The match was as bad as it was dramatic and I don't know what minute had already been played, it seems to me that it was the middle of the second half, when the unison cheering of the entire stadium began to break through the microphone of the camera, with the well-known cry "Kill the Serb". And I must admit that, regardless of the fact that the odds of such a thing not happening were huge, and regardless of the fact that even at one point I wondered why they hadn't happened yet, I was still surprised when it finally happened. Croatia and Albania played, the place of action is the legendary stadium in Hamburg, a good part of the audience was made up of guest workers, either from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, from Kosovo or from Albania, but for those people who had to emigrate, because no one is lying , does not go to emigration out of great happiness in his homeland, his soul was filled with joint chanting against the Serbs. First of all, it's sad and ugly, and then it's also grotesque, but it's a consequence of the structural nationalism in which we've all been growing up in this region for almost forty years, and which manifests itself most openly in football stadiums. And almost on everyone and on every occasion. This sentence is not a justification or relativization of what we heard in Hamburg, but the shock in the tabloid media and among the rulers in Serbia will be credible when there is also a reaction to chanting "Knife, wire, Srebrenica" and similar messages from the stands. .
Now, it's only been half a day, so I can't know what the reactions of the Croatian media and the public will be until the end, but what seems the most logical is what has already made its way in a few places. And that is a passing note of this fact, a laconic sentence that it is not right and a further analysis of the match. And this kind of reaction, or its absence, comes not only from the need to relativize one's own nationalism, but also from the fact that this kind of discourse is so normalized on the stands, that it is no longer perceived as an anomaly, nor as a problem that should be solved at all and which one could even get rid of.
As for Croatia, a country that achieved all its stated, but also unspoken goals from the nineties, becoming never more nationally and demographically homogenous, joining NATO and the European Union and becoming a country that lives a completely new reality, with a whole series of topics that they do not relate to the issue of relations with the Serbs and the region, all this is in vain for the Croatian nationalists. Because their only interest is that the matrix of behavior and understanding of the world, which was established in the nineties and which only cares that the Serbs fare worse in everything, remains intact. And realistically, it could not even be deconstructed, until the mythology of the nineties is dismantled, and HDZ and the Church simply do not allow that. That is where the answer to the question of when this self-evident pathology in the stands will disappear from them ends.
A normal and nationalistically unburdened person has three ways to react to this. On the one hand, he can write and argue that it is wrong, and then demonstratively cheer against his country because he cannot identify with such nationalism. On the other hand, he can completely ignore football and everything that surrounds it. And he can finally give up his rebellion and follow all this with interest, consoling himself that it's all part of folklore.
I personally had a kind of transition from the first to the third option, since the second could never be an option, because I am truly interested in football.
But from someone who a priori refused to support Croatia, and by default would support all other ex-Yu countries, I realized how pointless it is. In recent years, I've been rooting for Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina just as much as for Slovenia or Serbia, as I would also like Montenegro to qualify for a major competition.
Because we are all the way we are, and when a good part of us feeds on hatred, it doesn't necessarily mean that we all have to be like that.
Bonus video:
