Words of a song

(portalnovosti.com)

In the month of grief and remembrance of the victims of Vukovar, we need unity, dignity and peace, not division and intolerance – said the mayor of Split, a HDZ member Tomislav Šuta, condemning the “incident” in Blatine. The “incident” was called the organized march of about a hundred blackshirts who, chanting the Ustasha slogan “For the homeland” and shouting slogans such as “Serbian garbage”, on Monday evening dispersed the participants of a folklore and drama evening, including high school students from Novi Sad, which was supposed to open the Days of Serbian Culture in the city district hall, organized by the SKD Prosvjeta.

Since the members of the fascist assault troops used the same sentimental excuse when attacking Serbs – namely, the “month of sorrow and remembrance of the victim of Vukovar”, when local Serbs should probably not even be taking to the streets, let alone indulging in intimate folklore provocations – the mayor of Split has just perfectly presented the position of the party in power in Croatia: the very language of condemnation of violence contains its justification. Tomislav Šuta does not approve of violent attacks on members of the Serbian national minority and fully understands the aggression provoked “in the month of sorrow and remembrance of the victim of Vukovar”. Appealing for the preservation of “unity, dignity and peace”, he expresses full sympathy for those who destroy them.

The same guard, with much more words, was demonstrated by Prime Minister Andrej Plenković at an extraordinary press conference. He strongly condemned the “incident” and used the next hour to confront leftists (and, by the way, Zoran Milanović) who baselessly accuse him of the Ustashaization of Croatia. He categorically rejects such attacks because they are “not normal”. Moreover, the hysterical left is the “generator of hate speech”, and therefore, logically, the real cause of the unfortunate “incident”.

If the composition of the questioners had been different, if it had not been composed of journalists of Ivan Hrstić's profile, Plenković would probably have been sweating and making considerable efforts to pull himself out of the shit, but now, faced with a flock of tame Hrstićs who know everyone by name, he could afford to casually chat, lecture and spit at those who unfairly attribute responsibility to him for the fact that Croatia under his rule is turning into a disgusting pro-Ustasha den. Thus, the statement that his government has not changed its attitude towards national minorities after the coalition with the Homeland Movement remained fluttering in the air (like "a disabled person's sleeve in the wind", GB would say), thus without the inevitable question: then who on earth cut off the budget funds of the "Serbian Novosti"?

But the devil is language. In the prime minister's case, he articulated it most impressively through "the words of a song." It was in response to a journalist's question (obviously a runaway from the pack) whether he was perhaps sorry today that he had gone to visit Thompson on the eve of the concert at the Hippodrome. Of course he wasn't sorry, he said. He loved Thompson's music, he said. His children and his family loved it. And "it's not normal," he said, for "the words of a song" - written so many years ago, in the midst of war - to be "called into question"!

“The words of a song” are, of course, rhetorical packaging for the Ustasha greeting “For the Homeland Ready”, the Croatian version of the Nazi Sieg Heil. How did the Ustasha greeting become embedded in “the words of a song”? Why is it “not normal” to question it, regardless of when, in what form and under what circumstances it was used? And what to do with the fact that a horde of blackshirts carried out their operation in Blatine, Split, with “the words of a song”, giving them exactly the same meaning that Marko Perković Thompson intended for them in the early nineties, namely – let’s expel the Serbs, “chasing the gang across the source”? Or as summarized by Neprežaljeni, when in August 1995, after the famous “Storm”, he thundered to the crowd gathered on the Split waterfront: “Have a good journey!”

Through “the words of a song” – a phrase he repeated several times at the press conference, always with the remark that “it is not normal to question them” – Andrej Plenković normalizes the abnormal, moreover, he tries to portray as abnormal all those who dare to understand “the words of a song” in the only way they can be understood: as Ustasha agitation. Language with a double discourse (this is when the mass murders of Jews are called the “final solution”, or when the liquidations of Serbs along the Drava River are recorded as “the tape case”) is only a lexical complement to the famous “double connotation”, a cynical formula through which Ustashaism will be simultaneously condemned and supported.

The Croatian Prime Minister is therefore doing the same thing that the founder of his party did in the nineties: he is trying to ensure a democratic atmosphere for a fascist march, and only when things get too complicated to the point where they start to have negative effects. However, Thompson was and remains an Ustasha singer – both during and after the war – just as Marko Skeja’s HOS members nurtured the ideals of Endehazija during the war. Just as, after all, the HDZ was and remains a party through whose bloodstream a warm fascistoid substance circulates. The most beloved deceased, let us remember, was also “double-connoted”: he referred to Franco when he intended to mix the bones of the camp victims and their murderers in Jasenovac, and then ordered the prosecution of journalists who called him a Francoist. Today, his successors, under the guise of “freedom of speech” and “respect for procedure”, enable the unrestrained orgy of deniers of the Ustasha genocide in the Croatian Parliament. When the pseudoscientific packaging and feigned “pursuit of truth” are removed, the underlying tone of this gathering is best understood as ashenostalgia, an ecstatic longing for a lost place of execution.

One of the more important questions on which a minimally civilized community should establish a consensus is: What is it that we cannot tolerate? If we stay at the scene of the recent “incident”, i.e. in Split, it will turn out that it has been an extremely tolerant environment for decades (Mayor Šuta would add “inclusiveness”), although things are similar in other Croatian cities. For example, in the neighborhood where the attack on Serbs was staged on Monday, in Blatine, the previous tenants were evicted from hundreds of “Serb apartments” so that Croats could move in, and the then HDZ government not only tolerated this robbery, but also organized it. Today, a few hundred meters east of the site of the “incident”, on Ruđera Boškovića Street, a monument to IX. HOS battalion with an Ustasha salute carved on it: hundreds of citizens pass by this marble curse every day and obediently tolerate it, in most cases with a cramp in their stomachs and fear in their bones. A few kilometers to the northwest, in front of the entrance to the Lora Military Port, where during the war Serbian civilians were imprisoned, brutally tortured, and sometimes killed, a monument to the camp guards has been erected: the community obediently tolerates this, even if the boulder of stone kitsch unequivocally sends the message that ethnically motivated crimes should be considered heroic acts.

Why then would members of the Blackshirts troupe, while preventing a Serbian cultural event from taking place, expelling children and the elderly from the premises of the city district, think that society would not tolerate their actions? Because the gel-coated Prime Minister will say “phew, phew” at a forced press conference and once again teach them when “For the Homeland, Ready” is an unacceptable Ustasha rallying cry, and when they are “the words of a song” that he and his family like to listen to?

Ivan Penava, an Ustašophile from the ruling coalition, is troubled by another question: "Why does no minority in Croatia have problems, except for the Serbs?" And really: by what miracle – and until when? – did the Jews and Roma save themselves?

(The text was published on the Novosti portal on November 6, 2025.)