Propagandist For Balkan War Criminal REVEALS West's Dirty Secrets | Joe Tripician

## From Hired Storyteller to Conflicted Witness The conversation exposes a disturbing, familiar mechanic of modern statecraft: storytelling as a weapon to recast violent actors as democratic friends, and to bury inconvenient truths under a veneer of respectability. What began, in the exchange, as a routine freelance job for an Emmy-winning storyteller quickly turned into an ethnographic lesson about how reputations are manufactured, how narratives are policed, and how fragile the boundary is between propaganda and legitimate public diplomacy. The account at the center of the discussion is not an abstract theory about information warfare; it is a first-hand chronicle of being paid to write the life of a leader accused of war crimes, and of the ethical and personal unraveling that followed. The storyteller—Joe Tripician—arrives in this story as a working creative man in debt who takes a high-paying commission to write a biography. The purchaser, in effect, is a government intent on rebranding its leader to Western audiences. That simple transaction illuminates a wider ecosystem: cultural attachés, intermediaries with embassy connections, diasporic brokers, journalists both cooperative and dissident, and an international tribunal whose very existence served as motivation to sanitize a national record. The conversation unfolds less as a memoir than as a case study in how states try to manage history once the battlefield has cooled. ## The Mechanics of Manufactured Memory What emerges clearly from the discussion is how the process of manufacturing memory operates at the level of everyday decisions. The government middleman hands over glossy brochures showing the target leader shaking hands with Western presidents; interviewers are arranged, and the freelancer is promised editorial control and a hefty advance. Those promises are strategic: a veneer of independence lends credibility to the end product while allowing the commissioning party to set boundaries. When the author insists on editorial freedom, it is quickly constrained by requests to remove entire chapters—especially anything touching on wartime atrocities or the leader’s earlier role within the communist apparatus. This pattern—pay for a narrative, deliver a palatable account, selectively edit to erase dissonant facts—is not unique to one state or one era. The conversation points to routines that recur wherever states want to reset their image: hire expatriate-friendly brokers, commission Western-facing texts, cultivate appearances of transparency while controlling sensitive content. What is striking in Tripician’s recollection is how blunt the demands were: “Do not mention war crimes. Do not mention the communist time.” The bluntness reveals a pragmatic calculus: modern legitimacy in Europe and acceptance into the European Union required an appearance of rule-of-law maturity and distance from past abuses. So reshaping history became a political imperative, not merely a public relations option. ## Living Between Surveillance and Sources A second theme in the exchange is the lived reality of operating amid surveillance, intimidation, and a polarized media environment. The storyteller describes meeting independent journalists who warned that their phones were monitored, whose cars were bombed for reporting that displeased the authorities. The presence of dissidents and exiles who had fled to the United States offered countervailing narratives, but engaging with them carried obvious risks. The author recounts the anxiety of realizing that telling the truth could make him an “enemy of the state,” while the alternative—producing a whitewashed text—would brand him a paid propagandist. That dual pressure—the personal safety risk for local critics and the reputational risk for a foreign author—illuminates why many narratives get distorted after conflict. Those with access to official channels are rewarded with interviews, transportation, and access to elites; those who dissent operate in the shadows and often pay a price. The conversation shows how intermediaries curate an incoming foreign writer’s itinerary to maximize exposure to favorable voices, while controlling access to archives, witnesses, and unvarnished testimony. The result is a manufactured field of evidence in which the most visible testimony tends to be the least critical. ## The Hague as Narrative Leverage The threat—and the promise—of international justice plays a pivotal role in the story. The conversation situates the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as an active pressure point shaping national behavior. Leaders feared being indicted; governments sought to avoid handing prosecutors the clean paper trail that would make an indictment inevitable. That fear explains, in part, the urgency of buying reputational cover in Western capitals. If a homegrown biography can persuade journalists, diplomats, and think tanks