex reasons, but mostly out of military necessity. More to the point, the Ustashi also massacre Muslims, right? A, a lot of Muslims fight against them. A lot of Muslims get put in concentration camps and wiped out. I want to read a quote from an article for the Yasenovets concentration camp memorial, quote, "The first Muslims were imprisoned in Ustashi camps in 1941.

• 25:52Robert Evans?

  There are mostly communists or opponents of the Ustashi regime, who would have grown significantly in number. The first group of Muslims was deported to Camp 3, Brickworks, in mid-November 1941. The group consisted of 116 Jews and communists from the Sarajevo area, amongst whom there were 16 Muslims. Over the next few years, the number of imprisoned Muslims grew. They were communists and members of the People's Liberation Movement from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially from Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and parts of Bosnian Posavina and central Bosnia. Only a few managed to evade death." So they wipe out a lot of Muslims too. You know, it's, it's not a, it's not as simple as like, oh, the Ustashi, the Muslims fought for the Ustashi. A bunch of them fought against it, a bunch of them were genocided. But this is going to get twisted in kind of a lot of modern day right-wing historiography about the period.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. I mean, we're so invested in Islamophobia, people will take it wherever they can find it.

• 26:46Robert Evans?

  And there's, there's a lot of complicated reasons for why, like, a big chunk of Muslims thought the Ustashi were the people to back. And there's also other stuff. So, as I said, there's a lot of different horrible groups fighting in Yugoslavia in this period. One of the more 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 become known for their use of brutal insurgent and terrorist tactics, which they do use against the Ustashi, who had it coming, but also

• 27:28Robert Evans?

  against any Croats they could get their hands on. Bosniaks and Muslims and Herzegovina and elsewhere were also slaughtered. The nationalistic goals of the Chetniks set them against the Axis long-term, but they also fought alongside the Axis too, strategically supporting Nazi efforts, particularly when the Nazis wanted to wipe out a group of people that the Chetniks wanted, wanted slaughtered, right?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  This is a fucking nightmare.

• 27:52Robert Evans?

  It's horrible. It's horrible.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  This is a fucking nightmare. This is, because I mean, you just, you hear this many, this many horrible motivations, and you're just like, well, civilians are not going to be doing well in this atmosphere.

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  There's no civilians in this war.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  There's no, yeah. So it doesn't sound like, it's just, oh, God.

• 28:11Robert Evans?

  The other thing you'll get, so generally, as a rule, when you hear about like, German soldiers and like, their opinion on like where they were stationed during World War II, the worst place you can get is the East. You want to be anywhere but the East? German soldiers who wind up in the, in the Balkans are like asking to go east sometimes, because it's so bad. Because they're, "I will take my fucking chances with the Russians. Like, get me away from these people." Like, one of, one of the chief weapons that the Ustashi are using to like do their genocide is just this like glove with like a razor blade on the hand, that they just jab into people's necks, hundreds at a time. They just, "Throw them down in front of me, I'll cut their fucking necks with this hand knife thing."

• 28:53Robert Evans?

  Like, it's awful stuff. Like, I cannot exaggerate how fucking ugly the war in the Balkans is.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's pretty fucking horrible.

• 29:04Robert Evans?

  It's pretty bad.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Such a, such a simple device that would also, that also sounds like it would be, it would take so long to kill someone.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  It would take a lot of time to get through a lot of people doing it that way. But bullets are expensive, you know?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  But bullet, yeah, sure. And this you can just make at home.

• 29:21Robert Evans?

  Well, and that's, you know, the Nazis have that problem too. They're like, shooting a whole bunch of people is really bad for our troops. Their like, brains break after a while if they're just killing civilians with guns. And also, we don't have unlimited bullets. That's why like, gas chambers and shit become popular, part of why.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  I was gonna say.

• 29:36Robert Evans?

  The Ustasha are just like, what about hen knife?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  What if it was harder and we're like, that sounds like the quickest route to breaking your brain is having to like, kitchen glove knife someone repeatedly.

• 29:51Robert Evans?

  Nobody fighting for that particular group had a soul by the time the war started. They had already seen thousands of deaths.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  I, I, yeah, I guess it's like, that's not, you don't put that glove on for your first kill, I suppose.

• 30:05Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  God, that's gonna haunt me.

• 30:07Robert Evans?

  You don't start with the knife glove. Yeah, it's pretty haunting stuff. The Balkans. So the whole.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Well, you just made a T-shirt.

• 30:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And I, I love the Balkans. I've spent a lot of time, there's a wonderful part of the world, great food. Anytime you get a coffee, there's a cigarette with it. It's, it's, it's, it's great nowadays, but yeah, they've had a rough history. The whole ethnic and religious situation of, in the Balkans of World War II, and the details of everything that happened are way too complicated for me to cover in more depth during, what is the prelude to a completely different genocide? But there's a myth I do need to bust before we go on, because you will hear claims online that the Ustasha were so viable that even the SS were horrified by their actions, that they went too far for even the SS. And the idea that they went too far for the worst Nazis is very viral, and it's also untrue. Most of this rumor is due to the fact that one specific Nazi and Austrian named

• 31:00Robert Evans?

  Edmund Gleis Horstenau, uh, did attempt to halt the Ustasha's atrocities. He was like a German diplomat who was stationed there. And he sent a bunch of complaints to Berlin, and it were like, these guys are going a little bit off, a little bit out of pocket. But, and so, a Nazi was horrified, but like, Himmler wasn't, Hitler wasn't. Like, Berlin completely ignored his complaints. They were like, yeah, it's fine that they're, we don't give a shit. Like, we're the Nazis. And so you can find SS reports describing the bestial manner that the Ustasha used against, quote, helpless old people, women and children. But there's no evidence that like, Himmler himself, or anyone high up in the SS gave a shit. And you can also find, you can find similar individual SS men writing horror, about horrifying crimes other SS guys committed.

• 31:45Robert Evans?

  This is also true with Oscar Durlwanger. So it's not that the Ustasha were too horrible for the SS, it's that there's always some guys who are like, a little bit, like, softer.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like, of course there are Nazis who are also like,

• 32:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, this?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Cowardly and can, yeah, like.

• 32:03Robert Evans?

  I didn't, I didn't know we were doing this.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that is like, a piece of information that's designed to go dishonestly viral.

