“It takes a Village on July 27”: Srb, Yugoslav Antifa, and Croatia’s Bare Bones

The common antifascist narrative in the media and academia consists in a frequent reversal of World War II victimhood—a procedure once tested by communist commissars in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The label of communism, once proudly sported by a large number of intellectuals and journalists, has come out of fashion today. A more generic trademark, such as a neutral sounding word ‘antifascism’, had to be called to the rescue. For the recycled former Yugoslav historians and journalists residing in Serbia and Croatia, the term ‘antifascism’ offers the safest way to cover up their own murky and often hagiographic past. In addition, the word’antifascism’ serves today as a decent camouflage for shrugging off crimes committed during and after World War II by Yugoslav communists. In regard to the reversal of the antifascist victimhood narrative, a Soviet killing field, the Katyn Forest, comes first to mind. For a long time, communist-friendly historians managed to switch the role of the victim with that of the perpetrator, thereby successfully imprinting onto public consciousness the Katyn location as the locution for a  “Nazi-perpetrated crime.”

Similar scenarios of the narrative reversal are being observed in regard to the Croatia’s village of “Srb” (i.e., Serb), a small community situated in the southeastern part of Croatia and largely populated by ethnic Serbs. In communist Yugoslavia this high profile three-consonant eponymous village, in addition to being a crucial part of ex-Yugoslavia’s communist founding myth and a mandatory part of the school curriculum, also served as a place of pilgrimage for the Party. Every July 27 high-ranking Yugoslav communists commemorated the anniversary of their “Armed Uprising against Fascism” there.

In fact their much lauded antifascist uprising was far from being a major liberating event. It commenced on July 27, 1941 with a local gang of Serb communists and Yugoslavs killing a local Croat Catholic priest and a dozen of his parishioners in what was then a freshly proclaimed National Socialist-allied Croatia. Several decades later, on the eve of Yugoslavia’s break-up, in July, 1990, the same village came again into the same limelight: local ethnic Serbs, spurred by the communist-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, again started their brand of antifascist rebellion against newborn Croatia, perceived by many local Serbs as just another remake of vintage fascist Croatia. Having been sermonized in communist Yugoslavia on how hundreds of thousands and often millions of their compatriots had been killed by Nazi-Fascist-Ustasha Croats during World War II, Croatia’s Serbs were bound to turn their real fears into hyperreal body counts.

On July 27 of this year the municipality of Srb is becoming again the gathering place for old Yugoslav communists and their somewhat younger antifascist progeny, all of them invoking the specter of the timeless Croat fascist evil looming large over all of Europe. Hence the paradox: on the one hand Croatia has the reputation in the Western media and academia of being a hardcore, extreme right-wing state with fascist proclivities; on the other, it is the sole state in the EU which every July 27, publicly, and to a large extent officially, endorses the restitution of Communism and the rebirth of the Yugoslav state.

The political class in both Serbia and Croatia, which is largely made up of former Yugoslav communists and their self-described liberal antifascist offspring, refuse to allow forensic examination of the sites where, according to their narrative, hundreds of thousands Serbs, Communists and Jews were killed by proverbial Nazi-Fascist Croats. One prefers to rely on tales and hearsay. On the other hand, over the last twenty years, over 1000 mass graves have been uncovered in Croatia and neighboring Slovenia, containing the bones of hundreds of thousands Croat Axis soldiers and Croat civilians killed by Yugoslav Communists in the aftermath of World War II. Bare bones are the best evidence of a crime scene.

Century long interethnic conflicts have left terrible memory scars on all Europeans. If White groups in Europa and America ever wish to establish some sort of a racial-cultural unity in the face of the present non-European population replacement, they need get beyond their provincial narratives. Discarding the official postwar Liberal-Marxist historiography may prove, however, to be a far more daunting task.

Dr. Sunic’s website is www.tomsunic.com.