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....
"Do not be too hasty in entering that room . . . I had TACO BELL for lunch!"
You ever hear of any? Can you name any?
Do you have any photos of Germans hanging Croats like there are photos of Germans hanging and shooting Serb civilians, including women?
By your account, Croatia would have had to have the wimpiest fighting men in the entire world to have only lasted fighting against the Germans for 4 days, while the Serbs offered resiistance for 4 years! That makes no sense.
The Croat love affair with Nazism long preceeded the WWII German invasion and never died in the Ustashi diaspora post-war, coming back for another round to support Croat independence in the 1990's.
It is true that there was some resistance against Nazism by individual Croats -- I grew up knowing one of them -- but there was no real resistance to the Nazis by Croatia as a whole, with the exception of those who joined Tito's communists.
That Croat I was talking about was a Dubrovcanin, who told me that when he was growing up, he thought that Dubrovnik was the most wonderful place in the world. People went for a stroll every night and greeted each other politely and kindly, Serb or Croat didn't matter, they were all neighbors and treated each other with respect. But when the war came, those same neighbors turned into unrecognizable, racist murderers. He left Dubrovnik when he saw those same previously polite neighbors (including a Catholic priest) kick to death a pregnant Serb woman who had tripped and fallen crossing a Dubrovnik street. He went to Serbia, joined the Yugoslav Royal Army's Chetniks and never looked back. He eventually came to the US, married a Serb-American wife and raised his children Serbian Orthodox.
I also met a Slovenian-American woman when I was taking a course at college, who told a similar story minus the conversion, about her father. He witnessed a terrible act of cruelty against a Serb family and that was it, he joined the Chetniks for the same reasons, eventually coming to the US.
Seeing Croat fascists as some sort of "freedom fighters aganist communism" is a complete distortion of history. Nazi Germans were even appallled at the Croat vicious cruelty toward Serbs, Jews & Gypsies. Germany never sought to exterminate all the Serbs, Croatia did, which is why Jasenovac was the only death camp in Europe not run by Nazi Germany! And the genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies was what happened AFTER Croatia got their "independence", not before!
They voted Tuđman in, didn't they?
There are a lot of tendentious, self-serving things in your posts - but we can agree on this point.
The government of Pavelic was a Nazi-bootlicking collaborationist cabal even worse than Vichy France.
They were fighting for fascism, not freedom.
No moral person can defend the Pavelic regime.
On that we can agree.
Yay! Christians hating Christians. Stuff like this is why the world is facing the worsening Islamist problem.
I agree. Unfortunately with the WWII Pavelic crew we were discussing, they already had thrown their lot in with the Nazi Muslims 60 years ago!
The Nazi Muslims here were Pavelic's WWII "Honorary Croats" from Bosnia.
The whole situtation then was & is heart-breaking.
Churchill always knew the Russians would be next. There is not much difference between Nazism and Marxism- one has powerful industrialists favored by the state, and the other has powerful apparatchiks who control the factors of production and stash what they can steal in Switzerland.
http://www.jasenovac.org/whatwasjasenovac.php
From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Romas, as well as anti-fascists of many nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as Jasenovac. Estimates of the total numbers of men, women and children killed there range from 300,000 to 700,000. And yet, despite the scale of the crimes committed there, most of the world has never heard of Jasenovac.
Following the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the "Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by Nazism and extreme Roman Catholic fanaticism. On coming to power, the Ustashe Party dictatorship in Croatia quickly commenced on a systematic policy of racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews and Romas living within its borders.
