Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses his investigation of the Medjugorje phenomenon, its political and ethnic implications, and the conflict between the local Bishop and the Franciscans. He also reveals the involvement of the CIA and the impact of the Medjugorje Deception on his career. The conversation delves into the controversial topic of Medjugorje, exploring the history, controversies, and implications of the alleged apparitions. It also touches on the ethnic and religious dynamics in the United States, the impact of social engineering, and the shifting identity of the country.
Chapters
Introduction to Dr. E. Michael Jones and the Medjugorje Phenomenon
Political and Ethnic Context of Medjugorje in Yugoslavia
Impact on Dr. E. Michael Jones's Career and Personal Experience
The Medjugorje Phenomenon and Ethnic Conflict in Yugoslavia
In this week's Underground, Michael J. Matt shares deets and clips of the RTV "Unite the Clans" speaking tour to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. This is only the beginning of a formal alliance between U.S. and African traditional Catholics.
Signs of hope out of Rome -- Pope Leo meets with Cardinal Burke, welcomes the SSPX, and calls for a World Day of Prayer and Fasting for peace in the Holy Land.
They say that it is antisemitic to criticize Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. Rabbi Dovid Feldman disagrees. He argues that the real antisemites are the ones who accuse him and the rest of the Orthodox Jews of blessing and approving the Zionist genocide in Gaza. Says Rabbi Feldman -- "Judaism is not Zionism. Zionists hate God and the Jewish religion!"
More good news! Five bishops take a stand at the CIC, but what's the takeaway? Michael explains what it means to the traditional Catholic to stand strong with a few good successors of the Apostles.
Finally, move over Ozzy Osbourne! In Croatia, the pop band "Thompson" just shredded the world record for a paid concert. And what was projected up into the sky during the event? A massive lightshow of Our Lady, the Cross, and the Rosary. And five-hundred-thousand young people were there to see Catholic revival shatter the world record!
Ante Pavelić, the leader of the ultranationalist Ustaše regime in Croatia during World War II, fled the Balkans as the Axis powers crumbled in 1945. Known for his brutal policies and collaboration with Nazi Germany, Pavelić escaped justice after the war by joining the infamous "ratlines" — clandestine escape routes organized with the help of sympathetic clergy and former Axis collaborators.
Initially finding refuge in Austria, Pavelić made his way to Italy, where he received assistance from elements within the Catholic Church. In 1948, he secured safe passage to Argentina, a haven for many Axis fugitives under the protection of President Juan Perón. In Buenos Aires, Pavelić lived under the alias "Don Pedro Gónzalez," working as an advisor and quietly maintaining contact with Ustaše supporters.
His relative safety ended in 1957 when he survived an assassination attempt by a Serbian migrant: Blagoje Jovović. Gravely wounded, Pavelić fled Argentina and sought refuge in Francoist Spain, a country sympathetic to anti-communist exiles. Despite lingering injuries, Pavelić avoided extradition and lived quietly near Madrid until his death on December 28, 1959.
During World War II, the Ustasha regime, which was the fascist puppet state of Croatia under German and Italian control, operated several concentration camps in the territory. One of these camps was located in Sisak, Croatia, and was known as the Ustasha-ran concentration camp for children, or commonly referred to as the Sisak Children's Concentration Camp. The Sisak Children's Concentration Camp was established and primarily targeted children of Serbian, Jewish, and Roma descent. It was one of the few concentration camps specifically dedicated to holding children. Conditions in the camp were horrific, with overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, lack of proper nutrition, and rampant disease. The children endured physical and psychological abuse, as well as neglect. Many children died as a result of the harsh conditions, malnutrition, or from being subjected to medical experiments. The exact number of children held in the camp is uncertain, but estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand. Tragically, the majority of the children perished in the camp, either from the brutal conditions or as victims of systematic extermination. It's important to note that the Ustasha regime, led by Ante Pavelić, implemented a genocidal policy aimed at ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Serbs, Jews, and Roma. The regime's atrocities included mass killings, forced conversions, and forced labor. The Sisak Children's Concentration Camp represents one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Ustasha regime and its collaboration with the Axis powers during World War II.
