How Holocaust Revisionists Remake History as Nationalist Sham

The consumption of history seems to be more widespread than ever: from general-interest history magazines and historical dramas and documentaries to historical fiction, popular history seems, well, unprecedentedly popular.

The evolution of the TV historian reflects this trend: where once real working historians who had written serious books hosted television programmes, these days they are as likely to be photogenic media presenters with minimal, if any, actual history qualifications.

The attraction of history and being a historian are not hard to work out. In the public imagination, historians are usually considered to be intelligent, objective people, if a little eccentric, who tell us fascinating facts about the past but also important things about the present too.

Existing at the intersection of social science, humanities and art, historians not only reconstruct the stories of ordinary people, but get to give their opinions about contemporary issues, above all national ones. What’s not to love?

Two events in recent weeks related to memory and the Holocaust in Croatia made me think about this again – what it means to be a historian and how perceptions of history have changed in recent years, particularly in the formerly socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe.

Kiev 2017: Celebration of the leaders of a Nazifascist movement of the WWII Ukraine

First, there was the controversy caused by the laudatory review of Igor Vukic’s revisionist study of Jasenovac concentration camp, ‘Radni logor Jasenovac’ (‘Jasenovac Labour Camp’) by the critic Milan Ivkosic in the mainstream Vecernji list.

In his book, Vukic denies that the Ustasa-run Jasenovac camp was a place of extermination. Instead, he insists that it was a re-education and labour camp in which only political enemies of the Ustasa regime were imprisoned and one which provided prisoners not only with opportunities to learn new skills but cultural and sporting activities too.

Elsewhere, members of Vukic’s revisionist Society for the Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp have repeatedly – and falsely – claimed that in the post-war era, under the Partisans, Jasenovac continued to operate, this time as a real extermination camp, for Croats.

What was most striking about Ivkosic’s review of the Jasenovac book was the language he used to describe its supposed qualities. He described Vukic as a “calm observer, completely devoted to the facts” and the book itself as making an “enormous contribution” to the research of the “truth” of Jasenovac, free of ideological bias and “Greater Serbian and Communist falsifications”.

This followed closely after the news that Vlatka Vukelic, a historian of medieval Croatia and classical civilisation who has endorsed revisionist claims about the existence of a post-war extermination camp as well as a number of other Ustasa nostalgic canards about wartime Croatia, had been contracted to teach the history of the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia to undergraduate students at the University of Zagreb.

This is hardly the first time the University of Zagreb has hired academics with a problematic relationship to the Ustasa regime and the Holocaust. Nor, as illustrated by the example of Volodymyr Viatrovych, the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, is this an exclusively Croatian problem.

Like Vukic’s book about Jasenovac, Viatrovych’s heavily-criticised studies of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army have been framed in the language of scholarly ‘objectivity’ and similarly relied on selective archival sources to build their revisionist arguments.

Today, the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is characterised, to an unprecedented degree, by nationalist agendas: within that basic framework, the history of Ukraine and Croatia have become particularly poisonous.

While the experiences of Ukraine and Croatia were not identical, the impact of the occupation and the role of local collaborators for the Jews, Roma and other ‘undesired elements’ (in the case of Ukraine Poles and Russians, in the case of Croatia, Serbs) was similarly catastrophic.

Although the academic backgrounds of Vukic and Viatrovych are somewhat different – Vukic is a former journalist and self-described historian while Viatrovych holds the equivalent of a doctorate in history – their output is proving increasingly influential among a section of their respective audiences for a number of reasons.

First, individuals and organisations which want to believe that the Ustasa or the OUN were the ‘good guys’ in the story of the Second World War are naturally going to be receptive to the distorted version of history they are pedalling. More importantly, though, the archival approach taken by Vukic and Viatrovych looks superficially legitimate.

The fact that it isn’t since it invariably involves stripping archival sources of the context in which they were written, removing the bits which don’t fit with the story they want to tell and ignoring sources that undermine their narrative won’t be noticed by consumers of such books who will associate the use of archival sources with real knowledge and expertise.

Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović in Canada photographed with the flag of the WWII Nazifascist Independent State of Croatia

Although the popularisation of history has been a potentially positive development in many respects, it has failed to bring a greater understanding of how historical methodologies work. Historians of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, with their fetishisation of the archives, haven’t helped in this regard, helping to reinforce the impression that archival research is inherently reliable research.

This is particularly the case in South-Eastern Europe where history and political science students are taught how to use archives from the moment they start their undergraduate studies and often even before this point.

But history always has been and always will be about far more than using archives. Archival sources are as contradictory, misleading and freighted with sleight of hand as any other kind of source. There is no mystery to them either: using them requires no special expertise.

