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Selco on Martial Law: Forget your “movie illusions about being a freedom fighter”

February 23, 2018

Selco on Martial Law: Forget your “movie illusions about being a freedom fighter”

Let’s talk about martial law. This is when the normal law of the land is suspended and the authority comes from the military or federal government.

One recent example of undeclared martial law in the US was when the police were looking for the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and went door to door, forcing innocent people to come outside with their hands on their heads at gunpoint, while their homes were searched without warrants. 

It turns out that many of us have some serious misconceptions of what it’s really like to live through a martial law situation. I asked Selco, who has personally been through it, to clear up the myths and tell us what it’s actually like.

Would you say that your city in Bosnia was under martial law for any part of your ordeal? How long did it last?

During Yugoslav wars, in different regions (states) based on particular timing and events you can say that martial law was in place, or “state of direct war threat” as some call it here.

There were different “stages” or even levels of it, but one common fact is that during that all normal civil rights and laws were completely and absolutely a matter of the will of the “war government.” (Or “military council” or “war headquarters”.)

The names were different for different regions, even cities, but the results were the same.

In the case of my city in that particular time, it was “war government” that had little influence on ordinary citizen simply because there were too many factions.

But prior to that time and after that year I experienced and went through something that looks more like real “martial law” as your readership imagines it.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the SHTF in Bosnia: Selco Asks Americans, “Does this sound familiar?”

February 15, 2018

How the SHTF in Bosnia: Selco Asks Americans, “Does this sound familiar?”

Selco interviewed by Daisy Luther

I was recently emailing back and forth with Selco and we were discussing the situation in the US right now, with the political polarization, the rage, and the general cognitive dissonance. I asked him if he saw any similarities between our situation and the one in Bosnia when the SHTF there during the war. When he replied I knew I had to share this information with you.

While we might like to think it could never happen here, the current events here are eerily similar to what happened there in the 1990s.

When you read this. think about recent events. The anger about immigration. The destruction of Civil War monuments. The unease between the races. The deep rage about the recent presidential election. The scorn and derision for neighbors who think differently. The way the media fans the flames of dissent between our fellow Americans.

You’ll realize that it definitely CAN happen to us…and there’s not one darn thing we can do except to be prepared.

What parallels do you see with events in the US and Bosnia before the SHTF?

US and Yugoslavia (in 1990) on first look do not have anything in common because people are going to say, “The USA cannot have anything similar to any socialistic system.”

This is true but only on first look.

Yugoslavia had somewhere around 20-22 million citizens, six republics (similar to states in the US), 3-4 main religions, and many national groups (ethnicity).

The official state policy was to build Yugoslavian “nationality” (from the end of WW1) and through different ways that effort was successful until the 90s.

We were “something big, united through differences with a strong connection to make something big.”

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF

February 11, 2018

SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF

Are you prepared for the extreme violence that is likely to come your way if the SHTF? No matter what your plan is, it’s entirely probable that at some point, you’ll be the victim of violence or have to perpetrate violence to survive. As always, Selco is our go-to guy on SHTF reality checks and this thought-provoking interview will shake you to your core.

If you don’t know Selco, he’s from Bosnia and he lived through a year in a city that was blockaded with no utilities, no deliveries of supplies, and no services. In his interviews, he shares what the scenarios the rest of us theorize about were REALLY like.  He mentioned to me recently that most folks aren’t prepared for the violence that is part and parcel of a collapse, which brings us to today’s interview.

How prevalent was violence when the SHTF in Bosnia?

It was wartime and chaos, from all conflicts in those years in the Balkan region Bosnian conflict was most brutal because of multiple reasons, historical, political and other.

To simplify the explanation why violence was common and very brutal, you need to picture a situation where you are “bombarded” with huge amount of information (propaganda) which instills in you very strong feelings of fear and hate.

Out of fear and hate, violence grows easy and fast, and over the very short period of time you see how people around you (including you) do things that you could not imagine before.

I can say that violence was almost an everyday thing in the whole spectrum of different activities because it was a fight for survival.

Again, whenever (and wherever) you put people in a region without enough resources, you can expect violence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Governments Try to Control Language to Hilarious Results

January 10, 2018

Governments Try to Control Language to Hilarious Results

In the region formerly known as Yugoslavia, everyone speaks the same basic language, despite the individual countries’ governments insisting that they don’t.

It is quite interesting to see how widespread some languages are, with some having over a billion speakers while others are spoken by a single tribe. Languages have evolved due to the need for people to communicate and have likewise undergone changes over time.

The differences between are as little as the differences between English in Britain and in the US.

There is a rather peculiar case of languages in the former Yugoslavia, where governments have created four supposedly different languages out of one single language. The people of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro all speak the same language, the Serbo-Croatian language, yet their respective governments claim that they speak Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. This would be the equivalent of Australians claiming that they speak Australian, Americans claiming that they speak American, and the British claiming that they speak British, despite all of them speaking English and perfectly understanding each other.

In reality, the differences between how people speak in the former Yugoslavia are as little as the differences between English in Britain and the United States. The only notable thing to mention is that Serbia and Montenegro have, in addition to the Latin alphabet, also the Cyrillic one, but apart from this, these four countries speak the same exact language. Nonetheless, their respective governments sought to courageously protect their people from not speaking a language named after their national identity.

