JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum so who really controls the world??

I've lived in a socialist country until my age of 15, since the introduction of political pluralism and "democracy" in the republics of ex Yugoslavia and I can say for sure: there were issues, problems, there was a lot of things that needed to be solved, but life in general was much better, people were much happier, there was nobody starving, the health care was assured, people could live from their work, everyone could afford to get a decent education... I remember when I was a small kid I used to live in Novi Sad, now a part of Serbia, which is one of the biggest cities there. We'd travel by a city bus and meet foreign students on the bus, people who were coming from Africa and other places to get an education there, we used to be proud that these people will remember how they were welcomed and how they got their education when they go home to their countries and try to improve the lives of the people there. Many of these people met their future partners and got married and stayed to live in Yugoslavia. My mother's doctor is originally from Ghana and now he's a mayor of a small town in Slovenia called Piran. Nowadays it's absolutely unsafe for an African or a Roma person to take a walk in Zagreb or Belgrade, a year or so ago there was a scandalous attack on gay people in the city of Split, and on the Gay Pride march in Belgrade.
People in the last twenty years have become utterly intolerant to any "different" people, due to the wars and erupting nationalism in all the countries that formed the ex Yugoslavia. The quality of life has decreased immensely, many people are on the edge, there's no middle class left, there's only those who are very rich and those who are struggling to survive. We used to have no serious crime in the urban areas, now we have city's controlled by mafia and skin head gangs.
I know that the political position of ex Yugoslavia was way different then the rest of the so called socialist countries and I'm not here to defend any form of dictatorship. I'm a devoted anarchist and I believe any form of political border is enslaving it's population and creating injustice, but what I wanted to say with this post is that many people are full of prejudice about the left-wing politics, most of which have nothing to do with the idea of these politics but with the personal characteristics of those who have claimed through history they were trying to implement those ideas to practice. There's nothing wrong with having free medical care, education and system that takes care of those who are in need of support, it just needs a proper public control not to get hijacked by the politicians and greedy businessmen.