Soccer: White Nationalist Refuge

Marching Croatian soccer fans, Split, Croatia, October 15, 2026

Soccer matches have long been a secular religion for millions across East and Central Europe, often standing in for a suppressed national and racial identity. The aftermath of the recent match between the Croatian soccer club Hajduk Split and the Dutch side Ajax, which is historically associated with the Jewish community, drew widespread condemnation from multiple EU media outlets. The game itself went fine—until Croatian supporters began chanting anti-Jewish slogans  —  which happens to be a far more dangerous game to play.

Police in Split have arrested several people after members of Torcida, a group of hardcore supporters of Hajduk Split football club, marched through the city chanting antisemitic slogans, including “Trample, trample the Jews,” “Auschwitz, Auschwitz,” and “Rise, Adolf”, referencing Adolf Hitler.

The anti-Croat smear campaign kicked off in the media immediately afterward. This was merely the latest installment in an eighty-year campaign of liberal and communist propaganda that paints Croats and their German enablers as irredeemable crypto-fascists just waiting to open a new Auschwitz. Whenever a media piece touches on Croatia or Germany in connection with WWII, the reader is immediately treated to the usual litany of slogans about “the rise of Ustašism” or the hidden beast of “neo-Nazism.” The media outcry against the Croatian soccer fans of Hajduk’s Split-Torcida fan club was so fierce that the Croatian courts rushed overnight to file indictments — all in the name of the struggle against racial prejudice and the preservation of the sacrosanct memory of the Holocaust. And of course, the unspoken issue of race hung over the match: Croatian and other East European teams are exclusively White, while Ajax and most Western European soccer clubs field largely non-White squads.

The defeated Dutch club Ajax is itself hardly free of bizarre symbolism. Its old stadium stood in Amsterdam’s historic Jewish quarter and originally attracted a large Jewish crowd. Rival European fans often turned the very name “Ajax” into an antisemitic taunt, which eventually prompted the club to adopt a strong philosemitic and pro-Israeli stance as a core part of its identity. Yet the symbolic paradox runs deeper. The name Ajax comes from a mythical Greek pagan hero who shares nothing whatsoever with biblical Old-Testament Jewish heritage or the perpetual victimhood and kvetching in the Book of Job. The name borne by this Dutch club belongs to a Greek warrior from Homer’s Iliad — a figure far closer to the German mythical hero Siegfried of the medieval Nibelungenlied, an epic that still enjoys massive popularity among German nationalists of every stripe.

Victimhood as a Culture of Necrophilia

European World War II memorial politics displays a glaring bias regarding the victims of Allied WWII crimes. Following the constant Jewish commemoration of their WWII losses, one gets the impression that every side is now appropriating its dead rather than caring for its living. Across the EU, critical scrutiny of official death tolls attributed to fascists, National Socialists and their allies is either criminalized or demonized by the media under the convenient label of “revisionism,” while the mass atrocities of communist regimes and the Jews in it remain virtually off-limits. The endlessly contested death toll at Jasenovac—a WWII concentration camp run by the Croatian pro-fascist Ustaše—illustrates this logical absurdity: the lack of proper forensic investigation and the wild discrepancies between official estimates from Zagreb and Belgrade prove that historical figures are still weaponized as propaganda ammunition rather than treated as objects of genuine scientific inquiry. If the ruling cuckservative antifascist class in Zagreb and Belgrade cannot even agree on the actual body count at WWII Jasenovac, who exactly is lying? In order to offset the stigma of being the designated “antisemites“ or “bad Nazis,” both sides cozy up to the state of Israel—a recent example being the high-level meeting between prominent Israeli officials and their Serbian counterparts in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska.

