0:04 [SPEAKER_01]: When they poured across the border, I was cautioned to surrender, this I could not do. 0:17 [SPEAKER_01]: I took my gun and managed. 0:23 [SPEAKER_00]: That was the well known song, The Partisan, by the great Bernard Cohen. 0:29 [SPEAKER_00]: partisan is a dirty word. 0:31 [SPEAKER_00]: We think of political spin artists who defend their parties at all costs and filter the facts through their agendas. 0:39 [SPEAKER_00]: So-called partisan politics are tearing the country apart. 0:44 [SPEAKER_00]: But Cohen singing about a different kind of partisan, a member of an unofficial guerrilla combat unit. 0:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, he singing about the parliamentary heroes of the Second World War. 0:59 [SPEAKER_00]: systematically hunted and executed following the surrender of their home countries. 1:05 [SPEAKER_00]: When the French government capitulated in June of 1940, for example, many French soldiers and citizens refused to give up. 1:15 [SPEAKER_00]: They created unofficial or paramilitary, fighting units that terrorized the invading Germans. 1:21 [SPEAKER_00]: They bombed depots, destroyed telegraph wires, and railroad tracks, assassinated officers, and so on. 1:30 [SPEAKER_00]: The resistance was a dark, dirty underground war. 1:33 [SPEAKER_00]: and when a partisan was captured, he or she was tortured for information and then publicly executed as a warning to other conspirators. 1:44 [SPEAKER_00]: But you knew this going in. 1:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Get captured, you die. 1:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Your fellow partisan gives you up, you die. 1:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Go into battle against modern industrial armies, you die. 1:56 [SPEAKER_00]: You expected to die in one horrible way or another. 2:02 [SPEAKER_00]: But instead of slowing down the resistance, torture and executions, led more people to join. 2:09 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1942 the Nazis executed a partisan commander, named Stefan Philopovic, by hanging. 2:16 [SPEAKER_00]: There's a photo of him from the gallows, with a new surround his neck, and his arms outstretched, as if he had just won an award. 2:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Look it up, he looks calm, but his fists are bald up and defiant. 2:31 [SPEAKER_00]: You can see him shouting his last words, death too fascism. 2:36 [SPEAKER_00]: freedom to the people. 2:38 [SPEAKER_00]: By 1944, two years later, the Yugoslavia and resistance had grown to include 650,000 men and women organized into 52 separate divisions. 2:51 [SPEAKER_00]: By 1945, that number had risen to 800,000, and many refused to be captured. 2:57 [SPEAKER_00]: There were some divisions where every soldier carried an extra grenade for the sole purpose of blowing up their own faces, so their bodies could not be identified. 3:08 [SPEAKER_00]: If they were identified, their families would pay the price. 3:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The lyrics to the partisan are actually written by the French resistance fighter, Emmanuel, Della, Vigree, who also fought the Nazis following the collapse of his government during the Second World War. 3:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Every time I hear that song, I think of the image of Stefan Philopovic standing defiantly in the Gallows, and also of one of his Yugoslavia compatriots, a 17-year-old girl named Leparatic. 3:42 [SPEAKER_00]: By the end of 1942, Nazi forces had steam-rolled huge portions of Europe. 3:49 [SPEAKER_00]: beginning with Poland in 1939. 3:52 [SPEAKER_00]: The Germans moved quickly and decisively in a series of lightning-fast invasions. 3:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Next were Denmark and Norway, who surrendered to the following spring, April of 1940. 4:03 [SPEAKER_00]: The Netherlands, like someberg and France followed in May. 4:07 [SPEAKER_00]: After which the Nazis just kept going. 4:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Soon the continent was known as fortress Europe, a near wall to wall-fascist occupation. 4:17 [SPEAKER_00]: from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea. 4:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Under this occupation, three resistance armies stood out above the rest, the French, the Polish, and the Yugoslavia. 4:30 [SPEAKER_00]: More than saboteurs, the resistance in these countries was like a gigantic, well organized street gang, capable of meeting the Nazis in open battle. 4:41 [SPEAKER_00]: especially in Poland and Yugoslavia, the resistance grew huge numbers of Nazi troops and supplies away from the British and American armies in the western front. 4:52 [SPEAKER_00]: When Germany invaded Yugoslavia in early April 1941, a familiar thing happened, the country split into factions as many sided with fascism, the Chetnik movement allied itself with occupation forces, 5:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And the Communist Yugoslavia, partisans, opposed them on every front. 5:14 [SPEAKER_00]: The occupation became a civil war. 5:16 [SPEAKER_00]: 17-year-old Leppuratic was a Yugoslavia partisan, having joined the Communist Party at age 15. 5:25 [SPEAKER_00]: two years later, while tending to the wounded at the Battle of Newtiva, Lepa was captured and tortured for more than a week for information. 5:35 [SPEAKER_00]: She refused. 5:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Her Nazi captors sentenced her to death. 5:41 [SPEAKER_00]: As she stood on a wooden box with a news around her neck, the executioner gave her one last chance to provide the names of friends and allies. 5:50 [SPEAKER_00]: This is what she said. 5:53 [SPEAKER_00]: I am not a trader of my people. 5:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Those whom you are asking about will reveal themselves when they have succeeded in wiping out all of you evil doers to the last man. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Law and live the Communist Party and partisans fight people for your freedom do not surrender to the evil doers. 6:15 [SPEAKER_00]: I will be killed but there are those who will avenge me. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: There are photos of Lepa in her last moments, and also after her hanging, why I have absolutely no idea, but the composure in her face, the determination, gives you goosebumps. 6:34 [SPEAKER_00]: I can't imagine I don't think any of us can, what it meant to stare down death in that moment the way she did, knowing that even after it was all over. 6:45 [SPEAKER_00]: her body would hang humiliated, and disfigured, for all of history to see. 6:50 [SPEAKER_00]: As we know, Leppas' prophecy was revealed two years later, as allied forces, alongside the partisans, defeated fascism throughout Europe. 7:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Chetniks, Nazis, and all, Leppas had fought the good fight against a truly evil enemy. 7:11 [SPEAKER_00]: and her communist compatriots rose to power in the new Yugoslavia, what you may not know in what Lappa may not have known, was that the partisans were guilty of similar atrocities when Joseph brought Tito to control of the socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia following the war. 7:30 [SPEAKER_00]: He became everything we hate about fascism. 7:34 [SPEAKER_00]: and everything Lepa claimed to hate. 7:37 [SPEAKER_00]: He turned Yugoslavia toward a one-party system. 7:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And violently, brutally, suppressed the opposition. 7:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Lepa's compatriots did so many things we hate the Nazis for. 7:50 [SPEAKER_00]: They hung young girls from trees and worse, prisoners for more in innocent civilians were murdered, under direct orders from the new communist regime. 8:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Listen to this directive from the new Yugoslavia Department of National Security, quote, officers of enemy armies are to be purged without exception, unless you receive notification from the Communist Party that an individual is not to be liquidated. 8:22 [SPEAKER_00]: In general, no mercy is to be shown in purges and liquidation. 8:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Monasteries were emptied, and Catholic priests executed to the last man. 8:33 [SPEAKER_00]: The Italian families were marched to the edge of the abandoned mineshafts, and thrown down them alive. 8:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The equivalent of pushing them off the edge of skyscrapers. 8:44 [SPEAKER_00]: But this way, no burial was necessary. 8:48 [SPEAKER_00]: There remains, just disappeared, deep into the earth. 8:52 [SPEAKER_00]: And when the friends of Lepa had finished their revenge tour, against the friends and families of those people who had persecuted them, they covered it all up, sometimes literally, with concrete gates and slabs, blocking these graves from discovery. 9:10 [SPEAKER_00]: I think we're supposed to assume that Lappa would have been horrified at all of this. 9:16 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not so sure. 9:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Violent is famously a cycle, and as a general rule, all bullies and prosecutors were once victims themselves. 9:27 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it's because they see themselves as victims that they feel the license to hash out with such limitless hatred and brutality. 9:36 [SPEAKER_00]: because they were tortured, they feel like they have the right to torture. 9:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Their family was murdered for their ethnicity, so they'll murder your family, for your ethnicity, and the cycle continues. 9:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Remember Lep has lost words. 9:52 [SPEAKER_00]: She wasn't talking about peace. 9:55 [SPEAKER_00]: She was talking about vengeance, and looking over the bodies of 100,000 executions at the hands of the so-called good guys. 10:06 [SPEAKER_00]: They feel different because we know she was avenged, and we know how she was avenged along with other murdered partisans. 10:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Quote, those whom you are asking about will reveal themselves when they have succeeded in wiping out all you evil doers to the last man. 10:25 [SPEAKER_00]: I will be killed, but there are those who will avenge me. 10:31 [SPEAKER_00]: If violence were really capable of ending violence, this world would be an easier place in which to live. 10:38 [SPEAKER_00]: We'd have solutions we do not currently have. 10:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Violence would be continually canceling itself out, like a negative number in an algebraic equation. 10:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, that isn't how it works. 10:51 [SPEAKER_00]: It accumulates in compounds. 10:53 [SPEAKER_00]: In the order you get, the promise of vengeance, however brave, is less and less compelling. 11:00 [SPEAKER_01]: All the wind is blowing through the graves. 11:03 [SPEAKER_01]: The wind is blowing, freedom soon will come.
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