Posted on 01/16/2007 12:17:36 PM PST by Bokababe
LAS VEGAS // President Bush recently echoed Vice President Dick Cheney's support for Croatia to join the European Union, a bid that has been stalled because of the former Yugoslav republic's slowness to own up to and prosecute its 1990s war crimes and its failure to ensure protections and rights for minorities, including returning Serb refugees.
Croatia also faces the possibility of being excluded from the 2008 European soccer championship because when an Italian team's fans taunted the Croatian team's fans at a match in August by waving Yugoslavia's old communist flag, the other side took great offense and showed the competition what it was really made of: They formed a giant human swastika and gave Nazi salutes....
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
Oh I see, Nazis bad....Commies good.
Like those are the only choices?
I was pointing out the double standard that making Nazi symbols is worthy of being banned, whereas Commie symbols are given a pass, even though both systems were evil.
Thanks for your post. Wish it and others like it received wider audiences.
So it's OK to taunt Croats about their country's involuntary past ties with Stalin's Russia, but it's not OK to taunt Italians about their country's voluntary past ties with Hitler's Germany.
Nice double standard.
The double standard rears its ugly head yet again. Serbia - the faithful ally during WWII gets shoved aside and Croatia - the breeder of Tito, the Commie, and the Nazi henchmen--gets a free pass.
The Prez needs a reality check when it comes to Croatia..and its ugly past.
I understood that. The main difference between the two was that communism was an equal opportunity murderer and Nazism targeted specific ethnic groups for extermination. Both ideologies were killers, just with different styles.
It's just that, if I saw someone forming a human "hammer and sickle" today, I'd think that they were just morons, and not a real threat to anyone because communism is pretty much dead. Whereas Nazi symbols inspire fear, because the Nazis don't have to be in power to start targeting people for harrassment, hate-mongering and death -- they just have to exist in order to be a perceived threat.
Yes, those are the choices, and they are both the same.
Amazing how well vicitimizers play victim when they are caught.
What you just said is sheer nonsense. This wasn't about Italy's past, this was about Croatia's present. Why would Croatia taunt Italy re WWII Nazism when the Croats were WWII Nazis themselves? The difference is that Italy has changed since WWII and Croatia obviously hasn't!
Croatia was conquered by Nazi forces.
Italy was a voluntary member of the Axis and used their Nazi alliance to seize Croatian territory.
Or are you arguing that Croatia voluntarily donated Rijeka to Italy as a willing act of collaboration with the Facist powers?
Obviously FDR and Churchill didn't think so. We allied with communist Russia during WWII to fight the Nazis, so Nazism was perceived as a bigger threat to our way of life than communism was, when push came to shove back then. It was only post WWII that the cold war began in earnest.
I am no defender of communism, but if you asked me to choose, I'd rather deal with communists than I would Nazis.
I choose neither. It's a good thing we don't have to make the choice between these two noxious braindead state systems. We get to choose Ford/Chevy or Steelers/Packers, much more important.
They are to many academics, reporters and politicians, whose understanding of the political spectrum consists of two extremes at the left or right, and everything else somewher in the middle.
So you get Hitler as the epitome of the "extreme right" and someone like Mao, Stalin, Castro at the "extreme left."
Of course, it's impossible to place America's founding fathers on that scale, which is why the Progressives like it. It's also why they instinctively describe anyone who disagrees with them as "rightwing fascists."
They cannot imagine any organizing political principles that are not ultimately driven by murderous, social engineering thugs on the left and right.
Croat commanders of the army helped the Germans easily capture the Serbian soldiers and send them to jails. A Canadian Serb spoke of how his grandfather, stationed in Macedonia, was betrayed by the Croat commander, who subsequently, after the Germans took control of his men, departed in a small plane provided by the Germans.
This is what Ruth Mitchell, an American spy, who was even imprisoned for a while in a Gestapo prison in Belgrade during the war, writes:
The Croats, watching the rising power of Germany, decided to do business with Hitler. Secret agreements were arrived at and the Croat politicians understood that Germany would back them. After Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia in 1939, Dr. Machek, leader of the Croat Peasant Party, decided the time was ripe to take the first step toward independence. He demanded complete internal autonomy for Croatia "within the confines of the Yugoslav State." The request was granted by Prince Paul with the support of many of the Serb elements who, forthright and direct themselves, were tired of the inveterate Croat agitation and subversion.…On April 10 the German troops marched into the city of Zagreb, in Croatia proper, and were greeted by the wildly enthusiastic cheers of a people who only twenty-three years before had received their Serb "brothers" and "liberators" in exactly the same way. Dr. Machek, who had carried on the intrigues with Germany, gave orders on the radio to all his followers to cooperate with the Axis.
…The principal reason why Yugoslavia collapsed so quickly is that every Serbian officer had momentarily to expect to be shot in the back by his Croatian soldiers, and hundreds were so shot.
A total of 1,679 officers representing 95% of the Croat officers in the Yugoslav Army, who had sworn to protect their king and the country, proved traitors to their oath and went over to the enemy. The detailed figures, as given by the official gazette of the Independent State of Croatia, include 11 generals, 4 admirals, 52 colonels, 73 lieutenant colonels, 68 captains, and 72 naval captains and officers; also 1,342 non-commissioned officers, aviation specialists, and mechanics. Letters have been published in Croat papers in which Croat officers of high rank with the most cynical brutality BRAGGED that they had married Serbian girls of influential family with the single purpose of getting themselves into key positions for more effective treachery: so long and so well had the thing been planned.
Of 224,000 Yugoslav prisoners of war taken into Germany, less than 2% were Croats, and to them honor, for they only had to announce that they were Croats to be released at once. Of the 14,000 Serb officers who, if they agreed to submit to Germany, were offered their freedom to return home to their families, only 800 accepted, and most of them have been retaken and killed."
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/mitchell.html
Well....That's perhaps a very generous reading of history. The Croats were zealous fascists and the Ustashi were so brutal to Jews, Gypsies and Serbs they even made the SS wretch. They not only engaged in mass exterminations they did it in ways that were psychopathic.
Granted this is history and perhaps the old hatreds can be put to rest at last. But it is important that at least the history be correct.
She was an American citizen who volunteered for the Chetniks.
There were certainly Croats, plenty of them, who were more than happy to become fascists and German clients.
But the Croats never voted any fascists into power.
I am as skeptical of Serbian website accounts of Croat malfeasance as I am skeptical of Croat website accounts of Serb malfeasance.
Both sides are so embittered I cannot take anything one says about the other at face value.
It was? Wow....
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