"It will be the Storm of all storms!" announced the last match in Moscow by a reporter from Croatian Television, and thus accurately detected the politically produced football hysteria that had all the characteristics of the war from 23 years ago when, in the action Storm, Croatia liberated its territory from the hated Serbs. citizens. The unbearable atmosphere of collective ecstasy in which the painful reality, the desperation due to the social and economic collapse of the state was completely taken over by the soccer ball, was ultimately turned into a ridiculous, populist circus whose basic tone was set by the political elite. The one who recklessly took the quality of Croatian football players as her own, and tried to portray their success as her own.
So the first lady of the country kept the route Zagreb - Moscow, constantly in a high mood, going over the edge of decent behavior, like a hysterical cheerleader, drooling on the shoulders of the players in their dressing room and finally spending state money unbridled for her frequent trips to Russia. And it was she who showed all the vulgarity of Croatian politics and paved the way for equating the good performance of Croatian football players with the non-existent national successes, and then typically stupidly declared that the real winners were the Croatian national team.
Only a small country of great imbeciles could behave in recent days as if it were a state of war, which implies collective mobilization, and those few who believe that football is just a game and not necessarily a war, be ostracized and declared as national traitors by default. Just like in the nineties, the media flawlessly played the role of defenders of the homeland, not only from European football players, but from the devil's internal enemy, so it is a mere remark that "we have a nationalist charge around the national team", and that it "acts as a representation of the HDZ, not Croatia" cost one professor an avalanche of accusations of Yugoslavism, treason, testifying against "Croatian heroes" in The Hague, etc. Belgrade sports journalist Milojko Pantić, who is a fan of the Croatian national team, also suffered the same fate after remarking that Balkan politicians use sports successes to promote "shallow-minded political populism" and that a modern European politician does not enter the lunchroom and kiss sweaty athletes, thinking of the Croatian president. The attempt to make a distressed, hopeless nation great and powerful through 22 runners after the ball thus degenerated into a miserable caricature, erasing every line between journalism and complete idiocy. Jutarnji list before the match with England has the headline "We are Croats!", which would probably mean "We are warriors!". Therefore invincible. Before the final match, Slobodna Dalmacija comes out with the headline: "We are the champions!", and the columnist of that newspaper uses the opportunity for another hunt for freaks who refuse to be part of the nationalist euphoria. So he writes that "in its rudimentary emotion, this nation is unique and homogeneous, divided only into 90 percent of those who are loyal to their country, and maybe 10 percent of those who would drown it in the deep ocean." The last secretary of the Union of Communists in that newspaper house, thus, unwittingly observes only one thing - the rudimentary nature of emotions. Those lowest, homogenizing passions that "in the name of the nation" are skilfully used in every game here. Football or war, it doesn't matter.
The commentator of Novi List writes: "Those media who decided not to write a single word about Croatian problems have the right." Instead, they talked only about "our football heroes" who were "children of the Storm and the Homeland War", in collective ecstasy they were equated with " to our boys" from the military units, and the silver medal was meant to be the symbol of the final war action Storm from 1995. Hence the same checkered clothes, just like the military uniform, on all politicians, journalists, actors... hence the "people's event", as the all-day welcome a football player in Zagreb was called an idiot by a TV commentator. That expression, used at the beginning of the wars in Yugoslavia, froze the decent citizens of Croatia, watching the event of the people in front of the screens, which lasted a full six and a half hours as the football players traveled from the airport to the center of Zagreb. Through the impassable, ecstatic mass, with the constant roars of the crowd: "We Croats, tra, la, la...", some new warriors waved from the roof of a bus, and the shots irresistibly reminded of those when the tired soldiers in 1995 on old tanks entered the Knin. And unfortunately, the similarity does not end there. Because the important figure of that magnificent village dernek was precisely the symbol of Croatian patriotism, the pro-fascist singer Thompson who, at the express wish of the captain of the national team, Luka Modrić, rode in the bus with the players. And then he played his nationalist songs on the central square in Zagreb. All accompanied by the "world" guys, and Modrić's exclamations: "We want Thompson!" And look at the miracle, I guess under a serious political threat, the nation in total ecstasy was denied Thompson's favorite Ustasha greeting: Ready for home!
Or, as in Malaparte's great, anti-war novel Kaputt, after the war in Italy, a resident of the ruined, corpse-smelling Naples says: "Eh, what are you going to do, sir, the flies have won!"
(Sandstone/Youth)
Bonus video:
