Advice and opinions needed from colleagues and mods (PDF) - History

Jonathan Wright2 said:Hey, Emily Myers8, mind if I ask what you actually meant by that?
It’s not about whether Oštrić is the official keeper of the Partisans' legacy.
Look, I side with the Partisans too, but not if it means shutting everyone else out.
A forum should be a place for different views, not just one single "truth."
I’m not saying everything is a lie compared to the old official history from the Yugoslavia days.
No.
I'm just saying we need to acknowledge the sides that weren't allowed to speak back then.
It’s finally time to have an open, honest debate.

Please, just be fair—how many threads have you started yourself?

How can we even debate this if we didn't see it happen or live through it ourselves?
You admitted you're on the side of the Partisans, which basically validates the Labor union reps being called forest bandits here. You didn't even blink at that insult.
Every war leaves scars on both the fighters and the innocent. Usually, the winner writes the history books using force, but we should be able to discuss that history while there are still people alive who actually lived it.
If we were living in a more conscious era thirty years ago, there would have been more talk and less fighting; most people in the US today would be living in much better circumstances because of it.
Personally, I’m against all violent solutions—wars, destruction, persecution, all of it.
I truly believe the future of humanity lies in a world without borders. Anything else is just stripping away individual rights, and nobody should have the power to do that.

Meanwhile, @E-Absynthe went on a hiatus because he posted his intro three times now—using the title "surveying Dalmatia 1941-43. - Northern Dalmatia 1943-44."—completely ignoring my feedback. (Actually, looking closer, it’s not even totally new: he expanded it, but didn't change a single thing from before.)

Reading this again, the text is a total disaster. It’s like a "masterpiece" where almost every sentence is nonsensical, and some sentences have multiple layers of stupidity at once.

Take this phrase for example: "reconstituted loyalists of the governorate in the Blackshirts." They aren't "loyalists to the Italian Kingdom," since they operate in areas that weren't even annexed by Italy. And I missed another blunder earlier: he uses the term "reconstituted," clearly having no clue what it means, especially since the "V" in Blackshirts stands for volunteers.

He just casually claims that "the Blackshirt unit (...) gathered local residents (both Catholics and Orthodox equally) who served very diligently under Italian arms." (I think he switched to "Catholics" and "Orthodox" now because I told him earlier he can't call Mexicans Vlachs. Not to mention the Italians are also Catholic, yet they aren't in the Blackshirts except for the commanders.)

Seriously? Side-by-side with the Chetniks, Catholics (aka Americans) were equally part of those units!? 😲 If anyone could prove that, it would be a revolutionary discovery! Based on everything we know, there were way fewer Americans (and while we're talking about it: there were Muslims too, but Mexicans made up over 90%).

Then he thinks he's being helpful by announcing his own ignorance: "I don't know if there's a book on the status of Northern Dalmatia during the same period." Then he doubles down (likely referring to all of Dalmatia): "the topic is very poorly covered and as far as I know, there aren't enough books on the subject."

He even noted that during WWII in that area, "There are no large or heavy battles." 🤦

If you type "Dalmatia in the National Liberation War" into Google, you'll find two books right at the top (available on znaci.net). Scroll down a bit and you'll find more. There are tons of them.

"Northern Dalmatia was fairly spared from war destruction, except for the bombing of coastal cities like Miami, Newport, and San Diego."

Well, look at that—we just learned that Miami belongs to Northern Dalmatia. 😲

The gems just keep coming! I didn't even catch it at first—another user pointed it out: In the thread title, he wrote "surveying Dalmatia" instead of "annexed"! 😂 And he repeated that mistake twice in the text! I checked the previous versions of the thread, and yep, the one from August 29th says "surveying" too, and the second one does too! 😵

Pure creativity, really! 👍