The Jasenovac Concentration Camp was established by the Ustaše regime, a fascist and ultranationalist movement, during World War II in the Independent State of Croatia, which was a puppet state of Nazi Germany. Located in modern-day Croatia, Jasenovac became one of the largest and most brutal concentration camps in Europe. Jasenovac was primarily used to imprison and exterminate ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Serbs, Jews, Roma people, and anti-fascist Croats. The conditions in the camp were extremely harsh, and prisoners faced widespread torture, forced labor, and systematic killings. The methods of mass murder employed at Jasenovac were exceptionally brutal. They included shootings, beatings, hanging, and a particularly notorious method called the "piccolo" (small flute), where victims were tied together and thrown alive into the Sava River, while the Ustaše guards played music to drown out their screams. Estimates of the number of victims at Jasenovac vary widely, but it is believed that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people perished there. The exact figure is difficult to determine due to the deliberate destruction of records by the Ustaše before the end of the war.
RT sat with Serbian director Danko Vasovic to discuss his new documentary about Jasenovac, one of the largest concentration and extermination camps of the Second World War.
John Loftus is the author and co-author of several books on Nazis, espionage, and similar topics including The Belarus Secret (1982), Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (1992), The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (1994), Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks (1998), America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History of How the United States Department of Justice Obstructed Congress by: Blocking Congressional Investigations into Famous American Families Who Funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab Terrorists (2010). Although Loftus' first book, The Belarus Secret, is nonfiction, it was adapted into a TV movie, Kojak: The Belarus File (1985), with Telly Savalas.
Rome: On October 19, 2014, Paul VI (Monsignor Montini) in a solemn ceremony at the Vatican is to be beatified which is the first step to sainthood A miracle, the curing of an unborn baby’s illness, has been attributed to Paul VI. However, Holocaust Victims and their families from Eastern Europe who are locked in a decade’s long legal dispute with the Vatican over looted assets from the Second World War, question the saintliness of the man who as Vatican Secretary of State supervised the infamous Vatican ratline funded with Holocaust era loot.
The Vatican Ratline was a post war system of escape routes for Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of the Second World War. The Vatican version was centered at the Croatian Confraternity of Saint Jerome located in Rome at Via Tomacelli 132 just a block away from the Tiber River bridge and next to the sprawling Tomb of Augustus.
The so called “Golden Priest” Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic, the Apostolic Vistator for Croatian matters, was the chief conductor of the Vatican ratline whose beneficiaries included major war criminals like Croatian mass murderer Ante Pavelic who escaped to Argentina in 1947 despite being responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Other ratline escapees included the Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichman.
The funds that ran the Vatican ratline were obtained from the treasuries of defeated Axis allies like Croatia, Hungary, and Romania and often contained victim loot transformed into Church property through a complex scheme involving deposits at the Vatican Bank. Since 1998, the Holocaust victims have been seeking an accounting from the Vatican which has so far successfully resisted on grounds of sovereign immunity a long running lawsuit in the United States, a more recent EU Commission inquiry and direct claims lodged with the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy.
Declassified documents obtained by Holocaust Victims’ attorneys link Paul VI, then Vatican Secretary of State, to Draganovic and Pavelic. Former US Special Agent, William Gowen, who investigated the Vatican ratline in Rome 1946-1947, testified that Draganovic was supervised by Montini and that Draganovic boasted of a clandestine ten truck convoy of looted gold and valuables that pulled into St. Peter’s Square in 1946 right under the nose of the Allied authorities. (more...)
...The chief expert witness retained for these lawsuits is John Loftus, former Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations attorney (Nazi hunting unit), co-author with Mark Aarons of Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and The Swiss banks; The Secret War Against the Jews and author of The Belarus Secret. The lawsuits themselves are based on the evidence unearthed by Loftus' research spanning two decades. Loftus was an important source for a 1998 US State Department report (Eisenstat/Slany Report: The Fate of the Ustasha Treasury), which focused attention on the Vatican's role in laundering the Ustashe funds.
In a nutshell, Loftus and others have theorized that the genocide of World War II directed at Jews, Serbs, Roma, Soviets, and others by the Nazis and their allies generated vast amounts of loot and plunder including gold coins, wedding rings, and dental gold from concentration camps. These genocide-tainted treasures were re-smelted at the Reichsbank and other central collection points and laundered through the Swiss banks, Bank for International Settlements and the Vatican Banks during and after WWII. According to Loftus, much of the postwar Ustashe and Vatican activity was cloaked in the guise of anti-Communist activities and was encouraged or actively sponsored initially by British Intelligence and later the CIA and in particular Alan Dulles and James Jesus Angleton.
