New Albanian Challenge

I challenge everyone of you to present me 3 (THREE) world-recognized accomplishments that the brave and glorious socialist Albania contributed to world peace, progress, or economy.
No one was able to do it in my earlier challenge here (viewtopic.php?f=130&t=51449) because the admins have shut the thread down too early, so this time i'm raising the stakes of offering € 10 per three valid world-recognized accomplishments via PayPal.

Quote:

that the brave and glorious socialist Albania

I'm just wondering, by your post you seem to be brainwashed by the Cult of Personalities of various Marxist leaders.

Eire wrote:

I'm just wondering, by your post you seem to be brainwashed by the Cult of Personalities of various Marxist leaders.

He was being sarcastic. Ed happens to be of the opinion that socialist Albania contributed nothing of value to the world.

Indigo wrote:

He was being sarcastic. Ed happens to be of the opinion that socialist Albania contributed nothing of value to the world.

OH thank the Lord, yeah it confused me because he had the Yugoslav Flag in his avatar which threw me off.

Ed is an anti-Albanian chauvinist, that much is clear. A lot of people in ex-YU dislike Albanians for various reasons, but that doesn't have anything to do with Hoxha or PR Albania.

Indigo wrote:

Ed happens to be of the opinion that socialist Albania contributed nothing of value to the world.

You could not be more correct in this statement. I am still waiting for three contributions... Anyone?!

Loz wrote:

A lot of people in ex-YU dislike Albanians for various reasons, but that doesn't have anything to do with Hoxha or PR Albania.

I envy your ability to empathise with me because you seem to know me and my reasons more than I know them myself. In fact, I clearly don't know them at all.
Please, tell me more about my reasons to "dislike Albanians".

Beside, where have I said anything about disliking them in the first place? Mother THeresa is an Albanian, Anna Oxa is an Albanian... If ALbania was such a great and glorious country, why haven't these two individuals stay there and do their work there? ... Hoxha is an Albanian, too, and he brought the country to full stop.

Loz wrote:

Ed is an anti-Albanian chauvinist, that much is clear.

So we're namecalling each other now, you paranoid megalomaniac?

Quote:

I envy your ability to empathise with me because you seem to know me and my reasons more than I know them myself. In fact, I clearly don't know them at all.
Please, tell me more about my reasons to "dislike Albanians".

I think you have kidney problems.
: DDD

Quote:

So we're namecalling each other now, you paranoid megalomaniac?

You, you ,you !
Nasy nasty : DDD

I'm sure you must have a name for what you are doing, is it called trotskyism, stalinism, hoxhaism... ?
I'm referring to the fact that you prefer to attack on a personal level (calling me a chauvinist) than deal with the issue at hand which is the topic of this thread.

If you call it hoxhaism, I am willing to admit that this *IS* one of the three accomplishments of Albania.

You seem to have an obsession or inferiority complex when it comes to Albania.

What did Yugoslavia "contribute" to the world? Tito's friendship with figures like Nixon, Brezhnev, Ceaușescu and Kim Il Sung? Gigantic debts to the IMF and Western countries? Claiming that FDR's "New Deal" was a step towards socialism in the USA? Breaking up into wars and genocide?

But of course Tito was on good terms with various third-world leaders as well, such as Nasser (who imprisoned communists), Indira Gandhi ( who sterilized many of India's poor), Mobutu, etc.

Name a single pro-Tito party in the world that struggled against capitalism. Name a single internationalist act Tito himself did. You're nothing more than a Slav chauvinist and nationalist.

Ismail wrote:

You seem to have an obsession or inferiority complex when it comes to Albania.

What did Yugoslavia "contribute" to the world?

All of you on this forum already agree that SFRY did absolutely nothing and was the worst system of its kind in the world. It is useless of me to try and convince you otherwise. So it's Ok to trash SFRY as much as you can.

Me having inferiority complex? muahhahahhaha! Against muahha Almuahhabaniahahaha? muahhahhahah
We were not retarded, so no thank you.

EdvardK wrote:

All of you on this forum already agree that SFRY did absolutely nothing and was the worst system of its kind in the world. It is useless of me to try and convince you otherwise. So it's Ok to trash SFRY as much as you can.

As opposed to you claiming that Socialist Albania did nothing of value?

Again, what did Yugoslavia do? I know one additional thing it did: it denounced Vietnamese "aggression" in Kampuchea and recognized Pol Pot's government in exile at the UN, as did the USA, UK, China, DPRK, etc.

Which isn't surprising when just a year before he was overthrown he declared:

"Like our Democratic Cambodia, Yugoslavia is a non-aligned country which has adhered to the position of preserving independence. Friendship between our two countries is therefore based on the same principle. We have always esteemed and respected Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people. Comrade President Tito and the Yugoslav people have always supported and helped us. We have sympathy for them and wish to express our thanks to Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people."
(Pol Pot, quoted in Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 8 No. 3, 1978. p. 413.)

