Was Tito a dictator?

[fa2991]

Thoughts? And what do you think of him in general? I'm learning more about him and Yugoslavia's workers' councils and I'm fairly impressed.

[Weezer]

No, but he's a revisionist so that nullifies everything he ever did.


...just kidding!

[Roach]

What's the purpose of this? There is allready a thread about him.

[fa2991]

What's the purpose of this? There is allready a thread about him.

Most threads on RevLeft have subjects that have already been posted about a number of times.

Also, link?

[Roach]

Most threads on RevLeft have subjects that have already been posted about a number of times.

Also, link?
I know but the one that I'm talking about was started today you can see it when entering the history forum.

[Delenda Carthago]

Tito was the most democratic leader of a socialist country next to Lenin.Even though he fucked the greek communists up...

[nip]

I'm not quite sure who he is. I would google it but guys will tell me. :lol:

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

Thoughts? And what do you think of him in general? I'm learning more about him and Yugoslavia's workers' councils and I'm fairly impressed.

The Titoist policies were a somewhat pretentious compromise between workers' organizations and the state planners. (According to Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism, Tito's Yugoslavia used the fact that it was less involved in the economy than in places like the USSR as evidence that the state was "withering away.")

The problem is that when you have workers' organizations managing the economy, the problems that are endemic to capitalism resurface even more than under a completely planned economy: the workers' enterprises compete among themselves, the highly-skilled managers who are running things can demand super-high salaries, the state has fewer resources to allocate in an egalitarian fashion on the basis of needs, and the less competent workers get laid off when having them around is seen as inefficient.

As expected, some central planning and state regulation therefore had to be brought in to help make up for these nasty worker-capitalist features of the economy, so that the Titoist system was effectively a compromise between Soviet-style Marxism and the petty-bourgeois 19th-century ideas of Proudhon, who believed that the factories should be the private property of the workers running them, rather than the common property of the entire people.

The system thus combined both the advantages and the disadvantages of free-market capitalism and central planning. Titoism was a compromise.

In terms of economic inequalities, I believe that there was much more of that in Yugoslavia than in the USSR. Somebody (I believe it was Ismail) once mentioned that Yugoslavia even had a stock market at the time.

As to the question in the title of this thread -- whether Tito was actually dictator -- yes, and there is no doubt about it. There were repressed critics of the bureaucracy and other Marxist dissidents against the Tito government. The 1974 Constitution managed to go as far as to make Tito a leader for life:


Since the amendments had thoroughly reformed the federation, the 1974 Constitution introduced no major changes in the determination of character and content of functions and relations in the federal state. Changes mostly occurred in the organisation of the federation. Instead of the previous five houses, the SFRY Assembly was now made up of the Federal Council and the Council of Republics and Provinces. Josip Broz Tito became the president "without any limitation on his term of office." SIV members were elected by both houses of the SFRY Assembly, which had to pay attention to the equal representation of republics and appropriate representation of autonomous provinces.

[http://www.arhivyu.gov.rs/active/en/home/glavna_navigacija/leksikon_jugoslavije/konstitutivni_akti_jugoslavije/ustav_sfrj_1974.html]

[fa2991]

I've heard talk of genocide in the half-a-million range. Bullshit?

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

I've heard talk of genocide in the half-a-million range. Bullshit?

If genocide means anyone imprisoned dying for any reason and including people executed/and/or shot during/after the war... probably. That's how they usually get those numbers.

[Jazzhands]

I've heard talk of genocide in the half-a-million range. Bullshit?

preeetty sure that's bullshit.

anyway, yes. Tito was a dictator, no question. But a benevolent dictator as far as I know. I read his speech on workers' self-management in Yugoslavia, and he made a lot of sense. He instituted workers' self-management, stood up to the West and the Eastern Bloc, and made an average worker's life decent enough without becoming tools of either the USA or the USSR. He also held together the Balkans in relative peace for the entirety of his rule.

If you think that's not something, go to the national anthems of any one of the Balkan countries on Youtube and look in the comments section. it's filled with deep, festering hatred that probably goes back much longer than the 20th Century. The idea of a multi-ethnic state in an area like that is a genocide waiting to happen. So the fact that Tito held it together really is something.

By the way, this is coming from an anarchist.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

I've heard talk of genocide in the half-a-million range. Bullshit?

Probably a right-wing claim, and sounds like bullshit to me.

Although here's something I find particularly interesting: Yugoslav communists have been charged with "genocide" by the right-wing government in Slovenia... for killing Nazi collaborators after WWII.

BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4581197.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4581197.stm)):


Man on Slovenia genocide charges

Slovenia has charged a former senior communist official with genocide, over the massacre of 234 people in the aftermath of World War II.

Mitja Ribicic, 86, was a chief in the security forces under Yugoslavia's post-war communist leader Tito.

Slovene television said newly unearthed documents suggested Mr Ribicic ordered the summary execution of suspected Nazi collaborators.
Mr Ribicic, under investigation since 1994, has always denied such charges.

"He is being investigated under the law dealing with genocide committed against political or social groups," Pavel Jamnik, Slovenia's police chief dealing with war crimes, told the AFP news agency.

Revenge

After the war communist forces took revenge on those who had collaborated with German and Italian occupiers.

Some reports say there are hundreds of mass graves in Slovenia filled with the bodies of thousands of people massacred by the communist regime in the early post-war years.

Mr Ribicic is the first former Yugoslav official charged in Slovenia over the witch hunt for Nazi collaborators, since the country's independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.

