You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today. This is episode 10.38, Ocean on Fire and we're your hosts. I'm Tom and I'd like you to have this pendant. My mother gave it to me when. I enlisted in Podcaster Academy. And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam. And wow, the one time we don't. Comment on it, we do actually have a short talk back. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by.
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This week we're covering Victory Episode 38 Hokkaio Honou ni Sumate aka Dying the North Sea in Flames. The episode was written by Sonoda Hideki, storyboarded by Yamaguchi Yorufusa, and directed by Tamada Hiroshi. The animation director was Nishimura Nobuyoshi. Now the recap.
The White Ark continues its journey to Kasarelia by way of the North Sea. Their mobile suits fly patrols, but with the ceasefire still technically in effect, everyone seems to relax their guard. When an eerily observant USO notices that Marbette is flying a bit differently and asks if she's feeling alright, she admits to being a bit unwell and agrees to let USO and Odello patrol without her. And Odello, eager for some time alone with Alicia, had snuck her aboard his mobile suit before they even left the ship. It would seem that love is in the air. Dooker Ek, talking to his lieutenant Renda about her plans for after the war, asks if those plans could include him. She is surprised, but seems pleased, and Dookir gives her a necklace that belonged to his mother as a symbol of their mutual desire to make Earth a biker's paradise. But before they can live out their rose tinted dreams, they are hell bent on taking down the League Militaire's infamous white mobile suit. Out searching, Renda and her wingmen spot Odello's mobile suit and immediately attack. Odello switches from bashful young man on a date to serious, focused mobile suit pilot, but takes a moment to hand Alicia a gift, a necklace with a charm of A whale on it, which he calls a good luck charm. The Bespa Twinrads skim the surface of the ocean, dodging Odello's missiles and distracting him so that Renda can get close enough to attack with her beam saber. Fending her off, Odello fires a short burst from his Vulcans and a series of missiles, none of which hit Renda. What they do hit is the wrecked tanker behind her, igniting the oil inside and setting off massive explosions, complete with dense black smoke. In the aftermath, Odello is able to hide his mobile suit inside another wreck beam. Wings flaring, USO flies in low over the water, accompanied by Tomash. Before they can take stock of the situation, shots from the Twinrads force them into evasive maneuvers and Renda's twin Rad splits up each to focus on a single League Militaire mobile suit. While Renda keeps USO occupied with a flurry of close in attacks, the second Twinrad crashes into him from the side. From their current location, all the White Ark can see are the anonymous bursts and streaks of light. They move quickly to provide support, and in the meantime, sick or no, Marbet launches in the V1. USO and Tomash fly in closer to the White Ark so that they can shelter behind the ship's shield, and their whole group pursues the now fleeing Bespa squad. Then Renda's squad disappears and Dooku's ship emerges from underwater. The retreat was a feint to lead the White Ark into an ambush. Dooku's ship fires its new spiderweb weapon at the White Ark, and although the ship's beam shield destroys the first spiderweb, they miscalculate when they turn off the shield in order to fire a missile barrage. Dookker launches another spiderweb and this one shrouds the entire White Ark, incapacitating it. Marbit and Thomash hack desperately at the net with their beam sabers, but all the while they are extremely vulnerable. To buy them time, Uso sets himself between the two forces and uses the V2's beam shield to churn up the sea, sending plumes of spray and surging waves over the Bespa ship and mobile suits alike. The V2 can only keep it up for so long though, and the White Ark hasn't yet recovered. Marbet, USO and Tomash are struggling to defend themselves and the ship when a wrecked tanker approaches. Odello is pushing it toward the battlefield and Dooker, not realizing that it likely still has oil in it, orders his ship to fire the explosion. This sets off Surprises. The Bespa force cloaks the battlefield in smoke, sets fire to the now oily surface of the sea. In the confusion, Odello drops Elisha off at the White Ark. She offers him the good luck charm back, saying he needs it more than she does. But it's a different sort of good luck charm that he wants, and when he offers his cheek, she kisses him and tells him there will be more kisses if he comes back safely. Renda also returns to her ship and joins Dooker on the bridge as their squad withdraws. Odello, however, isn't ready to let them go. Despite USO calling him back, Odello flies straight at the enemy, determined to take out the force that's been harrying them. Deftly flying around their front shield, he fires a spray of shots, one of which is a direct hit on the ship's bridge. Their commander and bridge crew dead, the rest of the Bespa crew surrender. Through the fire and smoke, Marbet and Tomasz, Odello and Uso see an image of Duker and Renda smiling and happy, riding a motorcycle through the sky to the bikers paradise of their dreams.
They have brought back biking by land, they have brought back biking in space or air, and now they have brought biking to the very seas. And to the heavens. I Gosh. The only thing you can say about the ending to this episode is huh? Okay, let's begin at the beginning and arrive at the ending in good time. That's a very good place to start.
It occurred to me as Dooker is declaring his love for Renda, which what a way to let somebody know you like them. Hey, your dream house, does it have room for me too? Skipping straight from I had no idea you felt this way to let's get married in record time.
Here is a precious heirloom from my mother. Also, they do at the end of this episode, go through a little like clip show of precious memories for Dooker and Renda. You know, in case you happened to have been blindsided by this whole romance subplot. And all of their precious memories are just Dooker saying, renda, are you okay? Renda, are you okay? Renda, are you okay? It does create the impression though, that she is the only one of his subordinates he really cares about.
