>There was a documentary on CBC on the weekend. They said that some Serbs are still coming to the realization that Milosevic was indeed a mass murderer and it is not a western conspiracy.

The media coverage then was so tight that it could be paralleled only by... let's say the F-word network (aka Faux News), but on all channels. These people were raised on "it was on the radio - it is true" and just moved on to believing everything that's on TV.

I've seen true believers, pretty much in the shape of a few here, with the same trust in the leader's infallibility, conspiracy of everyone against him, with the same sort of patriotism (shaped not in "I like my people", but in "it's us against the rest of the world") as the last refuge, with the same disregard for the facts, and the same passion towards reading them the way they like them. So yes, I figure any half decent reporter with a video-capable cell phone could muster about a hundred people, aged 65 on the average, rallying on the street, waving their old slogans, and pretty much amusing the passers by.

Now in his best days Sloba could muster up a few thousand of these, by getting them on the buses, giving them lunch packets and some petty cash, and transporting them to the nearest place where he organized a spontaneous meeting of support. His TV would blow that to a few hundred thousand people, while it would reduce the real 150,000 people two blocks away to just a few hundred, by taking footage hours before the real beginning.

Some of his propaganda still lives, and some of the people truly believe he was the Messiah. Apart from obvious nutcases, there is a certain percentage of such believers (true or just having interest - financial, I mean) that still influences the current politics. Currently, there's a soft-nationalist party having a minority government, surviving on support by... guess who - remainders of Sloba's party. So we'll have a few more interesting weeks. Maybe a whole year.