• 32:11Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly. Now, at most, what it is fair to say, as I pointed out, is that the, the brutal hand-to-hand nature with which a lot of the killing gets done in the Balkans does nauseate a lot of SS guys. But even Himmler got sick visiting Auschwitz, and that doesn't mean he wasn't okay with it, right? Anyway, back to the Balkans. So, world war, Balkan World War II history knowers will be livid at me not yet discussing in detail, and arguably the most important partisan militia of that period, which is the communists. And this is because our bastard Radovan Karajic's father, Vuko, fought for the Chetniks against the communists. So he's a member of this kind of right-wing Serbian militia that fights the Nazis sometimes, but also fights alongside the Nazis, especially when they want to kill communists.

• 32:56Robert Evans?

  And the primary people they hate are the communists, right? So, our bastard's dad may have fought the Nazis. I haven't seen any evidence of this. It's probably a lot more likely that he wanted to kill communists and Muslim Croats, right? So, after Yugoslavia fell to the Nazis, Josip Broz Tito formed a resistance group made up of members of the former, of the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia, right? There'd been a Communist Party in Yugoslavia that's illegal. And these guys are like, you know, probably mostly book nerds, as communists tended to be at the period. And Tito's just one of, he's, we'll do an episode on him at some point. He's one of the most interesting men who ever fucking lived. I could easily do a two-part Behind the Bastards on Tito, but I would also have to have Margaret

• 33:38Robert Evans?

  do a two-part episode of cool people who did cool stuff to accurately depict Tito's life. He's that kind of guy. Where it's like, yeah, he's, like, he was a dictator, but he was also pretty amazing.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  That's, that actually sounds like an incredible, uh, game of volleyball.

• 33:55Robert Evans?

  Well, we'll do it one of these days.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Nightmare.

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  For this week, we're not talking much about Tito. What we need to know about him is that he turns his former political party into a partisan army, strong enough that they win. Yugoslavia is the only nation that gets conquered by the Nazis and independently frees themselves. They don't have to be, now, obviously, they receive some assistance and stuff, but they don't have to be liberated. There's not foreign troops who have to free, they do it because they're that good. Like, Tito is very, very effective as a partisan leader.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Can I ask something, like, very, very tiny-brained question? Why, why do we not learn about this area of World War II? What is the, what is the function?

• 34:39Robert Evans?

  Way too complicated.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:40Robert Evans?

  None of this, and, and afterwards even, in like, the, the Cold War, Yugoslavia doesn't cleanly slot into any boxes, right? Because they were communists, so you'd think they cleanly, but also, Tito literally threatened to have Stalin murdered. After Stalin, Stalin kept sending assassins to kill Tito, because Tito wouldn't do what he wanted. And Tito eventually was like, if you keep sending it, you've, you've sent like, seven of these guys to kill me. I've killed them all. If you send any more, I'll send one man to kill you, and I won't have to send another. Like, this is at the height of Stalin. That's how, that's who Tito is. Tito doesn't give a fuck.

• 35:15Robert Evans?

  You know who would have hated ads? Probably Tito.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  I guess anyone in this, yeah, probably Tito.

• 35:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, probably most of the communists in this story, but certainly Tito.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely the communist.

• 35:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah. Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Tito would not buy this.

• 35:30Robert Evans?

  He probably wouldn't.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Make, make of that what you will.

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• 40:16Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Although, again, one of the complicated things about Yugoslavia is that there are some points where he's trying, they're trying to align themselves closer to the West. So again, they don't fit super cleanly into any of the boxes that in our very simple histories, we like to assign states to.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Okay. So we just don't learn about it because, because we would have to teach children that more than one thing can be true. I see. I see.

• 40:40Robert Evans?

  It, it's also, it's impossible to learn about Tito without being like, wow, that guy's kind of amazing. And you, you really don't want that with like a communist dictator during like the Cold War era.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  That's how a lot of, that's how I feel when a lot of people describe their fathers. So where you hear some, some real atrocities followed by like, man, but he was a great guy.

• 40:58Robert Evans?

  Taught me how to fish. Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Ruined my life, but.

• 41:02Robert Evans?

  I learned how to fish. And Tito, I mean, the thing about him is that after the war, he governs for decades Yugoslavia up until like 1980. He's running it from the end of World War II up to, I think, 1980 is when he dies. And this is the only period of time, pretty much, that like the Balkans is one united thing. And it's because Tito's very good at keeping this incredibly quarrelsome area together, right? He's going to ultimately be unsuccessful. He tries to create this sense of like Yugoslav nationality. As you might guess by the fact that there's no Yugoslavia today, it doesn't work out in the long run, right?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, that's enough backstory for us to finally turn to the actual subject of these episodes.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  God, that was a really brutal journey to the beginning of the episode. Kind of an all-timer. The last, ah, man, sometimes we get some fun ones. Sometimes there's a witch at the beginning.

• 41:58Robert Evans?

  Millions are already dead.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  This time, millions are dead. Okay.

• 42:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Radovan Karajic was born on June 19th, 1945, in Pejka, which is a tiny Montenegrin village that Wikipedia notes is, quote, inhabited exclusively by the Karajic families. So everyone's kind of related in this like larger family group in this small town.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:21Robert Evans?

  Maybe a few dozen people, right?

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Incest, question mark.

• 42:26Robert Evans?

  I don't, it's, it's not family quite in the same sense. Like, I think these are more like a tri, it's more like a tribal group. But like, yeah, they're all kind of related, definitely. There is going to be incest in this story. Yes, Sophie.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Like an improv group.

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  There's attempted incest in this story.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Not quite Targaryens. Got it.

• 42:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, and kind of, again, Radovan comes into the world right at the end of World War II, after about a million Yugoslavians die in the war. Mostly, like Serbs are the largest number of that. A lot of Serbs get killed in Yugoslavia. And a lot of Serbs get killed by Croats in particular. So there's going to be anger over like what was effectively a Serbian genocide that gets committed by these people who you're now countrymen with some of them, right?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 43:10Robert Evans?

  And that's just gonna simmer.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  That's, that, that has to be like categorically true, right? Like that there just was a, a massive genocide that it sounds like most of the world was just ignoring because it was World War II. Yeah.

• 43:24Robert Evans?