Jasenovac was actually a complex of five major and three smaller "special" camps spread out over 240 square kilometers (150 square miles) in south-central Croatia. Along with hundreds of thousands of Serbs, some 25,000 Jews and at least 30,000 Romas were murdered in these camps. The names of some 20,000 murdered children of all three nationalities collected thus far by historians provides only a hint of the scale of the crimes committed there against children. Jasenovac is also known for having been one of the most barbaric death camps of the Holocaust for the extreme cruelty in which its victims were tortured and murdered. Jasenovac was not the only death camp in fascist occupied Yugoslavia, but it was by far the largest and the one in which a majority of the some one million victims of racial genocide in World War II fascist Croatia were exterminated.
http://www.jasenovac.info/cd/galerija/arhivrs/index_en.html
(Photos of graphic nature, please be advised)
http://www.jasenovac.info/cd/galerija/arhivrs/unutar/img0061.jpg
(Photo of "Srbosjek" (Serb-slicer) consisted of a metal knife-blade strapped with ledder belt otno wrist for more efficient slaughter of Serbs)
http://www.jasenovac.info/cd/galerija/djecakozare/1/index_en.html
http://www.jasenovac.info/cd/galerija/djecakozare/2/index_en.html
http://www.jasenovac.info/cd/galerija/djecakozare/3/index_en.html
(Photos of Serb children starved to death in Jasenovac, captured during Kosara region-offensive of Croates.)
Incorrect.
Who is the "Croatian Peasant" exactly? And can I see some copies of these pledges of allegiance?
As for the children and people of Kozara, I heard it was mainly the German soldiers, with aid of Croats, who encircled the Serbs around that mountainous area and then gradually tightened the circle until the Serbs were all trapped up a mountain.
Just to explain sheer size of slaughter of Serbs in Croatia (Bosnia was part of Croatia than) is that most of the people that were rescued from hands of Croates, were not saved by Partisans of Chetniks, but by Germans ant Itallians.
On several occasions, German troops dissarmed Croates after slaughters of Serbs and executed them. It went so far that Hitler himself ordered German troops not to interfear.
Several now-older people I know were saved from ustasha by German troops...
Sad but, true.
Letter of general Alesandro Luzan to Benito Mussolini
Duce! My imesurable devotion towards You gives me, I hope, the right to, sometimes, bypass strict military protocol. That is why I feel free and obliged to promptly describe you one event which, three weeks ago, I have personally witnessed. Patrolling in towns Stolac, Capljina and Lubinye (about 60 to 130km north of Ragusa) I heard from our intelligence officers that Pavelich Ustashas have in the previous day done some crime in village Prebilovci, and that, when they hear about it, nearby Serbs are certainly going to be upset yet again.
I miss words to describe what I found there. In big classroom, I found slaughtered teacher and 120 young pupils! No child was older than 12 years! Crime is not an appropriate, it is too innocent a word - that was above any madness! Many have their severed heads put orderly on school desks. From their severed bellies bowels were, like New Year's tinsels, spread across the classroom and nailed to the roof! The flies and unbearable smell did not allow us to spend more time there. I have noticed an opened bag of salt in the corner and I was stunned to realise that they have slauthered them slowly, salting their necks first! As we were just about to depart, from the back of the classroom we have heard a child rattling. I have sent two soldiers to see what it was. They found one pupil, still alive, breathing with throat half cut! I have took the poor child in my own car to our military hospital, and there we were able to awake him and from him we found out the full truth about the tragedy.
The criminals have first, taking turns, raped the Serbian teacher (her name was Stana Arnautovich) and then, in front of the children, they have killed her. They raped even the eight year old girls. During all that time, a Gypsy band brought there was forced to play music and hit tamborines! To the utter disgrace of our, Roman church, one priest participated in all this! The boy that we saved recovered quickly. And as soon as the wound healed, he was able to run away from the hospital because of our inattention, and he run back to his village looking for his relatives. We send a patrole for him, but to no avail: they find him in front of his house, slaughtered!
From more than a thousand souls in the village there is no-one left! The same day (that we discovered later) when the crime in school was perpetrated, Ustashe rounded 700 inhabitants of village Prebilovci and drop them into foiba, or killed them in the most bestial way on the road to the pit. Only 300 men saved themself: they were able to break Ustashi lines and to run to the mountains! These 300 survivors are stronger than the most elite Pavelich Ustashe division. All that they have to lose, they lost! Children, wifes, mothers, sisters, houses, possessions. They are free even from the fear of death. The only meaning of their lives is in revenge, in the horrible revenge - they are, in a way, even ashamed that they have survived!
