Ever heard of post WW2 executions (without previous trail) of local Nazi collaborators,
Gee, my heart bleeds. Guess what, if I were a Partisan fighting Nazi occupation I'd be droppin collaborators left and right. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started off by whacking Nazi collaborators without trial, but I'm not gonna criticize them for that either.
ideologically incompatible intelligentsia, ideological opposition (left wing, liberal and right wing), etc. by the new revolutionary government?
Tends to happen during revolutions. Doesn't in and of itself negate the value of the revolution. The American Revolution involved extrajudicial killings, and the French Revolution many more, but I still think France, the US, and the world in general are better off for having had those revolutions.
And I am talking tens of thousands here; so far approximately 600 mass graves have been indentified.
Citation?
How about politically motivated trials against intellectuals who were trying to form opposition in the '50 and '60? They were send to Goli Otok, an island in Adriatic which functioned as a sort of gulag, for reeducation.
I know that it was a different time back then and that there were totalitarian lunatics in the west too (McCarthy in the US for example) but saying that Yugoslavia was not much more repressive then most Western powers at the time is going a bit too far.
No, it's not going too far if you look, not just at McCarthyism, but the Smith Act, the Taft-Hartley Act, COINTELPRO, the murders of Black activists either by the state itself or by terrorists working under the protection of law enforcement (like the Klan), government harassment, imprisonment, and even murder of anti-war activists, there is a very good argument to be made that, from 1947 to the mid-70s, the US government was every bit as repressive as the Yugoslavian government against political dissidents, perhaps even more so, during the same time period.
On Communism not being a failure in Yugoslavia:
I suppose you know how it all ended?
Yep, and I would argue that Tito's Communist regime was the only thing preventing that from happening for so long. Once he died and the Serbian nationalists began taking control, the game changed.
Yugoslavia was indeed very different in comparison to the Soviet Bloc countries; free travel, booming tourism, decent economic situation, etc. ,
Yep.
but that was due to the fact that it was more westernized and cooperated with both sides while remaining neutral.
That and Tito had a very different vision of socialism than the USSR (a vision truer to the ideals of socialism I would argue)-- for example, workers in state-run enterprises in Yugoslavia actually exercised self-management whereas the Soviet industries still used the capitalist model of one-man management, having returned to that after liquidating the Factory Committees that sprung up during the February Revolution. In other words, the regime in Belgrade actually took steps to immediately improve the material status, power, and freedom of the working-class whereas Moscow did not.
And the only reason they were able to stay neutral is that, unlike the resistance movements elsewhere in Europe, the Partisans were able to kick the Nazis out basically by themselves, with very little direct intervention from Allied armies. So after Tito took care of Hitler's boys, he had no problem giving a big "fuck you" to Stalin when Uncle Joe tried making Yugoslavia into a subject of the Soviet Empire.
In Michel Houellebecq's Platform main protagonist travels to Cuba and an old Cuban tells him this (I am paraphrasing): "The most fundamental legacy of Castro in Cuba is the fact that a fat American tourist can get a blowjob from a beautiful Cuban girl for $5."
'Nuff said.
Prostitution was rampant in Batista's Cuba too. The difference now is that instead of prostitution being run by organized crime it is decriminalized, informally regulated and the prostitutes have access to condoms, free health care/STD testing, and police protection-- meaning that Cuba's prostitutes are the healthiest and most secure in their safety in Latin America (and arguably they're in a better position than many US working girls).
Poll
Topic: Would you describe yourself as a communist?