Well, okay, but they did create that impression for us already. I'm pretty confident. I remember saying that in one of his first episodes where the battle bikes are getting blown to smithereens all around him and he's like, yes, I love this. The feeling of battle, the feeling of biking it's amazing. The they should all be so happy that they've died on their bikes. Renda, are you okay? Um, unearned is the word I would use. Maybe this is just meant to be like workplace matchmaking. Maybe.
I don't know. It was funny to be like, oh, I have something in common with Renda. I also draw little sketches of my dream house. Aww, houses. Is there. Is there room in there for me sometimes? Hi, kitten. Is there room in there for her? Always. I see where I stand in the hierarchy of things around here.
Cats are small. If you were cat sized, there would always be room for you too. It did occur to me to wonder, especially as Dooker is talking about this family heirloom that his mother gave him, presumably as a oh, I'm so glad you're reformed and not a biker anymore. Presence, you're going off to military college where you will never bike again.
Whether his kind of implied delinquency or criminality is why he and his squadron, or whatever this group would be called, are the ones to break the ceasefire. Heck, the rules. Hmm. Okay, I can see how you connected those dots. It's a possibility. I don't have any reason to deny it. Yeah, I kind of think that from what we've learned of bespa, basically any member of that organization would be happy to break the rules in order to do more atrocities. Fair. That's fair.
Dooker is just kind of the only named and recognizable character who isn't already dead or in exile or whatever is going on with Tasilo after he didn't get executed that one time. The other thing about Dukrik is that in a lot of ways, he resembles Ramberal. I think, almost certainly intentionally. And Ramba Ral's mission, lest we forget about it, was to like, specifically pursue the white base and the Gundam and.
Annihilate them as revenge for the death of Garmazabi. So Dooku's little ceasefire breaking attack mission here to go after the lean horse and destroy it along with the Gundam. It's the same kind of mission.
Obviously they don't know they're in a TV show, but generally speaking, declaring your love for someone and talking about your hopes and dreams for after the war is over is a surefire way to one or both of you get killed in that episode. Death Flag's galore. I did, however, appreciate the pretty stupendous dramatic irony of Dooker Eek. Saying bikers don't belong in the sky.
Before ascending to heaven on his motorcycle. Despite the preponderance of death flags. Early on in this episode for Dooker and Renda, I kind of thought it was going to be Odello because Odello was also lining up to wave those death flags. Especially at the end there when he goes off alone to attack the enemy flagship. And everyone is saying, like Odello, you don't need to chase them. Odello, you're going in too deep. Odello, are you okay?
And his date even promised him kisses when he returns alive. Right? I thought it was so sweet when she offers him the charm, which would have had to have been something he made. Mm. And a great counterpoint to Duker's, like, gold and sapphire necklace from his mother. And Odello says to her, give me another charm in its place, please. And turns his cheek so she can give him a kiss on the cheek. It was so sweet.
So sweet. Not to connect everything to Evangelion, but there is a famous scene in Evangelion where a different female character kisses a male character and says, we'll do more when you get back. I see you, Anno Hideaki. I see what you're doing here. I get the feeling that is a very old trope. No, no. It's only ever appeared in Victory Gundam. The one thing about that whole sequence in the end where they're biking through the sky and then imagining they're home in the woods.
And the sequence is so memorable that it kind of washes out the rest of the episode. I am aware that the rest of the episode happened. I took notes on it. I can look at my notes now and read them. But really, I'm just thinking about Dooker and Renda flying off on that motorcycle.
But that scene, Renda's sketch of the Dream House, which. I don't know if you caught this. She carries it with her into the cockpit when she leaves on this mission, she's still holding it in her hands when she gets back in the cockpit of her mobile suit. And when they ascend to Biker Heaven. It'S that cabin that they're driving off to. Yes, but the. The environmental issues of this episode are visually very present, but then never discussed.
Mmm. I'm not sure that I agree with you on that. The environmental messaging of this episode, when you include the dialogue, becomes kind of incoherent. So much so that I think you might be overlooking it because it seems so nonsensical.
First, we have the North Sea. We see a series of abandoned and broken oil rigs, many of them badly damaged, wrecked oil tankers contrasted with these flocks of seagulls wheeling around in the sky and nesting on these structures. Even before any of the remnants of the oil in these tankers get lit on fire. The clouds are really thick and dark in a way that makes things feel dirty, makes things feel polluted and smoky. And there were significantly some very high profile oil spills not long before this came out, including one in or near the Shetland Islands, which are basically on the border of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. That happened in January of 93. Renda's dream house. This octagonal cabin made me think of a lot of the experiments around making more environmentally friendly single family housing that you saw a lot of in the 70s, 80s, even into the 90s. People were doing sort of like weird experiments with different shapes of structures. You saw a lot more things that were, you know, shaped like yurts, shaped like domes with little connecting tunnels partially.
Built into the ground or into a. Hillside made out of different kinds of materials. So it has a kind of hippie environmentalist feel. However, it's doing the whole settler colonial thing of like, ah, yes, we built the machine that's going to level all of this beautiful environment that apparently we love. And once we have cleansed earth, we. Can turn it into a biker's paradise. And build all the cute little cabins. We want, all the little eco friendly houses we can desire.
