How to Combat Croatian Revisionists’ Culture of Lies
Stories of resistance to Croatia’s fascist Ustasa can help counter revisionists’ attempts to rehabilitate the World War II regime and whitewash the truth about its concentration camp at Jasenovac and its role in the Holocaust [...]
In early 1944, Mirjana Babunovic-Dimitrijevic, a 22-year-old middle-class woman living in Sarajevo, was arrested by the Ustasa police. After she was arrested along with her mother and aunt, they were all deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp, for refusing to convert to Catholicism. All three women died there in late 1944.
These women were among more than 80,000 victims who perished at Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945. While we don’t know precisely how they died nor what happened during their short lives in the camp, two things are certain.
First, their deaths were the direct result of deliberate political decisions. Second, they died not because of anything they had done but because of what they were. They died because they were different in a state which not only criminalised difference but considered it legitimate grounds for extermination.
The Jasenovac death camp
To listen to Igor Vukic, a guest on the popular afternoon chat show ‘Dobar Dan Hrvatska’ (‘Good Day Croatia’) on Croatian Radio-Television, HRT last week, was to enter a parallel universe in which Jasenovac was not a concentration camp but rather a ‘labour and collection camp’ for opponents of the regime, in which inmates like Mirjana were offered opportunities to learn new professions and skills, given access to drama clubs and sporting facilities and treated with compassion by Ustasa guards.
The furore caused by the appearance of Vukic, a former journalist and the secretary of the Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp, on a popular afternoon show, is, in some ways, hard to understand. After all, Vukic and other revisionists have been making the rounds of television shows for years, promoting their theories.
Yes, it’s true there was something slightly shocking about how normalised the set up was: the hosts even thoughtfully plugged the society’s book about Jasenovac to viewers at the end of the segment.
But leave aside the prime-time kitsch, and the episode only seems outrageous if you ignore the past 25 years of public discourse in Croatia about the Holocaust and the Ustasa regime.
Which isn’t to say that people shouldn’t be alarmed by what’s happening now: they should.
I would argue there are two reasons why last week’s programme has cuased such a stir. First, unlike the revisionists of the Tudjman era who tended to minimise the crimes of the Ustasa regime or only rehabilitate only certain aspects of it, the new cohort of revisionists are, by their own admission, aiming to rehabilitate the regime in its entirety.
Second, revisionism in the 1990s had its strongholds in the academy and mainstream politics which had a constraining effect on all but the most committed acolytes.
Now, in an age of mass media it has migrated to media platforms. Revisionism hence seems more prevalent and dangerous now because it has essentially become a branch of the entertainment industry, amplified by the ubiquity of social media.
But no one should be so naïve as to think the current wave of revisionism began last week or even two years ago. The problem goes much deeper than that.
Arguably, Croatia’s leaders have never really known how to deal with the legacy of the Ustasa regime and Jasenovac, the most enduring symbol of its terror.
The narrative offered by the victorious Partisans provided a useable model, initially at least, emphasising the mass participation of Croats in the Partisan movement and the marginality of the Ustasa movement while placing most of the blame on the German occupiers. This was not exactly false but it was a simplified and idealised version of the truth.
The entrance gate to the Jasenovac death camp
The government of Franjo Tudjman, by contrast, offered a different kind of resolution, combining Ustasa nostalgia and Holocaust minimisation with a much more ambitious project to reconcile Croatian fascists and anti-fascists on the basis of their supposed shared fight for an independent Croatian state.
It also linked Croatia’s struggle for independence in the 1990s to the Croatian ‘independence struggle’ of the 1940s under the Ustasa movement.
In the post-Tudjman years, especially during Croatia’s application to join the European Union, Holocaust memory was Europeanised. As Ljiljana Radonic has written, memory culture transformed Jasenovac into a universal story in which the specifically Croatian identity of the perpetrators was pushed to the margins and the role of the Nazi occupation stressed.
At the same time, the narrative emphasised the specifically Croatian role in the ‘good’ parts of the story, in particular the political oppression of the Croats in inter-war Yugoslavia and the mass participation of Croats in the resistance.
The continued ambivalence regarding the Holocaust in Croatia was apparent at the opening of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum permanent exhibition in 2006 which, as a matter of policy, de-emphasised the national identity of both the victims and the Ustasas as well as their crimes.
