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Stossel : Attacks on Freedom
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De
01/08/2010 11:57:38
Dragan Nedeljkovich (En ligne)
Now officially retired
Zrenjanin, Serbia
 
 
À
31/07/2010 09:36:01
Information générale
Forum:
Politics
Catégorie:
Autre
Divers
Thread ID:
01472501
Message ID:
01474791
Vues:
38
>>Read some history. In Yugoslavia, the period of such life pretty much ended around 1952, before I was born. I was visiting Hungary and Romania a lot during such regimes, and the USSR briefly, and I've seen a lot of difference. Any contact with the foreigners was suspect there, probably tracked by agents (I smuggled some books for a Romanian student expelled from college because his dad was a Titoist), while we had hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting since mid sixties, and we freely mixed with them, visited them (I've been to Germany and Netherlands visiting, they were visiting me - all between '74 and '77). So I've been to all three sides - West, East and SFRY in those years, and I remember them well.
>>
>>There were some bad sides to the life in SFRY, some limitations and injustice, but generally people felt better then than now, when Serbia is recolonized.
>
>When I was in Europe,, Yugoslavia was the vacation spot of the mid - elite. It was a nice experiment that went wrong.... (how's that for over-simplification).

Too short, but not inaccurate. Somewhere in the middle of it, the self-management was diverted into a ridiculous direction, where it became too complicated and couldn't possibly work as it was designed, unless there was a whole bureaucracy which would understand its process and lubricate it. Of course, the bureaucracy came to be, and it oiled itself first, while the substance of what a citizen, as a subject in the decision process, could decide about has dwindled to some 2% of their own product. The rest was regulated this way or another.

Which happened probably because the political elite didn't like the consequences of their own program, where it said that they should, in time, cease to rule, and the whole process would fall on the shoulders of enlightened working people and citizens. Which just proves that there's no political elite which would choose the lesser damage to the country if that choice means that they lose power.

>It was also a place where two communities lived next to each other and never met or interrelated. Sure everyone could come and go but inside the country and its own neighborhoods and cities, it was often quite isolated. In some places marriages between different groups was perfectly ok, but in other communities absolutely not. There was a lot of ethnic separatism in some towns and absolutely none in others. After Tito, if anyone disagreed with Milosevic they labeled as counter-revolutionary and put into a separate group.... I was in my mid 20s then and that is the Yugoslavia I remember (and granted, I am not from there and never LIVED there as a resident or citizen). That was a short (very short period of time) for Yugoslavia but it was also a time when it began it's demise....during the turmoil it appeared that everyone - neighbors and different groups - wanted different things.
>
>So, how much of that is accurate and how much of that is way off base?

I have learned of those communities where intermarriage was frowned upon quite late - because I lived at the opposite end of the spectrum. In Vojvodina (my province), the official stamps couldn't have less than 2" in diameter, because they were in five languages. In my wife's family they spoke three languages, and even nowadays I live in a very mixed neighborhoods (at least one house Romanian, three Rroma, two Hungarian, and the rest a general mix of all ex-Yugoslav nations).

As for Milošević's policy, the "labeled as counter-revolutionary and put into a separate group" happened only inside the top ranks of the party; normal people didn't feel much of that. However, that was only before the split, in '86-'90; after that, it was socialists+former communists+radicals vs the others, who were labeled as traitors, foreign mercenaries etc. There wasn't much of direct prosecution, but you could expect the arrival of financial police to camp for days scrutinizing your business, or to have to hide lest you get voluntarily drafted into some obscure military unit to fight in Croatia or Bosnia (which I avoided twice, with zero consequences), and you generally didn't have the time to get involved in any politics or resistance, because bare survival took all day. But that's after SFRY.

Other than that, there's nothing inaccurate in your description, except its size - that country was so different from the rest of the world, that it would take a few books to just scratch the surface.

back to same old

the first online autobiography, unfinished by design
What, me reckless? I'm full of recks!
Balkans, eh? Count them.
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