Domovina Urednistvo
On Friday 18 May 2018 Croatia took over the rotating chair of the Council of Europe (for Croatia also a prelude to its presidency of European Union mandate due in 2020) and judging from the politically treacherous pressure created via allegations of right-wing extremism, neo-fascism and hate speech on the rise (The Council of Europe Anti-Racism Commission Report on Croatia), adopted on 21 March but “conveniently(!)” released on 15 May 2018, three days after the Bleiburg commemoration for victims of horrendous communist crimes against unarmed Croatian soldiers and civilians in 1945, by the evidently targeted and planned arrests by the Austrian police of 5 among 11,000 Croatians (and 1 Slovenian citizen) who came to Bleiburg on 12 May and the mean-spirited hardships imposed upon the Croatian pilgrims at the state border with the obvious intention of ensuring many don’t arrive in time for the commemorative Holy Mass, all give the picture of an internationally orchestrated environment that would set back even further from the current appalling state of communist crimes being left uncondemned. While the handful of those arrested may have been lawfully arrested for the reason of breaking the Austrian law – i.e. displaying the banned WWII symbols (which is illegal in Austria) but wearing a T-shirt with “Better dead than red” written across it and allegations of raising the right hand were reportedly also a reason for one of the arrests! Catch the drift here?
Compare that, if you please, to a music concert somewhere in a Western country where, say, 5 people get arrested for illegal drugs possession but thousands of other have no drugs – do we label the whole nation as an illegal drug-taking nation? Of course we don’t!
Do we express with concerns that illegal drug consumption is on the rise in the country? Of course we don’t!
For the Council of Europe and the liberal politics subscribers everywhere the attempts in Croatia to unveil and condemn communist crimes and the commemoration to the victims are seen as glorification of ideologies from World War II — especially of Croatia’s Ustasha regime, according to the report by the CoE’s Anti-Racism Commission. The same Anti-Racism Commission writes not a single word about the lack of condemnation of communist crimes/genocide committed under class-hatred ideology (the victims whom communists labelled as enemies of the people)! Not a single word about the fact that the lack of communist crimes condemnation signifies a concerning level of neo-communism, or something like it, being present in Croatia! A yet another sad but condemnation-worthy indictment on humanity when we come across the political plots where victims of racial hatred (e.g. the Holocaust) are more deserving of human compassion than victims of class hatred (e.g. communist crimes). Yet both fascism and communism stand as condemned totalitarian regimes by the European Union!
Class hatred is racial hatred’s twin sibling. But to call it by its name is unacceptable in progressive circles, which are by all and sundry slotted into the so-called liberal political platforms.
Many liberals don’t get that. They find it abhorrent to hate Jews for being Jews, but acceptable to hate the political class to the point of eradication that opposes another, the ruling one.
An older pair to Marx and Engels – Cain and Abel – appears to have been the first to ignite class hatred. Communism took on Marx and Engels ideological concoctions and gave itself a licence to kill. Throughout the ages, this virulent form of hatred has caused humanity endless suffering. We’re not only looking here at the “class enemies” who were hacked, guillotined, beaten and murdered during bloody revolutions. We are talking about the hundred and more millions of victims in cities and in villages, in gulags and in prisons, in Russia and in Romania, in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, in China, in Vietnam, in Croatia and in numerous other countries who suffered from mass murder, political class genocide, starvation, incarceration, torture and execution. When it comes to communist crimes under the communist Yugoslavia regime (including Croatia) hundreds of thousands of communism opponents were murdered, dumped in political prisons or fled abroad in fear for their lives and all that while communist Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito had the “protection” of many Western democratic countries. One must contemplate and deduce how much of this protectionism (shared guilt for crimes of communism) is still behind the appalling lack of due process for communist crimes.
Horrific figures of communist crimes were and still are being justified in “progressive” circles on the grounds that they were necessary to remove traitors and to build a utopian society. But communist societies failed miserably in their efforts to create a society that consumed freedom which all deserve.
The 1980s and the early 1990’s saw a crescendo of critiques and rejections of the ideals of communism, which, instead of socialist ideology, underpinned the Former Yugoslavia and the pervasive nostalgia for Croatian national identity. Croatia is no different to any other member state of the European Union when it comes to pursuits for national identity and never before in Europe’s history has this been so clearly demonstrated as it has been during the past decade that saw, and still sees, masses of refugees, illegal immigrants and the like charge across country borders, ending up with ghettos that reek of irreconcilable cultural, religious and moral profiles with the receiving country. It would seem that a significant dose of “unrestrained tolerance” found in these “progressive and permissive” societies has awakened a conservative temperament, a plight for national identity, traditional national values and pride.
Dealing head on with communist crimes means a plight for moral restoration. Croatia, and every other country with unresolved and unreconciled history of brutal communist crimes cannot breathe. It is not acceptable to condemn the crimes of one regime and tolerate the crimes of another. Such double standards in morality were the fabric of the communist regime and now – of the liberal wagon. Council of Europe, or any other body of international influence cannot expect to survive if it deals with one class of historical mass crimes, genocide, and ignores the other.
An astonishingly high percentage of today’s young and those in mid-life cycle do not know who murderous communist leaders were. Even worse, there are many who have favourable opinions about Stalin, Lenin, Zedong, Tito, Che Guevara… But the most disturbing fact is how many lack basic knowledge of the crimes of communist regimes. You can be sure that if a favourable leaning towards Hitler or ignorance about the Holocaust were evident it would generate outrage, hand wringing about historical amnesia and mainstream media would be awash with claims of danger to democratic values festering in the body politic.
Where are the equivalent warnings about the evils of communism?
For more than 70 years, communists conducted a ruthless war on their own citizens, starving tens of millions in deliberate campaigns to bring the peasantry to heel, executing millions because of their class background or their ethnic identity, deporting whole populations for the sole crime of belonging to a group labelled an enemy of the people, imprisoning thousands of intellectuals for their writings or ideas, persecuting and exterminating religious believers, men and women of the cloth, and arbitrarily shipping dissidents and innocents alike to concentration camps where they laboured under horrendous conditions.
Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews. Stalin alone is responsible for some 30 million deaths. Josip Broz Tito is responsible for almost 600,000 deaths (state murders) in Croatia (a very small country by comparison) alone. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedung’s policies led to some 45 million Chinese dying. And the Khmer Rouge killed nearly 2 million in Cambodia. Every other communist regime accounted for tens of thousands of other murders.
And today’s Croatian and European and the World’s “progressives” have the gall to label a Holy Mass and commemoration for several hundreds of thousands of victims of communist crimes at Bleiburg – a neo-fascist event. Such bigotry must be eradicated!
Ina Vukic
Commemorative mass at Bleiburg 12 May 2018 Austria
William Ernest Henley poem – Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
