Quote of the day
SPRAGGETT ON CHESS
The iconic Serbian grandmaster S.Gligoric is a national hero in his native Serbia. His death this week in Belgrade at age 89 has provoked an outpouring of grief and sadness, both inside Serbia and all around the world. One of the world’s finest had disappeared…
But not all see it that way. Some bitter immigrants in the Canadian chess community were delighted with Gliga’s death and have tried to paint him some type of a criminal or worse!
Such madness should never be allowed on to a Canadian message board, but CMA’s chesstalk has a history of allowing such hate to thrive it our midst…one reader objected:
click on to enlarge
”It’s a shame when a great chess player and personality such as Svetozar Gligoric is being painted with all kinds of colours here. He was the best Serbian and Yugoslav chess player of all times, journalist, chess tournaments organizer, was fluent in several languages, soft-spoken, true legend.
In his late years he even composed music and released CDs. That’s the man we are talking about here. After reading some of the comments here, I’m under the impression that he is being compared with Nazi soldiers?!
For the record, he joined Tito’s partisans as a very young man and fought Nazis. Partisans were the best organized anti-nazi force in the region at the time, if they weren’t they wouldn’t win the war and they wouldn’t get much support from the West.
After the war, almost every known personality living in Yugoslavia at the time was genuinely supportive of Tito and the system. If they disagreed, they kept their mouth shut, or they moved out of the country. It’s that simple. Different times, different era. How about Cuban players playing under the Cuban flag now? Are they all communists and pro-Castro?”
SASA KULIC