Party leaderships commonly distrust and dislike the heretic more than they detest the common enemy, but the streak of easant vengeance which has been vented on Djilas has deprived young Yugoslavs of the chance to find out where they really came from.

Because, with his new book Wartime, Djilas has undertaken to describe the birth of a nation. Total war came early to Yugoslavia, made all the more terrible by the fact that the Nazi invaders considered their victims to be racially inferior. This license to kill led to such atrocity, and such resistance, that by the end Churchill and Stalin were vying for the favors of the communist leadership. The fact that both scrounging imperial paws were severely bitten goes to show something that is still true—and still denied by imperialists of all hues.