Rev Left Radio - When the Balkans were Red: Reflections on Yugoslavia w/ Yugopnik

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Yugopnik joins Breht to talk about political development, philosophy, Yugoslavia, Tito, the Balkans today, the Russia-Ukraine War, perceptions of the US, and much more!  Sub to Yugopnik's YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs8mbJ-M142ZskR5VR0gBig Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/Yugopnik Subscribe to The Deprogram on your preferred podcast app, and support them here: https://www.patreon.com/TheDeprogram  Outro music "Video Sex" by Detektivska Prica Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. On today's episode, I am completing the hat trick. I've had on J.T. and I've had on Hakeem from the D program and from YouTube. And now it is time to have on Ugapnik. So this is long overdue, but this is a fascinating conversation about, mostly about Yugoslavia and the Balkans, but also about perceptions of U.S. politics, his time in the U.S. politics, his time in the U. United States, his political development.

We touch on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and a bunch of other shit. It's really fun. And Yugapnik is a hilarious and very entertaining person. Politics aside. So he does an amazing job at summarizing complex. Yugoslavian history at the same time

that he's very just off the cuff, funny as fuck, and very entertaining. Really solid comrade in person and this is a wide-ranging conversation. So yeah, if you like this show, definitely check out the other ones with JT and Hakeem. They all do a show together called the D program, which you can find on any podcast app, which is really cool. And they each have their individual YouTube channels as well,

just doing a lot of great work on political education in their own various unique ways. They all kind of do it in their own specific way that I think is very cool. And when they all come together, it's very fun as well. But this conversation is going to be focused just on me and Yugopnik, talking about a lot of shit, but centered mostly on Yugoslavia, what happened in the 90s after dissolution, his thoughts on Tito, and much more. And before we get in the show, as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can share our episodes with friends and family, or you can actually support us directly on patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio.

Keeps the show going, keeps our kids fed, and is deeply appreciated. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with you got me. Enjoy. what's up everyone my name i mean not really my name my online alias i love that word is ugopnik i am a video creator and a podcast co-host over at the d program at the youtube channel yugopnik i am a balkanoid socialist marxist anti-fascist anti-fascist and all the other buzzwords that all the listeners of this absolutely fantastic podcast probably here on a daily basis.

So I won't take a lot more of your time. My expertise usually, because of my experience in the corporate world, lies in sort of relatively deeper dives into the insanity, which is the free market, and from a point of view of a person living in a post-socialist region of the world, a kind of vocal point against the argument that nobody over here misses the quote-unquote good all days. And yeah, looking forward. Thank you so much for the invitation and looking forward to this little discussion that we will have now.

Absolutely. I'm very excited for it. And we'll definitely get into that that you laid on the table there. But it just has to be said, you know, this is long overdue. I think this is now the official hat trick because I've had all three co-hosts from the D program on now officially. So that's really cool. And I like all of you. I love the show.

I love what you each do individually. And it's an honor and a pleasure to have you on Rev Left finally. Likewise, right back at what you do. And let me just say, you left the best for last. Absolutely. I did that on purpose. Yeah. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. All right. Well, let's go ahead and just start with some. some stuff about you. And I'm personally actually kind of curious about this as well, especially given where, you know, you grew up. Can you kind of talk about your political development personally and what life experiences or other factors maybe helped shape you into a communist? I would love to. Thank you. Very nice question. I mean, you know, I was raised in the post-socialist healthscape of the Balkans, which were engulfed in ethnic strife, the installation of ravaging

privatization and, you know, a very cutthroat legal and illegal empire of capital. Throughout my early days, I was kind of a product of a sort of rebranding of our small but vibrantly beautiful peninsula. My education, you know, was staunchly anti-communist, greatly financed, you know, by Western capitalist institutions from what I read mostly from Germany, the U.S. and the U.K. and so on, which helped democratize, quote, unquote, and liberalize our education system. You know, we were taught about the horrors of what apparently had come before, and the local growing capitalists were more than happy to dive in heads first in this new rewriting of history, capitalists, which had become politicians at that point.

So I had completely engulfed myself in right libertarian bullshit, you know, Ancapistan, and very, if I can call it that, like self-orientalizing cringe by spending a lot of my early adulthood thinking that the reason we here aren't as civilized as well-off or as organized as the West was because we had this, you know, 60-year period of backwards communist ideology that needed to be rooted out of us in order to be able to finally grow to be like the big countries. You know, I had a massive hard-on for the U.S., for the free market, for the whole package they sold to us as, you know, our salvation that we've been just gifted. But my, you know, my real breaking point was when I experienced this heaven on earth personally. I went to the U.S. for a so-called work and travel program. There's no travel. There's no travel, trust me, it just worked, where you get to make some extra money, pay off your university, and work in like working class jobs over in the States. So, you know, that whole

experience ended up really putting the glasses of ideology, as Jirik would say on my face, and it broke kind of the whole fucking thing. I mean, I saw hundreds of people around me that worked two jobs, three jobs just to get by. I saw homelessness at every corner. I saw like this unexplainable like brutality and like scary cold in, you know, everyone's eyes is they, I don't fucking know, they hustle to fuck each other over and grow up, you know, throughout the hierarchy. So, you know, when I saw how they treated me, how they treated other immigrants, when I saw how much I made by working like 14 hours a day when I smelled, there's no better word than smelling it. The hypocrisy of this beautiful West, most precisely in how it's built on the sweat and blood

of millions, sweat and blood that's never truly rewarded for what it does. When I saw this in the line in the kitchen at the construction sites or behind the desk as a cashier, It really, my friend, it super fucked my idea of be it the American dream or the free market that I've been jerking off to so hard for so many years. So that was the moment when I realized that I might have been right before, but not in the way I thought I was. Yes, maybe we weren't developing in capitalism as fast as everyone else because we had a successful. experience with socialism for 60 years before, but that didn't make us worse. But those leftovers, which are unfortunately, we'll talk about this later, dying off more and more, were what didn't allow for that cold brutality in our eyes to develop as quickly.

And our instinct to not walk over each other as if we're just expendable material didn't let us, you know, establish the, let the market establish itself in our countries as fast as in these beautiful growing utopias. And it's funny because I, like, interacted with Marxism before I went there in my first year in university, but, you know, I shrugged it off. I mentioned why because of how brainwashed I was. But then when I actually worked, and it wasn't like even long, like two, three, four, five weeks and experience what it was to be working class in apparently the wealthiest country

on planet Earth. It's like everything I remembered from that very introductory kind of experience clicked, clicked really fucking hard. And that's how the whole story began. And after that, you know, you know how it goes. From one reading material to another, from summaries, et cetera, et cetera, from discussions with local Marxists, I ended up being. being so quote unquote radicalized.