Natasa Jovicic, the director of the museum, wrote that the exhibition aimed to restore the individuality of the victims, arguing that the collective identity of the victims and perpetrators had been manipulated in the cause of Serbian nationalism in the early 1990s to generate new hatred.
But this argument was misleading. The people who died in Jasenovac, while they were individuals, were incarcerated in Jasenovac precisely because of their perceived collective identity.
Moreover, in linking the World War II and the wars of the 1990s, the museum exhibition actually legitimated a narrative which has become a leit motif of revisionist forces in Croatia in recent years: namely, that commemorating the crimes of the Ustasa movement constitutes an attempt to blacken the name of Croatia, declare the Croats a genocidal people and criminalise the Homeland War.
On the surface, a narrative which implicated not just ordinary Croats but Croatian identity itself in the crimes of the Ustasa movement through linking defence of the Ustasa regime to patriotism should have permanently discredited revisionists.
After all, when it came to power in 1941, the Ustasa movement enjoyed no popular mandate and was very quickly rejected by a large number of Croats. Still today, the majority of Croats reject the legacy of the Ustasa movement.
Moreover, the constitution of the Republic of Croatia states unambiguously that it is founded on the principles of anti-fascism.
That revisionists have seen their influence actually grow in Croatia is a reflection of the weakness of civil society, a testament to the failure of institutions such as the Catholic Church in Croatia to confront their role in the horror of the 1940s and evidence of the increasingly receptive political climate in which groups such as these are operating.
As the recent controversy about the location of the commemorative plaque for fallen Homeland defenders (1990s Croatian war veterans) in Jasenovac illustrates, invoking the sacrosanct Homeland War has become an increasingly profitable strategy for revisionists and Ustasa nostalgists.
It is no coincidence that Vukic has been a frequent guest on right-wing veteran television shows nor that some of the loudest revisionist voices belong to right-wing war veterans.
At the same time, the growing reach of revisionists would not be possible without the funding and support they have received from the Ministry for Veterans.
In 2017, for example, Vukic’s society was awarded 6,700 euros by the ministry to conduct research on archives related to the Jasenovac camp. Meanwhile, a veterans’ group was awarded 2,700 euros for the publication of a collection of revisionist essays about the Ustasa children’s camp at Jastrebarsko, as part of a scheme which awards funds for applications which “promote the values of the Homeland War.”
What can be done? On the one hand, revisionism and Ustasa nostalgia in Croatia is a problem only Croats themselves can resolve. As the protests of 2016 demonstrated, when large numbers of people come onto the streets across Croatia to say enough is enough, politicians notice.
But there are also more modest actions that can be taken. Paradoxical as it might seem, denying crimes against entire groups of people is much easier than negating crimes against individuals.
As much as anything, perhaps, the Holocaust is made up of small stories and the personal lives of the victims, perpetrators and bystanders. In that sense, the failure of Yugoslav historiography to individualise the victims or perpetrators has been a gift to Holocaust minimizers since it has enabled them to dismiss the official history as an anti-Croatian conspiracy and reframe the victims as opponents of Croatian independence.
One of the reasons, I would argue, why Holocaust denial has tended to be marginal in Austria is because there are reminders of the victims of the Holocaust in every neighbourhood where Jews once lived.
Walk down any street in the old Jewish quarter of Praterstern in Vienna, for example, and there are countless street plaques memorialising the dead, many of them right under your feet.
The Jasenovac death camp
By contrast, the buildings in the Derecinova district of downtown Zagreb or Tuskanac are unmarked.
If such an initiative is unthinkable in Croatia at the moment, journalists, researchers and activists can play their part in restoring to the victims of the Holocaust their individuality while emphasising the collective reasons for their fate.
By the time Mirjana Babunovic-Dimitrijevic was arrested by the Ustasa police in 1944, her familiy was scattered: her husband was in Macedonia, her father had long since been detained, one brother was in Dachau, another was a refugee in Serbia. Her identity was the one thing she had which the regime could not take from her.
Her story and the thousands of similar small, personal stories are not only the history of Jasenovac and the Holocaust, but universal stories of resistance and courage.
They are perhaps the most powerful weapon we have in the preservation of a culture of memory and truth against the revisionist culture of lies.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
The U.S. Government certainly leads the world in invasions and coups.In recent years, it has invaded and occupied — either by military assault or by coup, but in either case followed by installing (or trying to install) a new regime there — a number of countries, especially Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. U.S. propaganda says that its invasions and military occupations (and it denies its coups) are to benefit the people in the invaded and militarily occupied countries, or to bring them ‘democracy’, and are not done merely to benefit the people who control the U.S. Government (which itself is not a ...
