Yugoslavia, Croatia and Communism

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This article is about the influence of the Yugoslav Communist party [1] on Croatian society. The party was the main driving force in all social matters within the former Yugoslavia.[2] Its Stalinist policies from the 1940s to the 1960s and authoritarian rule [3][4] have been mostly ignored in the Western media.

There needs to be an historical reassessment.

Paul Hollander:

 
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Public attitudes in former communist countries have been conflicted because of the arguable complicity of many citizens in keeping the old system in power. A predominant attitude in Eastern Europe and Russia toward the former communist systems has been a mixture of oblivion, denial, and repression [5]
 

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German Victims Women and Children who died in Yugoslav Camps

Ethnic cleansing of Germans [6][7][8] and Italians,[9][10][11][12] was carried out in Yugoslavia. Along the Dalmatian coast, (today part of Croatia) Italian was spoken for a millennium (i.e Zadar), [13][14][15] this was no longer the case after 1945/46. The Communists of Yugoslavia were the main organisers of a large scale execution of POWs and people who were guilty by association only. Documents show that many of these people were refugees and amongst them were large numbers of women and children.[16]

-See below-

  • Note A. Vladimir Geiger of the Croatian Institute for History:
 
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The list of German victims includes 26,000 women and 5,800 children who died in Yugoslav Camps- Geiger said.[17][18]
 

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Here is a statement made by Aleksandar Rankovic, the Interior Minister and the head of the military and secret police of Yugoslavia at a Belgrade Assembly (meeting):

 
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Through our prisons has passed between 1945 and 1951, 3 777 776 prisoners, while we killed 586 000 enemies of the people. Taken from Politika, Belgrade/1 February 1951 (p.1) [19]
 

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The findings of the "Commission on Concealed Mass Graves in Slovenia" was that there were 100 000 victims in 581 mass graves within Slovenia a former republic of Yugoslavia. According to the Reports and Proceedings of the European Public Hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes" , the killings were committed by the Yugoslav Paritsian Army in 1945 and 1946. [20][21]

Displaced persons from the former Yugoslavia from 1940s and 1950s

Displaced persons from former Yugoslavia right after World War Two:

 
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Around 6,000 of these displaced persons from the former Italian region of Venezia Giulia (Istra) and Zara (Zadar) resettled in Australia with the assistance of the IRO. After transfer of Trieste to Italy in 1954, another several thousand Giuliani were assisted to migrate toAustralia. While most were classed as Yugoslav residents and citizens, an estimated 5,000 were ethnic Italians from the cities of Fiume, Pola and Zara (Gardini 2004). Given the difficulty of ascertaining the ethnicity of displaced persons from the names and nationalities listed on official IRO documents, it is unclear how many displaced persons who identified as 'Italian' settled in Western Australia. What is clear is that the Istrian 'Italians' came from different backgrounds and had different motives for leaving their homes compared with other Italian assisted passage or sponsored migrants.[22]
 

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Post Berlin Wall and the former Yugoslavia

Barbara Rov in neighbouring Slovenia. One of the many massacre sites post World War Two.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a lot of factual evidence has emerged that indicates the former Communist Yugoslavia was responsible for executing mass murders, arrests and torture. Most media have turned a blind eye to these tragic issues. Very little has been reported about these unearthed historic events. One article worth mentioning is Ian Cuthbertson's review of the documentary called Tito's Ghosts in the Australian newspaper The Australian called “Balkans hero with a Bloodthirsty Streak” (September 13, 2008). [23]

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia pursued a revolutionary policy that was at odds with many of it's peoples, it's Yugoslav Communist utopia only happened unless you belonged to the communist elite. The party did improve the standard of living in the late 1960s and 1970s and this was achieved through Western investment which ultimately turned out to be it's weakness. The economy was primarily a subsidised one. Yugoslavia was essentially on borrowed time. Croatians recall this period as a golden time however they were living off money largely borrowed from the West.

  • Information from 'Keeping Tito Afloat' by Lorraine M. Lees:
 
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After World War Two, the United States considered Yugoslavia to be a loyal Soviet satellite, but Tito surprised the West in 1948 by breaking with Stalin. Seizing this opportunity, the Truman administration sought to "keep Tito afloat" by giving him military and economic aid.[24]
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Their lifestyle was subsidised leading to a false sense of communist, utopian prosperity. Economic problems started with the inflation crisis in 1978/79 which was mainly due to Communist economic mismanagement (it was down hill from there onwards) and then eventually civil war erupted.