It was like, fuck it, let's make propaganda for the children online as well. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. I'm curious, how long ago did you come to the U.S. and what city were you mostly based on it? So I was in Maryland, of all fucking places, in a touristy sort of town called Ocean City. Then I also was in Baltimore. And then for my last three weeks, I was actually in New York. There was another dude that went there, like found a job as a security guard at one, like,

strip club next to a restaurant. And he went there to eat every night. And the dude was like, actually, I'm looking to employ someone. And he thought of me. So I was like, okay, I get to escape Maryland to and maybe see something that's really legit. Like, oh, my God, New York. I slept over at his place.

So, yeah, Ocean City, Maryland, Baltimore, and then beautiful, beautiful New York City. But then afterwards for work, I also've been to Miami and shit, but like Petit bourgeois work. It's not corporate work where they, where I got to go and see what it's like for the quote-unquote middle class and it sucked as well. So, yeah, it's not, you guys don't have the best country. I'm sorry, I'm really sorry to say. Absolutely not, yeah. No, I always think, you know, obviously because it's the unipolar hegemon, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it doesn't only export its economy and its military, but it exports its culture and a lot of people that are either want to be immigrants or just are somewhere else and never been to the United States. Well, it's a very interesting sort of thought experiment.

There is this country in the world that is so wonderful, the shining city on top of the hill, so rich, you know, and then people kind of build. up not utopian ideas, but a lot of people, especially if you don't have exposure to a lot of other countries, you build up, take on board a lot of that propaganda and that, you know, global export of our culture and our narratives about ourselves. And you could think, yeah, it really is a wonderful country. I want to get there as soon as possible. And of course, you know, especially with Latin America, Central and South America, those countries were decimated and robbed by the United States. And then those societies are very dysfunctional, high crime rates, high poverty. And of course they want to go northward to the country that stole all the shit in the first place and

fuck their countries up because it'll be a little better. But when you get here, unless you're incredibly lucky or unless you're already rich, you really get a slap in the face about the disparity between the stories America tells others about itself and even tells itself about itself and the on-the-ground reality of everybody except for the rich. Because I do think America is the best country in the world if you're rich. It is a playground. You pay no taxes.

is. You do whatever the fuck you want. You control the political system outright. There's no working class movement to even make you slightly uncomfortable, let alone, you know, take your fucking profits or anything like that. So it is a playground for the rich, but the vast majority of us here are not rich. And we are this, you know, now there's not even, I mean, even the, I think you made a video on this, the illusion of a middle class. I mean, people still cling to the concept, but functionally it's gone. And so you have this increasingly proletarianized underclass and this smaller elite, you know, capitalist class that, you know, that it just self-perpetuates itself. And the class you're born into in the United States

is the number one variable that dictates what class you end up dying in. So even the whole story about class mobility and you can make yourself anything you want to be here. It's all bullshit. Yeah, I wish more people abroad knew the reality and could sort of check the the utopian fever dream that is exported. Absolutely. And I see it as a growing trend, thankfully, because of this interconnectivity that we all share, for example, this beautiful privilege of me talking to you in the U.S.

from my little shithole over here in the beautiful Balkans. It's because of this massive interconnectivity and because of the American working class, having the ability to openly speak about just, how fucked the situation is in plenty of states there, I would even say majority of them. And because we have access to new sources, et cetera, et cetera, and we see shit like Roe v. Wade being overturned, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of people don't even necessarily have to travel there the way I did in order for them

to kind of see the realistic material reality, the material reality of what the state states actually are. So with this illusion dying off more and more, I'm seeing sort of being optimistic here that people will no longer give themselves that same argument that I mentioned before, which is like, okay, if it works over there, it can work over here. The reason it doesn't work over here is, and then you can, you know, do 5,000 things. I did, oh my God, communists back in the day, they still rule us, their children, blah, blah, blah, it's fucked out. A lot of people do, like, self-directed bigotry, you know, we're just culturally inferior, we're stupid, we're lazy, blah, blah, blah, and 5,000 other factors.

Because you can tell yourself that, you can have these reactionary thoughts, these oriental's thoughts, because, oh my God, look over there, it actually works. So it's our fault that doesn't work here. When that idea is crushed, and it's slowly being crushed in. to dust that it actually doesn't work anywhere very well and the places which are up as a sort of beacon of you know relatively high standards of Scandinavia or whatever have some fucking social problems etc etc so you will start literally understanding that that you know maybe it's a systematic problem because there's no other excuses you can give yourself for why life

sucks here and hopefully you know goes it keeps going in that direction it's kind of our job to, you know, shove it in people's faces, just how nowhere is good. So it's a systematic problem, not the problem of that system being wrongly implemented in a particular spot. Yeah, absolutely well said. And, yeah, just one last thing I had in my notes that I wanted to mention before we move on is just that whatever people come, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it's guaranteed that it's worse now than it's ever been in my life.

as far as the obvious homelessness, the despair, the utter brutalization, of course, the Great Recession was the first real punch in the face to the American populace. But ever since then, and especially in the last couple years where it's hyper-accelerated, things are worse now than I've ever seen them than my grandparents who are in their 70s, literally born in the 40s, you know, classic boomers, they lived at the peak of what the U.S. could offer in like the 50s and 60s to like white middle class people and and you know they lived through that entire almost now close to a century they're almost 80 years old and they say this is the worst it's ever been in their entire life so it's rapidly deteriorating from a already less than

ideal position but i think that like as you're kind of alluding to there now that everything is so globally interconnected not only our economies but our culture our forms of communication you know, these problems are now sort of bursting outside of the boundaries of any one country and are in various different ways manifesting all across the globe because the global system itself is what's failing and it happens to be emanating primarily out of the hegemon, the U.S., but everybody's feeling it, I think. So before we get into the Balkans and talk more about that, I do want to discuss your most recent video on free will and how Marxism might intervene in that debate. I found it very interesting and a unique argument. sure i think we talked beforehand before recording that you know nobody has an

a totally original thought anymore somewhere some somebody is thought or written about the thing but for me it was the first time coming across this specific argument um and it's just really interesting obviously if anybody's listening to this and you haven't checked out you got nick's a youtube channel definitely go check it out it's a great resource and very well done videos but i was hoping that maybe if not talking about the entire debate um kind of touch on the main argument of the video and you can you can assume that my audience has a basic understanding of the general debate itself between, you know, free will and determinism. So you don't have to recap all of that.

