This Saturday, the circus of Thompson's concert at the Zagreb Hippodrome will finally take place, after which the analyses, bickering, loading of various meanings, etc. will stop. A good part of the people will then go on vacation or have already evacuated from Zagreb, also that half of the population that has nowhere and nothing to go on vacation and to the seaside, will at least breathe a little in a half-empty Zagreb and things will return to the standard, not overly eventful political and social life of Croatia.
What will take place at the Hippodrome this weekend will be nothing more than a count and an insight into who is who on the right. It is therefore no coincidence that the concert will be attended by Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandroković and several HDZ ministers, while Prime Minister Plenković himself is still calculating, although he has expressed his sympathy for this event in every possible way.
The concert itself, which will probably become a record in terms of the number of tickets sold and the number of attendees, will most certainly turn into a debacle in terms of music and experience. It will not be possible to avoid it because it would be almost impossible even with a serious organization, let alone with this amateur one whose only goal is to collect as much money as possible. If it were not so, Thompson would have done several concerts instead of one, he would not have lost a band that was demanding a fair salary, it would not have been expensive for him to pay for medical services, he would not have tried to extort a huge amount of money from HRT for broadcasting rights, and we would not have witnessed any of this.
However, given that the entire public knows that the concert is just an excuse for the right wing to gather and count, which will be massive, no one will hold it against him.
Things are ultimately very simple. The immense, unquestionable popularity of Marko Perković Thompson, whose defense even Andrej Plenković himself joined, primarily testifies to how resistance to the values instilled in Croatian society in the 1990s has almost disappeared.
It may sound incredible, but this resistance was greater and more comprehensive at the time when everything was happening, it largely led to the serious defeat of the HDZ in 2000, it was still strongly present in society for a whole decade, and then, sometime after Croatia's entry into the European Union, there was a complete reinterpretation of that era and Tuđman himself, who now suddenly become exclusively positive and unquestionable.
And this even becomes unrelated to who is actually in power, meaning the process continues unhindered even when we have a coalition of HDZ and the far right, or HDZ and minorities, as well as SDP.
These are processes of adopting an uncritical culture of memory which, as we know from historiography, becomes dominant after a certain number of years have passed within which it can be intervened in.
And here, unfortunately, even if we implemented them, some bans, such as those proposed and lynched on social networks by Katarina Peović, would simply have no purpose. After all, we had a whole series of serious bans in the legal system of the SFRY, so it didn't help. Just as Germany had a whole series of legal sanctions against parties that glorify Nazism, and yet a far-right party is on the threshold of power. Because, regardless of how right Katarina Peović was about Thompson's glorification of the Ustasha and the entire symbolism of that era, apart from the fact that bans do not achieve the goal, it is impossible to ban something that the majority of society wants to support.
On that side, the anger and frustration of the left-liberal part of the citizenry is clear, but in this case it does not hit the right target.
The basic prerequisite for any change in society and this type of sentiment lies in rejecting the mythology of the nineties and in rejecting fear and a passive position in the face of the right and its demands. Specifically, when we talk about Zagreb, this means that the name of Marshal Tito Square should have been restored long ago, which has not happened and there are no indications that it will happen. Which all means that no matter how much we say something different about Thompson from the position of the city government in Zagreb, we still do not have the courage to actually start changing things and overturning decisions that his like-minded people negotiated with Bandić solely for ideological reasons.
Bonus video:
