Chomsky whines about the USSR and calls its collapse "a win for the left". Absolutely unbelievable. Of course he has nothing to say about 1993 protests or the fact that the majority of Russians who experienced life in the USSR want it back.

Zizek calls China a "bad model for the left". Of course no actual socialist experiment is ever good enough for the ivory tower intellectual. Even worse, he keeps saying he hopes that China will liberalize its government. So fuck the DotP, lets just give away power to the capitalists, because that is literally what will happen in a liberal democracy, and he knows it.

  • read_freire [they/them]
    1·
    4 years ago

    huh? the article I linked is the Parenti essay I'm talking about

    gonna just point you to the rest of my comments about this in here to answer your second part

    to be fair, I can think of at least a dozen folks off the top of my head that deserved to face justice before slobo
    ...
    Holbrooke, Clinton, Tudman, Tus, Mladen, etc. etc. etc.
    ...
    at least w/ parenti you know it’s just a misguided vehicle for very deserved nato/propaganda criticism
    ...
    and slobo absolutely doesn’t deserve his propagandized rep. there’s a particularly famous speech he made on serbian independence day just as shit was escalating (91 or 92 if I remember right) where he called for yugo unity and absolutely put the serbian crowd to sleep by not calling for croat and albanian blood.

    Yes, the Serbs were subject to a ton of atrocities during balkanization. That doesn't absolve their genocidal ultranationalists (and again, I'm not saying Slobo was one of them, just that he enabled them).

    • JoeySteel [comrade/them]
      1·
      4 years ago

      So you posted a parenti article as if Parenti had a bad take on the Yugoslav wars or a bad take on Milosevic..

      What do you object to in that article?

      • read_freire [they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        it is wholly uncritical of the serbian right's role in balkanization/the balkan wars, and the way milosevic enabled those parts of his government/military

        The entire point is that you can point out nato, tudman, izetbegovic, etc.'s atrocities and nazi ties while staying critical of the ultranationalist serbs that rode milosevic into power. Even fucking Serbian documentarians producing social history of the balkan wars do.

        this is clear in my other comments in this thread. I suggest reading them

        • JoeySteel [comrade/them]
          1·
          4 years ago

          Nah you completely missed his point and the fact you can't point to a specific paragraph or point in the article is telling.

          Everyone knows about the Serbs atrocities - he mentions them loads of times.

          The Yugoslav leaders were essentially all involved atrocities of similar levels against each other - but only Milosovic was painted as Hitler whilst ethnic cleansing happened under the eye of Nato troops.

          That's his entire point essentially.

          • read_freire [they/them]
            1·
            4 years ago

            the fact you can’t point to a specific paragraph or point in the article is telling

            The complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or 100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes unnoticed.

            If this isn't downplaying the serbian side idk what is.

            I've met Serbians today who use genocidal rhetoric ('infestation', 'sub-human', etc.) to talk about Albanians. To pretend like that sentiment doesn't exist because it's propagandaized as the only genocidal impulse there during the time is asinine.

            he mentions them loads of times

            find one fucking quote, cause I can't

            better to just watch this, which is infinitely more nuanced than Parenti's shitty essay

            • JoeySteel [comrade/them]
              1·
              4 years ago

              If this isn’t downplaying the serbian side idk what is.

              Prior to the Yugoslav war the US told everyone that 200,000 people had been killed. Heres a little job for you bud...20 years have passed since the US claimed Serbs killed 200,000 people. Show me where thats true

              There was no such thing. It was a lie to go to war and murder 140,000 people and turn Serbia into the cancer capital of Europe.

              find one fucking quote, cause I can’t

              Then read his book To Kill A Nation where he explicitly says the war was more like a limited insurgency with all sides committing atrocities

              better to just watch this, which is infinitely more nuanced than Parenti’s shitty essay

              Already seen it. Im surprised you dont think its "downplaying the serbian side" by...telling the truth