Very curious what Dooker means by turning Earth into a biker's paradise. Does he plan to, like, pave most of it roads everywhere, or is it the opposite? Does he prefer the, like, off roading, off roading, touring through, you know, little dirt roads? Well, and you said off roading and touring. I have to quibble a little that. Those are different things.
Well, and that off roading, the type of bike people use for off roading, is usually entirely different from a touring bike. What he and Renda are riding into the sky is a touring bike. Do you imagine that Duke only has one motorcycle in his fantasy life on Earth, the biker's paradise?
Definitely not, but it is just kind of funny. I mean, I grew up with my dad really loving motorcycles and I learned how to ride at one point. And there's kind of a distinction between people who ride motorcycles and bikers. Right? And bikers sound kind of disreputable and sketchy. But lots of people are into motorcycles.
Though I don't know if that same distinction holds true in Japanese. Like, no one is saying that Dukarik is a hooligan, a boso zoku, or anything like that, though maybe he was, maybe before he joined the military academy and learned how to be a respectable engineer of genocide. He was a punk, a rapscallion.
My point being that visually at least, and maybe where I see sort of ambiguity or conflicting feelings, you see incoherence. Earth, noid, spacenoid, it doesn't seem to matter. They all wind up wreaking this horror on the environment. They all wind up causing all this damage to a planet they claim to want to save or protect. And nature is resilient. Nature is hanging on here. Even in these polluted, broken down places, there is still life. And that life still has value, that nature still has value. But our desire to possess it or extract things from it ends up leading to all this harm.
But now consider the dialogue. They're still banging the drum about the fusion reactors. Oh, if I set off an explosion. From one of these mobile suits, it'll be worse than blowing up all these oil tankers. Oh no, we can't pollute the earth with the icky fusion. That would be so much worse than. All of these fossil fuels.
Cast your mind back to when I talked about Chernobyl and like, Japanese perception of nuclear disasters at that time, there was a lot of scaremongering about nuclear and there was a deep fear of it because of how big those disasters were, you know, and nuclear disasters tend to happen fairly close to people. Oil spills often don't. Oil spills often happen out at sea where they cause a lot of damage. But not a lot of people see it. Not a lot of people are saying, like, oh, and then it rained oil on my house and there's like a coating of crude goo all over everything. And then me and my kids and my pets all got sick.
Right? And that of course discounts things like pipeline bursting, but those were not really in the news in the same way at the time. Did you play Final Fantasy vii? It's roughly contemporaneous with victory. I've probably started it at some point when I was younger and never finished.
It, because there's a compelling interpretation of that game's ecological politics that it is also saying, like, oh no, the icky nuclear power is killing the planet's soul. We need to go back to embracing good, clean, honest fossil fuels. I don't think this episode is pro. Fossil fuel, but it's like, maybe this. Is an unfair binary, but here we've got the fossil fuels represented by the.
Tankers, by the oil platforms, by this industrial decay. And then we've got the nuclear power represented by the mobile suit reactors. And if the characters in the show. Are saying, ah, I can't destroy the. Mobile suit because of the nuclear contaminations. But then they don't have any similar things to say about blowing up all of these tankers. Like that feels like a statement. That feels like the script is taking a side.
On the one hand, they do express quite a lot of surprise at the idea that these wrecked tankers would have been left there with crude still in them. Though the fact that they're there at all, like, well, they were left in place as it is. So yeah, they don't seem likely to have been cleaned of contaminants. While I'm not entirely sure I agree with your reading, another point in favor of that is the scene of Odello and what's her name? Elisha.
Elisha Clansky's sister, the Elder, when he and Alicia are stuck hiding in there and she is talking about how the fumes are affecting her and if I can smell it, doesn't that mean that the mobile suit's not sealed properly? And given the other reactions we've been shown spacenoids having to Earth, it does kind of seem like we're meant to think that she's freaking out about nothing or making too big a deal out of it, or that it's kind of in her head that there are these nasty fumes, that it's not really a.
Problem because Odello doesn't smell them. She's like, oh, really? That's weird. I did enjoy the other Earthnoid. V. Spacenoid A touch of Alicia pointing out that she couches it from the other direction, but that spacenoids live in constantly climate controlled conditions that are like optimal for human comfort. So she's like, one minute it's dry, the next minute it's wet. We're soaking, we're parched. My lips are chapped. Like, what is this nonsense? Love Odello's response to that.
Oh, they're chapped. Do you want to wet them? A man after my own heart. Never miss an opportunity no Gundam show has yet addressed. And maybe they won't. Maybe we're just supposed to like hand wave it away as future medicine. But don't you think spacenoids coming to Earth would catch all kinds of germs that they haven't been exposed to before? That's why Chronicle wears the mask. She blames her sneezing on being hot and cold and wet and dry. I think it's probably just Earth germs.
I'm sure they get all kinds of vaccines. I very much liked the Visual detail of Alicia's hand reaching from out of frame to pinch Odello on the cheek when she thinks he's making fun of women and menstruation. That one's very good. Marmot's pregnant, right? We're. We're in agreement generally that Marbet's not feeling well. And Odello speculating that it is her time of the month means that Marbet is in fact pregnant. Mmm hmm. Maybe. Watch and find out.
I guess she's moving her mobile suit differently. She's piloting for two. You mentioned Unearned earlier. Renda's this is for Cecily felt extremely unearned. Was Naruna the impression you gals were. So close, apparently you don't ship them. I actually liked that one. I think it's nice when the show acknowledges things that have happened in the past. And to my eye at least, Renda.