There is also no guarantee that what comes out at the end of the process will be ‘history’ in any meaningful sense of the word. If you cherry-pick data, as Holocaust revisionists do, then what is produced will be basically worthless in empirical terms.

Nor is a Holocaust revisionist who uses archival sources suddenly transformed into a historian simply by virtue of using an archive no more than a person who likes reading books can be considered a novelist.

They remain a Holocaust denier who has simply used archival sources. The expertise lies in being able to interpret what is meant by the sources, avoiding bias and getting inside the mindset of those who wrote them. It’s why grad school exists.

If pseudo-historians certainly profit from the popularisation of history and the increasing view that anyone can be a historian, they have also been fortunate in operating in an extremely receptive climate.

While it is true that some Croatian historians have been outspoken in combatting the culture of lies promoted by the revisionists and in exposing their shoddy, amateurish methods, many of the most prominent critics are not actually historians of the Ustasa regime or the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, too many historians of the Independent State of Croatia elsewhere in Europe or the US – and here there is a striking contrast with Ukrainian Holocaust history – have not made any meaningful effort to push back against the mounting revisionism: in some cases, they have actually helped the revisionists’ cause by seeming to endorse some of their claims.

Of course, the rewriting of history could be stopped tomorrow if the government in Croatia wished to do it, but the toleration of Ustasa nostalgia is ruthlessly pragmatic and cynical.

All the main Croatian political parties believe, to a greater or lesser extent, that they need the electoral support of the far right hence their toleration of and even pandering to Holocaust denial. At the same time, they are aware of how damaging it is for Croatia’s image, thus explaining the current government’s scarcely credible insistence that no such problem with Holocaust revisionism exists.

If the introduction of the kind of anti-Holocaust and genocide denial laws that exist in Germany and certain other European states is unrealistic, counter-productive and likely to raise profound questions about the limits of free speech, historians can play their part by communicating complex ideas in an imaginative, accessible and above all emotionally-engaged form to the public.

Too much current history writing on the Ustasa regime in newspapers – for example, on the anniversary of the establishment of the state – is intellectually obscurantist, divorced from the experiences of the real individuals who suffered occupation and terror and not relatable to ordinary Croats.

They also need to make the public more aware of what history is and what it is not. What it certainly is not is deciding on an ideological viewpoint and then selecting evidence to support it.

Croatia today: A Croat family in the WWII Nazifascist Ustashi uniforms

History is multi-layered, complex and full of contradictions for the simple reason that history is the story of individuals, the circumstances in which they lived and died, the decisions they made and the ways in which they interacted with each other and society.

Historians do not and should not come with ideological frameworks: they undertake only to work with the traces of the lives individuals left behind – archives, newspapers and journals, personal artefacts, diaries, letters – and to tell their stories as completely as they can.

Writing history requires imagination, empathy, intellectual flexibility and an overriding commitment to go where the data lead you even when that doesn’t fit with your preconceptions, prejudices or research assumptions.

Holocaust revisionists in Croatia, like those in Ukraine and elsewhere, might be many things, including people who know how to order documents from archives, but what they are not is historians.

It is time that the media, commentators and, not least, academics stopped describing them as such.

Originally published on 2018-09-12

About the author: Rory Yeomans is a historian and member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and the author of the book Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941-1945.

Source: Balkan Insight

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

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.

[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]

EuroMaidan Ukraine today: Azov Battalion with the Nazi insignia

READ MORE!

Islamic State Top Dog from Kosovo Returns to Europe with 400 Jihadis

What could possibly go wrong? Refugees welcome! Not to allow these enemy combatants to return would be “Islamophobic”! “Disguised as refugees and able to cross borders without being identified: ISIS general who blew up a hostage with a rocket and decapitated another prisoner is ‘back in Europe with 400 soldiers’ after fleeing Syria,” by Julian Robinson, MailOnline, December 29, 2016: An ISIS general once pictured decapitating a prisoner is back in Europe with up to 400 of his most trusted soldiers after fleeing the war zone in Syria, it has been claimed. Ex-NATO soldier Lavdrim Muhaxheri and his men are among thousands who ...

Ten Facts Everyone Needs to Know About Israel

1. Out of the 14.2 million Jewish people in the world, (in 2016), only a minority of 43% reside in Israel. 2. Whilst 75% of Israelis are Jewish, 21% are indigenous Arabs with restricted civil rights. 3. Israel has the highest birth rate in the developed world, with an average of 3 children per woman. 4. The Netanyahu government now receives more than US$6 billion every year from the US congress/ AIPAC lobby i.e. equating to $1000 annually for every Jewish Israeli, courtesy of the American taxpayer. 5. Israel has induced over 500,000 of its citizens to illegally settle in the Occupied Palestinian West ...

Zionism and Israel

ZionismThe term Zionism is derived from the word Zion that in the Hebrew language and cultural-historical tradition of the Jews refers to the citadel (acropolis) of the city of Jerusalem but as well as to the Kingdom of Heaven. From the matter of politics, Zionism refers to the political-national movement of the European Jews in the very late 19th century for the very purpose to re-create a Jewish homeland in the form of a nation-state in the Middle East – Israel.[i]This Zionist movement was to the great extent expressed as a consequence of the European (mostly West European) anti-Semitic (better ...

Ignorance and Indoctrination of Westerners Kills Millions

Our Planet Earth is heading straight towards the most dangerous collision in its history. It is not a collision with some foreign body, with an asteroid or a comet, but with the most brutal and selfish chunk of its own inhabitants: with people who proudly call themselves “members of the Western civilization.” Again and again it is clearly demonstrated that Western culture, which the paramount psychologist Carl Jung used to call “pathology”, couldn’t be trusted. This “culture” had already mercilessly slaughtered several hundreds of millions of people in all corners of the world; it enslaved entire continents, and plundered all that had ...

The Baltic Holocaust and Russophobia

On 23 June 2017 in the Parliament Square of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, an official celebration of the uprising of 23 June 1943 against Soviet rule took place. The event was orchestrated mainly by veterans of the Lithuanian Freedom Fighters Association, a far-right militia group. During these celebrations an exhibit of more than 12 posters were hung which presented the anti-Soviet insurrection one that “drove terror into the Bolshevik occupying army and the lackeys of the occupation forces.”Some historical context is needed here.In June 1941, Hitler had launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, overrunning the Baltics in a ...

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin Honors in Kremlin Afghan Mujahedin Fighters

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"]

Why would US Transform Afghanistan into a Drug Empire?

For a total of sixteen years the US has been occupying Afghanistan after invading immediately after the 9/11 attacks. This act of aggression has already become the longest war in American history, overtaking the “record” that was held by the Vietnam War that lasted from 1964 to 1975. During this period, Washington would spend over 800 billion dollars on the so-called reconstruction of the Afghan nation. As a result of this “reconstruction”, the Taliban has been regaining control over the country, which has resulted in this group controlling over 40% of Afghan territory. Additionally, opium production rates have overtaken the ...

Barbarism in Words and Deeds. Barbarism of U.S. Imperial Wars is Unmatched

“What Russia is sponsoring and doing [in Syria] is not counter-terrorism it is barbarism”Samantha Power, US Representative to the United NationsThe US representative to the United Nations, Ambassador ‘Ranting Sam’ Samantha Power, accused the Russian and Syrian governments of ‘barbarism’, claiming Moscow or Damascus had attacked an unarmed United Nations humanitarian convoy delivering aid to civilians in Aleppo. No evidence was presented. Rants and threats do not require facts or proof; they only require vehement emotional ejaculations and compliant mass propaganda organs.‘Barbarians’, to be clear, evoke images of leaders and groups, which abjure all civilized norms and laws. They only ...

The UN Does Kosovo and the Azov Sea

The December 17 UN Security Council meeting, on the announced creation of a Kosovo armed forces, featured some noticeable contrasts.In accordance with Kosovo not being a UN member state and the Serb position on UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (recognizing Kosovo as a continued part of Serbia), the disputed former Yugoslav territory wasn't formally represented at the discussion as a nation. Kosovo's leader, Hashim Thaci, sat with a nameplate having his name, as opposed to Kosovo. Countries recognizing Kosovo's independence made it a point to state Thaci as the president of Kosovo and Aleksandar Vučić as president of Serbia. Nations not ...

How Turkey Destroyed or Disposed of Its Historical Archives and Documents

For several decades, the Turkish government and its propagandists have been announcing that the state documents, particularly the Ottoman archives, are fully open and available to any researcher from around the world.What Turkish officials and their supporters do not say is that many documents of the Ottoman archives have been removed, destroyed, sold, or otherwise disposed of. In addition, some of the most sensitive archives are still closed to outsiders.Last month, Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut wrote a revealing article, “Turkey Uncensored: A History of Censorship and Bans,” published on the Philos Project website, regarding the status of Turkish archives and ...

The Role of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia’s Holocaust

On April 6th 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia. By April 10th, Croatian fascists led by Ante Pavelic were allowed by Hitler and his ally Mussolini to set up an “independent” puppet state of Croatia. Hitler granted “Aryan” status to Croatia as his fascist allies carved up Yugoslavia. Pavelic had been awaiting these developments whilst under the auspices of Mussolini in Italy who had granted them the use of remote training camps on a Aeolian island and access to a propaganda station Radio Bari for broadcasts across the Adriatic. As soon as the new fascist state of Croatia was born, a ...

