Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History (Eastern European Studies , No 2)

by David Riesman, Philip J. Cohen

Release Date: February, 1997

Edition: Paperback

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Interesting facts, not always completely objective

The author conducted a great deal of meticulous research to shed light on an under-researched area: Serbian anti-Semitism and Nazi collaboration. As such, "Serbia's Secret War" provides a wealth of information both to the general reader and more serious students of the former Yugoslavia. However, just the fact that this book appeared in the 1990s in the wake of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia makes it seem like a contribution to the propaganda war among the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians and their various sympathizers abroad. Often this propaganda has involved diatribes about the various atrocities committed by members of one or more of these nations during World War II, which is then projected onto the current situation. To his credit, Cohen does try to avoid such polemics, but his very treatment of the interwar and W.W.II period in Yugoslavia sometimes falls prey to a certain bias. Thus, there are some sections of the book which seem to take a very heavy-handed view of Serbian complicity for crimes against Jews and others during the Second World War, while downplaying (but by no means denying) those committed by the Croats. Even so, this book is worth reading, and particular attention should be paid to the writer's sources, because the most revealing and essential aspect of Cohen's text is the fact that far from being free of anti-Semitism (which Serbian propagandists often claim), Serbia was just as susceptible to this form of racism as any other Central and Southeast European people.

Interesting, but very biased

This is an interesting book on a subject where not a lot is written. The problem, however, is that it feels too much like a propaganda text aiming to discredit serbs realtive to other nationalities in Yugoslavia.

I have no way of knowing whether the facts in this book are correct or selective, but can't get away from the feeling that it has been written to cover up or at least decrease the magnitude of Croatian crimes during WWII.