But yeah, just kind of touch on that before we move on. Yeah, I would love to. I mean, it was kind of like, as I told you before, I just randomly woke up one day and decided to answer this honesty kind of metaphysical argument and every Marxist immediately cringes through, you know, our point of view. And, you know, a lot of people through the concept of, oh, compatibilism at me as he sort of thing I didn't comment on when I was comparing the, you know, determinist

argument, which you guys know, but I'll just say it very quickly, which implies that everything is set in stone, predetermined and we just follow that path to say it very simply. And, you know, free will which states that we can change our destiny, whatever way we see fit. So, you know, most of

those people didn't watch the whole fucking video. You know, the Marxian view on that debate, one seen through dialectical materialism, is one that turns the whole discussion on its head because, you know, no, it doesn't say that they can quote-unquote coexist, you know, determinism free will, the way that compatibilists think. But it does say that if we do live in a predetermined world, the swapping and changing of the way we organize

material aspects of our society, we can, in the long run, minimize potential bad predetermined outcomes. So creating a world which is still predetermined, but the potential outcomes in the worst case aren't so bad. I use an allegory metaphor. I'm English not level C2. I'm fucking around in the video where a, what was it? Yes, a bird living in a cage is predetermined by her material conditions, the cage. If you let it go into a forest, its future, yes, will now be massively influenced by the forest instead of the cage, you know, sure. But the potential life it can lead in the forest is a million times more diverse and interesting and potentially grandiose than anything it could have experienced between, you know, the iron walls off the cage.

So Marxism doesn't answer what's right and what's wrong because Marxism doesn't give a fuck. It just says that if it is predetermined, we should. should push the boundaries of what factors can predetermine our future, and as such, inch closer to greater, but never total, of course, free will. And the first of the things we could push forward and address is none other than class in the case of pushing the wall of predeterminism. Yeah, that was kind of the point. And a lot of people just came in and were like, oh, that's just compatible. is a Marxist version of some form of compatibilism, but that's not what people usually think of when they hear compatibilism in like philosophy classes, you know, wrestling with this topic. So that's kind of a slightly unfair criticism, but a form of it, perhaps, for sure.

But yeah, I just like that idea and I like the idea that, you know, the cage that we're in, in some sense, is the sort of the historical epoch that we're living in, the mode of production and its social relations dictates the thoughts we can. think and the moves we can make. I mean, even you and I knowing each other and being able to have a conversation is only literally possible with a certain degree of technological advancement. And in lieu of that, you and I would have no fucking clue who one another were. And so, you know, we weren't free to talk 40 years ago in the way that we, I mean, this is a mundane example, but, you know, it helps drive the point home. And then so once we realize that consciously, we can push for conditions that are, in simplest terms, more. more like the forest and less like the cage, if you will.

Bravo, yes. There you go. My video could have been like 30 seconds. You just condensed it very well. No, absolutely. That's a perfect framing of the whole argument. That's really cool. And the video itself, of course, is very well done.

Just before we move on, I'm kind of interested, you know, that you have this philosophy Ben. Do you have any other philosophical interests or where does this interest in philosophy broadly come when? Does it just come through your engagement with Marxism? Or is there a broader enjoyment of philosophy? I mean, mostly. A lot of people get kind of scared, but I'm, you know, into psychoanalytics a bit, you know, into Freud.

Some friends, you know, keep telling me I see massive phallic object, everything I go. I enjoy Sartre, but, you know, whenever I can actually fucking understand what he's saying, I'm growing through what the fuck is called, the critique of dialectical. reason, yeah. Matt, that is a slow fucking read, but for me at least. You know, he's trying to find the common ground between two things that, you know, I'm not sure he will, but let's see how it goes. A lot of my viewers and listeners know that I'm massively influenced by Zijik, but again, on the field of philosophy, not at all by his simplistic views, in my opinion on, you know, foreign policy, geopolitics, et cetera, et cetera. You know, he's a product of philosophy. He's a product of

It's time to do this fucking ancient at this point. You can't expect them to get everything right. And, you know, Lacan, for example, was a big influence on not necessarily my Marxian understanding of the world, but just like the way I interact with my partner, my family, my loved ones, hopefully one day my kids or whatever. It's kind of a relatively healthy motherfucker. But Marxism, obviously, is like my core tenets. because I see it addressing the most important question of our time, which is pretty much do we change this fucking thing or do we all die and not trying? Exactly.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I, of course, I'm a huge fan of psychoanalysis and that tradition. I find it very useful, especially as you said, like, you know, I was just having a discussion with a friend the other day of, like, you know, some Marxists will, like, don't even talk about psychoanalysis. It has nothing to do with us. But I kind of made the argument, you know, these are different elements of life. Like, I'm not going to try to use psychoanalysis by itself to understand the evolution of societies over time.

And I'm not going to use Marxism to try to understand the intricacies of my subjectivity would make no sense. So they don't necessarily need to be in conflict if they sort of each address what they're meant to address. And then you can try to see how you can draw threads across the two sort of realms of engagement. because I do think there are very interesting ways in which Marxism and psychoanalysis can be sort of played off each other or the contradictions can be explored in productive ways, etc. So these things need not be either or they can very much be both and, but they just have to make sure you keep them in their proper category of what they're trying to actually do.

Exactly. And it can become very unhealthy because we've seen in previous socialist experiments a sort of idea that even certain art and not even certain philosophies are inherently Petit Bourgeois and therefore need to be completely avoided and sometimes even forbidden in a working class society

which in the long run bounced back at our head super hard because people look like man I like this fucking painting that looks like squares and shit I don't really only one fucking social realism is absolutely beautiful and fantastic but you know

the It's a meme, but you know, you can do two things, my friend. Like, you know, you can touch grass and be very good at World of Warcraft. You can do both. Of course, you cannot do reactionary shit and Marxism, but certain things are not that, as you beautifully put, certain things like comment on vastly different aspects of life, to generalize it so massively to be as understandable as possible.

and they don't dissuade us against the other, if I can put it this way. Absolutely, yeah. And, yeah, for anybody interested, I just did a great episode with Todd McGowan, who's very good on these issues and wrote the book, Capitalism and Desire and Emancipation After Hegel, where he, you know, combined really, you know, leads with the psychoanalytic analysis, but also has, you know, appreciation of the Marxist tradition,

the Hegelian tradition. He just came on to do a whole episode on Lacan. So, and it was, I think we made it such that it's pretty accessible for people who, you know, don't know much about LaConne while also still being intellectually stimulating for those who know quite a bit. So if you're interested at all in that listener, definitely go check that out. Todd McGowan in particular is great on these issues. But it's time, I think, to move into, no, no, no, that's bourgeois, that's bourgeois bullshit in a waste of time. You should only think about class 24-7 all the time. You know, I had kind of funny to say that because I had a, on our other show,

Girl of History, we interviewed Richard Wolfe. And, you know, I posted about it. It was interesting, cool to talk to the guy. We talked about fucking inflation and how imperialism is a product of capitalism. He's an economist. But then, of course, you know, you have a Maoist in the comments. Like, why would you ever platform a revisionist? And I'm like, hey, I'm not asking Richard Wolfe what his take on the cultural revolution is. I'm asking him about what he's a fucking Harvard educated expert on economics, you know?

