I don’t know much about why it happened. What led up to it. Basically explain it as if I never heard about it.
Yugoslavia was a massive federal socialist country. The country never trusted the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia made many massive stupid mistakes, such as allegedly assassinating those who wanted to reform the country to be more like the USSR.
Yet, Yugoslavia was still a massive improvement over the rest of Europe. Very high relative living standards and a market-socialist economy made up of dozens of ethnicities.
One of the major problems of Yugoslavia was that to finance their economic development and successes, and due to them not trusting the USSR, they accepted loans from the IMF and opened themselves up to foreign economic exploitation. Yugoslavia’s socialist economy was tolerated because it acted as a bulwark against the USSR in favor of the imperialist capitalist west.
Yet the U.S. for decades funded right-wing terrorist groups that committed ethnic cleansing and racial violence and anti-communist sabotage and sanctions against Yugoslavia, and after the USSR was betrayed and dismantled, the IMF and World Bank came knocking at Yugoslavia’s door for massive debt collection.
Yugoslavia didn’t have the finances to pay the exorbitant prices or brace the economic and terrorist sabotage, so they were invaded as the capitalist news media ran bullshit stories about fictional atrocity propaganda, which led to internal collapse and racialized violence that was blamed on Milosevic and the socialist party.
After Yugoslavia was destroyed, Milosevic and many of his ilk were put on show trials, which failed to find evidence for many of the slanderous accusations.
I’m asking this in good faith, not tryna “debunk” or whatever, but did Yugoslavia kill a bunch of ethnic Albanian civilians or something or was that a Xinjiang-like conspiracy theory to drum up support?
The latter, read ‘To kill a Nation.’ Basically lots Albanians moved to Kosovo (part of Serbia), and there were some extreme Albanian groups around the time of the split of Yugoslavia that wanted to ethnic cleanse Kosovo of Serbs. They were doing terrorism and stuff against the FRY and so they had to intervene and a few people from both sides died. So, the western media was like “Serbia’s literally rounding up Albanians and genociding them by the tens of thousands” without a shred of evidence. One thing I forgot to mention is that Yugoslavia always gave special privilege to Kosovo, even after multiple countries left, but the Kosovan extremists somehow wanted more. And, so eventually NATO intervened and effectively ethnic cleansed Kosovo of Serbs, causing far more death and destruction than was ever Serbia’s fault.
Sorry if it’s poorly written, if you want more info just read the book (it’s not that long, I finished in a couple weeks only reading a few pages a day).
That was very helpful I’ll be sure to read Parenti’s book too!
Parenti To Kill a Nation and Weight of Chains documentaries by Boris Malagurski could help.
Parenti’s book was great. I knew absolutely nothing about the conflict until I read it, and there’s so much information in there. I found it originally through someone on gzd mentioning the parallels to Russia-Ukraine today, and it was very Interesting reading in that context.
