User talk:Peter Z./Wikipedia & Political Agendas

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Revision as of 01:24, 7 July 2010 by Peter Z. (talk | contribs) (Balkan section of Wikipedia/Great Soviet Encyclopedia)

Is Wikipedia taking on a darker tone? Where are the ethical and moral issues involved in creating articles with old communist propaganda rhetoric and it's false information? Is this the Balkan section of Wikipedia becoming the next Great Soviet Encyclopedia? This part of Wikipedia is not encyclopaedic work, pure and simple. The Wikipedia Point of View-History


Cazzo (www.sciforums.com):

Registered Senior User (1,028 posts) 04-07-08, 05:47 PM

  • When you bring up the topic of the Holocaust (of 6,000,000 jews) to neo-Nazis, they usually respond in 1 of 4 ways.

(1) They deny it ever happened.

(2) They say it was an "exaggeration" or a conspiracy theory.

(3) They try turning the tables or changing the subject.

(4) They say nothing at all.

The pure and simple fact is, they're evil people.

But what about neo-Communists ? (and many other leftists)

  • When you bring up the topic of nearly 100,000,000 civilians torchered and killed under Communist governments in the 20th century (not including deaths from wars, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bla...k_of_Communism), they react in the same way as the 4 catagories above.
  • Another excuse leftists make for this attrocity is that they were not "true perfect" Communist societies; well you could say that Germany wasn't a "true fascist" State too.....
  • Public schools barely touch (if even mention) the Communist mass killings, and Hollywood has put out how many films about this ? 1 ? 2 ?

And yet, the Communists killed several times more of their own civilians than the Nazis did!

Think it's fair to say leftists that fit those 4 catagories are as evil as neo-Nazis?

by Cazzo (www.sciforums.com)

Research on Wikipedia’s Articles on the Former Yugoslavia

The Balkan World According to Wikipedia:

According to Wikipedia if a Commander happens to lose an estimate of 100 000 POWs after World War Two , it is not that important. Sixty years later it was established that they were murdered and place in old mine shafts, caves and forests. The information is not to be mention in his biography as it is irrelevant.

On the 23rd of April in 1948, in a speech Harry Truman (the President of USA) stated:

"I am told that Tito murdered more than 400 000 of the opposition in Yugoslavia before he got himself established there as a dictator"

Reference from: Keeping Tito Afloat by Lorraine M. Lees [1] & Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman: Mission and Power in American Foreign Policy by Anne R. Pierce [2] (US declassified documents from the 1990s)

  • Christopher Bennett: Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences "Tito was a Stalinist in his own right" . [3] (book info)

Bennett, a British journalist who has the good fortune to speak both Slovenian and Croatian, a skill that has enabled him to draw heavily on literature of the region that would be unavailable to most American or British journalists.

  • Vladimir Tismaneanu: The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia. "Tito was a season Stalinist" [4]
  • Vesna Pusic-Croatia at the Crossroads/Journal of Democracy - Volume 9, Number 1, January 1998, pp. 111-124 "Tito, a Croat and a Moscow-trained communist, ...... While his was a single-party, totalitarian regime, Tito was more a shrewd pragmatist than an ideologue. " [5]

Notes on References

Contemporary views of Josip Broz that are clealy referenced:

  • A Personality Cult Transformed: The Evolution of Tito’s Image in the Former Yugoslavia 1974 – 2009/Tamara Pavasovic Trost Ph.D. Candidate Department of Sociology Harvard University USA.
  • Lorraine M. Lees is an associate professor of history at Old Dominion University in Virginia, USA.
  • Anne R. Pierce Ph. D. Political Science from the University of Chicago. Independent Scholar & Author/USA Author's Web Site*
  • BBC.UK/History Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941 - 1945 [6] By Dr Stephen A Hart

The article is written in the post Berlin Wall world. The Wiki article does not have the BBC as its source. This encyclopaedic articles clearly state the dark truth about Tito and his Army-Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941-1945