Similar patterns of name-calling appear more and more in the Croatian judiciary. Courts increasingly traffic in vague phrases imported from the EU that reek of the old Yugoslav-communist textbook. The French call this communist jargon la langue de bois—”wooden language“; the Germans call it Betonsprache—”petrified“, or “concrete speech“. In practice, under the holy banner of fighting fascism and defending the postwar “anti-fascist order,” legislators and prosecutors get to redefine “freedom of speech” however it suits them best. The fact that the main coastal promenade along the ritzy Riviera of Opatija in Croatia still bears the name of the communist mass murderer and former Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito does not bother Croatia’s ruling class. By simple deductive logic, Tito remains for them a symbol of virtue and upright rule. It is equally telling that Croat apparatchiks from the strong left-leaning parties never bother to show up at commemorations held at the country’s countless communist killing fields. Weaponizing legal charges against Hajduk-Split’s soccer fans sets a dangerous precedent: every Croatian conservative group and intellectual might eventually end up in the crosshairs of the EU judiciary, just as they did under the old communist Yugoslav criminal code.

Behind this media and legal indictment of Hajduk-Split supporters lies the usual Croatian bureaucratic inertia and spineless servility toward decrees from Brussels and Tel Aviv. To justify their repressive apparatus, state institutions and mainstream media constantly regurgitate the same narrative about the mortal threat of right-wing or “Ustaša extremism”—whether the target is the ethno-rock nationalist singer Marko Perković Thompson or the soccer ultras of Hajduk-Split. Meanwhile, the double standard is glaring: honest discussion of past communist atrocities is carefully suppressed, while any remembrance of the victims of Yugoslav communism is reduced to empty, ceremonial Catholic Church folklore. The ultimate absurdity in Croatia is that former communist apparatchiks and their spiritual heirs have simply rebranded themselves with modern globalist and anti-fascist jargon in order to whitewash their own responsibility for Yugoslav-communist mass killings and state repression. All things considered, what on earth do they expect from Hajduk-Split’s soccer fans?

Honest accounts of European and Croatian history are not black-and-white morality plays that can be reduced to simplistic ideological formulas. Today the terms “fascism” and “Nazism” have been completely gutted of their original meaning and are deployed almost exclusively as smear words against political opponents. Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin himself denounced his rival Lev Bronstein (alias Trotsky)—the Jewish architect of the Bolshevik Revolution—as a “fascist agent.” The early Croatian communist and personal friend of Tito, Andrija Hebrang, was branded an “Ustaša agent” by his own Yugoslav fellow travelers shortly after World War II. Countless leftists in America and the EU now routinely denounce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “fascist.” And during the collapse of Yugoslavia, influential outlets such as the German weekly Der Spiegel and The New York Times  slammed Croat President Franjo Tuđman as a “revisionist,” an “antisemite,” and an “ultra-rightist.” By that same logic, today’s Croatian ruling elite ought to ban the name Franjo Tuđman—the very name they now decorate themselves with.

Instead of imposing media newspeak, selective justice, and bureaucratic echo chambers, the study of history requires uniform standards and total freedom of scholarly inquiry. That said, every cloud has a silver lining. Should the Left seize the reins in the U.S. Congress after the upcoming midterms, or should the Left return to full power in Croatia tomorrow, one must expect the immediate breakdown of the state apparatus and widespread anarchy. Yet many right-wingers — whether on the Croatian or the American Right — are also mistaken when they claim that communists only target anticommunists. The prime enemies of the Left have always been their own comrades-in-arms. The mainstream media largely missed a telling incident in Leipzig, Germany, on January 17, 2026: rival leftist factions physically beat the living daylights out of one another, exposing their own ideological schizophrenia — one group waving Palestinian flags while the other waved Israeli flags.

Wrapped up in its own sectarian purges, the modern Antifa-Left across Europe, America, and Croatia has morphed into a totalitarian movement that displays fanatical intolerance, dogmatism, and a complete incapacity for political dialogue. This should come as no surprise. The entire history of the European Left is soaked in mutual mass killings: from the Spanish Civil War in 1936, through the Stalinist purges, to the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 — whose warring political parties  were, in the vast majority of cases, former communist comrades from Zagreb and Belgrade.