I do have some feeling of how things can happen in a country without the citizens knowing it. I lived in West Berlin for two years, 1972-73, but I really don't think I knew what was going on in the city. We didn't have much money and my ex didn't speak German, so we didn't watch television or listen to the radio, or read Berlin newspapers. I talked with Berliners all the time, but the conversations were usually pretty shallow. The only local paper I read was Neues Deutschland, and that was from East Berlin and had no thought-provoking news in it at all. We read the Stars and Stripes, a pretty good newspaper published by the U.S. military - but we had no source of local news from West Berlin. We would occasionally see the Wall, but not often enough to think very much about it. Same thing with the tanks that would rumble through the city - we didn't see them very often, but we saw them often enough that we didn't even think of them any more. We had a wonderful time living there, but there was much we didn't learn.
I suppose the same could be true for the people of Serbia - or of the United States. It's pretty easy not to know what's going on.
-Joe Offer-