And Sicily did seem like they were pretty close. In fact, maybe Dookker had to wait until Sicily was out of the picture before making his move on Renda. She's grieving, she's emotionally vulnerable. This is another black mark against Dukaryk. Sure, it's presented as a cute little romance subplot, but no, he is taking. Advantage of a grieving lesbian. Also his subordinate. Also his subordinate. A little sketchy. Thank you for not letting that go unexamined.
I thought of that immediately when you brought up Rambaral, because part of what was so beautiful about Rambural and Haman was that they felt like equals. He had his strengths and his job, and she had different strengths and different work, but that they worked together. Each of them were contributing their own skills and abilities to the same goals that they shared.
And we talked about this earlier when we were talking about all those flashbacks to their prior interactions, but there just is no chemistry between Dooker and Renda. She seems flattered that her commanding officer. Is into her, I guess. But Ramba and Hamon, they had chemistry. They had a relationship. Dooker and Renda never have any opportunity to have chemistry. We only ever see them interact with each other, like during battle or when battle is imminent.
They are the only two named characters in his biker gang and so of course they have to hook up. If any of you are holding out for a tribute to Dooker, eek. I don't think you're gonna get it. Besides, he already got to fly away to biker heaven. He's had enough. Incidentally, while I'm complaining Odello's reaction at the end of this where he's like, oh, did I Get carried away and attack unnecessarily. Did I do violence I shouldn't have done?
Is a preposterous thing to say in these circumstances. They are being hunted by this enemy ship relentlessly. All Odello did was destroy the bridge. The whole rest of the crew immediately surrenders. Odello just pulled off perhaps the most effective and restrained attack mission of this entire show, and he's beating himself up over it.
He does immediately think, well, they came after us, right? He acknowledges to himself, they were the ones who chased down the White Ark. They were the ones who broke the ceasefire. I mean, he's young. I think it speaks well of him to ask the question of himself and then to think it through and decide like, no, I did the right thing. I really liked that. Even though he was on a date, even though he has Alicia in the mobile suit with him, once the fighting starts, he goes completely serious, focused fighting mode. He is not really distracted by her, but he's also. Obviously, he doesn't want her to get hurt, but she's in the same mobile suit as him. He doesn't want to get hurt. He doesn't seem to let it affect him too much in the fighting itself. In yet another mobile suit name designed to make me tear my hair out, the Domu Toriya is written in the Roman Alphabet as Domutlia. Why it's not written as Domutoria, I don't know.
The world is full of beautiful mysteries. Flames, flames from the sides of my face. Would love to see them introduce some new weapon or mobile suit modification that actually causes our heroes some difficulty for more than just a fraction of an episode. They did. It was the big tire. That's true, the big tire. But now the little tires have saws, which apparently don't matter. Available in toy stores now. Special toy tires with saw gimmick. Saw blades press a button and the saw blades extend.
Hey, kids. They don't matter. The spider net was pretty shockingly fragile. I mean, they. It seems more like it succeeded because the White Ark messed up than because it was such a good weapon. I do, however, love the do. Motoriya's little pincer tooth. Or teeth. It's like a mandible. Yep. It honestly feels like it ought to be poisonous or something. Obviously, you can't poison a mobile suit, but maybe it could install a computer virus.
Yeah, we could poison a mobile suit. We could come up with some kind of mobile suit poison. Nanomachines, maybe, that get into your systems and destroy them from the inside. How hard can it be? Their memory is on 3 inch diskettes. I had to think about that one for a little bit because I was like, technically, the floppy disk is when they were much bigger and actually floppy. The ones we mostly used growing up were diskettes. We still called them floppy disks.
I know, but doesn't hurt to use their proper name now and again. So what do we think next episode in Cassarelia? Are we going to get stopped once more on the way? Or maybe more times? It's already taken a long time just to get this far. Well, now that they've got so many. Wheels, they have to spend a lot. Of time spinning them. Maybe it was all a fake out. Maybe the ceasefire will end before they can actually get to Cassarellia.
The characterization of Dooker Eke's mother, mentioned only in that one line, feels kind. Of important because so much of Victory is about mom stuff. And my reading at least is that. The message here is Dooker would have. Been much happier if he hadn't joined the army. If his mother had just accepted him as he was. Yeah, a biker. Yeah. Certainly he would have led a much less destructive life.
You know which characters have never mentioned their own mother in what feels significant? Chronicle. And Maria. Hmm, that is interesting. Who mothers? The mother? No one. She sprang fully formed already mom shaped. No, that's. That's Shakti, the once and future mother. I don't have anything else to say. This was not an episode to give us lots to talk about.
No, like I said, everything just gets kind of occluded by the big biker scene at the end. A sequence of images and sounds carefully calibrated to break our brains wide open. Like so many soft boiled eggs. You know, where Renda and Duker could have built their octagonal cabin in the woods and had their biker lifestyle without having to go to war and destroy the earth. Cassarellia. And now part two of Tom's research on Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Wars.