  • Dr Stephen A Hart is senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is the author of The Road to Falaise: Operations "Totalize" & "Tractable" (Alan Sutton, 2004), "Montgomery " and "Colossal Cracks": The 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944-45 (Praeger, 2000).
  • Zdravko Dizdar [1]: In Mr Dizdar's Scientific Journal-An Addition to the Research of the Problem of Bleiburg & Way of the Cross -Hrcak Portal of Scientific Journals of Croatia states that Tito asked the "Croatian Home Guard" to surrender or face the consequences of not surrendering. After the war ended POWs who did not surrender were slaughter on mass, estimates are about 100 000 victims in total.
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica [7] -The article is written post Berlin Wall but it's thin in terms of information, but does not hold back on economic realities: "At his death, the state treasury was empty."

The Wiki article has Encyclopaedia Britannica under its Notes section as its source, it might be just cosmetic.

  • BBC UK/History [8] by Tim Judah: "The economy was built on the shaky foundations of massive western loans." The article is also written in the post Berlin Wall world. The Wiki article does not have the BBC as it's source.
  • Tim Judah is a front line reporter for The Economist and author. A graduate of the London School of Economics and of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University he worked for the BBC before becoming the Balkans correspondent for The Times and The Economist. Judah is also the author of the prize-winning The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, published in 1997 by Yale University Press.
  • Michael Portamm: 2003-2005 Fellow of the ZEIT Foundation in Hamburg, doctoral studies at the University of Vienna (Dr. phil.). Author Profile

Professional activities: Since 2006, staff at the Historical Commission of the Academy, since 2008 Lecturer at the Universities of Vienna and Bern.[2]

  • Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing: Genocide Carried out by the Tito Partisans: Hungarians & Italians [3]

Ref from: Communist Retaliation and Persecution on Yugoslav Territory During and After WWII [9]. by Dr. phil. Michael Portmann

Other Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing: Genocide carried out by the Tito Partisans/Danube Swabian History (former Yugoslavia) 1944-1948 [4]

  • David W. Del Testa has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Davis.

The below referenced information is from 'Government Leaders, Military Rulers and Political Activists: An Encyclopaedia of People Who Changed the World (Lives & Legacies Series)’ by David W. Del Testa.

Yugoslavia under Tito was a curious combination of relative economic and cultural freedom and total political repression and control. The lack of political freedom made debate on the role of ethnic identity in Yugoslavia impossible. Tito’s regime had created temporary stability in a historically unstable region. Treated almost as a mythic hero in his lifetime, Tito’s image began to decay in the years following his death, undermining the legitimacy of the regime so connected to his cult of personality.' [10]

David W. Del Testa’s statement succinctly sums up Josip Broz and his political life. One could say it is well balanced in the objective sense.

Ivo Goldstein: 'Croatia A History'. Josip Broz and his fellow communist were committing economic management suicide. The Wiki article does not have Ivo Goldstein as its source.

The articles clearly state:
1. Josip Broz Tito’s failure in addressing ethnic tensions of the former Yugoslavia;
2. Failure in the economic management of the former of Yugoslavia;

Note: Ivo Goldstein is a Professor at the University of Zagreb. The university is the oldest (1669) and biggest in South-Eastern Europe. The university has 29 faculties, three art academies and the Centre for Croatian Studies. With its comprehensive programmes and over 50,000 full-time undergraduate and postgraduate students. The University is the strongest teaching institution in Croatia. It offers a wide range of academic degree courses leading to Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees in the following fields: Arts, Biomedicine, Biotechnology, Engineering, Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences.

  • Commission on Concealed Mass Graves in Slovenia-created by Government of the Republic of Slovenia.

Academics involved:

  • Joze Dezman: Slovenian Historian-Director of the National Museum of Contemporary History-Ljubljana (Slovenian) National Museum of Contemporary History- Slovenia
  • Mitja Ferenc: Slovenian Historian-University of Ljubljana

(Identification of Skeletal Remains of Communist Armed Forces Victims During and After World War II Croatian Medical Journal)

  • Council of the European Union (January–June 2008) and the European Commission:

Reports and proceedings of the 8 April European public hearing on “Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes”, organised by the Slovenian Presidency.