that a leader was a bulwark against aggression rather than a perpetrator, then the political cost of an indictment could be softened. This logic reframes propaganda as risk-mitigation: it is not only about winning hearts and minds, it is also about preempting legal jeopardy. The storyteller’s account suggests that states engage in reputational hygiene long after active combat ends—because international tribunals and Western publics continue to adjudicate the moral legitimacy of new governments. The attempt to avoid the Hague is thus both a pragmatic and symbolic endeavor: keep your image clean enough that courts and foreign capitals treat you as a partner rather than a pariah. ## Ethics, Credibility, and the Limits of Complicity At its core, the exchange is an ethical reckoning. Tripician’s candid reflections reveal the friction between financial need, creative ambition, and moral responsibility. He accepted an advance, traveled across the Atlantic, and found himself in a moral trap he hadn’t anticipated. The conversation traces the evolution from eager contractor to disenchanted witness who learns that “editorial control” can be as illusory as the glossy brochures offered to him. The choice points are stark: produce a flattering but dishonest account and risk a career-long label as a propagandist; pursue truth and risk alienation, blacklisting, or worse in a still-tense environment. The episode poses broader questions about the obligations of cultural producers. To what extent should storytellers accept commissions from actors with compromised records? When does the pursuit of access and material independence become complicity in state-sponsored revisionism? Tripician’s eventual decision to resist censorship and to document the whole experience in a memoir reframes the original assignment as a spur to accountability. His story suggests a pragmatic policy for would-be Western contractors: insist on transparent funding, independent verification of facts, and ethical thresholds that, if crossed, trigger withdrawal. ## Lessons for Contemporary Nonalignment and Neutrality Debates The conversation speaks directly to debates about neutrality and nonalignment in international politics. The Yugoslav breakup was shaped by a mixture of historical grievances, Tito-era suppression, economic imbalances, and external meddling. Yet the way former combatants sought Western legitimization afterward demonstrates how alignment or nonalignment is also a question of narrative. Governments seeking entry into Western institutions often moderate policies and manufacture narratives accordingly; competing powers will, in turn, invest in counter-narratives or instrumentalize historical grievances for present-day advantage. For scholars of neutrality, the story underscores that neutral positions are not simply geopolitical coordinates but reputational battlegrounds. Being treated as a legitimate, neutral actor in the international system depends on how history is told and received. The intentional reshaping

Emmy Award winner REVEALS West's Dirty Secrets | Joe Tripician If someone offered you money to write about the "heroic deeds" of war criminal in the Balkans, would do you so? Do you think people would fall for it? Well, here's the thing: one man's war criminal is another man's war hero... Joe Tripician is an Emmy award-winning Producer / Writer / Director and a Published Author. His work has been broadcast across America, Europe and Japan, has shown at the Cannes Film Festival, and is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Joe also once was paid good money to produce a hagiography of Franjo Tudjman, the Croat leader during the Yugoslav wars. Today we discuss the ins and outs of his experience as being a paid propagandist for a darling of the western narrative about the Balkan Wars. Links: Joe’s memoir “Balkanized at Sunrise”: https://www.amazon.com/Balkanized-at-Sunrise- Joe-Tripician/dp/0557494516/ Joe’s documentary (in production) “I Was a Paid Propagandist” Trailer: https://vimeo.com/693242604 Donation link: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/joetripician /25 Joe’s website: https://joetripician.com Follow Joe on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/joetrip. bsky.social #M3 The motives are still the same, right? It's to mind control the population, basically, you know, to direct them into a certain political narrative that is more in line with the rulers so that the rulers can still stay in power, so that, you know, the money can still flow up to them. It's apparent everywhere you look these days. #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and a few weeks ago I got an email that started as follows: Hello, I'm an American Emmy Award-winning writer, producer, and director with a true story that I'd like to share with you and your audience. It is based on my personal experience of being a paid propagandist for a Balkan war criminal. After a little bit of research and a conversation with my Kosovo specialist, it became clear to me that this was a true story, so I invited its author. I'm talking today to Joe Tripician, the man who was tasked with creating a biography of Franjo Tuđman, the leader of Croatia when it broke apart from Yugoslavia. Joe, welcome. Thank you, Pascal. Thanks for the invite. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming online. And I hope I didn't butcher your name. I forgot to ask you if your last name is pronounced Tripician. Is that correct? #M3 It's Tripician. -- 1 of 17 -- #M2 Okay, almost. #M3 It's Tripician. #M2 Then let's start with your story. Since you're a storyteller, why don't you begin where you think it should start and tell us what happened? #M3 Oh, well, for me, it began in 1997. I was recently divorced, I was deep in debt, and this job had landed in my lap. I was introduced to a man named Jakov, Jakov Sedlar, and he was, and still is, a Croatian film and theater director. Back then, he was also the official cultural attaché of Croatia to the United Nations. I still had my video production company where I did a lot of post-production work and animation. The introduction to him was that he asked me to do a job, to create a little animated map of Croatia for a travelogue he was producing. Like any other ignorant American, I couldn't locate Croatia on a map, so I had to go to a store to buy one. It had a very strange disclaimer on it. It said, "Size is subject to change from acts of war." Now, that's a little bit of a joke, but this is two years after the bloody Balkan Wars of the '90s. And so some of your viewers may know about the history. But for me, I didn't know a thing about it. So I did the job. He thanked me, he paid me, and some months later, he came back and he had a script he wanted me to review. It was a script for a biography of Franjo Tuđman, Croatia's first president, as you mentioned in the introduction, immediately after Croatia broke apart from Yugoslavia. So I read it through, and it had a section in there about Tuđman's book, which was published some years earlier, called "The Horrors of War." And in that book, it caused some controversy where Tuđman claimed that the Jews in Jasenovac, which was Croatia's notorious concentration camp during the Second World War, that the concentration camp was run in part by the Jews who were interned there. And I said this to Jakov as delicately as I could. I said, you know, this film you plan to show in New York, right? He said, yes. I said, well, there's a large Jewish community here. You may want to rephrase this section. And he looked at me like he didn't understand it. Anyway, so I gave him my notes. And then a few months later, he returned and asked me to write the official biography of Franjo Tuđman. Well, this caught me by surprise. -- 2 of 17 -- I then quickly asked the person who introduced us, who was my doctor and also Jakov's doctor, how this came about. He said, "Well, Joe, I know you're a filmmaker and you're also an author. It's going to do well because I knew you're broke and you need the work." And it's true. At that time, I had published my first book. It's a humor book called "The Official Alien Abductee's Handbook," sort of a self-help book for alien abductees. Again, I emphasize it's a humor book. Anyway, I was puzzled. I said, "Jakov, you know, I only had this one book published and it's an alien book. Why are you asking me?" He said, "Joe, no, Joe, you're a very important artist. You would tell your story." I said, why would you want an American? You know, he said, we want the American point of view to tell Tuđman what a correct man he is. And I said, well, you know, if you want that, you should just hire a PR firm. There are lots of them here in New York. He says, no, Joe, you really must do it. I said, look, first of all, I don't know anything about Tuđman, you know, and I could be very critical about it. Give me the weekend and I'll get back to you. So I did some quick research. I found that Tuđman was lauded as the savior of the Croatian people because he fought against Serb aggression and he brought his country more or less safely into independence. And also, Tuđman was vilified as a neo-Nazi, an Idi Amin of the Balkans, a butcher of the Balkans, and other terms less flattering. So I met with Jakov on the Monday after that weekend. I said, look, Jakov, I can't possibly write this book, you know, because if you really want an official glowing book about Tuđman, A, I can't do that. I'd have no credibility. And B, even if I could, I wouldn't. I don't want to become known as a paid propagandist. And he says, no, Joe, you absolutely must. He was very insistent. And I said, look, I'm going to be critical. If I find something that I don't agree with, I'm going to be critical. He says, yeah, yeah, yeah, Joe, look, I'll help you, give you information. And he handed me this glossy brochure. It had a photograph of Franjo Tuđman shaking hands with Bill Clinton. He was, of course, the president