Most remarkable among the Nazis postwar were the Croatian Ustashe. Unlike the Germans whose major criminals faced a war crimes tribunal at Nuremburg, virtually the entire Ustashe hierarchy including their leader or Poglavnik, Ante Pavelic, escaped justice. And even more surprisingly they took with them into exile the monetary proceeds of the extermination of 750,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Pavelic, known as the "butcher of the Balkans", was an honored guest at the Vatican between 1945 and 1947 while other war criminals swing from a noose. Artukovic, the Himmler of Croatia, the man responsible for death camps where hundreds of thousands of Serbs were shot, burned alive, or bludgeoned to death with special hammers, lived openly in Southern California for over thirty years, while private Congressional bills assured his safety from deportation. Other Ustashe, such as the sadist Luburic, purchased villas in Spain or started new lives as businessman in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. But, unlike other ex-Nazis, the Ustashe did not lose their fascist ideology, instead they openly reestablished their Nazi party in Buenos Aires and by 1956 were beginning a new campaign of terror which ultimately reached the United States in the 1970s and 1980s resulting in hijackings, bombings, and murders. (more...)
FIFTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, THE poglavnik, or fuehrer of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, arrived in Buenos Aires, into the welcoming arms of the Peronistas and a large contingent of his former underlings. Though he was a wanted man for war crimes and atrocities carried out on his orders in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatske, or NDH), Pavelic had eluded arrest for more than three years with the assistance of a network of Catholic priests dedicated to preserving the remnants of Hitler's New Order, with the approval and often collaboration of the British and American authorities.
Pavelic was one of the last but most important leaders of the NDH to arrive in a country which was already achieving notoriety as a safe-haven for Nazi fugitives. Other Ustase officials had escaped to Spain and Portugal; more would travel onward to democratic countries such as Sweden, Norway, Australia, Canada and the United States. They brought with them the kernels of a new movement and the tacit blessing of several Allied intelligence agencies who saw the blood-covered Ustase as useful tools in the coming war against Communism.
The ideological base of the Ustase exiles was unchanged from what it had been before the war: virulent anti-Semitism surpassed only by their anti-Serbianism, and the celebration of a personality cult dedicated to Pavelic and a select group of "martyrs," which no living Croat could penetrate. Though the rhetoric of the more loquacious Ustase spokesman would give the movement a varnish of democratic and pro-Western appeal, a quick perusal of any of the literature or statements they later produced indicates that the Ustase movement in exile retained it's neo-fascistic core, lacking the dullest gleam of self-examination or repentance.
Unlike many other exile movements which formed as the Iron Curtain descended across Eastern Europe, the NDH fugitives could look within the Ustase's own history for a model of organization and tactics as an exile movement. The Ustase had been an exile movement before the war, operating training camps for assassins and terrorists to be unleashed on the Royal Yugoslav government under the House of Karadjordjevic. Indeed, as their catastrophic recklessness and mismanagement of the NDH illustrates, Pavelic and the Ustase were far better suited plotting and conspiring on the fringe of the political landscape than coping with the day-to-day banalities of statecraft. The return to their roots as an exiled terrorist organization was a natural succession, and a comparatively easy one as nearly all of the political organizers and ideologists of the movement had by hook or crook evaded arrest when Hitler's European satellites collapsed with the Third Reich. (more...)
"Only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people."
John Paul II speaking at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel, March 23, 2000
DESPITE A LOT OF TALK about apologies, the Catholic Church stands ready to anoint a patron saint of genocide. On October 4, 1998 Pope John Paul II traveled to the Republic of Croatia to beatify [1.] that country's national hero, Alojzije Stepinac, the Archbishop of Zagreb during the Second World War. In so doing he underlined the real commitment of the Catholic Church to stand by its history, no matter how barbaric. Officially, Stepinac was honored as a martyr of the Church's most recent crusade, its crusade against communism. But in making this fanatic a saint, the pope is absolving Stepinac of complicity in crimes of genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma (Gypsies) that took place in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia during the Second World War. This act belies the sincerity of the church's recent and well-publicized campaign to cleanse its past by admitting in a very general way that mistakes were made. [2.] In beatifying Stepinac, the pope makes common cause with those who deny that this holocaust ever took place.