  • Joachim Friedrich & Zbigniew Brzezinski (Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy): [12] Characteristics of a totalitarian regime; a total ideology, a single mass party, a terrorist secret police, a monopoly of mass communication, all instruments to wage combat are in the control of the same hands, and a centrally directed planned economy. Totalitarian dictatorships emerge after the seizure of power by the leaders of a movement who have developed support for an ideology. The point when the government becomes totalitarian is when the leadership uses open and legal violence to maintain its control. The dictator demands unanimous devotion from the people and often uses a real or imaginary enemy to create a threat so the people rally around him.

Totalitarian machine:

  • Abuse of national sentiment to carry out racial and class revolutionary projects;
  • Cult of a great leader, who permits his fanatics to murder, steal and lie;
  • Dictatorship of one party;
  • Militarisation of society, police state – almighty secret political police;
  • Collectivism, subjection of the citizen to the totalitarian state;
  • State terrorism with systematic abuses of basic human rights;
  • Aggressive assumption of power and struggle for territory.

Ref: Joze Dezman CRIMES COMMITTED BY TOTALITARIAN REGIMES [13] page 197 Slovenian Presidency of the-EU 2008 European Commission

Mass killings without court trials:

The Main Headquarters of the Yugoslav Army had already called attention to respecting the Geneva Convention on 3 May in its order on the treatment of prisoners of war. However, despite this injunction, both prisoners of war and civilians were killed massively at the end of May and in the first half of June 1945 in Slovenia. Tito’s telegram on respecting the Geneva Convention was later revoked; however, it could only be revoked by the person who issued it in the first place, i.e. Tito himself.

The killings without a trial were most massive in the first months after the war in 1945 and continued until the beginning of 1946. How extensive these killings were is illustrated by the fact that 581 hidden graves of victims of post-war killings without a court trial have thus far been found in the territory of Slovenia.

Ref: Milko Mikola CRIMES COMMITTED BY TOTALITARIAN REGIMES page 163 Slovenian Presidency of the-EU 2008 European Commission


Note: Natasa Kandic [5] Call for Cross-border War Crimes ‘Truth Commission’ By Pedja Obradovic-30 November 2009

A broad regional coalition of civil society associations from the countries of the former Yugoslavia is planning to strongly pressure the succession countries into forming regional commissions to establish the facts on war crimes and other severe violations of human rights.

Natasa Kandic: Founder and Director, Humanitarian Law Centre, Serbia and Montenegro.

  • Serbia to Uncover Mass Graves-Belgrade 13 August 2009 [6]

The Serbian Justice Ministry has announced that a state commission will be formed by September to mark out uncovered mass graves from 1944-46, daily Danas reported Thursday. The graves are thought to contain victims of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito's Partisans.

  • Dr. Zoran Bozic: Tito ordered massacre of the Croatian population in May and June 1945

The purpose of this presentation is to contribute to the formulation and established chain of command and composition of the genocide perpetrators of one sixth of the entire Croatian population in May and June 1945. In this preparation partisan sources were used exclusively.

Dr. Zoran Bozic an official of the Croatian Association of Victims of Communism.

(Mr Bozic is a Doctor from Zagreb -Croatia, Master of Medical Science and has done 20 years intensive research into partisan communists in the former Yugoslavia)

  • The below referenced information is from ‘Discontents: Post-modern and Post-communist’ by Paul Hollander [7][8].
“Virtually every communist system extinct or surviving at one point or another, had a supreme leader who was both extraordinarily powerful and surrounded by a bizarre cult, indeed worship. In the past (or in a more traditional contemporary societies) such as cults were reserved for deities and associated with conventional religious behaviour and institutions. These cults although apparently an intrinsic part of communist dictatorships (at any rate at a stage in their evolution) are largely forgotten today.”
“ Stalin, Maio, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Sung, Enver Hoxha, Ceascesu, Dimitrov, Ulbricht, Gottwald, Tito and others all were the object of such cults. The prototypical cult was that of Stalin which was duplicated elsewhere with minor variations”

Paul Hollander is an American scholar, journalist, and conservative political writer. (Ph.D in Sociology. Princeton University, 1963, B.A. London School of Economics, 1959 Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Centre Associate, Davis).

