Deprived of Reason

One label I don’t mind getting attached to my name is “anti-fascist”. However, I often get some looks about it: why would anybody be an anti-fascist 50 years after fascism was defeated. Well, it wasn’t!

Some weeks ago we witnessed a bunch of Jewish neo-nazis (although I’m not quite sure what’s so neo about their nazism) getting arrested in Israel. I wasn’t surprised about it, because those of us who one way or another belong to the punk subculture are used to getting in the way of such creeps.

But, let’s look closer to home. A Serbian white-power-we-hate-everybody-but-hitler organization announced it will hold a rally in Novi Sad.

Who is to blame?

Probably not those kids who don’t know better than to hate — that’s the only thing they could learn from their elders.

Sure, more or less all political parties and patriotic organizations in Serbia claim they are anti-fascist, but what is behind it? For those of you who are not familiar with Serbia during the Second World War, when this marvelous ideology called fascism sprang into its fullest marvelousness, let me try to summarize it:

Kingdom of Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact" in 1941. People rallied against it and Yugoslavia was invaded and easily conquered by the above mentioned idiots, including German and Italian forces. Several puppet regimes soon appeared (namely in Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo) and several armies emerged. The Ustashe, Croatian nationalists, openly collaborated with the occupier and murdered many people, including many Serbs. The Chetniks, Serbian nationalists and royalists, openly collaborated with the Italian occupier, and to a lesser extent collaborated with the Germans and Ustashe themselves. The Partisans, republicans and mainly led by communist ideology, fought against Ustashe, Chetniks and all the occupiers.

The only anti-fascist force in that mess were the Partisans: while Chetniks did get involved into some skirmishes against the Germans, their strategy involved watching the Jews, Gypsies, communists, and their other enemies get taken away to death camps.

So, when our political parties express anti-fascist feeling, they usually mean anti-Croatian/Ustashe feeling. They never forget to count all the bodies of the Serbs who got murdered in a death-camp in Croatia, Jasenovac.

But, they don’t mind the Chetniks, and they choose to celebrate royalist Chetniks over communist Partisans any time of day.

Words like “Chetnik” and “fascist” are taboo in my family.

My grandmother, who was a partisan, was once nearly captured by Chetniks and she had nightmares about it as long as she lived. Her capture would mean a certain slow death, preceeded by rape.

Nearly all of my other grandmother’s immediate family was slaughtered, with a knife, by Chetniks, for having a communist brother.

My grandfather’s entire school class was pulled out of their classroom and shot by the Nazis. He survived because a German soldier pulled him out of line for looking too young.

My other grandfather spent 4 years in woods, often wounded and ill, fighting against people who thought their ethnicity gave them more right to live than the others.

I will be in Novi Sad on 7th October to rally against the fascists and neo-nazis.

Not because I feel obliged by my grandparents’ suffering, but because I witness fetishising of a nation and ethnicity all over again. It’s an evil we all have to try to stop.