Sunday 28 October 2018

The Daddy of 21st Century Reaction

This old thread on Twitter was brought to my attention. An excellent and brief dissection of Slobodan Milošević's career and what he means today:



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.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

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.

Regardless 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.

Johny Conspiranoid. said...

Evidence?

Tmb said...

The only thing I really thought about this bloke, is that he looks alarmingly like W.C. Fields!

Anonymous said...

Anonymous

Milosovic 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)