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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum
GLD 414.47+0.7%Jan 9 4:00 PM EST
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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (136077)10/14/2017 6:58:57 PM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (1) of 219238
 
1974 in Yugoslavia were the days of President Josip Broz Tito, and he certainly would have disagreed with you.

In the multi-ethnic country Tito was was born to a Croat father and Slovene mother, becoming the youngest Sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian military. Tito was wholly intolerant of ethnic divisions or 'nationalism' and was absolutely determined to eradicate the differences.

As the President of communist Yugoslavia is thoroughly integrated all of the multi-ethnic groups in the country. If the director of a department was Albanian (although not Muslim because all religions were banned), then the assistant director was definitely a Serb or Croat. There was no area in Yugoslavian government or business which wasn't meticulously integrated. People whose parents had intermarried between ethnic groups were given preference for important positions because they hopefully had a mixed loyalty built in.

At the the time Yugoslavia was the communist nation most integrated with the West, so relatively quite prosperous, but it was also arguably the most totalitarian of all of the industrialized communist nations - though nothing the nightmare in North Korea.

Yugoslavians who spread any ethnic dissension by comment or action would disappear around 3 am when the secret police came to their door. Most of these people were never heard from again. It was in this context that central markets contained no smiling, playful gossip or chatting. Jovial loose lips or drunken talk might lead to your disappearance.

This was compounded by the fact that 'wealthy' westerners were given close to free run within Yugoslavia, at least relative to other communist countries. There were few places Yugoslavians could go without having wealthy Westerners in their face, leading Yugoslavians to feel like second class citizens in their own country.

By the time I visited, Tito had recently died and people were falling back into ethnic cliques and openly hating foreigners - primarily spearheaded by the Serbs supported by Russia. The hostility on people's faces was very evident as they tried to figure out exactly what group you belonged to. To an American, all of the various ethnic groups looked physically exactly alike which must have made the work of racists in an integrated society extremely taxing.
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