Journal stoolpigeon's Journal: Tito liked villas 2
Josip Broz Tito is viewed as a good guy or a bad guy, depending upon who you ask. I don't have a strong opinion of him. As an American, I tend to not be in favor of dictators. But having seen the impact of some of the other options that were available at the time and how Yugoslavia turned out, I'm not so quick to condemn. So it's interesting to learn about, think about and in general when I'm around anyone who might have a strong opinion, keep my mouth shut about.
I do know this about the guy though, he liked to build villas. He built one villa in what is now Croatia that was pretty freaking huge and sitting in a rather beautiful area. You can see it right here on google maps. The big white building that looks a little like a game controller from above. If you zoom out a tad and look at the village just to the southwest, Plitvica Selo, then you will see little white dots that are good sized houses. This may put the scale of the villa in perspective.
Why do I mention it? Well my family and I were taking in the sites and spent this last long week-end (All Saints day here) staying in Plitvica Selo and our hosts took us to see the villa. After the war in the 90's it was abandoned. You can check out this little album of the pics I took. It's pretty much wrecked and it doesn't seem like it will be too many more years before the roof falls in. Very sad - as it looks like it was an amazing place and seems such a waste.
My host told me that the villa was built shortly after WWII, using slave labor consisting of axis prisoners from the war. He was an interesting guy, Milo, our host. His mother was a Serb, his father Croat and they had to abandon their home during the war as that area was Serb dominated. He has an interesting perspective, due to that mixed heritage on the more recent conflict. In regards to the time under Tito he seemed rather pragmatic stating that it wasn't the best but if you kept quiet you could do all right for yourself.
It's not that we don't LIKE dictators (Score:1)
I'm sure that there's an affable person sitting on the throne on occasion. It's not the person we're against, it's the position.
The best form of government would obviously be an omniscient benevolent dictator, but we don't have any omniscience and benevolence is hard to come by these days, so we make do with what we have.
Tito's Biggest Problem (Score:3)
Is that his governance was unable to produce a successor. This allowed for power-grabs by various self-interested, party leaders - who put their own leadership ahead of national interest and stability.
Unfortunately, for Jugoslavia, this entailed the exploitation of nearly superficial but very historical ethnic divisions. This played EXACTLY into the NATO/GLADIO gameplan for crushing any resistance to hegemony, and while decrying "atrocities" the US and European players exacerbated conflict and reinforced the concept of Jugoslav divisions.
We saw the results of this.
Sad. This is the same problem faced by Chavez - but with an economic strata to be exploited in his wake, more than an ethnic one - tho' the rich are not Indios.