The Origin Language and Its Subsequent Divisions

Serbo-Croatian was created in 1850 in Vienna by mutual agreement from several scholars.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Selco: How to Stay Warm During a Long-Term SHTF Situation

January 5, 2018

Selco: How to Stay Warm During a Long-Term SHTF Situation

As America is dealing with a record-breaking cold snap and a weird storm hitting the East Coast, some folks are having to handle the whole thing with the power out also. But we all know that at least this time, our situation is temporary. Most of us have power, and those who don’t will have it restored within a few days. But what if you had to stay warm during a long-term SHTF situation?

After your warm response to Selco’s story about Christmas during the SHTF in Bosnia, I hired him to start writing for us more often. Today, he shares with us what it was like to try and stay warm during an entire year in a war zone without any type of utilities. It’s a lot of information, and we can apply this to our preps.

Selco’s information is incredibly valuable because he has actually been through what we plan for during our preparedness endeavors. He teaches this information in-depth on his website, SHTF School.  Let’s get started.

The US is dealing with quite a cold snap right now, and it got me thinking about your SHTF year in Bosnia. First of all, what is the winter like there? How cold does it get and what is the climate?

In a small part of the country close to Adriatic sea it is Mediterranean climate with mild winters and temperatures then goes just below 0 or -5 Celsius (32-23 Fahrenheit) and in other parts of country it is a Continental climate with temperatures during the winter -10 or -18 (14-5 Fahrenheit), with cold waves down to -26 (-15 Fahrenheit) and a lot of snow. 

Very usual are periods of strong cold wind (Bora) that actually can lower your body temperature very fast and complicate things.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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Secret Warfare: U.S. Special Forces Expand Training to Allies With Histories of Abuse

September 11, 2015

Secret Warfare: U.S. Special Forces Expand Training to Allies With Histories of Abuse

THEY HAD HIM AT THEIR MERCY. The burly man, hooded and helpless, sat on the ground as his two captors — a soldier dressed in black from helmet to boots, another clad in camouflage, both with rifles slung on their backs — grabbed him by his armpits and hauled him to his feet. A dark Mercedes minivan snaked up the dirt road toward them, as two other soldiers in full camouflage scanned the bare tree line with their automatic weapons at the ready. The van pulled up, its door slid open, and the men, captors and victim, were gone. It looked like a scene out of a thriller starring Liam Neeson or Jason Statham.

It was, indeed, something of a fiction.

In March, members of the U.S. Special Operations forces traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to train with local special police units. Carried out at Bosnia and Herzegovina’s national training center in Manjaca, the arrest demonstration, chronicled in an official video, was part of the first-of-its-kind Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) in the Balkan nation.

The training program was part of a shadowy and growing global engagement strategy involving America’s most secretive and least scrutinized troops. Since 9/11, Special Ops forces have expanded in almost every conceivable way — from budget to personnel to overseas missions — with JCETs playing a significant role. Special Operations Command keeps the size and scope of the program a well-guarded secret, refusing to release even basic figures about the number of missions or the countries involved, but documents obtained by The Interceptdemonstrate that from 2012 to 2014 some of America’s most elite troops — including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets — carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training missions around the world.

Special Police Units of the Republika Srpska participate in a tactical demonstration at the training center Manjaca near western Bosnian town of Banja Luka, 260 kms west of Sarajevo , Bosnia, on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. Ten soldiers from U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, 18 police officers from the Police Forces of the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina and 18 from the Police Forces of the Republic of Srpska trained and lived together for a month and conclude their training with this exercise. The month-long Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program provides U.S. Special Operations Forces a chance to train with colleagues in partner nations to develop their military tactics and skills in unfamiliar settings, while also improving bilateral relations and interoperability with partner nation forces. (AP Photo/Radivoje Pavicic)

Members of a Special Police Unit conduct a drill as part of an exercise with U.S. forces in a Joint Combined Exchange Training at Manjaca, Bosnia.
Photo: Radivoje Pavicic/AP

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

New social movements arise in Bosnia Herzegovina | ROAR Magazine

December 25, 2014

New social movements arise in Bosnia Herzegovina | ROAR Magazine.

New grassroots movements, assemblies and unions are arising in Bosnia Herzegovina. Other post-Yugoslav countries experience similar returns of the left.

What’s going on in Bosnia Herzegovina ten months after the uprising? Following the violent riots in February 2014, the citizens of Bosnia have jointly channeled their rage into horizontal and self-organized assemblies called plenums, which mushroomed throughout the country and surfaced in as many as 24 cities and towns. Unfortunately, the flood that hit the country a few months later appears to have wiped out the new experiments of collective self-organization. But the protests, plenums and even the flood contributed to activate a solidarity chain that has now translated into an informal network calling for social justice.

Where have all the protesters gone?

The February protests kicked off in the city of Tuzla, 130 kilometers north of the capital Sarajevo, where the laid-off workers of five bankrupted factories staged a protest to get their unpaid pensions and health insurance back. Shortly afterwards, the protest exploded across the country, in the biggest protest wave the country has witnessed since the end of the war. Although the participation in the rallies faded away several months after the revolt, the laid off workers in the Tuzla area have not stopped voicing their rage. They still keep staging protests in front of the institutional buildings, claiming the salaries and pensions the factory owners still owe them. To this end, they founded an independent trade union called Solidarnost (Solidarity), aimed at uniting workers with various professional backgrounds and across ethnic boundaries.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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