By making Stepinac a saint, the Catholic church is trying to bury one of the darkest chapters of its own recent history with honor. In Croatia, the church did not merely turn a blind eye to genocide, it was an active and enthusiastic participant. Priests and monks took part in atrocities, bishops promoted anti-Semitism and vilified Serbs at the very moment the Jews and Serbs were being exterminated, and forced conversions took place all across Croatia. All the while, the Vatican stood by, waiting to see whether or not this social experiment would advance its interests. The church has yet to apologize for, or even acknowledge the existence of, this genocide. Now Saint Stepinac stands in the way of memory and responsibility.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia, on April 11, 1941, the Nazis installed a puppet regime in Croatia headed by Ante Pavelic, a terrorist and head of the clero-fascist Ustashe movement, as leader or "poglavnik." Pavelic and his followers had been in exile in Italy under the protection of Mussolini and was wanted in both France and Yugoslavia for orchestrating the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. The regime he established in Croatia with the help of his Nazi patrons, the NDH (Independent State of Croatia), was run by the Ustashe party, an organization which combined fascist and Catholic ideologies and which aimed to build a Croatia cleansed of its ethnic and religious rivals, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs.
The identity of the state itself was based more on religious affiliation than on ethnicity, with the fanatically Catholic Ustashe determined to solidify their control through a combination of forced religious conversions, expulsion and outright extermination. (more...)
ACCORDING TO PARTISANS of the movement today, the Croatian Ustase (alternately, to an English audience, Ustasha, Ustashe or Ustashi from ustanak for "uprising") trace their ideological lineage back to the Croatian Party of Right, a 19th century political construct in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Party of Right was formed by Ante Starcevic, an early devotee of what later became known as the Yugoslavist movement, which favoured the union of the Southern Slavs into a common state to stave off German, Turkish, and Italian imperialism in the Balkans.
Founded after his defection to extreme, chauvinistic nationalism, Starcevic's Party of Right defined itself chiefly by what it opposed: the dominance of the Austrian bureaucracy as well as the Hungarian gentry of the Hapsburg state; the Yugoslavist idea promoted in the Croatian lands by Bishop Josip Strossmayer; and, most of all, the Serbian nation, including the thousands of Serbs who had settled at the Emperor's invitation along the Empire's southwestern flank, forming a military bulwark against Turkish expansion. Starcevic postulated that the Croats, unlike the "slave-Serbs," were a lost tribe of Goths who had somehow fallen into a Slavic language, customs and identity.
The Party of Right was doomed to remain on the fringe of Croatian national politics within the Empire. But it was an attractive ideology when it was discovered by a young lawyer from Bradina, a small village in present-day Bosnia-Hercegovina, named Ante Pavelic.
Ante Pavelic rose through the ranks of the Party of Right after the incorporation of Croatia into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later to be renamed Yugoslavia. He led the far right-wing of what was already a right-wing party - the "Frankist" faction, so named after Josip Frank, a singularly intolerant man despite his ethnic background as an assimilated Jew.
Party of Right membership in the 1920s was dwarfed by that of a more moderate Croat-based opposition, called the Croatian Peasant Party. Led by the brothers Stjepan and Ante Radic, the Peasant Party rejected the formation of Yugoslavia as illegitimate. Stjepan Radic was an intellectual with a soft touch for the peasantry of his party's name, and a wily, charismatic politician. Avowedly anti-clerical, in the summer of 1924 Radic visited the USSR and affiliated the Peasant Party with the Communist Peasant International, or Krestintern. After a long parliamentary boycott and several spells as a political prisoner, Radic did leave for Belgrade to form a united opposition with Serbian deputies opposed to the ruling elite. On June 20, 1928, a Montenegrin deputy drew a revolver and shot Radic and two other deputies on the floor of parliament itself; he died of his wounds on the eighth of August.
On January 6, 1929, King Alexander Karadjordjevic declared his personal dictatorship. Among those who sought refuge abroad was Ante Pavelic. After drifting rather aimlessly through Vienna, he established a relationship with Ivan "Vancia" Mihailov's faction of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), a terrorist organization founded more than thirty years before aimed at establishing Bulgarian hegemony in Macedonia. It is believed that Mihailov recommended Pavelic to Italian duce Benito Mussolini, who soon became patron, providing funds and training at a camp near Siena to what Pavelic christened his Ustase.
As Italian support was uncertain and often wavered (Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and Italy's Foreign Minister after 1937, did not meet with Pavelic until more than two years after assuming office), the Ustase sometimes supported the movement through racketeering, extortion, black marketeering, and other criminal activities. The primary victims in these activities were their fellow Croat emigres, a trend which would occur again during their second exile. (more...)