Communist Yugoslav nationalistic policies is all but forgotten in the West. It was the regimes policy to create a uniform state rather than a collective of peoples. The policy was one of the great historic failures of recent times. In essence Yugoslavia was a contradiction, on one hand it had the slogan Brotherhood and Unity [25][26] and on the other hand it executed Stalinist policies from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Yugoslavia and it's interpretation of history was mainly based on historical re-writes and falsehoods.[27] It was based on the Great Union of Southern Slavs combined with Communism's grand plan for its people to evolve into a superior society (and a superior man) as a whole. It's all derived from dogmatic 19-century thinking, i.e., Marxism combined with extreme Nationalism (combined with Darwinism as interpreted by extremists i.e. German Nazism, Fascism, Communism).

It is based on a philosophy that an individual human life is without value and the culture of a society is expendable.

Note: Communist Yugoslavia executed Historian - Kerubin Segvic. He was executed mainly for proposing a different historic model than that of Yugoslav regime state policies of Croatians arriving in the Western Balkans.[28] Franjo Tudman who was the first President of Croatia, was sentenced to prison for his political activities in the former Yugoslavia.

Yugostalgia and Titostalgia

Aerial view of Marshal Tito Square-Zagreb, Croatia. (photo by Suradnik13)

In 2004 Josip Broz (the Dictator of Yugoslavia) was voted to be The Greatest Croatian. The poll was conducted by the Croatian weekly magazine the "Nacional".[29]

It is very interesting to note that Yugostalgia and Titostalgia within Croatia is still very strong even though Josip Broz Tito and his fellow Communists organised the Way of the Cross (death marches) massacres, Bleiburg and Foibe massacres and the ethnic cleansing of the German and Italian population of the former Yugoslavia. [30]

The Croatians love Josip Broz Tito so much that they have a City Square named after him, Marshal Tito Square-Zagreb (the capital city of Croatia). [31]