And, of course, he has a Marxian take, so it's left-wing economics. It's fascinating to me. So the idea that I shouldn't even talk to him because he's not in the exact microsect as this, what I can only assume, is a 13-year-old fucking Twitter user, is just absolutely insane, you know. And, you know, maybe some people are trying to inspire people into Marxism by not being very abruptly and openly direct and without sound, trying to not sound as radical because that bounces some people off. You know, maybe, you know, Wolf and a lot of other people take an approach, which is, you know, not as, not as, as loud as some other people who are already further down the pipeline would like them to be.

But they are doing their part for the funnel through which we're all trying to push people who are trying to introduce to this MLM scheme of ours called Marxism. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. David Harvey is another one. They play their role. You know, they don't have to do, they don't have to be everything for everybody. They don't have to be super Marxists that have the perfect take on every element of the entire

tradition. They play their role and they're very useful in the role that they play. And we should appreciate that and not try to divide us and hate on everybody that doesn't think exactly like we do. It's like sort of a dogmatic devouring of one's entire intellectual life to even think that way. Perfectly put. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move out of philosophy and towards the Balkans. So we recently had an episode detailing the rise and eventual fall of Yugoslavia and socialist construction in the Balkans. And so many of our listeners will be, you know, familiar with the basics of that history. Can you kind of talk about your views, though, on Yugoslavia, its unique form of socialist construction and even Tito as a leader? I know that's a

big question you can take it in any direction you want. Thank you so much. Well, I honestly don't even know where to start, but in order to, you know, condense it into something that's not too boring for our lovely, lovely listeners here, it's, to me, Yugoslavia represents an almost naively innocent, social, economic, and class experiment, which lasted for as long as it lasted. It's extremely important not only because of the way you try to see and implement Marxist theory inside of its own borders, but also how it used class consciousness as a tool for extremely healthy internationalism, which is, in my opinion, one of the core tenets of a successful and potentially long-lasting Marxist world that we might want to build one day, a country which

took, yes, nations and peoples that are extremely similar, nobody's denying this, but nations and peoples right after World War II, where some of them. the most brutal and heinous crimes were committed by one group over the other during, you know, those five to six years. And it managed to take us out of that like bottom of the bottom of the feudal and early capitalist experiences of ultrxenophobic fascism and monarchic degeneracy into what, ended up being one of the most prosperous countries in all of Europe, if not the world, a country with whose passport you could travel to Moscow and to New York and to fucking Rio de Janeiro and to the DPRK.

A country that through its own little loopholes, et cetera, et cetera, managed to cheat the West out of so much capital, which were then reinvested in the livelihoods of local Yugoslavians. A country that presented, not only presented, but put into practice the idea that petty divisions in the long run end up turning us all into banana republics, which we ended up becoming after the fall of Yugoslavia. Tito in particular being a sort of almost godlike figure of that era, which was not necessarily someone who put his fist on the table and was like, you motherfuckers listen or I'm a break your legs. But he himself was a metaphor for everything that Yugoslavia was striving to be.

So as long as he ruled, he was the inspiration of the potential greatness that we could, you know, reach, be it through his biography, be it through his very, like, unknowable ethnicity, you know, to this day, people are, I'm sure he's, you know, I'm sure he's Polish. I'm sure he's a Jew. I'm sure he's Croatian. I'm sure. He's Croatian. There's no absolutely 100% concrete proof on this conversation. Trust me, I looked into it. From every, every angle he was so. of Yugoslavia in a guy, in a person. So for as long as he lived, the dream managed to be relatively kept afloat. But as you probably touched, I'm definitely going to listen to the episode. You probably touched in your episode on Yugoslavia. After his death and even during his later years, as the markets were slowly getting more and more liberalized. It allowed for the corruption of capitalist greed to go into, to slowly develop in the whole country. And it allowed for the creation of pockets

of apparatchik elites to amass enough capital in all of the individual Yugoslav republics, which then led them through their reactionary capitalist thought to obviously, we as Mars has noticed, to try and compete with other capitalist classes in the other republics of Yugoslavia. So they needed cannon father in order to achieve said domination over the other now fledgling bourgeois. And they did that by investing, be it in institutions, in TV stations, in newspapers, which in movies and shows and whatever the fuck you can think of, in paramilitaries, which presented the idea of their own republics being fucked over by these fucking commies, and especially by that neighbor and that neighbor, our republic is carrying everything on its shoulder.

Look at how lazy those guys are. Look at how lazy those guys are. And then, you know, you introduce this is a very, like you have Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox people here, et cetera, et cetera, then you spice it up a bit with religious division, et cetera, et cetera, and you have a powder keg that immediately will erupt. And while I'm extremely simplifying, it would be like a five-hour discussion, in my personal opinion, it is exactly what I mentioned before, because a lot of people always ask, okay, what caused it?

You know, it's not that simple. It's not one thing. But if I have to pinpoint one thing, is the market liberalizations which created fledgling, you You know, capitalist inspired, inspiring to be capitalist classes, which then invested massively in separatism, which would then divide the country in a thousand pieces. And it led to what we, you know, a lot of people know that it led to, you know, the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II.

A beautiful, innocent, in my opinion. but naive experiment ended up backfiring on itself, but in my opinion, it was extremely worth it, especially for the people who lived very, very good lives during that period, number one, and number two, because it taught us a lot of lessons, which we can apply whenever we try to do something similar, hopefully in the future. Yeah, that's very interesting. People today, just really quickly, I have a few things to follow up on that question, but what are people today's view of that period of time?

Is there some nostalgia for it? Is there like older people that lived through it? I mean, it does not even that old, I guess. What's like the kind of looking back now, you know, 30, 40 some years on, you know, contrasting their current conditions with, you know, the socialist construction attempt? What are people's views broadly, the average person, if you will? So it's pretty like it's divided, not even 50, 50, but 30, 30, 30, 30. So you have the youngans like myself that have grown up with very reactionary history of all of the individual republics saying, oh my God, we're the world's oldest people.

We are the, like, we flew in with fucking spaceships and we created the first, like we were the first monkey, you know. Those are the young people that never got to experience it. So they tend to be relatively reactionary, which I am seeing a very optimistic direction that they're going into, thanks to again, to the fucking interview. internet in which they're realizing similarly to how I realize that what they've been sold is absolute bullshit. Then we have the other half which lived extraordinary lives

in the socialist federative Republic of Yugoslavia that absolutely miss it with incredible fervor. They have what we here like to call Yugo Nostalgia. And then you have some that like then you have also an older population that is usually

the children or grandchildren of reactionaries during World War II that were punished by Yugoslavia and then therefore they feel like the commies, you know, came in and fucked up grandpa who, you know, wanted to side with the guys wearing fucking crooked crosses on their sleeves. So they're very hurt about that. And obviously, great children and children of petite bourgeois and large bourgeois motherfuckers of, you know, the kingdom of Yugoslavia from back in the day. And obviously, okay, you have the fourth, but that's a small percentage of category of people who managed to make insane money from the introduction of capitalism in the Balkans.

And they are obviously doing their best, not only, you know, the way you have lobbying in the U.S., but you didn't have like an attempt of a, I mean, no, there was great group. You know what the fuck I'm saying. There wasn't like official state socialist policy in the U.S. ever. So the lobbying only concentrates in making sure it never happens again. Here, a lot of the lobbying makes sure that it doesn't happen again, but a lot of it is directed at smearing super hardcore, whatever did happen in the past. And those are kind of the three plus one categories of people that look back at it. But the working class proletariots that did not have kind of a family lineage in reactionary

bullshit. I have not met a single motherfucker who hasn't been who hasn't looked back to those days with with extreme positive thought. And my family is exactly divided 50-50. One half looks at it absolutely fantastically and then

like 90% of the members of my other half of the family also look at it back at it very positively except for one grandparent who was really triggered by it because he used to like his grandpa used to be like a landowner and shit. You know the classic fucking story. absolutely yeah that's absolutely fascinating you know and learning about um socialist construction

yugoslavia and tito in particular you know tito does have the credentials and the mass popular support that figures like fidel castro or even kim il sung absolutely had which comes from their national liberation struggles preceding the revolution so you know tito was a very i think well-known communist partisan fighting nazis and Croatian fascists and stuff in world war two and And a lot of the belief in them get funneled through what they actually did to liberate their country from various forms of occupation and depression. So, you know, I can always tip my hat to Tito for that. But one thing does come up. And this is why I think Mao is such a crucial communist thinker and figure.

And you don't have to be a Maoist to take a lot from Mao because Mao did become very interested in how, you know, socialist parties, even after successful socialist revolution. revolutions get on the so-called capitalist road. And he watched the move from, you know, Stalin to Khrushchev, and then obviously he died, but then eventually it would go on to Yeltsin. And then Putin, this complete collapse of the Soviet Union on that front. And there's something there with Tito and Yugoslavia, as you said, which is market liberalization, opening up ideological space for people to promote capitalist policies. And then you see that domino effect down the road. And so I think Mao looks at these experiments. and specifically the Soviet Union, but other ones as well,

and sees how these little seemingly innocent expansions or even, you know, quote unquote, liberalizations of politics or economics at one point in the development can actually create a space where a block is sort of slowly and imperceptibly formed that over many years takes you in the exact opposite direction you want to go in. And so, you know, Mao really articulating, making that explicit, trying to wrestle with and prevent that, We all have our different opinions on whether or not that actually happened.

But I think it's a very interesting insight that Mao in particular had that really came from a study of these previous attempts to construct socialism. Absolutely. I would argue that he's right for one very, like obviously I'm going to oversimplify insanely here. But people forget, like people forget what it was like, quote unquote, before. And they start thinking. thinking, you know, maybe the way they're doing it in this case, when it comes to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, et cetera, et cetera, the way they're doing it in the West isn't that bad, you know. Maybe we should, you know, let's try a bit of their policies here. Let's try a bit of their policies there. And then boom Shackalaka, you're fucking, you have a massive civil war, which is sponsored both by foreign and domestic capital. not always does it start from a good place a lot of people knew exactly what they were fucking doing for some it did come come from from a good place but just the it's fucked that

we live you know for for 60 to 100 years and the generations change and we we forget the struggles that were necessary for us to be able to live the way we do in for example I'm saying, if I'm imagining if I'm living like in Yugoslavia, 1975 and shit, and I start imagining this alternate universe where there's Levi's jeans and, you know, seven types of coffee, you know, maybe I really miss that, which now is going to be very interesting because kind of, because we are experiencing the absolute peak of hypercommodification and being able to, you know, choose the way every single one of your nails is fucking painted, that hopefully, Hopefully it's going to be so imprinted in our fucking genetic memory that when we try socialist experiments in the future, it hopefully will take a lot longer for us to start, you know, forgetting, start saying the question, oh, was it really that bad before? I mean, this shit, this socialism shit is fucking complicated. Should we just, you know, let the market do its thing? hopefully we will like this fucking insanity that we're living in right now is going to get embedded in our fucking skulls for a bit longer than it did for you know people that were founding socialism like for example the soviets after world war one or the Yugoslavs after world war two yeah yeah absolutely well said well let's let's kind of touch on that you know

after the collapse of Yugoslavia in the wars in the 90s because even in our pretty fairly expansive episode on the topic, we sort of ended the discussion at, you know, Tito's death and sort of gestured towards where things went, but didn't have time, obviously, to get into it. And I don't expect a, you know, a full breakdown of everything because as you say, this stuff is infinitely complicated. And the more you zoom in, the further you find you can continue to zoom in on any one, you know, event or year or part of the country or part of the Balkans or whatever. So with all of that in mind, can you kind of talk about the wars that took place in the 90s and the U.S.'s role and their impact on the Balkans broadly.

Sure thing. So with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, there was no longer the need for a sort of tampon zone, as we used to call it, which existed in the Balkans in the form of Yugoslavia. So foreign elements and foreign lobbies, which to an extent were ready to accept a socialist to an extent, let's call it, that state in the middle of Europe, no longer saw reasons for that to exist where it does. And then in the imperial core and in the Western general, the question of support for the Yugoslav

Federation, the way it was, has got put into question. Many individuals who were already fledgling capitalist, as we mentioned before, as well as with reactionary, people with reactionary aspirations, were now free to interact with political thought leaders from all over the world, which were pushing them in the direction of dividing the country fully. But that is not only say from a philosophical perspective, but from literally funds just rolling in like a motherfucker into Yugoslavia and the different republics, which wanted to inspire us into self-determination, as they call it, ended up massively influencing the local population. But that's not to say that the local leadership and the locals themselves were not. at fault as well, as we all know, as the economic strife increases, as there's more poverty, as there's more hunger, people look for others to blame. And a similar thing happened exactly with Yugoslavia. It became a very fertile ground for absolute chaos where neighbors were being blamed for what was happening in their own country. And as I said previously, when the

When that rhetoric was introduced back in Tito's era, those people fucking disappeared in the middle of the night. People that were giving ideas of greater Serbia's, greater Croatia's, greater Bosnias, or Albanian expansion or whatever the fuck you want, were not allowed in the limelight. Towards the last years of Yugoslavia, they were not only allowed in the limelight, but prime time television of the different.

local republic. So you can see where this story is going. All the countries were now creating self-determination arguments, which basically said the following. We are being oppressed by the other federations, which are leaching off of us, and we need to establish a nation state. Then they would start establishing a nation state, but because Yugoslavia was this super-international, nationalist place, there would obviously be a massive minority of other ethnicities in that republic that you're now trying to form. So the other country would say, what the fuck are you doing? You can't make a nation state with all my people in there without allowing them, you know,

to self-determined themselves. So if you can self-determine, then we can self-determine. And then every republic would have had to, you know, get cut up in 50 fucking pieces. And if they were not hypocrites and if the West specifically wasn't backing certain players and not others, then we would end up not as like seven, eight republics, but as 78 republics, we really had to follow the self-determinism principle. But basically you can see where this argument kind of goes. You can't secede with such a big chunk of my population.

in your territory, which was used as kind of the, and that ended up being used as kind of the main moral argument for one state to attack the other. As the war started going on, full-on reactionary mentality started to set in, and, you know, masks were off. It was no longer necessarily about defending your own people in the other country. It was about revenge for what they did to us in World War II, revenge for what their comies did to us, reestablishing old empires from like a thousand years ago and shit like that, or, you know, finally beating the Turkish oppressors, which oppresses for 500 years,

for example, typical Serbian rhetoric towards Bosnian Muslims, et cetera, et cetera. that all of these literally hundreds of reactionary ideologies got born, were given birth to in all of the republics. And then everyone got to pick one from the supermarket of fascism and go blow up houses and shoot up kids with that argument in mind. But those seeds would not have been able to grow if not for, if, you know, international. nationalism wasn't abandoned, and if the economy was stable enough for people to not have a reason to look at their neighbor and point a finger. What we ended up seeing is over 140,000 people dead. The industry of almost all of the countries being, except to Slovenia, smashed to the ground, a NATO intervention in no longer socialist, but just federative. Republic of Yugoslavia, untold massacres committed by one group over the other, where the Serbs and Croats were the big swinging dicks because they had the bigger fucking

guns to kill more people in my opinion, but also more like ideological fervor of the Ustasha Croatian and the greater Serbia nationalist, not to say that Bosnians didn't do their fair share or the KLA down in Kosovo, but in my opinion, it's very unhealthy to basically continue what we were taught by these reactionaries as a way to treat each other by digging up these reactionary ideologies and pointing figures at each other forever, because it's not going to really, the only thing it really does is dissuade us from a materialist, a of what actually happened. And yeah, I said I'm going to be short, but then I didn't end up being short, but that

is literally just scraping, scraping the fucking surface. The LDR, country starts falling apart. People get more poor. People get more nationalists. They forget internationalism. They start massacring each other. From the massacres, they need to excuse the massacres. They create fascist ideologies.

Then the fire starts burning even more intensely. The West absolutely likes this because it no longer needs this strong country in this part of the world. It needs divided squabbling tribes to control better. And the only person ending up winning in this whole story is exactly them, the imperial superpowers, which then can come in by a industry, by a plan, control the governments in one way or another, and establish those as semi-colonies for themselves for the future. Yeah.

Well, very well done. I think you did an amazing, amazing summary. That is not an easy summary to do. and certainly it's worth noting that the U.S. uses this tactic of, you know, just to destabilize in and of itself can be often, especially regionally, very beneficial to an already existing imperial hegemon. Obviously, the U.S. wants to see Yugoslavia fall, but, you know, the destruction of the entire area and the debasement and destabilization of it actually does serve U.S. interests. And so you see places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and on some level people want to say the U.S. lost to those wars. and certainly an argument can be made for them

but at the same time they did the objective what they wanted to do which was absolutely fuck these countries up such that they could not have a political coherent movement that might one day rise to challenge US imperialism or whatever it may be so sometimes just the

just funding or helping or nudging along destabilization and destruction itself can serve U.S. goals but within Yugoslavia the former Yugoslavia in any place really when things start getting really bad when the wheels start falling off when there's lots of fear precarity uncertainty chaos you know nine times out of ten in a global capitalist world at least those movements will

tend toward fascism become more susceptible to fascism and then those instances were out of fear and crisis and uncertainty communism or socialism came it was due to high levels of organization So you can think of, you know, the communists in China fighting the nationalist and the Japanese imperialists and coming out on top due to their high level of organization and their, you know, popularity amongst the masses or in the Soviet case, you know, the Bolsheviks, Lenin's profound leadership itself, et cetera, was enough to push those moments of insanity towards the left instead of to the right. So in a place like the U.S. today, I look back and take those historical notes and then you add on top. of it, what the U.S. is, you know, the imperialist hegemon, the center of global capitalism, deeply anti-communist throughout our entire history. And you wonder when, as we're seeing, the U.S. starts to break down. Lots of fear and uncertainty and crises start to pile up. You know, unless you have a very organized socialist, communist movement wedded to labor and the

masses, you are going to nine times out of ten default in the direction of fascism. And that is, I think, a huge fear of mine personally as a father raising multiple children in the U.S. crumbling empire domestically, I mean, the situation is deteriorating quite quickly. We don't have the organizational capacity to take a moment of crisis and push it leftwards. Everything in this society is geared toward falling rightward. And that's a big fear of mind. You can certainly see how that psychology and that politics plays out in a place like the former Yugoslavia and the breakup during the 90s. you really do it's like a perfect case study example of when if as you beautifully put it when

things start falling when all the cars are on the floor you have to you know get them together and either put them left or right and they're going to fall either left or right and if the left does not manage to put them in their spot the the reactionary sure as fuck will yeah because the reactionaries a lot of times they won't even depend on high levels of organization you have the you know the baseline ideology of a place like the U.S., and then you can just add violence in on that. You don't even have to, like, I think communists and socialist have to be many times more actually organized than the fascists to push it in that direction in a place like the U.S. I think, obviously, the former Yugoslavi is a little different in that you had this

multi-decade socialist experiment, and lots of people are already invested in that. But, yeah, it's just very fascinating and very worth monitoring how these things actually fall apart and in what direction they tend to go, because, I think in the next several decades, no matter where you live on this fucking planet, you'll be faced with surmounting crises and levels of chaos that most of us are not fully used to. So it's worth studying history for that. Absolutely. My friend, really sorry, two minutes.

Can I really go to the toilet? I'm going to pass out. Absolutely. Go ahead. Okay, thank you. No problem. Approximately 10 hours later. Hey, hey, I'm back.

I'm so sorry. That was super unprofessional, man. but like I ate I don't want to tell you what I ate today and just at one moment I'm sitting there I'm like dude I am about to pass out like if I continue talking I'm gonna talk like this because you know I'm I'm really really sorry but that was literally trust me I if I could have held it in I would have held it in that's totally okay I've been there many times myself so I'm totally fine with that I was like go to the toilet before you go on Rev left I'm not drinking water anything like you know this is one of my favorite shows

of all time let me fucking you know be respectful towards this honor I'm being given and then you know I shit myself on the fucking thing Jesus Christ See I almost want to keep it in for the last But I'll edit this out I'll edit this out Oh no fuck fuck Keep it in it's your show

Do it do it do it yourself All right well I'm absolutely fine with self-ironizing myself Perfect I know you are And I appreciate that about your sense of humor It's very fucking funny Thank you all right well that was a great summary and i know we're already at an hour

so let's uh i just have a couple more questions for you um and and this one is actually a little indulgent just because i'm personally kind of fascinated by the perceptions of people around the world to what america is becoming or has done over the past several years so we talked earlier about how America often exports the shiny and glittering narratives about itself and it is enough to convince people all over the world that the U.S. is the best country in the world and that, you know, a lot of people want to get there and live there only to find out that there's a, you know, a much less beautiful thing behind the facade they were presented with. But I've gone online and I just do this thing where I like try to find what people around the world think of

the U.S. as it's currently sort of, you know, collapse. I don't. don't know in this moment of a prolonged crisis um so i'm just interested what people around you and in your part of the world's view of the u.s is in the last couple of years you know trump the uprisings in 2020 um just the insane handling of covid we we've you know a million americans dead that's more americans than we're killed in both world wars combined that's more americans than we're killed in the civil war and our society just brushes right past it like nothing fucking happened. But I know people outside the U.S. can kind of have a little bit more of an objective view. And so I'm wondering what people's view of the U.S. over the last several

years in your area of the world has been. That's a really fun question. So when it comes to the million dead, everybody's absolutely shell-shocked, but then not really. Usually the rhetoric you hear is like, yeah, when I think about it, like, that's, if I had to think of a place where a million people who die of COVID, yeah, the state sounds like the logical place

where a million people would die because, you know, nobody gives a fuck about people when there's money to be made. When it comes to,

you know, the Trump era and then the switch into over towards Joe Biden. In my part, like in certain parts of the Balkans,

we get very positively excited when a president openly speaks about being isolationist. And in my opinion, Trump wasn't necessarily isolationist, but if we look at the situation right now compared to Biden, he might have been. There was a sort of semi-hop scene in him, but mostly by people that don't understand Jack shit about the policies that he was proposing or where he's positioned on the political spectrum. people were basic like, oh, I know that guy from a TV show, and he says that he doesn't want to go to other countries.

So, you know, maybe he's decent. Now with Joe Biden, like a lot of liberals think that with Trump, you became the laughingstock of the world. I'm going to say a cliche here, but, you know, Trump is the mirror, which all Americans have to face. And they only wanted to go back to brunch. So the reason they wanted Trump out of office is because they couldn't, you know, look themselves in the eyes every time they turned on the TV. So they needed a respectable, you know, relatively decent, you know, okay, dude, in this case, Uncle Joe. But I'm very sorry to inform you. And, okay, I can only speak about the Balkans.

But the U.S. is now a much bigger laughing stock with Joe Biden than they ever were with Trump. The, like, it's like free clicks over here. Every time, you know, he shakes his hand with air or compares poor kids are just good as white kids who are like, oh, the girls were swimming in the pool and like playing with my hairs on my legs, that gets played like on motherfucking repeat absolutely everywhere. So I'm sorry, I doubt liberals are listening to this podcast, but I'm sorry. Like, Joe Biden is doing you no favors as compared to orange chito man. When it comes to, you know, the division of the U.S. in general, again, what I said previously, if someone, you know, masturbates to capitalism, then they still think it's the beacon of all beacons.

If they do not, then it's relatively negative. Depending on what part of the Balkans you go to, parts which were helped by the U.S., from. all the banana republics that were fighting each other or those that were not, their perspective towards U.S. imperialism is going to vastly differ on average. I think

in the left on the Balkans, it's not going to. Like even countries that have quote-unquote been saved by, for example, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which in my opinion is fucking bullshit. You know, even the left, even there is like, okay, they obviously didn't do it to

to save us from genocide by the evil Serbs, they did it in order to establish themselves in our new Banana Republic. But among the normal populists, center, center, right, blah, blah, blah, the libs, depending on how the U.S. treated them in those wars 30 years ago, they will, oh my God, 30 years ago,

I can't believe it's been 30 years. The people are going to be more pro-US or less pro-U.S. when it comes to foreign policy. So when you see stuff like Taiwan happening or the Russo-Ukrainian war, you can pretty much cut the line right there. The countries that are going to be very pro-American

are the ones that have been quote-unquote helped during the war and the ones who were not are going to automatically always choose the opposite side to which the U.S. faces. And yeah, that's pretty much the whole thing. all think that your food tastes very, very bad. Everybody's terrified about how you motherfuckers put sugar in bread. We were super excited by your fast food when it came here, but, you know, now every other motherfucker has liquid diarrhea because of that shit.

You're welcome. So we kind of stopped. Absolutely. We started going there. You know what they say? When a country's rebelling against the U.S., the first thing they burn down is a McDonald's. But we still really, really, really, including me myself, your cultural experts, yes, sure, they're not on the same level as they used to be, but the music you guys make, the art, the film, which is the parts of it, which have not been corrupted by mass commodification, really is stopped here. And it comes out of this spontaneous internationalism that you guys have with people from every corner of the world, you know, living and coexisting and sometimes striving together in spite of the market system which operates there.

