Turning Back the Clock
Citizens of Zagreb, Croatia's capital, acknowledging speakers with the Nazi salute at the 2002 rally.
Visiting the new, independent Slovenia, Peter Handke wrote:
Now... I arrived at the Hotel 'Zlatorog' ... at the valley's end, everything arranged for German speakers, and in the entrance the framed photos of Tito's visit had been removed not a pity really and replaced with those of Willy Brandt.... On state television almost nothing other than German and Austrian channel over and over again a foreign trade or economic delegation was having native folk songs sung to them. Then the Slovenian President would enter the scene. Wasn't he once a capable and proud functionary? But now he behaves like a waiter, almost like a lackey, who serves up his country to the foreigners who visit, as if he wanted to satisfy every wish of a German employer or customer: the Slovenians aren't this or that, but rather a 'hard working and willing Alpen people'. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice For Serbia
The first question that Handke heard a customer in the new supermarket ask, was: "Has The Bild (German newspaper) arrived?"
A woman from Split, Dalmatia, sporting a hat with Nazi-Ustasha insignia.
Likewise, the Independent State of Croatia II (NDH II), never bothered to curtail its rather embarrassing enthusiasm for the opportunity given by Germany, Vatican and the West in general to turn the clock back and revert to the ethnically clean German satellite. Quite the contrary. From the fateful 1991 when Tudjman's Croatia proudly unveiled the dusted off insignia from its fascist slice of heaven with the spontaneous burst into a collective Danke Deutschland song - the absolute worst, prime example of the kitsch, tastelessness and shameless sycophancy ever recorded in the history of humanity - till today, Croatia has been cheerfully sliding back in time, to the abominable 1940's.
The renowned Balkan expert, Diana Johnstone, wrote in September of 1999:
When I visited Croatia three years ago, the book most prominently displayed in the leading bookstores of the capital city Zagreb was a new edition of the notorious anti-Semitic classic, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Next came the memoires of the World War II Croatian fascist Ustashe dictator Ante Pavelic, responsible for the organized genocide of Serbs, Jews and Romany (gypsies) that began in 1941, that is, even before the German Nazi "final solution".
Croatia's flag 50 years later, in 1993 and at present, with its war-time president, Franjo Tudjman.
However, if the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide, that doesn't mean they have forgotten their World War II benefactors. After all, it was thanks to Hitler's invasion of Yugoslavia that the "Independent State of Croatia" was set up in April 1941, with Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose population was mostly Serb at the time) as part of its territory. And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was "Danke Deutschland" in gratitude to Germany's strong diplomatic support for Zagreb's unnegotiated secession.
Fascist Croatia's fathers and leaders: Ante Pavelic on the far left and Roman Catholic Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, on the far right.
In the West, of course, one will quickly object that the Germany of today is not the Germany of 1941. True enough. But in Zagreb, with a longer historical view, they are so much the same that visiting Germans are sometimes embarrassed when Croats enthusiastically welcome them with a raised arm and a Nazi "Heil!" greeting.
So it should be no surprise that this year's best seller in Croatia is none other than a new edition of "Mein Kampf". This is not a critical edition, mind you, but a reverently faithful reproduction of the original text by that great European leader, benefactor of Croatian nationalism and leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.
The magazine "Globus" reported that "Mein Kampf" is selling like hotcakes in all segments of Croatian society. For those who want to read more, there is a new book entitled "The Protocols of Zion, the Jews and Adolf Hitler" by Mladen Schwartz, leader of the Croatian neo-Nazi party New Right, and "Talks with Hitler" by the Fuhrer's aide Herman Rauschning, as well as various other memoires celebrating the Ustashe state whose violent massacres of Serbs shocked the Italian fascist allies and even German diplomatic observers at the time. (Nazi Nostalgia In Croatia, by Diana Johnstone)
Pope John Paul II, surrounded by Roman Catholic clergy, praying in front of remains of Aloysius Stepinac, responsible for the genocide of 750.000 Serbs, 60.000 Jews and 30.000 Gypsies massacred in the name of religious purification. The Pope beatified Stepinac in Croatia on October 3, 1998.
Of course, the fact that Pope John Paul II went to Croatia in October of 1998 to beatify Aloysius Stepinac who openly supported Nazi regime and Croatia's bloody pogroms by inviting clergy to help the Ustasha efforts in cleansing the country from 'Serbian schismatics', Jews and Gypsies in the name of "faith" has hardly helped Croats come to terms with their monstrous past. Neither does this sort of negative encouragement by Vatican promote civilized (or Christian) behavior which would finally allow, 15 years later, over a quarter of a million Serbs they purified the Independent State of Croatia II from, those who survived the "Operation Storm" and "Lightning", to return to their land in Krajina and rebuild their burnt, bulldozed and stolen homes. The same Pope who refused the invitation by Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, His Holiness Pavle, to hold a joint commemoration to almost a million victims of Croatia's Nazi madness in Jasenovac, on its 50 years anniversary in 1995, has rushed to beatify the one who gave blessings to the pogroms, in the name of Roman Catholic church. No wonder the clock is turning back to the time of the rule of the Beast.