what do you guys think about Michael Parenti's piece The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia?

Posted by bigwavecoming@reddit | AskBalkans | View on Reddit | 23 comments

Not trying to stir the pot but didn't realize he wrote about yugoslavia until recently and wondered if anyone here had read it. https://www.michael-parenti.org/article-the-rational-destruction-of-yugoslavia

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Defiant-Strength2010@reddit

Michael Parenti was right in principle, but he got a few details wrong, he misjudged Milošević and fell for his charade in which "he was defending Yugoslavia", in reality Milošević was just another accomplice in the destruction of Yugoslavia.

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bigwavecoming@reddit (OP)

I see, do you feel similarly about parentis book, if you have read it? Do you feel his characterization of the symmetry or lack of symmetry in the scope and scale of violence presented in this article is mostly factual? It seems hard to find neutral information. I definitely had a naive "serbs=bad guys" narrative in my head prior to recently learning more about the conflict. I like parenti's other work.

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Defiant-Strength2010@reddit

I didn't read the book, but the "serbs=bad guys" was also a self-fulfilling prophecy, Serbia/Yugoslavia was sanctioned and pressure was put on Serbia for years because of the support for Republika Srpska and Republika Srpska Krajina, even though the support was milquetoast in many situations and even non-existent in others. For example Yugoslavia put sanctions on Republika Srpska when they didn't accept the Vance-Owen peace plan in 1993, then further intensified those sanctions in 1994, so Republika Srpska was under heavy sanctions by Yugoslavia for years when Srebrenica happened in 1995, but that didn't stop the entire western world to blame Serbia for what happened in Srebrenica.

In Kosovo Serbian military and police were fighting terrorists armed and trained by US PMC in camps in Albania, many policemen were murdered in ambushes, so they were brutal in the way they dealt with villages that harboured terrorists, after sieging the village for a few days when they didn't surrender they would just go in and kill everyone, this happened a couple of times but it was always localized to villages and families that actually harboured terrorists, killed police and put up an armed resistance. Then NATO attacked and the scale and scope of the crimes massively expanded, over a million people were expelled from their homes during the bombing, of course nothing can justify those crimes but the common narrative is that the bombing campaign stopped the ethnic cleansing, when in reality it massively exacerbated it and you could even say it caused it, because 99% of all crimes happened during the bombing not before it.

So yeah, serbs were the bad guys, but it is easy to make a bad guy out of someone if you mess with them for over a decade.

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causebaum@reddit

"Had you not bombed us, we would not have killed as many Albanians. We would have killed them anyway, of course, but probably not as many."

"Yes, we slaughtered Albanians, but we massively expanded our slaughter because you bombed us"

How can this be the essence of your later part of your response?

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Defiant-Strength2010@reddit

Funny that an Albanian is talking considering the treatment of Serbs in Kosovo after the war, no bombs and no sanctions yet still they got expelled...

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causebaum@reddit

Thats what you get for losing a war that you escalated.

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Defiant-Strength2010@reddit

Wow, so why are you then mad with what Serbia did in '99 when NATO escalated the conflict on your behalf? That's just what you get for involving NATO into our conflict.

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causebaum@reddit

[ Removed by Reddit ]

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bigwavecoming@reddit (OP)

tbh a friend of mine is serbian and I felt awkward bringing it up, but I like talking about politics, so I was trying to learn more about the recent politics. I have actually visited belgrade and novi sad, about ten years ago, as well as travelled around bosnia, all of which I liked very much, and in both places was treated kindly and with warm hospitality.

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One-Act-2601@reddit

He was pushing a narrative, he is not someone I would get objective information from.

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AnythingGoesBy2014@reddit

the fact that he compares treatment of kosovo albanians with czech romani people is absurd. serbs wanted to ethnically cleanse kosovo after they attempted that in bosnia. europe and UN sent “monitors” who stood by and tried not to watch the genocide infront of their eyes. only thanks to US swift action that was stopped. and 4 years later after bosnia they wanted to do the same in kosovo. and were stopped. if they took the EU approach with peacekeepers, there would be dead in thousands.

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Defiant-Strength2010@reddit

This is bullshit, Milošević did whatever he wanted to Albanians, the bombing didn't stop shit. It forced the country to capitulate after two and a half months, but during those 2 and a half months Serbian military and police did as they pleased in Kosovo, they expelled over a million people much quicker than those 2 and a half months, they didn't stop until they were done.

Here's a US documentary from 2000 going into detail https://youtu.be/vl_DPhmII6U

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Melodic_Interview210@reddit

Old world communists still entertain the myth that pre-war Titoist Jugoslavija was some kind of paradise. Nihil novi sub sole.

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alkorisno@reddit

That man was very famous and popular, even on the west. He faced a lot of oppression from the red scare for his freedom of political opinions. He has some great talks on youtube. He is absolutly right about everything

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Besrax@reddit

This article is very biased. Basically, it reads like "Yugoslavia was heaven on Earth, but the bad West destroyed it". Sad to see such a BS take coming from someone who is supposedly a historian and a scientist, but I'm not surprised - after all, propaganda and ideology are known to infect the minds of all sorts of people, even very intelligent ones.

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alkorisno@reddit

Compared to capitalism it was practiclly heaven. Your comment reads as if someone was talkimg about WW2 and you said, but the alias ware also bad, they killed a lot of people, mostly nazis

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vonbr@reddit

any idiot can write apologetic bullshit. but it takes a special kind of idiot to write such bullshit to piss of even beneficiaries of said apologetics. lemme just point to you this pearl of wisdom:

Milosevic was elected as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few violations

Yep, sure. And then people of Serbia got so pissed of for those "few violations" they ousted him in basically rebellion...

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