It is absolutely astounding that in 2015 people in the Balkans are still reading history books written by Soviet Russian controlled stooges. According to whom, of course, the Russians won the war single handed. What a joke. First they stabbed the Poles and the west in the back to get some territory, then they had to beg for war materiel from the west, including food, because their collectivization was a total failure, and their "strategy" was to let the Germans burn and destroy half the country while waiting for the winter to come to their rescue. Oh, they also threw unnumbered thousands and hundreds of thousands of unarmed people at German tanks and guns. About the only intelligent thing they did was cut the German supply lines, but then the Germans wreaked so much havoc on the initially welcoming local populations that even the Soviets seemed better by comparison, so they were willing to help.
The poor Russians...led by an insane thug who had terrified the entire officer corps, the factory directors, even the Party intelligentsia itself, virtually anyone who could actually have contributed, into a state of total idiocy.
When does perceived (not even "real") "ethnic loyalty" give way to common sense? I know that the Italian leaders of the time were idiots, from the Pope and the King on down. "Ethnic loyalty" isn't going to stop me or Italians in general from exercising reason and common sense.
Someone wondered about the effect of the "Iron Curtain". This is it: some die hard totally brainwashed, uninformed people fifty years behind the rest of Europe. Is it any surprise they were committing genocide only twenty-five years ago?
I'd recommend some textbooks and first hand accounts of the thirties in Europe, including the disastrous purges conducted by Stalin, and then of World War II itself, but it's useless; they won't read them.