While it is certainly true that the Jewish people have relatively deep roots in the land that is today known as Palestine and Israel, this area has been a crossroads since the origins of the human species. In fact the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa was recently found in modern-day Israel, dated at approximately 180,000 years old. Neanderthal bones have also been found in the Levant.In historical times the Palestine region or parts of it have been controlled by numerous different peoples and regional powers, including the Canaanites, Amorites, Ancient Egyptians, Israelites, Moabites, Ammonites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, ...
“The United States has been sending a message that the settlements must stop privately and publicly for nearly five decades.”Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the UNChristians following the Gregorian calendar are getting busy to celebrate Christmas, but the business of diplomacy continued in the United Nations. In the Security Council, anticipation about a particular resolution was greater than usual.On Friday, interest was piqued by what the Obama administration’s representative, Samantha Power, would do about a particular resolution that had riled Israeli politicians, US president-elect Donald Trump, and various members of the US Congress.Resolution 2334, as worded, demanded that Israel “immediately ...
One of the negative characteristics of the Israeli “Left” is how it terms the military rule over the West Bank and Gaza “The Occupation.” Part of the Left even accuses Palestinians who claim there is no difference between Petah Tikva and Ariel of being like the Right, because “that’s what the Israeli Right claims.” For most Palestinians, however, this exaggerated and Orwellian talk of “The Occupation” blurs Israel’s real shame, and the skeleton buried deep in the closet: The brutal and criminal occupation of 1948.Ethnic cleansing and massive land expropriation, and then settlement of that land, are the mother of ...
Ante Pavelic - a leader of the Independent State of Croatia with the Roman Catholic clergy Scattered over almost two centuries across the globe – in Germany, the US, Canada, Argentina and Australia – most members of the Croatian diaspora are still closely linked to their homeland.The Croatian state responds in kind; it pledges to take “special care” of Croats living abroad, a pledge outlined in the country’s 1990 constitution. Subsequently, Croatia has set up the Central State Office for Croats Abroad, as well as a government body, the Council for Croats Abroad.More controversially, some in the diaspora maintain close ...
Author’s Introduction and UpdateFirst published by GR on June 14, 2014, updated in August 2014, this article reveals how the US and its allies facilitated the incursion of Islamic State (ISIS) convoys into Iraq in June 2014 prior to the onset of the counter-terrorism bombing campaign launched by Obama in August 2014. It is worth recalling the history of the initial incursion of ISIS forces (Summer 2014) and the timeline extending from the occupation of Mosul in Summer of 2014 which was covertly supported by the US, to the “Liberation” of Mosul three years later which was also supported by ...
The media is currently in the midst of an anti-Russian hysteria that many have dubbed Cold War 2.0. Of course the first cold war never really ended as the wars in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and even Afghanistan were aimed at Russia as was the relentless NATO expansion. This manufactured panic is a form of psychological warfare that went into high gear during the Sochi Olympics in 2014 as the US was working to launch a fascist coup in Ukraine. Since most ordinary people would be shocked to discover that Nazis had been installed in power in Ukraine an anti-Russian hysteria was ...
Originally published in June 2018.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
The global informative and propaganda forgery of the USA, EU, and NATO’s ruling circles became the focal source of the massive Western informational aggression against Russia during the last decades. The Western diplomatic reaction to the absolutely legal choice of the Crimean residents to rejoin Russia in 2014 followed by the economic war initiated by the West against Russia is absolutely illegal from the point of view of international law. The Western economic and political sanctions against Russia for reincluding Crimea are just another global international crime of the Russophobic US-NATO-EU triangle states.Historically, Western politics in the international arena and ...
In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 – an invasion which many Iraqis believe left their country in the worst condition it has been since the Mongol invasion of 1258 — there was much discussion in the media about the Bush Administration’s goal for “nation-building” in that country. Of course, if there ever were such a goal, it was quickly abandoned, and one hardly ever hears the term “nation-building” discussed as a U.S. foreign policy objective anymore.The stark truth is that the U.S. really has no intentions of helping to build strong states in the Middle ...