  There was a lot of genocides going around. The Balkans are complicated. None of it was easy to talk about. So yeah, Radovan comes into the world in 45, and his father, Vuko, who again had fought with the Chetniks, had been born in 1912, and he was not a nice man. An analysis of Radovan's life, published by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law, noted after the war that media accounts described Vuko as, quote, "a poor tramp and a tenderant journeyman with a history of incest and theft." And this is slightly incorrect, right? But the truth is actually a little worse. He didn't, he didn't, he, he aspired to incest. He never quite made it happen, right? Because he.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  I, I do think that's better. I do think that's better.

• 44:07Robert Evans?

  Well, you hear about what happens, Jamie. Maybe I should read this story to you first.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  What do we mean about failed incest guy? Okay.

• 44:16Robert Evans?

  He tries to marry his fifth cousin, right? Which is legal at the time. Anything further than like third cousins is legal. So it's not like illegal incest.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Anytime you need to pull out the law, it's like when you're talking to someone or like you're in an argument on Twitter and someone's like, actually, it's okay that I said that. And then they send you a picture of a map. You're like, no.

• 44:35Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yeah. Or they're making a strong point about age of consent law. Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Like, that wasn't creepy that I said that.

• 44:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you need a map, you're a pervert.

• 44:47Robert Evans?

  There's a couple different versions of the story of like what happens with, with Vuko and his fifth cousin. In the version told by his family, this, this cousin does not love him back. He's in love with her and they're both cowherds. So they spend like a lot of time together. And one day he tries to kiss her and she pushes him off. And the gun that he was carrying accidentally goes off and hits an artery in her leg. And he tries to, they're very specific. He tries to plug the wound with tobacco, which was apparently a folk remedy for cuts, but she bled out. You should not use tobacco as a folk remedy for an arterial wound.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, so he attempted incest and then killed her?

• 45:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He definitely killed her. The, the family version of the story is, yeah, there's two variants.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  It was an accident.

• 45:32Robert Evans?

  Let me go with the other first. The, the, the family version is, he loved her, she didn't love him back, and his gun just went off by accident as she's like pushing him away. There's a second version of the story. And in the family version of the story, the girl's family, after he kills her, the girl's family understands it's an accident. But because of his negligence, Vuko goes to prison for a year. Now Jessica Stern, the author of My War Criminal, does not totally buy this story and finds a contemporary news article about the killing. And this news article claimed that Vuko and Jella, who's his fifth cousin, were both in love, right? So it's different from the family story. But her parents wanted her to wait to marry him until he finished his compulsory military service. As Stern summarizes, quote, "Jella promised to marry Vuko, but in keeping with her parents'

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  wishes, insisted on delay. Vuko, on the other hand, wanted to get married immediately. One day, Jella asked Vuko to meet her at the top of the large hill above the village. Vuko went to meet his cousin, as requested. He brought a revolver, as well as the cows. He pressed once again for Jella to marry him. When Jella refused, he shot her. The bullet went through both of her thighs, damaging the blood vessels. She died soon afterwards due to the loss of blood. Vuko did not confess to the crime, but told the court that the shooting was accidental. He testified that his revolver had fallen out of his pocket as he was seating himself next to his cousin Jella. He said that Jella had asked him, "Why are you carrying that devil with you?" Then she grabbed the gun and threw it away from where they were sitting. Vuko testified that the gun hit a rock and accidentally discharged, fatally wounding Jella in the thigh. The court did not accept Vuko's version

• 47:01Robert Evans?

  of what transpired. The court had access to a letter." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course they don't. That's the most obvious lie.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  He's like, he's like creating like an, mm, what you say kind of scenario for what happened with the gun. Like, that's ridiculous. Stop, stop.

• 47:20Robert Evans?

  He's found with like a letter on his person.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  No, Robert, pause. That was the most impeccable reference I've ever heard. Oh, my god. If someone's dramatically shooting, I'm going. Oh, my god. If you didn't get that reference, message me on Blue Sky. I'll send you the video. Oh, my god, Jamie. Sorry, Robert. Sorry, Robert. That was amazing.

• 47:44Robert Evans?

  The court, the court actually has access to a letter that Vuko had in his bag when he gets taken into custody, in which he threatens to kill Jella and then himself if she doesn't marry him immediately. And it read in part, quote, "Dear Jella, if our marriage cannot be proclaimed, then thank you for burying both of us in the black ground." And Vuko was like, well, yeah, I wrote that letter, but it was to scare her into marrying me. I wouldn't have actually killed her.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  I like that he is.

• 48:09Robert Evans?

  The fact that I killed her was a clear accident.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  No matter what, no matter what, there is no doubt that he

• 48:16Robert Evans?

  Great. Perfect crime, man.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Shot her in the thigh and killed her.

• 48:19Robert Evans?

  Definitely shot her in the thigh and killed her.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  I, I like that there is no interpretation of the, it was like, okay, no, but so he definitely killed her, but it was actually an accident and he was just trying to trick her into marrying him. I, yeah, I guess, not that it doesn't matter which version of the story is true, but I'm gonna go with the least charitable one.

• 48:41Robert Evans?

  Killed her. Yeah, probably, probably not the nicest one.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  And it sounds like he's like, kind of, I mean, a shot to the thigh feels quite personal, I feel.

• 48:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Um, that is not giving an accident if you, if you have just rejected someone's advance.

• 48:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So again, not a great dude, no matter which version of the story is true. And Vuko gets released from his, from prison right at the start of the Axis invasion, right? That's what gets him out of being locked up. And that's when he joins the Chetniks. And then after the war, right after his son is born, the communists wind up victorious and he gets arrested and imprisoned for another year because he fought against the communists a bunch. Or another five years.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Who did he, who, who did he end up with after he killed his cousin for essentially rejecting him?

• 49:29Robert Evans?

  He has to marry, he has to, so everyone will know that the, the woman who becomes Radovan's mother, that who he eventually marries, is like illiterate and like comes from a poor family. And so he has to like, he has to go down a couple of steps. He was like, because of his social position that the Karajics had, he should have been able to marry somebody better, but he's not able to because he murders this woman, right?

• 49:48Speaker 01

  You know, she, I mean.

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  That's what people say.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  And, and so does, so does she. She has to marry a murderer.

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  She has to marry the murderer. Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:58Robert Evans?

