Those That Left Us This Year

And now, part two in a very special Barbarossa look back at some of those who left us this past year:

Slobodan Milošević

Picture of a President

"Milosevic was an outstanding politician who gave his all to serving his fatherland."
- Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus

The world seems a bit less of a cheery place this year without Mr. Milosevic's upbeat demeanor to brighten our days. His light has dimmed and the world is a bit of a darker for it. Certainly whenever President Lukashenko was in a bind Mr. Milosevic was there to help him through it, to encourage him and to tell him, "Who cares what the western election observers think, huh? Do they have a cool moustache? No. Do they have their own country? No. You do and they are just jealous. You rig those elections if you want to because I know you will be a good president, you know it, and one day your people will too. Oh sure it make some time and half a tub of tear gas, but they will!" Mr. Milosevic was always there for his friends and he never gave up. He didn't give up after losing one war, or a second, or a third, or a fourth, or after his capitol was bombed, or after he falsified election results, or after his people came out onto the streets to protect his election rigging, or after the military refused to quash the demonstrators like he nicely asked them too, or when he was twiddling his thumbs in jail cell in the Hague. Okay he did give up when he had a heart attack, but that isn't the point, the point is that Sloby didn't give up or let people live because he wasn't a quitter, he was a winner and winners never quit. He listened to his high school gym teacher, oh no didn't just ignore his high school gym teacher's advice because he saw that his gym teacher was well a gym teacher and had done nothing in his life and therefore had no business telling anyone else what to do with his, no, he recognized his gym teacher was from Yugoslavia and that nobody in Yugoslavia could so anything with their lives so he set out to make Yugoslavia a somebody. After years of communist oppression where no one could leave the country he was determined to show people something new, to take them to new countries, to spice things up a bit (except for the ethnic Albanian, they weren't invited, okay they were but the invitations were never delivered or something). So he started of with one country and by the end he didn't just have one country, oh no anyone could do that, he took his one country and invested it and in the end had not one but five countries. Be brought new countries for the people of Yugoslavia to see and they didn't even have to leave their own homes. If that isn't love then I don't know what is. We miss you Sloby and Lukashenko just hasn't stopped sobbing since you left, I am just not sure he would have the heart brutally break up another non-violent protest without you.