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‘Ustasa’ Letter Threatens Croatian Historian with Death

Croatian historian Hrvoje Klasic, who has criticised the rehabilitation of the WWII fascist Ustasa movement in the country, was sent an anonymous death threat signed in the name of the Ustasa.

Historian Hrvoje Klasic received the death threat letter at his office at Zagreb University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences on Wednesday after making public statements critical of the rehabilitation of the WWII fascist Ustasa movement in Croatian society.

The anonymous sender or senders, who signed the letter ‘Ustasa’, said they regretted that Klasic had not been “liquidated” yet but hoped he would be.

“We will be glad to attend your funeral in HOS [Croatian Defence Forces, a 1990s wartime paramilitary unit] uniforms on which Za dom spremni [“Ready for the Homeland”, a Ustasa slogan] is nicely highlighted,” the letter said.

It concluded with the words: “Death to traitors – freedom to the people.”

Attached to the letter was a newspaper excerpt in which Klasic said he would welcome a decision by the Austrian authorities to ban and sanction the public display of the WWII Ustasa movement’s symbols.

Earlier this year, the Austrian Interior Ministry banned the display of two Ustasa symbols – the letter ‘U’ with a grenade, and the checkerboard coat of arms of the Nazi-backed WWII-era Independent State of Croatia.

These symbols are often seen at the annual Bleiburg commemoration in Austria, which commemorates the killings of Croatian Nazi collaboration troops and civilians at the end of WWII.

Klasic told BIRN that this was not the first such letter he has received, but that it was the most explicit death threat, and that he will report it to the police.

He said that the fact that he received the letter showed there was a real problem in Croatian society.

“This [letter] is perhaps the best answer to the political elite in power about their thesis that the atmosphere [in society] is normal,” Klasic said. Speaking after a spate of recent attacks on Serbs in Croatia, he said that here had been “too many incidents” in which “those who are different” have been targeted.

“If someone who is named Hrvoje, who is from a 100 per cent Croatian family, who was a volunteer in the ‘Homeland War’ in 1991 and who, as a doctor of historical sciences, speaks publicly about the things that he deals with scientifically [and is threatened for it]… then really, how it is for the people who belong to the ‘wrong groups’?” he asked.

{Submitter’s note: a photo of the letter can be seen in the article linked above. EDIT: A translation of the letter by Vman follows, relaying the approximate style and poor grammar of the original text. Translator’s notes and in-line explanations are given in italics and brackets.}

You [Hrvoje Klasić] participated in [the Croatian daily paper] Večernji List’s poll (on 17.8.19) on the topic of good news this year. For us Ustashe who follow events the best thing that happened was your getting snuffed which meant one traitor less. Unfortunately, our cheer didn’t last long because it turned out that the news was fake. We hope that next time it won’t be. We will gladly come to your funeral in HOS uniforms on which ZA DOM SPREMNI [“Ready for the Homeland”] is nicely highlighted.

For the traitor Klasić, Austria’s decision and especially the award given at the Pula film festival to [film director] Dana Budisavljević for the forgery about [her relative, Holocaust-era hero] Diana Budisavljević are “good news”. Well, you traitorous/Chetnik* piece of shit, facts mean nothing to you. Didn’t [Holocaust revisionist] journalist Igor Vukić and historian Nikica Barić independently reach the same conclusion based on historical facts - that the one who deserves the most credit for the saving of the Kozara children** was [Ustasha dictator and Croatia’s equivalent of Hitler] Ante Pavelić. Had he not allowed and organized aid Diana Budisavljević couldve done fuck all. As both authors concluded, the main culprits for the suffering of those children were the Chetnik and Partisan brigands who rebelled against the state. Once they got their asses kicked, they abandoned the children leaving them in the care of the Croatian state, you motherfucker.

* {the Chetniks were a Serb and Montenegrin ultranationalist militia during WW2 which ended up collaborating with the Axis forces and committing a lot of atrocities.}

** {’Kozara children’ refers to the children of Serb civilians captured during the Axis’s Kozara offensive against the pro-communist Partisans. Many of them were selected for forced labor in Nazi Germany, and once the parents were shipped off, the Ustashe basically left their children to slowly die in horrid and unsanitary conditions. A woman named Diana Budisavljević, together with some sympathetic officials and Catholic Church people, launched an operation to pressure the Ustashe authorities and save the children through adoption into ‘proper Catholic Croat’ families, which was largely successful.}

And regarding ZA DOM SPREMNI itll remain and outlive you, and the Chetniks and the fucking antifascists. You bite your own balls out of frustration when you see how many people, especially young ones, come to the concerts of [neo-Ustashe singer] Marko Perković Thompson and greet him with ZA DOM. We would recommend you read the “Ustashe” media and news portals and not just [Croatian Serb politician Milorad] Pupovac’s Chetnik [newspaper] Novosti. On the “Ustashe” portals, the famous lawyer Zvonimir Hodak writes opinion pieces in which he often mentions you alongside other fifth-columners like [Croatian historians] Goldstein, Jakovina, Markovina… and you refuse to react.

You are a “respectable” historian in your dear Chetnik Serbia, you are always welcome there. Here in Croatia you are a mere activist as excelently noted by historian Mario Jareb.