  So she, he misses the first five years of his son Radovan's life, which is the happiest years of his son Radovan's life. He is, he's emphatic about the fact, the fact that, no, it was great before dad came back from prison. The communists did us a favor by taking him away. And so his earliest memories, when he's just with his mom, would have been a mix of heroic poems, because his mom sings a lot. They usually set their poems to music in this part of the world. So his mom's singing him a lot of poems about his valiant ancestors, fighting the Muslims and, you know, furiously whispered tales of communist violence against his family. He grows up knowing which oak trees in town had been used as backstops for the communists to execute his family members, right? These are the stories this kid grows up with. It's a very Serbian childhood.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  It's like, every boy knows.

• 50:45Robert Evans?

  Which trees your family members bled to death against? Yes.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Wow, my mother would sing it to me as we passed by.

• 50:52Robert Evans?

  Like, the family stories that they shoot his dad, too. They try to kill him once and he like blocks the bullet with his hand, so they just put him in prison instead.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  This is, this is hard.

• 51:03Robert Evans?

  It's a harsh, it's, yeah, some hard stories to grow up with.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:06Robert Evans?

  Uh, his mother, Jovanica, raises Radovan as an only child for five happy years while his dad is away. Now, she's a decade younger than her husband. She's also illiterate and Radovan later described her as a scrappy, energetic peasant girl. Quote, "She used to recite epic poetry for me every night. I learned many of these poems by heart before I learned to read." So for those first few years until his dad came home and started producing what would become four younger siblings, Radovan mostly remembers the songs of his mother and the natural beauty of the rugged landscape around their hometown. He grew up with an almost religious appreciation for the ancient oaks. There's this like, they're like, they, they form part of like the, the like religious ceremonies. I mean, they're Christian ceremonies, but in this region, like they are very, very focused on their oak trees, right?

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  It's like a big deal to these Montenegrin Serbs. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of like, both natural folk remedies and kind of like magic, like natural, like, or not, not natural, but like, um, like folk magic that he's also raised to believe in. This is an important part of his childhood and his upbringing, right?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Like the thing when you shoot your cousin in the crotch and then shove tobacco into the wound so that she doesn't die.

• 52:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's not all very effective folk medicine.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  It's not 100% effective, but what medicine is?

• 52:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, "His mother was peaceful and never used any corporal punishment on him or his other siblings." Uh, "He recalled later, 'In the first five years of my life, I was never beaten. I was never hit. My mother never kicked me.'" Now, his biographer, Jessica Stern, suggest, cause she's talking to him while he's in prison after he does the things that we're gonna talk about. And she came to him that he praised-

• 52:42Speaker 01

  She's Mrs. My War Criminal?

• 52:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She's a little weird. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's like, is it like when the journalist fell in love with Martin Shkreli?

• 52:54Robert Evans?

  Not quite, but she, I, we'll talk about this later. I don't wanna shit talk, cause I rely on her book a lot and she gets a lot of good details in there. She, she writes some stuff in there that I don't fully understand. I'll say that much.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  There's something about a horny journalist that-

• 53:11Robert Evans?

  Maybe a little, I don't know.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:14Robert Evans?

  It, it's more that she was impressed by his charisma. Um, let's say that.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Oh, come on, okay. First of all, dare I say Jamie Loftus, at times, a horny journalist. Oh, no, I mean, I'm, I, I'm interested to hear her point of view.

• 53:30Robert Evans?

  We've all been there. It's not horny, it's just like weirdly, uh, weird. I don't know how else to describe it.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  I'm excited to hear the weirdness.

• 53:40Robert Evans?

  On her, she's doing like energy healing and she clearly believes in that stuff, too. So she's like, I could feel his energy, like, it's weird. It's a weird biography.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Great.

• 53:49Robert Evans?

  I don't know how else to say it, guys.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Okay, they're, they're healing each other. Yeah, that's, okay, I'm excited to meet her. Okay.

• 53:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Well, she sounds trustworthy.

• 54:00Robert Evans?

  So, and, and she suggests that like, the reason he emphasizes that his mom never hits him is that his dad beats the shit out of him when he gets back, right? And for his part, Radovan more or less agrees. Quote, "My father was a strict disciplinarian, but he hit me less than he hit my siblings. I was afraid that my father was very harsh with the other children. My father did beat me, but he didn't beat me that much." Okay, I guess that's all you can ask for.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Okay, I do feel like a lot of Behind the Bastards episodes kind of start with this dynamic. This is, this is feeling familiar.

• 54:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, so he also grew up hearing poems from his father, who was a great guslar or a player of an indigenous, there's this indigenous Serbian instrument. Um, and he plays it a lot and he sings. And singing seems to have been one of the relatively few things that Vuko is both around his kids to do. And also, he's tolerable when he's singing. Radovan later recalled to Stern, "My friends and I once asked my late father how it was possible to know so many poems by heart. And my father said that if a singer forgets a line, he can substitute a new one. If this new line was better than the old one, other singers will continue to use the, to use the old one." And-

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 55:07Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, the, the, he's, this is, he's gonna learn a lot about like art from this. He becomes like a poet and a musician. And he's also, as, as, when he becomes a dictator, he gives all his speeches extemporaneously. So I think this has a big influence on him, right?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:21Robert Evans?

  From his parents-

• 55:22Speaker 01

  It's pretty potent to say like, "Well, if you don't know how it goes, just make it up and see what people say."

• 55:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:30Robert Evans?

  So, from his parents, Radovan would inherit a love of poetry and an appreciation for being able to make shit up on the spot. I haven't found a lot of detail about how he spent his childhood and adolescence. One BBC article summarizing interviews with his mother put it this way. "His mother described her son as loyal and a hard worker who used to help her in the home and in the fields. She said that he was a serious boy who was respectful towards the elderly and helped his school friends with their homework." So that's, you know, maybe. Uh, "The family left Pejka not long after Vuko gets out of prison and they move to another village, Savnik. When Radovan was 11, they leave for the big city, Nixik, which is the second city of Montenegro. But he never gets over the village that he's raised in and he would later complain to interviewers with vehement hatred

• 56:15Robert Evans?

  that the communists destroyed the ancient oak trees to build a highway. And he calls this blasphemy, right? So he takes that very seriously. He does not seem to have held any ire against the communists as a young man, though. And he's gonna join the Communist Party for years. This might be because he hated his father so much. It may have been a, "Well, my dad hates the communists, so I'm gonna like the communists for a while."

• 56:36Speaker 01

  I mean, that feels like a safe bet.

• 56:38Robert Evans?

  Many such cases.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:40Robert Evans?