They are the extremists. If you need proof, look no further than the Afghan capital, Kabul, where the latest wave of suicide bombings has proven devastating. Recently, for instance, a fanatic set off his explosives among a group of citizens lining up outside a government office to register to vote in upcoming elections. At least 57 people died, including 22 women and eight children. ISIS’s branch in Afghanistan proudly took responsibility for that callous act -- but one not perhaps quite as callous as the ISIS suicide bomber who, in August 2016, took out a Kurdish wedding in Turkey, missing the bride and groom but killing at ...
The Green Corridor[1] is a geopolitical concept with two meanings: (a) The Islamists’ goal of creating a contiguous chain of Muslim-dominated polities from Istanbul in the southeast to northwestern Bosnia, a mere 120 miles from Austria [2]; and (b) The process of increasing ethno-religious assertiveness among the Muslim communities along that route. The process entails four key elements: Expanding the area of those communities’ demographic dominance; Establishing and/or expanding various entities under Muslim political control with actual or potential claim to sovereign statehood; Enhancing the dominant community’s Islamic character and identity within those entities, with the parallel decrease of presence and power of non-Muslim groups; and Prompting Muslim communities’ ambitions for ever bolder ...
Recently, the West and the Middle East pundits and analysts have been trying to analyze the provisions of the new draft constitution proposed by the Russian side as a solution to the Syrian conflict.Naturally, analyzing the provisions, any of the sides involved in the conflict is trying to present itself as the legitimate government. That raises the question of whether to adopt such a draft or not, because a newly appointed government would have to comply with a new constitution. Not surprisingly, not only the moderate opposition and illegal armed groups, but the official Syrian authorities as well subject the ...
The world is lectured frequently by the United States of America — the One Indispensable Nation — about how to behave, on the grounds that, as President Obama declared, «from London and Prague, to Tokyo and Seoul, to Rio and Jakarta... there is a new confidence in our leadership».He didn’t mention Amman, Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut, Caracas or the capitals of so many other countries in which the majority of citizens, according to the Pew Research Centre and other pollsters such as Marketwatch, regard the United States as an aggressive and malign manipulator of world affairs.Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton went further than President Obama in glorifying ...
Documentary films about ex-Yugoslavia not seen on global corporate mass-media news. For instance:US documentary movie "RETLINES" with English subtitle from 1991 about Vatican smuggling Croat Nazi Ustashi to South America in 1945Ratlines were a system of escape routes for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe at the end of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in South America, particularly Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. Other destinations included the United States and perhaps Canada and the Middle East. There were two primary routes: the first went from Germany to Spain, then Argentina; the second from Germany ...
Types of elections In the USA, elections are organized on a regular basis for the President, both houses of Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate), and state and local government offices. In practice, candidates in the majority of cases run for office as members of the party (one of two main political parties – the Democrats or the Republicans) in order to get the party’s support for their candidacy. However, in principle, whoever wants to run as an independent candidate can organize a petition. In that case, if it is collected enough signatures, the person can run. According to ...
With the recent failed bid by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Arab League at the UN security council, to try and end Israelis’ occupation of Palestinian land and to create a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders, it seems an appropriate moment to review the situation for Palestinians since 1915.What is the background to the demonization and brutalization of Palestinians? Most of all, why is the international community was assisting properly and why has it not assisted the Palestinians in protecting or restoring their inalienable rights over decades? Why is their situation so brutally upside-down almost a century after ...
Thursday marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of America’s deadliest terrorist organization: the Klu Klux Klan.Since September 11, extremists associated with various far-right wing ideologies, including the KKK and Jewish extremists, have killed far more people in the United States than extremists motivated by radical Islam.One centuries’ old example of US government double standards when it comes to terrorism, is the infamous Klu Klux Klan. The Klan has terrorized and killed far more Americans than Islamic terrorists ever have; and despite being America’s oldest terrorist organization, the US government does not officially consider the KKK a terrorist organization, classifying ...
Uncovering the Western mainstream mass-media lies on Ukraine.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
When considering United States President Donald Trump’s decision to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, we learn many things about him:+ He is desperate to hold onto his base, which includes so-called Christian fundamentalists, who unquestioningly support Israel;+ His interest in ‘the ultimate deal’ between Palestine and Israel is non-existent;+ He has no regard for the opinions of the U.S.’s closest allies;+ His knowledge of international law is limited, at best;+ He holds the safety of U.S. personnel abroad in disdain;+ His understanding of the complexities of the Middle East are far beyond his interest or ability to ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
The Jasenovac death camp
The entrance gate to the Jasenovac death camp
The Jasenovac death camp
