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Comment by giingyui | Hacker News Reader

It’s not the eighties anymore. The world has moved on. You have to look at things from the perspective of the present. Forget Yugoslavia.

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You would have a hard time understanding the EU today if you knew nothing about Yugoslavia, since the fallout turned into portions of the EU.

If you know of some other institutionally left wing bureaucracy you consider more appropriate to use as an example, name it.

Yugoslavia was the perfect economic model. Forgetting it would be doing the world a disservice.

Today is Srebrenica remembrance day so I'll sneak in a OT link to the BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsBTkAXnPZs

It is quite unfortunate what happened when ethnic nationalism won out over brotherhood and unity, but to be clear, I don't think that has anything to do with the economic model

Marxists usually apply a discourse regarding political economy because they perceive economy and ideology to be inseparable, and I'd expect Tito to also have done so. Yugoslavia as an entity was tightly coupled with the person of Tito and lacked mechanisms for keeping local governments in cooperation in his absence.

I'm sympathetic to the yugoslavian project and consider it an important source of inspiration and knowledge, but I don't believe fortune had anything to do with what happened afterwards.

I also don't believe fortune did. I believe western capital, threatened by the success of the Yugoslav project, bankrolled nationalist extremists in a successful ploy to destabilize systemic competition.

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