  At age 15, he leaves on his own and moves to Sarajevo in nearby Bosnia. And everything in the Balkans is kinda near Bosnia, but still. Uh, Sarajevo is a strange choice for a man who would later become a violent Serbian ethno-nationalist. Belgrade, which is like the capital of, of Yugoslavia, is much larger and it's very Serb. Sarajevo, meanwhile, was and is a melting pot. If you've ever been there, it's a wonderful city. You can see the influence of Turkish and even Arab culture alongside Balkan and European influences. It's a lot like Istanbul, if you've ever been, right? And that it's the city that you can just see has been a crossroads for a bunch of civilizations for forever. It's a beautiful place. Uh, it's, I mean, and I can't know why Radovan went to Sarajevo.

• 57:25Robert Evans?

  He would only explain to his biographer, "Most Montenegrins would have gone to Belgrade to study," right? So he's like, "Most people would not have made the choice that I made." But he doesn't really explain why. Maybe it is because he's attracted to the cosmopolitanism of the city, right? He is initially a pretty cosmopolitan guy. He has a lot of Muslim friends when he's living in Sarajevo.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:43Robert Evans?

  Jessica Stern writes that when he starts college, he's largely seen as a country bumpkin, a bit like a southerner with a strong hillbilly accent who like moves to NYU or something to go to college.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Who knows, who knows all of his local trees type of guy, yeah.

• 57:57Robert Evans?

  Right, all great at trees. Uh, "One of his friends tries to get him to change his hillbilly haircut when he moves to Sarajevo, but he refuses despite seeming odd. And despite the fact that he's like a weirdo, he's very charismatic. And so he becomes a popular guy in short order, just as his intelligence makes him a good student. He's going to opt to go to medical school in order to become a psychiatrist. And while he studied, he marries a peer medical student named Liliana Zelen in 1967. They had their daughter that year and a son a couple of years later. And unlike Radovan's family, Liliana's has money. She comes from like an upper class family. Uh, she describes her husband as a poetic soul." That's why you go to Sarajevo. Marry a rich girl, yeah.

• 58:44Robert Evans?

  Now, per that American Academy of Psychiatry Law article, others described Radovan differently. Other accounts note his penchant for drinking, gambling and spending thousands of dollars over the years in casinos. So he's got a wild side, too, right? Uh, he's not all good students.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Not to excuse it, but like, he's, he's still in college right now-ish age? Okay.

• 59:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's in college, medical school, right? You know, it's like teens to early twenties.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Casino behaviors we can, we can excuse.

• 59:10Robert Evans?

  Casino behavior.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:11Robert Evans?

  So when he's like 23 in 1968, he's, and he's, he's become the president of the school Communist Party by 1968, right? And that's the year that he starts activism, right? He becomes a student activist and he, he helps to organize. There's like a series of protests that culminates in this like big day-long strike, right? Of students at the school. Now, everyone protesting are still communists. This is Yugoslavia. So they're, they're protesting the communist government by carrying pictures of Che Guevara with them. Because like, that's just, I guess, a universal protest thing, even if you're a communist?

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Wow. Okay. Potent. Interesting.

• 59:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He later explained this by saying that the protesters considered the fight against their local elites to be part of the global struggle against capitalism, even though their elites were communists. I don't, I don't know what they thought at the time. I didn't grow up in Yugoslavia. That's what he says later, but he is a liar. So maybe that's not how everyone felt.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  It's so, it's so, yeah, especially in a, I know so little about Yugoslavia that I'm like, you could tell me anything and I would have to take you at your word.

• 1:00:17Robert Evans?

  Maybe Radovan.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  And he's, yeah, he's taking advantage of it.

• 1:00:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It is very weird, though, that as a medical student, he's the leader of these protests because he's the only medical student who participates. Most medical students are from privileged backgrounds and rarely become dissidents. So he is kind of unique. And he's also, his style changes during this time. He's said to dress in flower children get up and wear groovy outfits. So he's dressing like a, he's dressing like the, like a communist impression of a stereotypical hippie, right? Like you have to assume they don't have access to the same clothes. It's like shitty or tie dye or something. I don't know.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Walking around like a Gary Larson character. That's so interesting. Okay.

• 1:00:57Robert Evans?

  It must've looked fascinating. Um, yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Especially for a medical student. Yeah. It's like, yeah, like whatever. All right.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Long hair weirdo hippie. During the main day of the protest, he climbs onto the roof of the faculty building to give what will be the first of many political speeches. Now, this is also the year that he becomes a published poet for the first time, and he fights with his publisher to ensure that his first book of poems gets published in Akavian, which is a Serb dialect common in rural areas, as opposed to the Bosnian dialect of the language that was much more common for literary works. Stern sees this as an early example of the fact that this guy has ethno-nationalist leanings. And he does note that during this period, Radovan's activism has plugged him in with the Serbian elite in Bosnia. He would later say, "They were all dissidents working in opposition to the regime." Now, it's noteworthy

• 1:01:49Robert Evans?

  that he specified they're part of the Serbian elite because the Yugoslav elite at the time were not dissidents. They're communists, right? That's what makes them their elite. The elite in a communist country are not anti-communists, right? So when he says, I was like, when he's talking about the Serbian elite, he's not talking, he's talking about the ethno-nationalist elite, like among kind of the people who want independent Serbia. Those are the people he's talking about, right? Because Tito, the guy who's the dictator, had been born a Croat, but he really emphasizes that he's Yugoslav and he tries to build a Yugoslav identity. And some people buy that and some people don't. And you get the feeling

• 1:02:29Robert Evans?

  that even when he's with the Communist Party for a while, Radovan is never like a Yugoslav identity guy, right? He's always kind of a little bit on the ethno-nationalist side of things. And he resigns from the Communist Party after these protests, right? Um, so that's, you know, it's a, it makes sense.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  It does. It does. And it also feels very like, I don't know. First of all, a lot of intent for someone of his age. And also just like, I've, what is, what is his, what is the vision at this point? I mean, it's, it seems like he's-

• 1:03:06Robert Evans?

  I don't know that he has a vision.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Robert Evans?

  I think he's, he's just, he's got some inclinations towards Serbian ethno-nationalism, right? That are not fully formed yet. And I wouldn't want people to think that like he's, he's fully the guy he's gonna be, but you can see he's on that path a little bit even now. And you know what path you're on right now?