Let us now return to the Balkans and continue our intermittent miniseries on the Yugoslav wars, which, according to Chief Director Tomino, inspired much of the story of Victory Gundam. Keeping in mind, of course, that according to Chief Director Tomino, the Yugoslav wars provided little to no inspiration for the story of Victory Gundam. Last time on MSB 10.30, we covered over a thousand years of history. From the Plague of Justinian and the arrival of Slavic settlers in the former Byzantine territories of the Balkan Peninsula, up through the role of Balkan nationalism in touching off the First World War and the post war formation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This Week we're slamming on the brakes and focusing on the tumultuous 20 year life of the kingdom and its destruction at the outbreak of the Second World War. From the start, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, originally the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, had capital p problems, mostly stemming from the uneasy alliance of peoples reflected in that name, particularly between the two largest groups, the Serbs and the Croats. From this arose a fundamental dispute over the kind of nation that they were trying to build. Would it be a pan ethnic federation of semi autonomous republics with power sharing agreements and constitutional protections for minorities? Or would power be concentrated in the hands of the largest and the most powerful single ethnic bloc, the Serbs? Or to put it another way, no one could quite agree on what had just happened. Had the Kingdom of Serbia, victorious in World War I, annexed the smaller Balkan states to fulfill the long cherished nationalist dream of a Greater Serbia? Or had it joined with them as equals to form a new nation? On the one hand, the new King of Yugoslavia was none other than the King of Serbia, Peter I. Karadjordjevic, whose family traced their origins back to the leader of the first Serbian uprising in 1804. And Serbians dominated both the civilian administration and the military of the new state. On the other hand, ethnic Serbs made up less than 40% of the Yugoslav population, with Croats a quarter and other minority groups Turks, Albanians, Germans, Magyars, Jews, Roma, Vlaks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, and so on. Accounting for the rest, some of these ethnic groupings that we're talking about were relatively new and untested. The parents of The Croats of 1918 had considered themselves to be Slavonians, Dalmatians, Istrians. As late as 1911, one Croat scholar wrote that the Sirmians were ashamed to call themselves Croats in public. The faction within the new kingdom favoring a Serb dominated central government won the first round at the constitutional assembly of 1921, voting in their favored system in the face of walkouts by the Croat and Slovene delegates. But the non Serbian Yugoslavs never accepted this balance of power. The fractures were everywhere. But there are two specific conflicts that deserve special the first because it anticipated the darkest aspects of the Yugoslav wars to come, and the latter because it set the kingdom firmly on the path to its destruction. So first, Kosovo. Small but strategically important, Kosovo sits between Serbia in the north and Albania in the south. Once part of the medieval kingdom of Serbia, Kosovo fell under Ottoman domination in the 14th century, along with the rest of the Balkans. In the ensuing centuries, while Serbia chafed under the Ottoman yoke, the Albanian Leaders accepted Ottoman rule, adopted Islam, and prospered. Large numbers of Muslim Albanians settled in kosovo, and by 1800, the region's population had become majority Albanian. In the early 19th century, starting around 1815, when Serbia, then known as the Principality of Serbia, attained full autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, the authorities there began expelling any ethnic Albanians and any other Muslims living in the principality. By the 1870s, there were practically no Albanians or Muslims left in Serbia. Then, in 1878, Serbia rebelled against the Ottomans, winning international recognition as an independent country and seizing the Sanjak of Nis, a region bordering Kosovo and mainly populated by Albanians. Once again, the Serbian army expelled most of the Albanian Muslim population, which fled in large numbers across the border to Kosovo. In the ensuing years, some of the refugees engaged in reprisals against Kosovo Serbs and retaliatory raids against the Serbs living on what had once been their land. I've used the term expulsion here, but let's be clear that the consequences of these expulsions were mass death. Whole civilian populations forced to flee their homes, trekking through mountains, largely on foot, without supplies, without adequate clothing. The best estimates say that roughly half of them, hundreds of thousands of people, especially children and older people, died on the roads. Three decades later, during the Balkan wars of 1912, 1913, Serbia and ally Montenegro seized Kosovo from the Ottomans and immediately began another massive program of colonization and ethnic cleansing. That program continued in the background throughout the whole period that we're discussing today. So keep that in the back of your head whenever people in this story are arguing about what Yugoslavia was or could be and who counted as Yugoslavian. The ethnic Albanians living in Yugoslavia were not going to be included in any of those definitions. At the other end of the country, the young kingdom was struggling with Croatian separatism. Croats comprised about a quarter of the kingdom's total population, making them the largest single ethnic bloc behind the Serbs. Located in the northwest of the Balkan Peninsula, Croatia had been part of the Habsburg Empire, and as a whole, the Croats were more Western facing European and Catholic than the Serbs. Indeed, Catholicism, as opposed to Orthodoxy, was one of the definitional differences between Croats and Serbs. Combined with the neighboring Slovenes, also former Habsburg subjects, they amounted to 3.8 million people at the kingdom's founding in 1918, versus 4.6 million Serbs. Croatian resistance to Serbian dominance began even before the country was formally established. When the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs met to discuss the proposed merger with Serbia, a delegate named Stepan Radic argued so vociferously against the union that he was removed from his seat on the Central Committee. When he continued to object, the government had him arrested. Stepan Radic was born an impoverished peasant, nearsighted and physically weak, two years before the beginning of the Great European depression of 1873-1895, which devastated the already fragile agrarian economy of what was then the Kingdom of Hungary. Within the Habsburg led Dual Monarchy