  • Croatia: Amnesty International & PART II - LUSTRATION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

The Draft Law on Removing the Consequences of the Totalitarian Communist Regime, proposed by: the Croatian Party of Rights (1998 and 1999) aimed to systematically bar high-ranking party and state officials of the former regime from holding high-ranking offices in the new state, if in the past these persons had violated human rights and opposed the establishment of democracy.

The Law on the Security Services of the Republic of Croatia has been applied since 1 April 2002. The key intention of the law is the establishment of an appropriate model of supervision of their work (internal and external control). The law makes no distinction between the period from 1945 until 1990 and the period after 1990. Principally, the law allows for access to the documents and material. In the period 1990-1996 there were an estimated 2,200 dismissals and appointments of judges and state attorneys recorded in the Official Gazette.

In Croatia there have as yet been practically no major public debates on the past. [14]

Mr Dizdar's Scientific Journal Study Notes

  • Item A-An Addition to the Research of the Problem of Bleiburg & Way of the Cross [15]

Translated: Josip Broz Tito, the supreme commander of the NOV and PO-Yugoslavia and President of the National Committee of Liberation of Yugoslavia, sent on 30 August. 1944:

"Last call to all deluded servants of the occupiers and to all Domobrani Croatian, Slovenian Domobrancima and seduced Chetniks to leave the occupier and surrender to the National Liberation Army by September 15, 1944, with a threat to all those who do not, will be brought before a war court, judged as traitors and punished by the strictest punishment and concerning on the issue of the Allies, they will not interfere in our internal matters and that no one will not stop to punish the traitors of the people and servants occupying forces." (See: N. BARIC, 2003, 496. / faksimil letka/) page 121

  • Item B- Z. Dizdar: An Addition to the Research of the Problem of Bleiburg & Way of the Cross

According to the research of Z.Dizdar, Partisan General Aleksandar Rankovic was only answerable to Tito (page 128). Aleksandar Rankovic play a major role in these executions and the only person that could to give Rankovic such an order, was Tito. The report also states that there were huge Camps housing POWs, amongst them were women and children. On page 182 (66) it states that there were 24 422 children in the camps.[16]

  • Treba kazati kako su postojali još posebni logoru za folsdojčere, kojisu još 21. XI. 1944. od Predsjedništva AVNOJ-a proglašeni kolektivnimkrivcima i neprijateljima naroda, na osnovi cega je od nove komunistickevlasti izvršena konfisciranja njihove imovine te zapoceo njihov progon,uhicivanja i upucivanja u logore.130 Tako je 18. I. 1946. u jugoslavenskimlogorima bilo 117.485 folksdojcera (58.821 žena, 34.214 muškaraca i24.422 djece)

(Opširnije o tome vidi/ for more details: V. GEIGER, 200)

Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Tito & the Yugoslav Economy

Self-management as system was only slightly more efficient than the Soviet model. It was bureaucratised and cumbersome and could not compete with Western economies. People could obtain so much free or for less than the market price (e.g. apartments) that they could be obtain without work. All this made the settling of accounts in the 1980s and in the post-socialist age more difficult

In Tito’s system no interest or ideas could be expressed in a truly democratic way. This did most harm where feelings of ethnic identity were concerned because their suppression led to growth of extreme nationalism. Furthermore, the economic failure of Tito’s system, most clearly expressed in the protracted crisis of the 1980s, left people who even if they were not poor, were disillusioned and open to manipulation by demagogues. Finally Tito’s practical solutions ensured that he would retain unlimited power during his life time, but foreshadowed the problems would come after his death.