Macedonization of Macedonia

As a matter of historical fact, a separate Macedonian ethnonational identity did not exist until the second half of the 19th century. This is partly due to the fact that Macedonia was ruled by Ottoman Empire for a longer period of time: from 1371 to 1912. It is known that Ottoman authorities did not recognize any kind of ethnonational or ethnolinguistic identities but rather only the confessional (millet-system). Therefore, the Christians of Macedonia were not differentiated between themselves on the ethnic bases. Furthermore, Macedonian territories were inhabited by different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups (Slavic- and Greek-speaking Christians, Turkish- and ...

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton: Who’s the Fascist?

The U.S. public loves fascists; they elect them, constantly. Donald Trump, who “says he would raise the minimum wage and stop the endless efforts at regime change,” is called a fascist by some. But Hillary Clinton “is happy to bomb Libya or Syria or any other country,” and played a major role in mass Black incarceration. Barack Obama is the war-maker and deporter-in-chief. “All of the major party candidates fit the F word description in some way.”“No one comes into office with any intention of undoing America’s leadership as the world’s worst jailer.”Donald Trump is the ill spoken, boorish, graceless ...

How to Combat Croatian Revisionists’ Culture of Lies

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 ...

The Authoritarian Militarization of the Croats in the 1990s

The internal and much more external destruction of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was celebrating in 2015 its 20th year of anniversary. However, this historical and much more geopolitical event still needs a satisfactory research approach in regard to the true geopolitical reasons and political-military course of the destruction of this South Slavic and Balkan state. During the last quarter of century, the (western) global mainstream media unanimously accused Serbia and the Serbs of the national chauvinism as the main cause of the bloody wars on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, the role and direct impact ...

The Illyrians: Autochthonous Balkan People having Nothing Common with Modern Albanians

It is true that every story about the Balkan Peninsula begins with the ancient Illyrians.[1] Historians believe that these Indo-European people were one of the largest European populations to inhabit the western portion of the Balkans from the coasts of the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea to the Alps about 1000 B.C. Their eastern neighbours were also Indo-European peoples – the Thracians. The demarcation line between their settlements and their cultural and political influence was the Morava river in present-day Serbia (in Latin Margus, located in the Roman province of Moesia Superior) and the Vardar river in present-day FYR ...

Depleted Uranium Haunts Kosovo and Iraq

Iraq and Kosovo may be thousands of miles apart, but they share the dubious distinction of contamination with radioactive residue from depleted uranium (DU) bullets used in American air strikes. After several years of silence, US officials finally admitted that 340 tons of DU were fired during the Gulf war. In Kosovo, American delays in providing details of quantities and target points have frustrated international efforts to assess health risks. Despite repeated requests, NATO waited almost a full year after the start of bombing in March 1999 to say that 31,000 DU bullets–a fraction of the number fired in Iraq–were ...

President Trump Welcomes Egyptian Dictator – The “Butcher of Cairo”

President Donald Trump Monday, April 3, 2017, welcomed the Egyptian military dictator, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who assumed the title of Field Marshal after arresting and deposing the democratically elected President Mohamed Mursi in July 2013. After the meeting Trump told the press: “We agree on so many things. I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President el-Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation.” By “a fantastic job” Trump was apparently referring to the massacre of hundreds of innocent Egyptians in the aftermath of US-endorsed coup ...

The Problem is America: The Malignant Cultural Hegemony

What is wrong with the American people? After several years of horrific policy toward the waking world, democracy’s standard bearers seem to be drowning in a lake of selfishness. Distracted, apathetic, or simply dumbed and numbed by unrelenting propaganda, the most admired society on Earth has turned to a wriggling mush of diverging ideals. I fear that American have become what we ultimately deplored, just another despicable cultural hegemony. Here’s a short brief on the matter. A recent article by James Carden at The Nation prompted me to discuss this unsavory truth today. The title of the piece, “Trump’s Syria Policy: ...

Trump and the Wolfowitz Doctrine

As President Trump affirms publicly his commitment to friendly relations with Russia at an economic summit in Hanoi, (the first President since Franklin Roosevelt to do so), the press backs the special prosecutor seeking to indict him, while NATO continues to ramp up its forces on Russia’s borders with Europe by bringing in tanks and other ‘defensive’ weapons. Although the United States was founded on Christian principles, and has one of the highest percentages of people practicing a religion of any Western country, most Americans seem not to realize that their country is building a case for nuclear war with the ...