Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Joy (talk | contribs) at 09:41, 12 May 2004 (="communist dictator"=). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

An event in this article is a April 5 selected anniversary (may be in HTML comment).

Wrong image

Sorry Andre the image of Tito is incorrect. It shows a Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Please correct this. Best regard. -- XJamRastafire 13:48 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)

Lack of content 1945-1980

The entry at present doesn't say anything of consequence about Tito's role in the formation of Yugoslavia and from then to 1980. It just chops off after the "early life" section. Misplaced Pages should cover someone as important as this in much greater detail. I'm not qualified to do it, can someone else? Tannin 11:11 Mar 11, 2003 (UTC)

Hmm. The history after WWII is basically condensed into the timeline, which is inserted pretty ad hoc. This needs work. --Shallot 23:12, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Funeral photos

i am writing from Bosnia and herzegovina and i would be very grateful if you could show some photos from Tito's funerel. It is almnoust impossible to find those pics on the web.

Anonymous edit

examined edit by anonymous IP. safe. - Hemanshu 10:21, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Grenades vs. shells

Can someone please fix this sentence? I don't know anything about Tito's life or history beyond what I've learned here, but I do know that grenades are hand-thrown (or at best, rifle-propelled) weapons and that a howitzer shell can not possibly be mistaken for a grenade. Which was it, please? Rossami 03:22, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

BTW, that is a misconception; there is also the contemporary RPG (launched from either a rifle or a special one-person launcher or perhaps sometimes one and other times the other) and is propelled by a built-in rocket engine, hence Rocket Propelled Grenade. (These figured crucially in the Mogadishu Black Hawk Down battle, bringing down the choppers with tactics developed against the Russians in Afghanistan.) --Jerzy(t) 15:26, 2004 Mar 20 (UTC)

In Bukovina he was seriously injured by a grenade from a howitzer.

That clear, even tho anonymous, statement is helpful but does not fix the problem: everyone who looks at the article text is going to have the same reaction, bcz the apparatus implied by it is so obscure. Either this was an improvised use of a howitzer, or an unusual item produced by a specific nation, or a fragmenting mortar shell whose native name invites mistranslation. This has not been shown to be verifiable yet, and further, it will remain confusing (giving the impression, sadly true, that we don't know what we're talking about) until we can explain in the article what it means and why it sounds confusing. (This is very much like, in its effect, Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated with the pick end of an ice axe, not with "an ice pick" as the common mistranslation has it, and our article used to; it may be, or not, rooted in the same kind of error.) --Jerzy(t) 15:26, 2004 Mar 20 (UTC)

It means a shell, yes. The local word for both is the same (at least colloquially), which is probably the reason for the wrong English term, it's a bad translation. --Shallot 22:23, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The name Broz

The article leaves me with the impression that my vague recollection is accurate, that he was born "Josip Broz" and that "Tito" was a nom de guerre, alias, or code-name that facilitated his revolutionary work. Much like the grenade issue above, this lack of clarity undercuts the credibility of the article. I'm adding an entry for

Broz, Josip, birth name of Yugoslaw partisan leader and president Joseph Tito

at List of people by name: Bro#Brox - Broz and assuming i've gotten it right, despite the lack of the confirmation i expected here. --Jerzy(t) 15:26, 2004 Mar 20 (UTC)

Due to an edit which i have now reverted, this page represented, from 2004 Apr 8 until Apr 20, a colleagues' comment as being mine. What i suggested appears, restored, in the preceding comment. I did not suggest that there be an entry reading like this one that i have struck through:

Broz, Josip, birth name of Yugoslaw partisan leader and president Joseph Tito Tito

--Jerzy(t) 16:08, 2004 Apr 20 (UTC)

Who made the silly decision to call this article Josip Broz rather than Josip Tito or Josip Broz Tito? He is universally known as Tito, regardless of what his legal name might have been. We don't call Lenin Vladimir Ulyanov or Stalin Iosif Djugashvili. Unless someone can give me a good reason not to, I am going to redirect it. Adam 10:48, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

At least in former Yu, his real name was well known. Are there guidelines for naming articles about persons with well-known nicknames? (Possibilities might be "Josip Broz Tito" or "Josip Broz - Tito", for example.) If yes, these should be followed. Josip Tito is not a good idea. Nikola 19:30, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I moved it back because inclusion of the nickname Tito is indeed the Right Thing to do as far as the Misplaced Pages naming conventions are concerned. --Shallot 22:12, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

As i stated earlier in this section, i made an entry at List of people by name: Bro#Brox - Broz for Tito. A colleague (not the one who appropriately edited me at Brox - Broz) editted my discussion of that (without a signature or other indication that modification had occurred, as it happens), making it read

Broz, Josip, birth name of Yugoslaw partisan leader and president Joseph Tito Tito