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• 1:03:29Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right, baby.

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• 1:03:33Robert Evans?

  That's right.

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• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yay.

• 1:08:17Robert Evans?

  So, yeah. Uh, it turns out later, you know, I've just been talking about how maybe he was like sympathetic to Serbian nationalist aims at this period and started to be anti-communist. A lot of people would disagree with that because interviews later, a bunch of his friends who had been part of this activist campaign with him, immediately after it ends, comes to suspect that he'd been an informer for the regime and had been reporting on their activities to the police. This seems like it could be likely because not long after this, this supposed dissident, this guy who would like led a protest campaign, is granted permission by the government to move to the United States and live in New York City, where he attends Columbia University from 1974 to 75. So yeah, maybe he did the government a solid.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Columbia has no history with feds? That's, that's so funny. Okay. That actually, that makes so, I feel silly now. Oh, he was dressing like a cartoon hippie? Oh, he was getting on the roof and acting weird?

• 1:09:17Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Okay. He was a fed. Okay.

• 1:09:22Robert Evans?

  So he's, he studies poetry at Columbia, which is weird because he'd been in medical school, right? And he's gonna finish his, his medical degree later, but he's studying poetry while he's at Columbia. Uh, this is basically like a hiatus period for him, which suggests that maybe he had some doubts. Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Still the 60s? Are we in the 70s now?

• 1:09:42Robert Evans?

  This is the 70s. 74 to 75 is when he's in Columbia.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  That's another, that's another suspicious move. Poetry majors do not like when a science expat, you know, wanders into their midst.

• 1:09:53Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Stay in your fucking lane.

• 1:09:56Robert Evans?

  And we do get very different opinions on the quality of his poetry, depending on who we ask. Sometimes the same person will say like, oh, he was good. And they're like, nah, he was shitty. I can't judge his poetry. So I'm not gonna try, right? He does, a lot of people do say he was like, just kind of like a nickel and dime poet. Like he was, he was, he was writing like not high, high art. One of his most noteworthy pieces, though, is a 1971 poem titled Sarajevo, which despite being set 21 years before the war, seems to describe the horror that Radovan himself would bring on his former home. Here's a selection of the, of the poem. "The city lies ablaze like a rough lump of incense, where in the haze of our awareness twists, the city implodes in that latent emptiness. A stone's crimson death bespeaks

• 1:10:40Robert Evans?

  the house's blood-soaked tide. Plague tranquility." Again, this is the guy who's going to order the shalag of Sarajevo for three years. So it's weird that he wrote that 20 something years beforehand?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:10:52Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah. It'd be like if George Bush had written in 1970, like a short story about invading Iraq and it not going well. Or painted it, I guess.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Like, alright, you know, I guess I'll just put this in the back drawer.

• 1:11:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  See how it fits with me. I will, I will say very beside the point, but you know what? That was mid. That was a mid, that was a mid poem, I think.

• 1:11:15Robert Evans?

  I assume it rhymes better in, in, in Serb.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  I'm sure, but you know. So, you know, the, the civil, the, the use of language is a little obvious, you know?

• 1:11:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe a little. So while living in the US, Radovan was a loud and vocal supporter of Tito. Although this may be due to the fact that he had minders regularly checking in and spying on him. His roommate during this period was Barry Farber, who himself grew up to become an influential right wing radio talk show host in the 1990s. It's just kinda weird that they lived together.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  I, I feel like anytime you learn about.

• 1:11:49Robert Evans?

  Limbach contemporary?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Name two men who were roommates in New York and you get like the most, the scariest story you've ever heard. You get like, or I mean, just two people. That's how you get like Barry Weiss and Kate McKinnon. You're like, what the fuck are you talking about? You shouldn't be in the same room.

• 1:12:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, he later, Barry later recalled this of Radovan. "I should have seen that Radovan would not remain just a poet. He was much too smart and forceful a character. I could see him running a country. He was formidable. He looked the part." And while I don't have a picture of him from the mid 70s, here's how he looked almost a decade later. These are obviously mug shots. He's gonna get arrested. We'll talk about why a little later. But, okay, look at that hair. Look at that hair. Amazing.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 1:12:36Robert Evans?

  He looks, he looks incredible his entire life. He's an amazing looking man.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  The hair is hair.

• 1:12:42Robert Evans?

  Describe, it's like a, it's like a gray pompadour. It's insane.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  It is. And like, you can tell that it kind of just falls that way, which I resent.

• 1:12:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  You know, it's a lot of us need to do a lot of work to just get it to fall vague. Oh, that's.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, he's giving like 2019 Harry Styles here.

• 1:13:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, sure, Sophie.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  I was gonna, I was gonna say like.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Not in the face, but the hair and the suit. Not in the face, but the hair and the suit. And I agree with Antonio Banderas. Yes, I see that as well.

• 1:13:17Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Anyways.

• 1:13:18Robert Evans?

  I always agree with Antonio Banderas.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Look, I'm not gonna speak against Harry Styles' hairline today, cuz I mean, I'm, I'm not seeing a hairline struggle from, from our past.

• 1:13:27Robert Evans?

  There you go.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. Harry has a manual, Harry got, Harry got, Harry got the hair transplant situation. He's open about it.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  The plugs?

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  He got the plugs. He taught, he's open about it. Anyways, bye, Harry.

• 1:13:39Robert Evans?

  So, the differing accounts of Radovan make sense when you learn that he'd, he's been described as a social comedian, or as a social chameleon later, right? He's a guy who's really good at blending. He's good at being whoever he needs to be in the room that he's in, right? If he wants you to like him, you'll like him. Historian Robert Donia, who testified at his trial and was cross-examined by Radovan, noted, "He knew exactly what to say. A different story for everyone with perfect knowledge of what people wanted to hear." After returning home, Karajic began to work as a psychiatrist. His mentor, Dr. Sarek, noted that he was not a very good psychiatrist due to the fact that he's not interested in anyone but himself. He does not care about people. Like.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's, I also, just going back to that other comment, that there's a world where Karajic is like in court and he's like, "Your honor, I'm a people pleaser. I don't know what to tell you."

• 1:14:32Robert Evans?

  I'm just good at being liked.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  I give the people what they want. Yeah, of course, he's a terrible psychiatrist. I guess that's, that stands to reason.

• 1:14:40Robert Evans?

  That scans, it'd be weird if he was good at it.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  I mean, most psychiatrists are bad psychiatrists in my experience, you know?

