Vlado Gotovac

Vladimir "Vlado" Gotovac (September 18, 1930 in Imotski, Dalmatia, Kingdom of Yugoslavia – December 7, 2000 in Rome, Italy) was a Croatian poet and liberal politician.Vladimir Gotovac was known as a very talented poet but was also stigmatized as a Croatian nationalist in socialist Yugoslavia. In many of his interviews Gotovac expressed the frustration of not having the types of freedom afforded those living under more democratic regimes.
 In an interview for a Swedish television channel in 1978 he was asked to elaborate upon his own philosophical beliefs, and he said:

 "My entire life I’ve dreamt of a socially just society and exactly for this reason I’ve always been left-oriented. I believed only when justice and freedom existed could human problems be solved. I always believed that only through the solution of these problems could human values be realized. A free individual, an individual who lives justly, only this individual can offer all which the human being has to offer, all of his greatness and all of his human dignity."

 His experience in Croatia, dominated by communism, did not manage to pervert or shatter his own view of socialism; rather he felt that the sort of socialism he believed in had nothing whatsoever to do with communism, an ideology that he viewed as nothing more than centralist totalitarianism, of which its followers, he said, “are incapable of thinking freely. They do not know what freedom is!”
 Gotovac believed liberty could only thrive if embraced by a pluralist society, which guaranteed people’s legal and political rights.