Documents found in the Slovene National Archive reportedly suggest that in 1945 and 1946 Mr Ribicic helped draft a hit list of 234 people for execution. He faces up to 30 years in prison if found guilty of the charges. The Slovene government has recently drawn up draft laws giving equal status to all those civilians killed during and after the war, whether by communists or fascists.

I've also found other sources for the same Nazis-were-genocided-by-communists claim.

TerrorismCentral Newsletter (http://www.terrorismcentral.com/Newsletters/2005/052905.html):


Mitja Ribicic, a communist official in Tito's Yugoslavia, has been charged in Slovenia with genocide against suspected Nazi collaborators at the end of World War II.
More on the same "outrage" in The Australian: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/wwii-era-mass-grave-found-in-slovenia/story-e6frg6to-1111119038762.

What do you make of that? I'd really find it funny if it weren't sad.

[What Would Durruti Do?]

Lol

[stella2010]

Tito was good for land reform

Not like today where you'll see peasants with horse and cart
run over by the onslaught of the multinationals.

[tbasherizer]

I've heard talk of genocide in the half-a-million range. Bullshit?

I'm no expert on Yugoslavia, but I'll try to clear this up.

Yugoslavia was an extremely multi-ethnic country, with different republics for all the ethnicities. Before World War One, these all fell under the jurisdiction of the Habsburgs (Austria-Hungary). After the war, the guys at Versailles didn't want to make a giant confusion of things, so they forced all the Yugoslavs together into their own Yugoslav state instead of having a Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, etc. This pattern continued through to Tito's time, with inter-ethnic tensions remaining, as can be seen with the recent Yugoslav Wars and associated ethnic cleansing (see Karadzik, Milosovic, and company)

For Tito to have genocided against one ethnicity or another would not only be a mean thing to do, but it would also be foolish politically. One can't effectively rule a multi-ethnic nation if they play favourites. Now, people may have encountered health issues (such as having accidents, not enough food, or bullets in vital places of the body) as an indirect result of Tito existing, or maybe even due to his policies, but I'm sure those deaths weren't doled out on a racial basis, or even deliberately.

Of course, one could argue that every commie has to have some number of deaths with lots of zeroes in it to their name, but that's a very rightist and not very revleftist, so those guys can burn in hell.

As has been said before, the constitutional amendments he made enshrined him as the leader of the country forever, which pretty much made him the dictator. In my opinion, he wasn't too bad a dictator, but he was one nonetheless.


So to answer your question: Yes.

[fa2991]

Any forced labor camps, etc.?


Tito was the most democratic leader of a socialist country next to Lenin.

You seem to be the only one who believes that. :p Care to explain why?

[fa2991]

How exactly was Goli Otok used?

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Probably a right-wing claim, and sounds like bullshit to me.

Although here's something I find particularly interesting: Yugoslav communists have been charged with "genocide" by the right-wing government in Slovenia... for killing Nazi collaborators after WWII.

BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4581197.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4581197.stm)):



I've also found other sources for the same Nazis-were-genocided-by-communists claim.

TerrorismCentral Newsletter (http://www.terrorismcentral.com/Newsletters/2005/052905.html):


More on the same "outrage" in The Australian: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/wwii-era-mass-grave-found-in-slovenia/story-e6frg6to-1111119038762.

What do you make of that? I'd really find it funny if it weren't sad.

Killing Nazi war-criminal scum is "genocide" now? :laugh:

[Os Cangaceiros]

He was Murray Rothbard's favorite communist.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

Killing Nazi war-criminal scum is "genocide" now? If you're a communist, yes.

How else would you expect our right-wing friends to utilize a law that defines genocide as including the targeted elimination of "political or social groups"?

So, yeah... the instances of communists killing people on a large scale obviously occured. But turning kind of mass killing as "genocide"?

The narrative is that the communists were worse than Nazis, and the new history is so designed as to deliberately inculcate that point of view.

Latvia officially commemorates a sort of Waffen-SS Veterans' Day since 1998 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_Legion_Day), and Latvian Red Army veterans are regarded as evil pawns of bloody communism. The Baltic narrative has it that the Soviets were mass-killers and abusive occupiers, and the pro-Nazi rightists were a kind of national liberator. Roman Shukhevych (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Shukhevych), who helped the Nazis at one point during Barbarossa, posthumously received the Hero of Ukraine title from Yushchenko's administration. (http://en.rian.ru/exsoviet/20100122/157651041.html)

A little town in Estonia has an SS monument (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2148732.stm).

The beneficiaries of this old process are the obnoxious nationalists of the newly-bourgeois ("democratic") east. The political right generously profits from highlighting every last drawback of communism's history in eastern Europe. The actual distinction between the communists' real and invented crimes is unimportant to that objective.

I'm sure some can remember the recent hullabaloo in Western media about Putin "rewriting history" to make the Soviet past look multi-sided. If Serbs attempted the same thing, they'd find themselves in similar circumstances. Meanwhile, various efforts to make right-wing "history" the official narrative either go by unnoticed or are glossed over -- so propagandistic claims about "genocidal communis," and "freedom-loving allies of the Nazis" increasingly assume the role of the official history.

Why didn't God deliver Nazis from the commies' genocide?

[Blackscare]

He split the unity of the Socialist countries with his non-aligned bullshit. Totally un-leftist of him.


The only way to properly split is to accuse the other country/party of being Trotskyists. Preferably if the other side is saying the same thing of you.