of Austria, Hungary. Administrative reforms within the Dual monarchy dramatically expanded the government bureaucracy that was operating in the Croatian lands, leading to soaring tax rates. Since all of those new bureaucrats had to be paid, the new taxes also had to be paid in money, forcing the peasants to sell their produce in a market that was, to put it mildly, neither fair nor efficient, all at the exact moment when the depression was causing agricultural prices to plummet. Meanwhile, all of those new government bureaucrats seemed to be good for nothing except meddling in the peasants business. And to make matters worse, any peasant kid who was lucky, energetic and talented enough to escape the farm and get himself a good education was probably just going to wind up turning into one of those self same meddling bureaucrats. Nor could these former peasants be counted on for sympathy. As a rule, those who made it out were even more disdainful of their own former fellows. Even accounting for the increased size of the urban bureaucracy, the Croat population was overwhelmingly composed of rural peasants. The intelligentsia and proletarian classes were miniscule. As late as 1910, only 6% of the population lived in cities. And Zagreb, the capital and largest urban center, had a population of barely 75,000. As Stepan Radic's older brother Anton once said, the peasants alone are not the nation. But it is also true that besides the peasant, there are very few people. Stepan Radic himself was one of those rare peasant kids who made it out. A truly penniless student, he got most of his meals from the free kitchens run by charities and was regularly fainting from hunger during school. At one point he lived in a church run orphanage, but he got kicked out because he stood up against abuse from one of the staff. His studies were erratic and and he took frequent breaks from school to travel the countryside. Developing his political ideas from first hand experience of peasant hardship. He got involved in politics early as a student activist. His activism, which was focused on Croatian rights and against Hungarian dominance, got him arrested, detained and imprisoned several times, including one incident in which he was jailed for 10 days on the suspicion that he had tried to throw a policeman out of a second story window. Kicked out of school, he was forced to finish his studies in semi exile in Czechoslovakia, where he came into contact with the writings of Tomasz Masaryk, who he admired greatly. His time there made him a devoted Czechophile, and he soon married a Czech schoolteacher. Though he initially gravitated to the established Croatian nationalist leaders of his era, Radic was dismayed by their disdain for the peasantry. The intelligentsia of the time were trying to create a Croat identity and then disseminate it to the people. But Radic believed that the Croat nation already existed. It was the dress and the customs, the folk tradition and all the rest that was already being practiced by the peasants. In his view, the cosmopolitan culture of the cities, of the intellectuals, was fundamentally the same all across Europe and everywhere it was distinct from the authentic natural cultures being practiced in the countryside. From the 1890s, he began to break away from his student agitator colleagues. They saw him as too idealistic and too romantic, too focused on peasant issues, but also just kind of an uncompromising jerk about it. In 1903, he was bounced from his post as secretary of the Executive committee of the Croat opposition. So in 1904 he created his own party, the Croat People's Peasant Party. The Peasant Party remained marginal and obscure up through World War I, but the horrors and abuses of the war years, the worst of which fell hardest on the peasants, radicalized that class as nothing before had. As a whole, the peasants in Croatia turned strongly in favor of national self determination, pacifism and republicanism, which just happened to be the three core tenets of Radic's political philosophy. Now the Peasant Party's long standing commitment to peasantist ideology gave them a degree of credibility in post war, post Habsburg Croatia that no other party could match. At the height of its influence, Radi's Peasant Party was able to claim the loyalty of some 80% of the electorate. The peasantist ideology Radi espoused has been called an eclectic synthesis of sorts of liberal and socialist principles. It diverged from classic Marxism by viewing all peasants as part of a single class, rather than dividing the poor peasants from their wealthier neighbors. But Radish went even further, arguing that the interests of all classes, artisans, landowners, intelligentsia, clergy, they were all dependent on the productivity of the peasants and entangled with their interests. Thus, what was good for the peasant was good for the nation on the practical level. Like basically all peasantist programs, Radich supported land distribution, breaking up big estates and dividing the land more evenly with compensation to the large landowners and financial assistance like debt relief to the smallholders. He also wanted protective tariffs, state supported manufacturing cooperatives and more responsive local governments that would do more than just extract wealth in the form of taxes and people in the form of conscripts with elected officials rather than appointees from the central government, and universal suffrage, including for women. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, with the future composition of the Balkans still unsettled, Radi imagined a kind of pan Yugoslav alliance between culturally united but politically independent states. He rejected the proposed union with the Kingdom of Serbia because he believed it was little more than a power grab by the Serbs, A fear that was immediately strengthened by the imposition of pre existing Serbian bureaucracy onto Croatia in 1918, even before the final composition of the Balkans was settled. These new Serbian bureaucrats were deeply resented by the Croatian peasants, even more so than their Habsburg predecessors. Bradi still hoped to attain Croatian independence as a French protectorate, and he tried to appeal to the Entente powers at the Paris Peace Conference, which is specifically why he was arrested by the provisional government in 1919. He then attempted to send various members of his Peasant Party to plead their case to the diplomats in Paris, but they too were arrested by the Yugoslavian authorities before they could leave the country. While Radic was in prison, a new program of draft animal registration imposed by those hated Serbian bureaucrats sparked a revolt among the Croat peasants. It didn't go anywhere. But despite Radic's own deeply held pacifist beliefs, some local leaders of his party did participate in the uprisings, and it was alleged that