See also

References

  1. ^ The League of Communists of Yugoslavia
  2. ^ Discontents: Post-modern and Post Communist by Paul Hollander.
    • “Virtually every communist system extinct or surviving at one point or another had a supreme leader who was both extraordinarily powerful and surrounded by a bizarre cult, indeed worship. In the past (or in a more traditional contemporary societies) such as cults were reserved for deities and associated with conventional religious behaviour and institutions. These cults although apparently an intrinsic part of communist dictatorships (at any rate at a stage in their evolution) are largely forgotten today.”
    • “ Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Sung, Enver Hoxha, Ceascesu, Dimitrov, Ulbricht, Gottwald, Tito and others all were the object of such cults. The prototypical cult was that of Stalin which was duplicated elsewhere with minor variations. (p377)
    ”Paul Hollander Ph.D in Sociology. Princeton University, 1963, B.A. London School of Economics, 1959 Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Center Associate, Davis Center
  3. ^ Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Volume 3 by Dinah Shelton Macmillan Reference, 2005 - Political Science (p.1170)
  4. ^ www.enotes.com "Yugoslavia." Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Dinah L. Shelton. Gale Cengage, 2005. eNotes.com. 2006. 26 Jun, 2010 Yugoslavia: Genocide & Crimes Against Humanity-Mark Thompson.
    • "The killing continued after the war, as Tito's victorious forces took revenge on their real and perceived enemies. British forces in Austria turned back tens of thousands of fleeing Yugoslavs. Estimates range from 30,000 to 55,000 killed between spring and autumn 1945."
    • "Native German and Hungarian communities, seen as complicit with wartime occupation, were brutally treated; tantamount in some cases to ethnic cleansing. The Volksdeutsch settlements of Vojvodina and Slavonia largely disappeared. Perhaps 100,000 people—half the ethnic German population in Yugoslavia—fled in 1945, and many who remained were compelled to do forced Labour, murdered, or later ransomed by West Germany. Some 20,000 Hungarians of Vojvodina were killed in reprisals. Albanian rebellions in Kosovo were suppressed, with prisoners sent on death marches towards the coast. An estimated 170,000 ethnic Italians fled to Italy in the late 1940s and 1950s. (All of these figures are highly approximate.)"
  5. ^ http://www.cato.org/publications/development-policy-analysis/reflections-communism-twenty-years-after-fall-berlin-wall
  6. ^ Ethnic Conflict: Causes, Consequences, and Responses by Karl Cordell & Stefan Wolff (p181)
  7. ^ Taken: A Lament for a Lost Ethnicity by Kathryn Schaeffer Pabst & Douglas Schaeffer Pabst (p16)
  8. ^ Genocide of the ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, 1944-1948 by Herbert Prokle Web site
  9. ^ The Frontiers of Europe by Malcolm Anderson & Eberhard Bort (p77)
  10. ^ Refugees in the Age of Total War by Anna Bramwell (p136, read Zara-p137)
  11. ^ A Tragedy Revealed The Story of the Italian Population of Istria & Dalmatia by Arrigo Petacco. (p12 & read page 81 Zadar/Zara)
  12. ^ Where the Balkans Begin (The Slovenes in Triest-The Foiba Story) by Bernard Meares:
  13. ^ The Italians of Dalmatia: From Italian unification to World War I by Luciano Monzali (p17)
  14. ^ Dalmatia and Montenegro: With a journey to Mostar in Herzegovina.Volume 1 by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (p4). Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797 – 1875) was an English traveller, writer and pioneer Egyptologist of the 19th century. He is often referred to as "the Father of British Egyptology".
    • Italian is spoken in all the seaports of Dalmatia (editors note: today part of Croatia), but the language of the country is a dialect of the Slavonic, which alone is used by peasants in the interior."
  15. ^ Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic, Volume 1 by Andrew Archibald Paton (1811 - 1874) Andrew Archibald Paton was a British diplomat and writer from the 19 century. In 1861 he wrote in ; Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic: Or, Contributions to the Modern. This is his statement (p167):
    • "...the islands of Dalmatia owe much of their culture to the near vicinity of Venice and the more extensive use of the Italian language..."
  16. ^ Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical by David B. MacDonald. (p168).
    • "The Partisans also carried out massacres, best known being at Bleiburg (Austria), where retreating Croatian and Slovenian forces and their families were massacred."
  17. ^ Newcomers Network: German Mass Grave Sheds New Light on Close of World War Two
  18. ^ M & C News: Feature German mass grave sheds new light on close of World War Two (Feature) By Boris Raseta Feb 17, 2011, 2:06 GMT
  19. ^ Communist Crime is not Antifascism Released on International Human Rights Day, 10 DECEMBER 2008. On behalf of the participants in public meetings Maja Runje, a member of the Steering Committee- Zagreb (p. 19). Article is in Croatian: KOMUNISTIČKI ZLOČINI NISU ANTIFAŠIZAM] POVODOM MEĐUNARODNOG DANA LJUDSKIH PRAVA,10. PROSINCA 2008. U ime sudionika javnog okupljanja Maja Runje, članica Koordinacijskog odbora Kruga za trg10 000 Zagreb, Jurjevska 47a (str. 19)
  20. ^ European Public Hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes" (p163-p164)
  21. ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica - Slovenia (a former republic of Yugoslavia):
    • "After the armistice the British repatriated more than 10,000 Slovene collaborators who had attempted to retreat with the Germans, and Tito had most of them massacred at the infamous Pits of Kocevje".
  22. ^ The University of Western Australia (Italian Lives www.italianlives.arts.uwa.edu.au)
  23. ^ The Australian: Balkans Hero with a Bloodthirsty Streak by Ian Cuthbertson
  24. ^ Keeping Tito Afloat by Lorraine M. Lees
    • "Keeping Tito Afloat draws upon newly declassified documents to show the critical role that Yugoslavia played in U.S. foreign policy with the communist world in the early years of the Cold War." (p67, p71, p74, p83, p85, p98, p90 & p182)
  25. ^ Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation by David Bruce MacDonald (p169)
  26. ^ Brotherhood and Unity was originally a policy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
  27. ^ Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity: Volume 3 by Dinah Shelton- Macmillan Reference, 2005 - Political Science
    • "Tito's regime created an official celebratory myth about the "People's Liberation War," denying partisan atrocities and negotiations with Germans and exaggerating their role in defeating the Axis."
  28. ^ Becoming Slav, Becoming Croat: Identity Transformations in Post-Roman and Early Medieval Dalmatia by Danijel Dzino (p20)
  29. ^ www.nacional.hr
  30. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica Online-Croatian:
    • "British commanders refused to accept their surrender and handed them over to the Partisans, who took a merciless revenge. Tens of thousands, including many civilians, were subsequently slaughtered on forced marches and in death camps."
  31. ^ Wikipedia: Marshal Tito Square

External links



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