• 1:14:48Robert Evans?

  True of most people in most jobs.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Throw a pill bottle at your head and tell you to fuck off.

• 1:14:53Robert Evans?

  I wish. I have, I have the opposite. Anyway, uh, Radovan was very popular and good at charming his colleagues, but he was also lazy. Quote, "He tried to find the easy way for everything." Dr. Sarek described him also as having a thousand faces. So again, he's, he's a liar, he's a charmer, and he's lazy. Radovan spoke highly of his mentor, though, which, which is weird because his mentor is a Muslim man, right? And several people who have noted that during this time, many, most of the people in his social circle in Sarajevo are Muslims. He does not have any visible or obvious bias against Muslims. Again, he's going to do a genocide against Bosnics, but he doesn't seem to have an issue with them socially.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  This is, okay.

• 1:15:37Robert Evans?

  Cause like with Hitler, you can find like, yeah, there was like one Jewish guy he was nice to in his life. But like with Radovan, it's like, no, like, most of his friends were Muslim. It's kinda weird that he did a genocide.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I'm really, I'm really, I mean, the, finding out he was, he was a fed for a period of time so far is the thing that it makes the most sense to me about this guy. Everything else is fairly baffling so far.

• 1:15:57Robert Evans?

  He's, he's, he's a complicated man, that's for sure.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  He's had like 12 different professions before the age of 25. He's basically on good terms with people he will later genocide. Like, what?

• 1:16:11Robert Evans?

  What?

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 1:16:13Robert Evans?

  Uh, he spent nearly a decade, uh, 70s to the 80s, uh, working and living a fairly normal life. No, no. Jamie, you're not ready for where this man's hair is in part two. I'm gonna say that right now. You are not ready. I cannot prepare you.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  I'm just not seeing the, the source of, of, okay, yeah. Usually I feel like we have, we have the source of anger by college.

• 1:16:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. He's, he's a little hard to understand, I'll be honest. So he spends a decade or so working as like a psychiatrist. He's like a successful, upper middle class guy based, I mean, I don't know that those terms are super useful for Sarajevo, but he's doing well, right? Perhaps his greatest professional achievement was that he somehow gets hired as the team psychologist for Red Star, Yugoslavia's premier football team. Uh, per the book My War Criminal, quote, "Karajic instructed team members to lie down together in a darkened room and imagine themselves to be bumblebees flying from flower to flower. The captain recalled the players' responses. Someone was sleeping, someone snoring, someone else was farting, and someone cursing about bumblebees. The whole bumblebee thing was a huge joke to us.

• 1:17:21Robert Evans?

  For the Red Star position, he moved to Belgrade, leaving his family behind for a year in 1983. Karajic was as boastful about his skill as team psychologist as he was about everything else. One of his friends recalled that if the team scored a point, Karajic felt that the point was due to his psycho-training of the players. He said he could make Red Star the best team in the world."

• 1:17:41Robert Evans?

  Everyone knows the most important part of a good football team is the psychiatry.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  He's like, guys, guys, guys.

• 1:17:47Robert Evans?

  During the World Cup, we were all competing psychiatrists.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  They would, we would not be in the semis without the bee thing.

• 1:17:56Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:17:58Robert Evans?

  It's wild stuff.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  So bizarre.

• 1:18:00Robert Evans?

  He's a little bit of an egomaniac.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I guess it's like, I mean, he does chase attention.

• 1:18:06Robert Evans?

  He's a narcissist. Like, like, pretty much, anyway, you know, not a lot of like humble, self-effacing men become dictators. Like, I'm sure even Tito was on that spectrum, but again, one of the things Tito is known for is he's like really good at like delegating and knowing his strengths from his weaknesses, actually, which is very rare for a dictator. Usually a problem for them. Yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Right. He's a dictator unicorn.

• 1:18:28Robert Evans?

  Like, I'll say this about Tito. If you were gonna have a dictator in Eastern Europe in the post-war period, you'd want it to be Tito. There's no one else you would have wanted it to be. You'd want it to have been, if you had to pick a dictator.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  I think I just, I just have to take your word for that.

• 1:18:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I'm taking the word of all of the Yugoslavian people, former Yugoslav people that I met, who were like, "No, Tito, actually, we kinda miss him. It was, it was a lot better in some ways."

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Say what you will about Tito.

• 1:18:57Robert Evans?

  Say what you will about Tito, but we weren't all killing each other when he was in charge.

• 1:19:04Robert Evans?

  In 1984, Karajic is arrested, and he's convicted the next year of fraud and misuse of public funds. He spends 11 months in prison, like his dad did for murdering that lady. Uh, Radovan would later call himself.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Why does he have pub, why does he have public funds?

• 1:19:20Robert Evans?

  Well, he's, because, I mean, the soccer team is a public team, I think, right? Like, it's a communist state. Like, the team is not, there's not like a billionaire that owns Red Star, right? That, they're communist.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  I forgot that, that, yeah, that not just like some ugly guy would own the team.

• 1:19:35Robert Evans?

  No, no, it wasn't just some billionaire fucking hedge fund asshole. It was, I mean, I'm sure it was some asshole.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Cube-headed guy who's 26 but looks 70.

• 1:19:44Robert Evans?

  They hired him to be the team psychiatrist, so he couldn't have been that good, whoever the owner was. Radovan would later say that this arrest was a, he was a political prisoner, right? And that he was abused by the Muslim secret police, who definitely did not exist in Yugoslavia in this time. It was not the Muslim secret police who took him into custody. It's because he was horribly corrupt.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  So this is him revising it later, or he is now?

• 1:20:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:20:10Robert Evans?

  This is later. This is later, that he would blame it on that, right?

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, he just stole money from his, from his bumblebees.

• 1:20:17Robert Evans?

  Right, right. He stole money from his bumblebees. That journal write-up notes that he claimed he, quote, "emerged psychically strengthened following the experience." It further notes, "Allegations have been made of Karajic's corruptibility of his selling fake prescriptions and providing false medical diagnoses to help people collect insurance or pension benefits."

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Again, this just sounds, many such psychiatrists.

• 1:20:38Robert Evans?

  Maybe that's why. Yeah. Maybe it was more that than the Muslim secret police.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Anytime you hear that someone, uh, came out of tax jail feeling psychically strengthened, it's like, I don't, I don't know.