So no matter how much sometimes I shit on the U.S., etc., etc., some of the brightest people I've met were Americans and some of the things in life that I enjoy the most were created. by Americans. So that's this sort of dichotomy that most Balkanoids, including myself, live under. We're like, if we could have America without capitalism and

imperialism, you know, might be a relatively decent fucking group of people, you know, and without the bread with fucking sugar in it. Well, I just got back, I just went on a once in a lifetime trip to France and got to walk around Paris and explore their bread culture and yeah like coming back to to the u.s and it's like you know our

wonder bread is just sugar cubes it's not even bread and it wouldn't be seen as bread by most europeans the tomatoes just taste like wet water like in the restaurant i worked out there was like a normal salad with tomatoes and then a salad that was three times the price with a single tomato which was an actual organic tomato from the chef's garden i was like okay so they know that like these other tomatoes suck balls and yet they put them on the menu because the other one is inflated over its you know.

That's hilarious. But I just wanted to touch really quick on the Trump thing because I think that's very interesting that dichotomy of like, well, Trump is promoting this isolationism and that will probably be better for the people around the world who are on the other end of U.S. bombs or U.S.-backed, you know, coups or whatever. And in some sense, I always think, like,

at least in my lifetime, Bush was the worst president abroad like internationally the tragedy and the crime of Iraq and Afghanistan can be laid at his feet but you know Trump domestically was like the absolute worst like you know no matter what system you live in the leader is supposed to try to bring people together

and shit and this is the first time in my life that a president who is actively every single day sought to divide and inflame already inflamed tensions but it also lit a fire under the left's ass I mean we were the left in this country was like burning down fucking police stations

and shit with like 55% support from the rest of the population as unheard of in the US but you know I mean yeah ultimately the rest of us were all like great things like happening in America who knows that fucking reference point

like spends too much time on the internet and like should go touch grass yeah sorry yeah absolutely but you know Trump Trump rhetoric aside basically governed like a normal fucking Republican huge tax cuts to the rich

and then you know that bombing of the Iranian general and shit it just Trump just cares about himself first and foremost. And so whatever he has to do, even if it's slaughtering people, if he had to get into a war that would boost his numbers, he would do it in a heartbeat. But, but yeah, Biden is just the weakest president of fucking all time. And I think both Trump and Biden are the perfect paragons of the Republican and Democratic Party hitting the end of the road, as it were. They're the ugliest and most flourished versions of both of those dead-end fucking parties. So that's how I kind of see it. But enough about me. was a little indulgent. I do want to talk as the last question before we wrap this wonderful conversation up. You mentioned it too. The Russia-Ukraine war, obviously that is a regional issue for people in the Balkans who are right next door in a lot of cases to this conflict. So I'm just kind of thinking how are people in the region responding to this war

and where do you personally kind of think this conflict is headed? A lot of people see the conflict as Yugoslavia falling apart too. A lot of people were questioning, okay, after the Soviet Union broke up, sure, we had the Chechen War. And then sometime later, everything that happened in Georgia recently, we had Armenia and Azerbaijan, et cetera, et cetera, which, you know, we're not apart, but they're close. So what, like, big conflict, some big conflict has to come out of this fucking thing because you do not basically change the entirety of the world without it engulfing on itself. we've seen with the downfall, Yugoslavia, and it exactly ended up happening like an example part excellence with the Russo-Ukrainian war. As I said previously, usually people are divided on what side they pick based on what side they identify with the most, be it the

west or the east, and everyone creates arguments for themselves. you know, sprinkled with liberal morality on why they are on this side or the other. My personal view of where the conflict is headed is basically the cliché question that, and you know, I mentioned this word 7,000 times during this episode. Self-determination and the way a local population wants to be governed, a lot of people want to tell you that it's based on international, law. It's based on some moral principles or it's based on how legal and just of the referendums organized there are, etc., etc. Self-determination, my friends, is the most hypocritical

point that has existed, in my opinion, of all time in not only international law, but in geopolitics, because it is applied as a hardcore principle when it comes to the self-determination of states which are seceding from countries which are not in line with international with the Imperial Corps and self-determination is absolutely forbidden and defined as separatist lunacy whenever it is done in the name of states which are against whatever at that time, in this case, the U.S. is the imperial superpower. And the only way at the end of the day that allows for seceding countries to become states is through victory in war, victory in conflict and the solidification of those territories

under a banner, under a flag, and under some sort of loose or very set-up organization. Therefore, the conflict there is headed exactly in that direction. The one who wins, who manages to hold, who manages to plant enough flags, is going to be the one who manages the discussion on self-determination and the ethics of that or another part of, in this case, Ukraine, being able to become a new state, which it will later on, obviously, be. eaten up by one country or the other depending on where the war goes. So a similar repeat of Yugoslavia, a redrawing of borders in a national conflict where might makes right and anything else is sugar-coding it. Yeah, well said, that's a real politic right there. And we're all monitoring the situation, seeing which way the bowl ultimately bounces.

lots of discussion about emerging multipolarity, lots of discussion about the global south, not being, you know, not allowing themselves to be wrapped into this whole like, you know, Europe and America. This was a fight for democracy and freedom. We must come to the side of Ukraine.

A lot of the rest of the third world is indifferent or even how would be pro-Russia? Was it the Indians that said whenever we have problems, it's not a problem in the world. Whenever the West has problems, it's a, you want us to make it a problem of the world. Spot on. A lot of developing nations and a lot of people in the global south are really realizing this.

And yes, to an extent Russia was the first one to question the unipolarity in general. And we'll see what it goes. I have my opinions. On multipolarity, whoever wants to check out the podcast, can hear plenty on that. But for sure, it's a step in that direction. Yeah, absolutely. Lots of trajectories it could take from here, but it's certainly worth monitoring. Well, my friend, I am a genuine fan of yours. I love the D-Program, love your YouTube

channel, and I'm very honored to have you come on this show, have this very all-over-the-place conversation with me. It's always fun talking to you and to hearing you just kind of cut loose and talk normally as you would, unscripted, very entertaining, very fun, always a pleasure. Before I let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you, your YouTube channel, and your podcast online? Thank you so much. This was a pleasure. Everyone can find me as Yugopnik on YouTube. If Rev. Left adds a link, you can just click it. And you can find me as part of a three-member team of an Iraqi, a Yankee, and me, myself,

a Balkanoid, at the D-Program podcast on all platforms that you can imagine just fucking Google it. Absolutely. And to make it very easy, I'll put it in the show notes as well. So you'll be able to find all that very quickly in the show notes. Thank you so much, my friend. Keep up the great work. and you have an open invite to come back on Revlect anytime.

Thank you so much. I would love to. Oh, bros, on, I'm gonna be seen, no, and there's plenty of detectives, she'll be able to hear of my daughter,

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