[lbo-talk] Anti-communism

Wendy Lyon wendy.lyon at gmail.com
Mon May 23 14:27:45 PDT 2005


On 5/23/05, John Lacny <jlacny at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Does anyone know someone from the former Yugoslavia (from any side) who
> would claim that the fall of communism was a positive development for that
> country? (Apart, that is, from people who got rich from war crimes and
> profiteering, or people who are on crack?)

Yugoslavia's a difficult one because the present dire conditions in much of the region quite patently have to do with a lot more than merely the fall of communism. I know a lot of people in Serbia who would say that the end of communism was a good thing in and of itself and that it was the rise of Milosevic, specifically, that destroyed the country. But I need to point out that my Serbian friends are a bit more .. let's say .. progressive than a lot of their countrymen and women; there are certainly plenty of other Serbs who don't accept that their postcommunist leadership was largely responsible for the disaster that is their country now, and among these people you do often find a nostalgia for the communist era. Of course, Tito's communism was a very different animal to Soviet communism.

In Bosnia Tito is still very revered; one of the main streets downtown is still named after him, there's an eternal-flame sort of memorial to him and Tito t-shirts for sale everywhere.

However, I'd be surprised if these feelings were anywhere near as widespread in Slovenia, which has done quite well by the standards of the region. Even in Croatia, which is nobody's idea of a successful country, nationalist sentiment (in the "hurray, we're independent" sense, not the "let's purge all the foreigners" sense) is probably strong enough to keep the level of nostalgia to a minimum.

I don't know enough about the other Ex-Yu republics to even take a guess.



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