• 1:20:51Robert Evans?

  Uh, I mean Wesley Snipes.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  That's, that, that's, I mean, it's like, and then you have, you have your Martha Stewart's, the bracelet comes off and all of a sudden she's like, she's more powerful than ever.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  And Shakira, Shakira, tax fraud.

• 1:21:04Robert Evans?

  I just, and if we had to have one of our tax fraud celebrities be a dictator, I think I would pick Wesley Snipes over Martha Stewart.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  Snipes, Snipes over Stewart, for sure.

• 1:21:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I'd pick Wesley Snipes over the current president, to be honest. I'd pick Wesley Snipes over any president, because you know what none of our presidents have been in? Blade. That's true. Look it up.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  And that is-

• 1:21:32Robert Evans?

  That's a fact.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  And we can't know what a Blade president would be until we have one.

• 1:21:36Robert Evans?

  Although, I think Barack Obama might have, might have been okay. I don't know. He never had a chance. You can tell he really wished he'd been an actor and not the president. That's why he's making movies now, is that ever-

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Well-

• 1:21:47Robert Evans?

  And everyone who gets into politics wishes they'd succeeded in Hollywood.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  That's basically every president from the past, like, forty years.

• 1:21:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Ronald's the only one who did it the other way.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  He's not alone, yeah.

• 1:21:57Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. It would have been really funny to watch Joe Biden play Blade. I would watch Joe Biden as Blade. I mean, I'd watch Trump as Blade, to be honest. I don't think it would be as good, but I would watch it.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Wait, Biden as Blade is really disgusting to think about.

• 1:22:12Robert Evans?

  It's just a shot-for-shot remake of Blade with Joe Biden.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  That's really, that's really horrible to think about. I mean, you could say, you know, Obama's kind of doing a bit of a reverse Reagan in some ways, right? He's kind of going into entertainment after.

• 1:22:27Robert Evans?

  He's going into entertainment after. I do wish we'd gotten to see Joe Biden and, uh, Chris Christopherson opposite each other, you know? Two men who's, who's, I could just imagine magnetic personal charisma next to each other. Oh, God, if only that movie had happened.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Talking in nonsense words to each other, God.

• 1:22:47Robert Evans?

  Just gibberish at each other. Yeah, just old man speak.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Is Joe Biden alive?

• 1:22:53Robert Evans?

  The smell of beefy roast thick in the air. Chris Christopherson's dead, unfortunately. We, we lost Chris and we kept Joe Biden. I don't know why. Um, so he emerged from prison in the late 1980s, not Joe Biden, Radovan Karadzic. That would have been, again, weird if Joe Biden had spent prison in the eighties in Yugoslavia. Uh, he emerged from prison in the late 1980s to a Yugoslavia that was in the slow process of collapse. As I said, Tito died in 1980, so before he gets arrested, actually. Tito, Tito is dead. And the government continues limping on for a while after him, but Tito's force of personality had held the entire Balkans together for pretty much the only time that happened. And with his death, kind of these nationalist differences that had been really prominent

• 1:23:35Robert Evans?

  in, in and after World War II start to reassert themselves. They've been kind of buried during the Tito years. And then the, the years after his death, it becomes obvious to any intelligent observer, communism's not gonna last forever, and Yugoslavia is not gonna be one state forever, right? In 1974, late in Tito's life, they had changed the constitution to give each of these independent, not independent, there's these semi-autonomous states that make up Yugoslavia, like Bosnia and Serbia, they had the right to, like, secede if there was a, if enough people wanted to leave. So like, if Croatia wants to leave, they could potentially. And so, once Tito dies, it becomes obvious, that's gonna happen at some point. And as this sort of, and you have in the USSR, Glasnost and Perestroika, around the same

• 1:24:20Robert Evans?

  time, the Soviet Union's also loosening stuff, politics starts to come to Yugoslavia in a way that it just hadn't existed there for a while. And a lot of people start looking at what's gonna happen next. And Radovan Karadzic is one of these guys, and he starts increasingly thinking about politics, envisioning a future for himself that's very different than his checkered past, a future in which he would hold the kind of power he always felt he deserved. And we'll talk about that in part two. But Jamie, why don't you plug your new novel, The Tower, which I just plugged, but you can plug it.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  I, I'm gonna, I'll do it again. Why the hell not?

• 1:24:56Robert Evans?

  Sure. Yeah, I can't stop you, and I won't.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  You can preorder The Tower now. Again, it's, it's about, uh, a woman having, uh, making beautiful love to her beautiful building.

• 1:25:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  Um, and it, it comes out in June, and also, uh, the Battle Cast is on tour, uh, in the East Coast.

• 1:25:16Robert Evans?

  Damn right it is.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Throughout the fall. So if you live, um, in the Northeast, we're going basically everywhere, so come out and see us.

• 1:25:24Robert Evans?

  Everywhere. That's the only part of the country, the Northeast.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  And especially Baltimore. Baltimore extra.

• 1:25:29Robert Evans?

  Baltimore, the Serbia of the United States?

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:25:33Robert Evans?

  Almost certainly not.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:25:35Robert Evans?

  But maybe.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Wow, what an interesting thing to just throw in.

• 1:25:37Robert Evans?

  Did you say that?

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Baltimore, weigh in.

• 1:25:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, Baltimore.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Come to the show and I'll say it to your face. That's the episode, motherfuckers.

• 1:25:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, watch a Serbian film. Don't watch a Serbian film. Actually, do it, it's pretty good, but it's, it's pretty messed up. Anyway, good night.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:26:32Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:26:47Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:26:53Speaker 05

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 1:27:10Speaker 07

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But someone will find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and they said, maybe she'll find

• 1:27:31Speaker 06

  out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded her a bow. Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:27:54Speaker 05

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life, until the messages started. Someone's not gonna make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal, Season Six, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  From shocking betrayals to carefully planned murders, The Black Effect's new original podcast series, Bloodline Crimes, hosted by me, Morgan Wood, explores the darkest and bizarre cases where family became the most dangerous threat of all. Listen to The Black Effect's Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8th, from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  Detective said he had stalked her before she died. Years later, they said he remained the person they continued to focus on. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told, and to the questions that still remain. Listen to Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast, from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:29:25Speaker 04

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research, until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers now, only at blockers.fm. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed.

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  There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras.

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  It's raw.

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  And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

• 1:30:18Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.