can we please not pull the Tankie stuff? the Kosovo conflict was an active genocide, that the USA stopped. if you are calling it the “U.S. War on Yugoslavia” you either must assume that: genocides are good or ethno-states are good.
if your oppositional point is that one side was backed by “the capitalist west” and the other by “the totally socialist/communist guys really I swear former soviets” then I can only see you as a fascist supporter, because that’s all what the former USSR nations ended up being, Oligarchical fascists, and only some of them have been able to at least cast off that plague on humanity.
I recommend listening to the speech first. This is Michael Parenti discussing how the US utilized economic warfare against Yugoslavia to cause the country to destabilize into nationalist right wing reactionary movements.
ya, no I have had to look into this stuff way too much and can tell you it’s BS, the ethnic tensions were brewing long before it became unstable, but i recommend you look into some actually historic accounts and motivations instead of following a tanky’s word
I’ve listened to this speech several times. This doesn’t discuss what happened in Yugoslavia after the collapse, at all. Parenti is one of the most prominent and published communists in the 21st century. This isn’t just some uneducated slop.
just because someone is prominent and published doesn’t mean it’s right, and just because it’s wrong doesn’t mean it is uneducated slop, what you should be very aware of is that he is just as much trying to push a narrative as he accuses others of doing, the difference is once you actually stop to speak to some of the older people in the region it becomes very obvious that the three-way genocide was a result of long-standing ethnic/religious tensions that predate even the socialist movement in the region, but instead brought to a point with the fall of the somewhat authoritarian government leaving these ethnic lines as some of the only way the people identified each other as, along with a general distrust between these groups that the Tito-ist government exasperated, that is amazing is that it lasted any amount of time
Once again, you’re assuming things about this speech without listening to it. He never makes the claim that Yugoslavia collapsed only due to the economic warfare. It’s a significant factor, not the sole factor. It feels like you don’t want to acknowledge the role the US played in flaring those deeply complex conflicts. This speech is based on his book “To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia”, in which he did exactly that, travel to Yugoslavia and talk to people in the former state. Parenti, like most socialists, doesn’t believe that Yugoslavia (or any nation under the rule of a communist party for that matter) was a communist utopia. He acknowledges the flaws in Yugoslavia, and never claims or even insinuates that ethnic hatred was created by the US. It’s naive to claim that the US Appropriations Act of 1991 had nothing to do with the the dissolution of the state though.
the ethnic tensions were brewing long before it became unstable
They were. The observation is not denied, and also is not a meaningful repudiation of the indictment being made.
you can’t prove a negative, you can on the other hand show a demonstrably more significant cause of the events
you can’t prove a negative
How insightful you must be, to make such an observation, while discussing a video you have not watched.
Your entire contribution to the community has been simply creating your own reasons for objecting to everyone else.
no, just mainly you