Professor Ivo Goldstein’s[9] work above proves that Josip Broz, put simply, was a bad economist and the Communists Party members were bad economists too. According to these and other references [10], this was one of the reasons that contributed to the break-up of Yugoslavia. As this was such a historical event, this information should be in the Wikipedia article in order to make it more encyclopaedic.

When ethnicity did not matter in the Balkans: a study of identity in pre ... By John Van Antwerp Fine

References

  1. ^ Keeping Tito Afloat by Lorraine M. Lees.Keeping Tito Afloat draws upon newly declassified documents to show the critical role that Yugoslavia played in U.S. foreign policy with the communist world in the early years of the Cold War. After World War II, the United States considered Yugoslavia to be a loyal Soviet satellite, but Tito surprised the West in 1948 by breaking with Stalin. Seizing this opportunity, the Truman administration sought to "keep Tito afloat" by giving him military and economic aid.
  2. ^ American Foreign Policy by Anne R. Pierce
  3. ^ Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences by Christopher Bennett
  4. ^ The Poverty of Utopia by Vladimir Tismaneanu
  5. ^ Croatia at the Crossroads Journal of Democracy - Volume 9, Number 1, January 1998, pp. 111-124 by Vesna Pusic
  6. ^ BBC-History Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941-1945
  7. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica: History & Society-Josip Broz Tito
  8. ^ BBC UK/History by Tim Judah
  9. ^ Communist Retaliation and Persecution on Yugoslav Territory During and After WWII by Dr. Ph. Michael Portmann-The following article deals with repressive measures undertaken by communist-dominated Partisan forces during and especially after WWII in order to take revenge on former enemies, to punish collaborators, and “people’s enemies“ and to decimate and eliminate the potential of opponents to a new, socialist Yugoslavia. The text represents a summary of a master thesis referring to the above-mentioned topic written and accepted at Vienna University in 2002
  10. ^ Government Leaders, Military Rulers and Political Activists: An Encyclopaedia of People Who Changed the World (Lives & Legacies Series) By David W. Del Testa, Florence Lemoine, John Strickland/ page181 Legacy
  11. ^ Croatia A History-Mc Gill Queen’s University Press Publication by Ivo Goldstein.
  12. ^ Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Joachim Friedrich & Zbigniew Brzezinski
  13. ^ CRIMES COMMITTED BY TOTALITARIAN REGIMES Crimes and other gross and large scale human rights violations committed during the reign of totalitarian regimes in Europe: cross- national survey of crimes committed and of their remembrance, recognition, redress, and reconciliation Reports and proceedings of the 8 April European public hearing on “Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes”, organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (January–June 2008) and the European Commission.
  14. ^ Croatia & PART II - LUSTRATION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, Amnesty International
  15. ^ Hrcak Portal of Scientific Journals of Croatia by Mr Dizdar's Scientific Journal - An Addition to the Research of the Problem of Bleiburg & Way of the Cross. This paper dedicated to the 60th anniversary of these tragic events represents a small step towards the elaboration of known data and brings a list of yet unknown and unpublished original documents, mostly belonging to the Yugoslavian Military and Political Government 1945-1947. Amongst those documents are those mostly relating to Croatian territory although a majority of concentration camps and execution sites were outside of Croatia, in other parts of Yugoslavia. The author hopes that the readers will receive a complete picture about events related to Bleiburg and the Way of The Cross and the suffering of numerous Croats, which is confirmed directly in many documents and is related to the execution of a person or a whole group of people and sometimes non-stop for days.
  16. ^ Hrcak Portal of Scientific Journals of Croatia by Mr Dizdar's Scientific Journal - An Addition to the Research of the Problem of Bleiburg & Way of the Cross. This paper dedicated to the 60th anniversary of these tragic events represents a small step towards the elaboration of known data and brings a list of yet unknown and unpublished original documents, mostly belonging to the Yugoslavian Military and Political Government 1945-1947.
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