The suggestion that the name "Tito" may stand alone is not particularly harmful, but it is unneeded clutter in a List of people by name entry that links to a full bio, which in this case seems to make the point adequately; LoPbN needs only enough information for people with a name in mind to be, once they've found a link to the bio they want, pretty sure of that fact. Telling them the ways they can (and preferably the ways they can't) use the name properly is the job of the bio article.
The apparent suggestion that the entry have two more links that redirect to the same bio is a violation of WP style, and a poster child for why that style almost always calls for avoiding redundant links: the three links in one line would practically demand that the reader explore the differing implications of the three related names by following them each in turn. Fuggeddabowdit. --Jerzy(t) 16:08, 2004 Apr 20 (UTC)

1930s

A new IP edit is awash in vagueness, and on reflection i have moved it here to be worked on, rather than just discussing it here: i think it is so hedged that it detracts more than it contributes. (However, i'd like to see a more precise account of this included.) Removed from the article:

During the 1930's Tito worked from the Communist Party and spent some time in Spain. While in Spain he was instrumental is suppressing socialists whose views were opposed to those of the Stalinist Communist Party.

• Does "from" have the meaning of "through", "within", or the like? If not, then what?
• Was he in Spain for a whirlwind tour (and if so, when?), or from Jan 1931 until the fall of the Republic?
• Is this innuendo that he was an executioner, or an informant for executioners? Or did he make dandy speeches about the dustbin of history that embarrassed non-Stalinists into leaving Spain to go home and marry artists?

Please forgive this tone of mine (which comes forth from frustration, despite my distaste for Stalinism), especially if your inarticulateness reflects struggling in a foreign language. If you're a Stalist troll, parodying your opponents within the left, then congratulations; if not, please get your facts together (or be explicit about what things you can't find out), and then speak up clearly. --Jerzy(t) 17:59, 2004 Apr 20 (UTC)

"communist dictator"

User:GeneralPatton wants to add the phrase "communist dictator" to the first 'graph, and believes it can not be considered PoV.

I don't think my objection to it it is just a matter of that phrase being contaminated by his other phrase, "brutal reign of terror", that OB&G has (IMO wisely) at least deferred re-proposing.

My first reaction is that the phrase has a lot stronger POV than the sum of its two words, and the idea of situating it (or even one and then the other, in separate phrases) in the lead 'graph is PoV in pre-empting the opportunity to bring them in in a more nuanced fashion later in the article, where there's more room for qualifications and the like.

The pairing of those two words, even if they are each accurate, expresses the PoV that they are crucially relevant to each other. If we were writing about Stalin, i, and i think most editors, would be sympathetic: his bolshevik ideology and his realization of the idea "L'etat, c'est moi" seem an awful lot like two inseparable sides of a coin -- or perhaps his paranoia was the weld that joined them against attempts to drive them apart.

In contrast, i see Tito having a tension with Stalin and the Soviet system that in many ways put him outside the Soviet bloc; i see a foreign policy independent enough to involve him deeply in the so-called "unaligned movement"; i see an internal situation of ethnic divisions that probably called for a strong hand to balance the factions (in a significantly pluralistic fashion?), for reasons other than paranoia and megalomania. So i see sort of a communist, and a perhaps fairly dictatorial strongman, with nothing like the firm connection between them that i imagine between Stalin's ideology and his stranglehold on state and society.

So, yes, i find your wordings so far too PoV, but i'm optomistic that you may be capable of working with your colleagues to find ways to bring those two concepts in, in ways you couldn't conceive at first and may even surprise you before we're done. I expect this talk page to be a more fruitful place to pursue that than whole-cloth edits of the article. --Jerzy(t) 05:43, 2004 May 11 (UTC)

It is indeed entirely biased to replace "was President between" with "whose brutal reign of terror lasted betwen", at least I don't see much need to elaborate that... but again, the article is missing a huge chunk of content while he was the head of Yugoslavia in which one could elaborate things that make him a president and things that make him a terrorist, without making any such off-the-cuff remarks that are really not encyclopedic. --Shallot 09:55, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

I see User:24.126.189.85's edit with "communist president" as no obvious problem, and likely an enhancement; i'm no expert on Yugoslavia, tho i think i can often be pretty sure about the absence of nuance.

I presume the party mentioned in the article was, like the "Social Unity-party of Germany" in the GDR, the local communist-party-in-all-but-name; perhaps someone able state nuances in this context can state this situation with more nuance than i just did. I expect that would enhance the article, by making the connection between "communist" and the later, more nuanced but apparently still incomplete 'graph. --Jerzy(t) 07:59, 2004 May 12 (UTC)

Actually the Communist Party was indeed called that way in Yugoslavia. But anyway. --Shallot 09:41, 12 May 2004 (UTC)