And villages, such as Prebilovci, are all around Herzegovina, Bosina, Lika and Dalmazia. Slaughter of Serbs has reached such proportions, that, in these areas, even water resources are polluted. From one spring in Popovo Polye, near the pit in which 4000 Serbs were thrown, a reddish water ran, I have seen it myself! On conscience of Italy and our culture a dark stain will fall forever if we do not distance ourselves from Ustashe and their demented crimes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_general_Alesandro_Luzan_to_Benito_Mussolini
The criminals have first, taking turns, raped the Serbian teacher (her name was Stana Arnautovich) and then, in front of the children, they have killed her. They raped even the eight year old girls. During all that time, a Gypsy band brought there was forced to play music and hit tamborines! To the utter disgrace of our, Roman church, one priest participated in all this! The boy that we saved recovered quickly. And as soon as the wound healed, he was able to run away from the hospital because of our inattention, and he run back to his village looking for his relatives. We send a patrole for him, but to no avail: they find him in front of his house, slaughtered!
From Letter of general Alesandro Luzan to Benito Mussolini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_general_Alesandro_Luzan_to_Benito_Mussolini
The Germans had no opposition to killing Serbs (who they blamed for their WWI humiliation), and to killing as many Jews and Gypsies as they could. But Germany realized that Serbs were too numerous to completely wipe off the face of the earth in spite of the Ustashi goals to slaughter a third, expell a third and convert a third. The stories that were being passed on to Serbs elsewhere in Yugoslavia by those Serbs that the Croat Ustashi had expelled (ethnically cleansed) were inciting the rest of the Serbs even further against Germany. Plus witnessing the Ustashi's sadistic bloodthirsty slaughter was also demoralizing many of Germany & Italy's ordinary troops. (It wasn't just that people were being killed, efficiently as they might be in a gas chamber, but rather the way they were being killed -- in an orgy of blood, even aginst children). Germany's eventual objections were not based on moral grounds, but rather on tactical reasons -- the Ustashi's methods were making it harder for them to subdue the already resistant Serbs.
The Serbs were the only ones with substantial loyalty to Yugoslavia when the going gets tough and foreign meddlers start whispering promises of backing and other things in the ears of potential separatists.
Thanks Wuli!
So far, 565 reads and counting -- not too bad a number for the audience.
What utter crap. This article is an embarassment to anyone with a brain.
Serbs weren't a faithful ally in WW2. More Serbs collaborated with the Germans than fought against them.
Don't listen to the Serbs. More Serbs collaborated with the Axis than fought against the Axis.
The Croatian Peasant Party didn't pledge allegiance to NDH. It split into 3 parts during the war....a small group joined the Ustashe...a small group joined the AntiFascists...the majority sided with neither hoping that Germany would lose and the West would help them against the Communists.
Why do you want people to read lies?
Upsetting Communists is a sin according to this author and to Serbs as the comments on this thread show.
ask yourself that question. You've posted a big one under this thread.
You speaking for the commie mole James Klugman of British Intelligence or just can't stand to read about the croat nazi past? Wake up---that misinformation campaign that threw the west's support to Tito was outed a while back.
Croat does not equal Ustashe and Serb does not equal Stalinist.
And I am tired of fake stories about Catholic priests kicking pregnant Serbs to death and other such anti-Catholic bigoted twaddle.
No Orthodox believer likes it when I bring up the truth about Orthodox priests who were full members of the Church and who were also members of the Green Shirts in Romania.
But they love to claim that Catholic priests were guards at Jasenovac when a single Franciscan who had been thrown out of his order and excommunicated before Pavelic had even come to power was there.
Right, then these are all actors?
If what was told to me was a lie, then it would have to had been from a man who took that "lie" seriously to give up his family again, give up his town, his country, and his religion -- with no other possible reason to do so. Doesn't make sense to tell such a lie.
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