during the Balkan Wars. And he says, look at this. Here's your president and our president. Clinton loves Croatia. We must do both. I said, look, the only way I'll do this is if you give me total editorial control. He says, yes, yes, of course, we give you that. Be careful what you ask for. This is a lesson for everyone out there, and it was a big one for me. Because when he said that, I said, look, are you sure you know what you're agreeing to? He says, yeah, yeah, yeah. You have editorial control, and we pay you $40,000 up front. Great. When do I go? That's how my journey into the Balkans started. So I had the contract written up. He signed it. He said, this is all perfectly normal. I said, yeah, it's perfectly normal. And so within two months, I landed in Zagreb. Now, during that two- month period, I had hired a researcher who was the son of Croatian immigrants to the United States. And during the war, he was a very vociferous supporter of Tuđman. He was also a translator for Tuđman on many occasions in peace negotiations. So he knew practically everybody there. I later heard some gossip and rumors that his name was George Rudman, and that George did some freelancing for the CIA. I can't verify that, so that's an allegation. Anyway, so I had him for one side of the equation. Then I met a young man named Ivo Skorich, who was a political refugee in the -- 3 of 17 -- United States because he was an independent journalist and wrote some highly unflattering things about Tuđman. He was granted asylum, and he gave me a different point of view than George did. He talked about how Tuđman, if you interview Tuđman, he'll just give you a plate of fish and talk about great relations, history, and blah, blah. Then he'll never really answer the questions about war crimes and concentration camps in Bosnia. So I had George on the right and Ivo on the left. With that information, I landed in Zagreb and immediately went to the American embassy to tell them who I was and why I was there. The man, Doug Davidson, who was the information officer at that time, seemed completely puzzled by why the Croatian government would hire me, someone who was not a historian, whose only published book was a book about aliens, and why they wanted me to do it. I said, you know, it's something I've always wanted to do. You know, foreign affairs is my first love. Now, at this point, a lot of people would ask me, okay, what was your real incentive? I know money must have been the incentive. I said, yes. But remember, I was also recently divorced and was hoping as a newly single man to meet some Balkan women who might be impressed by an American passport. So that's one of my first confessions. So I then had Vakoff take me from office to office to meet politician after politician, interview after interview. Never have I been lied to by so many people in such a short period of time. And they all wanted to explain to me how the war started very simply, very recently, back in the 11th century. So there is a strain of truth when people talk about ancient ethnic rivalries. But to rewind back to the beginning of the troubles in the Balkans, you have to understand that these are people who lived together, intermarried, and raised families together for decades and decades. And during the time of Tito, who had a delicate balancing act between East and West, the non-alignment political position, he was able to keep different ethnic groups united by the worst possible method: by suppression. So any expression of nationalist identity or cultural identity or what have you, you got sent to Goli Otok, which was known as Naked Island, a notorious prison like Alcatraz. So, of course, that's going to cause some blowback. What happened in the '70s was the Croatian Spring, and Franjo Tudjman was part of that rebellion. He was jailed twice for his writings about expressing Croatian nationalism. When Tito died, everything fell apart because he was the only one keeping everything together. Everything was centralized. It was a country, someone said, where the profits are nationalized and the losses are socialized, because the power resided in Belgrade, which was landlocked. But Croatia was formed like a croissant. They had a very thin but long strip of land bordering the Adriatic. They got a lot of the bulk of the revenue of the country through tourism, and so there was a lot of resentment in that, as you can imagine. So after Tito kicked the bucket, Slobodan Milošević took advantage of the death and made a speech in Kosovo, where at first he didn't realize what he was doing, but he got such a response when he said, no more will they suppress you, because the Serbs were a minority in Kosovo and the Muslims were in the majority. And so because of this -- 4 of 17 -- suppression of nationalism, nationalistic identity, and cultural identity, he was able to form that revolt with the Serb minorities in Kosovo and primarily in Croatia. Croatia was prime territory for the taking. And so that's whe