The USTASHE greet you with ZA DOM SPREMNI

DEATH TO TRAITORS - FREEDOM TO THE PEOPLE***

*** {This is a corruption of the Partisan slogan “Death to fascism - freedom to the people!”}

[From "Southern History Series: The Rise of Modernism"]

If you want to understand how and why the South is the way it is today, you won’t find the answer in the distant past. The roots of the present crisis trace back to the Second World War and the Cold War, begin in the North and overwhelm the South during the Civil Rights Movement.

The South as it existed from Redemption through the Great Depression was a totally different world. It was becoming more homogeneous, not heterogeneous. It was poor, not wealthy and bourgeois. It had a colonial extractive economy based on agriculture and mining, not on services and commerce. It was overwhelmingly rural, not urban and suburban. It was highly personal and deeply rooted, not anonymous and alienated. It was segregated, not integrated. It was strongly Protestant, not agnostic, atheist or apathetic. It had a rural elite that celebrated traditional values based in the county seats, not a metropolitan middle class animated by economic growth. The Solid South was Democratic, not Republican. It was racially conscious, not racially masochistic. It built monuments to the Confederate dead as opposed to tearing them down. Its people got their news from other people at the country store or through the editor of their local segregationist newspaper, not through television.

The following excerpts come from Numan V. Bartley’s book The New South: 1945-1980:

[...]
The southern white-collar legions were a rising force in society and politics. Despite the frequent references to a “new middle class,” its membership, aside from being overwhelmingly white in racial composition, was a more diverse aggregation than some contemporary accounts implied …
They were better educated and more widely informed on public issues than southerners generally and, according to opinion polls, were more tolerant on racial matters. Their families were in the vanguard of the stampede to suburbia and of the introduction of far-reaching changes in southern lifestyles. They formed the base for the open-schools movement and for the moderate position in southern politics.”

[...]

Let’s stop here for a moment and think about the consequences of the technological revolution that swept the South between 1940 and 1970. The tractor and mechanical cotton picker destroyed sharecropping which unsettled millions of people in the lowland South. Similarly, the mechanization of coal mining led to an exodus out of Appalachia in the 1950s. The television transformed Southern politics by making local racial conflicts – things like the lynching of Emmett Till or the rebuff of John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma – into narratives of international significance in the Cold War.

The invention and spread of the air conditioner homogenized the Southern climate and made it attractive to transplants. Florida went from being the smallest Southern state to one of the largest states in the country because of the air conditioner. The bulldozer began to level the areas around our major cities which is where suburbia was created and millions of people moved from rural areas into the suburbs of the new ballooning metropolitan areas where the Baby Boomers were raised on the television.

There was a shift in power from the rapidly depopulating Black Belt, which had been the historical stronghold of white supremacy and segregation, to the metropolitan areas and their suburbs. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Black Belt was placed under black majority rule. The White middle class of the suburbs and the metropolitan elites became the dominant class in the South after 1970.

“Some academics and progressives bemoaned the materialism and shallowness of urban middle-class lief. Robert J. Steamer wrote in 1963 that a typical member was a “rootless nomad whose primary, and sometimes, only loyalty is to business. His political ideas are substantially barren, because at bottom, materialism is his life philosophy, but translating his thought into political maxims we get free enterprise, fiscal sanity, balanced budgets,” and certainly it was true that the South’s uptown business leadership frequently equated sensible social policy with what best served the exigencies of the real estate market. …
A South Carolina observer remarked about moderates, “I don’t think they take the Negroes seriously as people … They look at it as something … that doesn’t really have much to do with them.” Middle-class metropolitan southerners threatened the paternal order because of their commitment to atomistic individualism, consumer materialism, upward mobility, and unfettered economic development.”

Sounds familiar.

[...]

This would be me … not a deracinated ideologue or a fanatic, but someone who clings to the old ways, values, traditions and sense of identity of the Black Belt, someone who values my roots, ancestors and social stability as opposed to chasing after social status or worshiping the GDP. I despise mainstream conservatism because I am a Southern conservative populist. We’re not retreating from mainstream conservatism anymore though. We’re going on the offensive.

[...]

This is an interesting passage.

The most striking thing about the “white supremacy” and mass shootings narrative is that under actual white supremacy in the Jim Crow South we didn’t have mass shootings. We had plenty of guns, but none of this nihilistic anti-social rage and alienation which is at bottom an attempt to escape from the sick anti-culture that we live under in our own times. The people who engage in mass shootings want to draw attention to their profound psychological angst and pain.

[...]

The American dream of living in a nice little house in an artificial community with “good schools” adjacent to big box stores was a nursery of countless social and psychological problems. In hindsight, it was probably healthier to live in a shack with no electricity or an indoor toilet. In those days, you inherited your beliefs, values and politics from granddaddy who sat on the front porch and told you who you were and where you come from. Now, you absorb all the Jewish poison that is pulsating through the “mainstream” culture around you while in college or through being immersed in the mass media.

What’s the solution? Think of it as a great catastrophe that we have lived through. The old organic culture has to resprout from its roots in much the same way that a clearcut forest grows back.