Was Yugoslavia's system "the worst system of its kind in the world"? Maybe, considering that it wasn't until the late 80's in the USSR that unemployment began appearing in massive numbers, whereas unemployment was a major issue in Yugoslavia decades before then and was considered something "normal" by Yugoslav "socialist" theorists. Albania by contrast eliminated unemployment, as had the USSR under Stalin.

Ismail wrote:

Again, what did Yugoslavia do?

Let me reiterate two things - yes, i *know* you all think SFRY did nothing, and second, let me reiterate my challenge: will pay the money to the first person who will show me two (not even three) things that Albania did which was of world-value. As I stated earlier, winning the Albanian football cup is not an accomplishment.

Yugoslavia did all sorts of things, they just happened to be either irrelevant or hostile to the interests of the international communist movement. You're actually a citizen of one of those states, so prove us wrong.

Fair warning: if this doesn't evolve past a back and forth snark battle, I'm not even going to bother locking the thread; I'll just trash it.

EdvardK wrote:

will pay the money to the first person who will show me two (not even three) things that Albania did which was of world-value. As I stated earlier, winning the Albanian football cup is not an accomplishment.

1. Define what you mean by "of world-value".

2. Why would Albania have to prove itself by this standard?

I'll give you at least one answer to the first question : it managed to reduce income disparities to 2:1. That is unprecedented in the history of class society. Even in the relatively mild classism of Teutonic serf/tribal societies, the difference in wergild (or value) between highest nobility and lowest freepeople (serfs did not count of value except to those who essentially owned them) was 3:1. This created an incredible example for the rest of the world.

But even if they hadn't achieved that, why would it not be enough for them to have made impressive achievements locally?

Are we taking into account the poverty of Albania prior to its Communist revolution? Does the starting-line in a race matter?

Was ending Italian imperialism not in itself an impressive achievement?

I see no need to overglorify Albania, but I fail to understand the angst in denigrating it.

Well, other "comrades" on this site have quite an imagination about what is world-value.
You may not have read the other thread which had an exactly the same challenge - we discussed the terms at length there. What is required is an achievement that helped the world (other countries) to (benefit or) become better by using/applying some hard-core Albanian domestic brains/know-how/product.
I would gather that a Nobel prize would be a good starting criteria. I don't mind if an achievement hasn't received the Nobel prize, but has neverthless helped other countries, maybe eradicate measels, smallpox or similar. I'm not talking about Albania getting that medicine from the World Health Organisation and applying it domestically, but rather the opposite - to generate a medicine and share it with the rest of the world - now, THAT is a world-class achievement. Ergo, winning the Albanian soccer title cannot be an achievement by itself (as to what you asked about "locally").
As to your last sentence (overglorifying), that was actually the motivation behind the challenge - namely, some "comrades" here were doing just that and I wanted to do a reality-check on myself by asking for an unbiased list of world-class achievements.

EdvardK wrote:

Well, other "comrades" on this site have quite an imagination about what is world-value.
You may not have read the other thread which had an exactly the same challenge - we discussed the terms at length there. What is required is an achievement that helped the world (other countries) to (benefit or) become better by using/applying some hard-core Albanian domestic brains/know-how/product.
I would gather that a Nobel prize would be a good starting criteria. I don't mind if an achievement hasn't received the Nobel prize, but has neverthless helped other countries, maybe eradicate measels, smallpox or similar. I'm not talking about Albania getting that medicine from the World Health Organisation and applying it domestically, but rather the opposite - to generate a medicine and share it with the rest of the world - now, THAT is a world-class achievement. Ergo, winning the Albanian soccer title cannot be an achievement by itself (as to what you asked about "locally").
As to your last sentence (overglorifying), that was actually the motivation behind the challenge - namely, some "comrades" here were doing just that and I wanted to do a reality-check on myself by asking for an unbiased list of world-class achievements.

Albania was the poorest country in Europe upon independence in 1912 and upon liberation in 1944. Asking it to have world-class medical research is ridiculous.

Using your criteria Yugoslavia and any other East European country (and Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, etc.) didn't carry out "achievement(s) that helped the world" either. You've also moved away from socialist achievements to achievements capitalist countries tout as "proof" that the "free market" brings forth innovation, incentives, etc.

Ismail wrote:

Using your criteria Yugoslavia and any other East European country (and Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, etc.) didn't carry out "achievement(s) that helped the world" either. You've also moved away from socialist achievements to achievements capitalist countries tout as "proof" that the "free market" brings forth innovation, incentives, etc.

Are you saying no socialist country provided any world-class achievement? And all innovations that the Russians did to their rocket engines (http://bit.ly/176lzSO - "The NK-33 and NK-43 rocket engines are the highest performing Liquid Oxygen/ Kerosene ever produced.") are filthy free-market capitalist inventions? Probably the CIA made Soviets create such a rotten capitalist thing as the best performing LOX rocket engine? How do you respond to that as it is exactly against your claims (which must be truly founded in some writings of either Hoxha or Stalin)?
The challenge still holds - will pay € 100 in albanian leks, so i am not chastised again for offering capitalist currency.

How is it against my claims? A social-imperialist superpower builds innovative military technology as part of its war economy. Albania would neither have the ability nor need to research such a thing, let alone build it.