members of the central party leadership had backed them. This spooked Radich, who was convinced that any violent revolution would end in oppressive tyranny. So he would spend the rest of his career trying to walk a tightrope, pushing hard for reforms which while trying to keep the more radical impulses of his party in check. Radi was released just ahead of the first parliamentary elections in November 1920, a move that seems to have given him some major anti establishment credibility and helped his party, now called the Croatian Republican peasant party, win 50 of the 93 seats allotted to Croatia, more than double their closest rival. However, hoping to deny the Serb dominated government any legitimacy in Croatia, the Peasant Party declined to send its deputies to the parliament in Belgrade. They continued this abstention through the elections of 1923, in which they doubled their votes to become the second largest party in all of Yugoslavia. They held onto abstention for so long because Radic believed both that the Croat cause was bound to attract international support from the great powers and that any day now the central regime in Belgrade would fall to a socialist revolution, just like the one that brought down Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government in Russia some few years earlier. When neither foreign intervention nor a Bolshevik style uprising materialized, he decided to try working for change within the system and abandoned the policy of abstention in 1924. The system, however, was not willing to work with Radi so long as he maintained his strict objection to monarchy. When the Peasant Party again improved their vote share in the 1925 elections, even penetrating into urban centers where the party had once been anathema, the authorities reacted by tossing out the results of elections where the Peasant Party had triumphed and throwing Radich himself back in jail. Now committed to working within the system, he decided to capitulate on republicanism, settling for the lesser ambition of a parliamentary monarchy with local self government and constitutional freedoms. So in 1925, his Croatian Republican Peasant Party dropped the Republican for their name and entered into a coalition government with the conservative Radical Party. Radic and four of his deputies were made ministers in the government, but ultimately resigned this posting the following year and returned to the opposition, this time in coalition with the other leading Serbian party, the independent Democrats. In September 1927, the Croatian Peasant Party again rebranded now as the National Peasant Party and expanded beyond their traditional Croatian strongholds, running candidates in Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro. It was an ambitious move, but as a matter of electoral strategy, it seems to have backfired. Beset by police crackdowns, declining support among urban voters and low voter turnout in the rural areas, the Peasant Party lost a significant number of seats. Up until now, Radic's personal popularity and the dominance of the Peasant Party had marginalized basically all other political currents within Croatia. As they struggled to make any kind of progress on their goals, though, space opened up for some of those alternatives to stake out their own claims to power, especially in the urban areas where the Peasant Party had always been weakest. One such politician elected to represent Zagreb was the right wing lawyer Ante Pavelic. Pavelic, though he favored Croatian independence, also hated Radi and the Peasant Party so much that he was willing to collaborate with the government to undermine them. He is going to be important. In the spring of 1928, the Yugoslav parliament took up the issue of ratifying the nettuno Conventions, a 1925 treaty with the Kingdom of Italy that Radi and the Peasant Party feared would lead to Italian economic domination of the Balkan Peninsula, especially the Croatian regions. Tensions ran especially high during the debates over the conventions, with the opposition parties using every available parliamentary maneuver to delay and obstruct the ratifications. By June, the atmosphere had become so toxic that Radi himself believed, believed there might even be a murder in Parliament. On the 19th of that month, a colleague urged him to stay away from Parliament for a few days, just to bring the temperature down. The very next day, June 20, a Montenegrin Serb deputy, Punisha Rati, took the podium and began a provocative speech. But he was heckled by a deputy from the Peasant Party who accused Rati of corruption. When the president of the parliament tried to suspend the session, Rati pulled out a Luger Parabellum pistol and opened fire on the opposition benches. Several nearby deputies tried to stop him, but he broke free, shot the man who had criticized him, and then turned his gun on Radic. Two deputies tried to block the shot, but they were gunned down. In turn, he shot Radic in the chest, then shot Radic's nephew, Pavel. In total, five deputies were shot in the course of the assassination. Two died instantly. But Radic himself clung to life for six more weeks. During that time, he advised his compatriots in the Peasant Party that it might be time to abandon pacifism, to fight back against Serbian and royalist domination with the same weapons that had been used against them. Radic's murder on the floor of parliament effectively ended Yugoslavia's flirtation with democracy. King Alexander I responded by seizing power, ruling personally in a royal dictatorship. Yet somehow, the shift from constitutional monarchy to dictatorship did not mollify the republicans or the separatists who had once looked to Radic for leadership. Although his successors and the Peasant Party would continue trying to work peacefully within the system to achieve change, the assassination radicalized many young Croats, who now saw violence as the only way to secure their independence. This was a godsend for the Croat nationalist and politician Ante Pavelic. Sure, he had hated Radic, but now he saw in the murdered peasant leader a very useful martyr. Before the year was out, Pavelic began assembling the ultranationalist terrorist organization that would eventually be called the Ustasha. By March of 1929, his men were assassinating their political opponents, the first of countless attacks designed to undermine the Yugoslav state. To make matters worse, the Great Depression slammed into the heavily agrarian Yugoslavian economy. And as the young kingdom flailed from crisis to crisis, her neighbors began throwing covetous glances her way. After all, they all had claims on one bit of Yugoslavian territory or another. Mussolini, now ascendant in fascist Italy, was outwardly friendly with Yugoslavia, but he also favored its rival, Albania, throwing His support, at least for a time, behind King Zog? I. In