I'm reminded of last night's discussion of modulation. Milošević and his contemporary imitators can never be properly pinned down. They are simultaneously in the thick of things and at a remove from them, racist but non-racist. A sort of Schrodinger's demagogue and one, we know, that is proving to have a great deal of purchase.
Many thanks to @CatherineBuca for dredging this one up.
Never seen an attempt to unpick Milosevic's dictatorship in terms of his background in the Communist-lite SPS and DPS. And his wife's leadership of JUL has to bear examination too.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of where he ended up on the political spectrum, Milosevic's roots were in the old Soviet-orbiting Jugoslavia of Tito. What we would normally describe, for want of a better category, as "The Left." So the attempt to map him onto the rise of the current Alt-Right appears (stress, "appears") to have a fatal flaw.
I suspect that a closer examination would show Milosevic took a lot of inspiration from Tito's regime and from non-left regimes. But who can say? Fertile ground for further exploration, to be sure, if this thesis is to be fleshed out properly.
Evidence?
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I really thought about this bloke, is that he looks alarmingly like W.C. Fields!
ReplyDeleteAnonymous
ReplyDeleteMilosovic and the Serb nationalists inspired by him generally despised Tito, regarding him as a lifelong anti-Serb.
(and he was of course Croat/Slovene himself, not Serbian at all)