Centre for Historical Studies, CAS Programme, JNU invites you to a
Special Lecture
on
Politics of Memory, Historical Revisionism and the Hate Speech in Croatia
by
Dr Nebojša Blanuša
University of Zagreb, Croatia
(CHS CAS Visiting Fellow, JNU)
On
25th February 2019
At
12:15 pm, room 447, SSS 3
Twentieth century history of Croatia was permeated by violent conflicts, atrocities and their afterlives. Belonging to the overlapping geopolitical regions of the Central Europe and the Balkans, on the crossroad between capitalist West and socialist East, Croatia has produced more history than it can bear and consume. A such, it was usually perceived as Europe’s inner Other, the bloodiest part of “Restern” Europe, or an intermediate area, permeated by political instability, struggles, wars, changes of borders and “spheres of influence” between imperial powers and emerging nation-states, with the climax in the dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. Rocky road of problematic political consolidation and accession to the EU, together with several other Balkan countries was perceived as its normalization, permeated by internal turmoils, conflicts and international frictions in the last two decades. Moreover, Croatia is still troubled by its violent past from the Second World War, the postwar socialist period, and recent wars.
This lecture will try to deal with those specters of the past which still haunt Croatian politics and citizens. These problems are expressed through the politics of memory and historical revisionism, which include double process of “normalizing” the neo-fascist tendencies from the Second World War together with simultaneous demonizing the anti-fascist tradition, which is often repressed and considered as historical vacuum. In that sense, constant diminishing of fascist war crimes during the Second World War, tolerance of neo-fascist hate speech, together with other political decisionstried to produce ideological continuity of today’s Republic of Croatia with the fascist puppet state Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), installed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Consequences of such political discourse are discernable today at the level of public opinion in terms of citizens’ support of public usage of local fascist symbols, legal ban on antifascist symbols, as well as attitudes toward commemorating different political traditions through the street names and monuments which celebrate contentious persons, symbols and slogans.What bothers even more is an ideological profile of those citizens who would like to preserve fascist and remove antifascist insignia.
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Dr Jyoti Atwal
Associate Professor
Centre for Historical Studies
School of Social Sciences -III
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi 110067