Croatia, Mussolini supported Pavelic and the USTAA. In Yugoslavia and Macedonia, he provided secret assistance to the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, or imro. Originally a secret revolutionary society founded to fight the Ottomans, IMRO now wanted Macedonia to join Bulgaria. And with Mussolini's backing, they launched a campaign of terror against the Yugoslav authorities. By the way, this is the second time that we've encountered IMRO this season. Back in episode 10.12, when I talked about the origins of the name Liege Militaire and went through some other organizations in history that have been called that, I I mentioned the Bulgarian Military League and their participation in the 1923 assassination of Prime Minister Alexander Stamboliski. Stamboliski, another peasantist leader very much like Radi, had wanted friendly relations with Yugoslavia, and that had been one of the main reasons for his murder. In fact, Mussolini sent agents to assist in the plot because Stamboliski refused to join his secret anti Yugoslavian coalition. IMRO helped with that assassination. With internal and external pressure mounting, King Alexander sought backing from the same great powers that had overseen the creation of Yugoslavia in the first place. In 1934, he traveled to France to make a personal appeal to the government in Paris. But a joint IMRO USTAA assassination team caught up to him in Marseille. One of the assassins, carrying flowers and shouting Long live the King, jumped onto the running board of the King's car. Then he pulled a 20 round pistol from the bouquet and started blasting. The King and the French Foreign Minister Louis Bartow, along with the chauffeur, were killed. Although Bartow may actually have been killed by a police officer who was trying to shoot the assassin. Army Chief of Staff Alphonse Georges, also in the car, was hit four times and reported dead. But in fact he survived and lived long enough to lead the French army to disaster. During the Blitzkri of 1939, at least four other people were killed, either by the assassin who fired at anyone trying to stop him, or by police firing at the assassin as he fled into the crowd. It was the crowd who eventually stopped him, beating the assassin half to death while the police watched. Eventually taken into custody, he was given no medical attention and died that evening. With Alexander dead, the crown passed to his 11 year old son Peter, and power passed to a cousin, the regent, Prince Paul. Paul was personally wary of the fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany. But his country was flailing and his liberal democratic allies in France and Britain were unable or unwilling to offer meaningful aid. So he allowed his government to pursue closer relations with the Axis powers. The plan was to get close, but not too close. On the one hand, perhaps the Axis powers would reduce pressure on the struggling kingdom if it seemed biddable and quiescent. And on the other hand, the threat of an Axis aligned Yugoslavia might finally convince the Allies to offer some real support in order to prevent the country from falling fully into the fascist orbit. It was a risky gambit, sailing so close to the wind, and it failed catastrophically. In March 1941, Prince Paul bowed to pressure from the Axis and agreed to join the Tripartite Pact. Two days later, anti Axis army officers responded with a coup d'etat, ousting the regent and nullifying the agreement. Hitler responded by ordering the invasion of Yugoslavia. By this point, Yugoslavia was completely encircled. Her northern neighbours Austria, Hungary, Romania and Bolivia. Bulgaria had all joined the fascists one way or another. To the south, Albania was occupied by Italy, and Greece was fighting desperately to repel the Italian invasion there. Hit from all sides simultaneously, with no assistance forthcoming, and divided by the ongoing strife between Serb, Croat and Slovenian peoples, the Royal Yugoslav army simply disintegrated. The invasion took less than two weeks, and when it was over, Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia was dismembered. Everybody took their cut. Slovenia was divided between Germany and Italy, while Croatia's homegrown fascist party, the Ustasha, were rewarded with a state of their own, which included Croatia and the long disputed territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hungary annexed parts of the north and Albania reclaimed Kosovo. Bulgaria realized its long cherished dream of seizing North Macedonia. Serbia and Montenegro were split up, with the Germans occupying the former and Italians the latter. So the dream of a united Yugoslavia was dead, right? Right. Tune in next time as the dream rises like a phoenix from the ashes left behind by the fires of World War II. Plus find out which gang of fascist thugs was so extreme that the Gestapo, the literal Gestapo, was like, hey man, that's a bit much.
Next time on episode 10.40, Guardian angel, we research and discuss Victory Gundam episode 40 and Kachi Warren's all fired Up Tadaima Dog Paddle Forest bathing Raining fish A fox's wedding Take to the skies. Skill issue. Marbet lends a hand. Use. Em or lose em and the future beyond the stars. Please listen to it.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unseated land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp Misha Dioxin the closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music is Slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like.
To get in touch with us, you. Can email hostsundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support. The show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us [email protected] Patreon you can find links and more ways to help [email protected] support thank you for listening. Doesn't two weeks feel like a long past time?
Really does, and that's even with an ungundant there. We weren't actually off for two weeks. But it's been two weeks since we've done one of these. Yeah, yeah, I forgot important things like I need to have my notes in front of me, so I'll be right back after I get my notes. They are kind of me. I assume they're important. I mean, I've been podcasting for about six years. I can take it from my head.
You are not allowed to give the patrons me singing rat a tat. You mock me constantly. You only sometimes notice. Now let's see what I've got in my notes for this episode. Motorcycles and that's it, I guess. Motor cycles. And romance. When you first did that, it sounded a little bit like you were going for wrong genre. Tom, I don't know. In this show, anything is possible. If you're yowling at the heat lamp or heat lamp at the heating thingy. It won't work that way.
This is the one advantage you and I have over the space heater. We actually respond when she yells at us. The cat is standing on my notes, which makes this somewhat difficult, but. Sa.