In early May, numerous ex-Yugoslav media recalled the fortieth anniversary of the death of Josip Broz Tito . On that occasion, the newspapers always turned over the same factual line and always the same archive recordings. And among those recordings, inevitably was the most delicious, the most famous, shown so many times: and that is the moment of the announcement of Tito's death in Split's Poljud.
You know what happened there - you know that and you who weren't there then, as I know who - well - I did. When the news was announced that the Yugoslav ruler had died, there was silence, followed by a mass sob. Then the singing "Comrade Tito, we swear to you / not to deviate from your path" started at the stadium. All four tribunes of Poljud sang like that, players cried, coaches cried, mascaras flaked down women's faces, and one city and one stadium swore they would never let down a great leader. As we know, this was the case of the most massive perjury in known history.
Today - forty years later - it is easy and effective to describe this perjury. "Red Split" has - as we know - become "black Split". The fortress of partisan heritage became the city of the Ustashas, the city of militant secularism is now the city of Don Delas. In the meantime, at the same stadium where Tito was swearing, "for-home-ready" was chanted at least three times, and fans of the same club that defected to Tito on Vis are now regularly photographed on Facebook with a swastika and an eared U. I never understood how to smell it’s in your brain when you’re an Ustasha and a fan of a partisan club, but it obviously works somehow, when there are those who don’t mind so much.
This transformation of red into black city, partisans into Ustashas and titophiles into fans of Kuščević's grandfather is often the subject of journalistic horror and popular, amateur sociologization. It is interpreted in some way, from the immigration of a new population to deindustrialization or a change in mentality. The implied premise of all these theories is that the city, the region, and the country have changed greatly. No one, however, is inclined to test the opposite hypothesis.
That - in fact - they remained the same.
In 1980, my city celebrated the recently deceased Great Leader. It celebrated the leader of the last glorious war. It was a gesture of mass support for the then ruling ideology, which was always backed by the same ruling party, a party that drew legitimacy from the last war. Today - 2020 - Dalmatia (and not only Dalmatia) once again celebrates the cult of the late great leader. Even today, it massively supports the ruling party, which draws the legitimacy of its rule from the last war. And then sport was a toy of ideological legitimacy, it is still today. And then the opportunistic, mass majority languished in the rotten warmth of the ruling ideology, as it does today.
And then that majority knew how to opportunistically play the waltz with the ruling order, as it knows today. At that time, they knew how to join a party, pull the sleeve of an uncle's secretary, take a social apartment, take a job in an inflated industrial bonanza, they could slip opportunistically down the hair system and compose a comfortable, Biedermeier life made up of union halves, going to the House of Flowers and the celebration of March 8th. Even today, the same silent majority knows how to join a party, pull the sleeve of a guardian uncle, know how to employ a niece in Croatian Forests or some agency, know how to arrange a pleasant, Biedermeier life made up of communion, Vukovar processions, banner parties and After Confirmation Party. Both epochs have a cult of a long-ago war, and both live in an extended militarized reality,
Therefore, the story of the Croatian transition is not just a story of discontinuity. It is even more a story of continuity. The story of young swastika lovers living in a socialist apartment in a socialist skyscraper, of former industrial workers living off renting a socialist cottage, all together has meanwhile become Thompson's fan base, and somewhere at the bottom of the cupboards would probably be dug up by his father's party, or youth , or union booklet. Everyone here has grandparents and great-grandparents partisans. Kerum , Kuščević and Thompson also have partisan grandfathers, but they do not mention them, they treat them as valdamortes. As other political colors are worn, Kuščević's apartment does not have a picture of his aunt who died in Sutjeska, but a picture of "the other one", the one from Bradina.
These days, Jutarnji list published an article from which we learned that the flag bearer of the national reconquest is Miroslav Škoroamong those who - lo and behold - lived in communion in beautiful coexistence. Our Osijek colleague Patković published a newspaper article from 1985, which shows that the future national troubadour was then a young activist of the Alliance of Socialist Youth and that as an agile SSO member he was in charge of musical life. I will say right away - from everything I've heard so far about Škoro's life history, this new information is by far the most sympathetic to me. The fact that young Škoro spat in his hands to fix the fun life in his boring hometown is one of the few positive episodes in the life of a man who escaped the war when he was in trouble, then took a diplomatic sinecure from the HDZ and who until yesterday rented people with too expensive parking in front of the Zagreb hospital. After reading the article, I thought I had found at least something in Skor’s biography that I like.
And Skorin's "coming out" from the closet of the socialist youth is just new in a series of similar ones. Bora Cosic wrote an excellent novel "The Role of My Family in the World Revolution" a long time ago, probably not even imagining that in a decade we will read a feuilleton novel entitled "The Role of Croatian Rightists in the World Revolution". As soon as we found out how Comrade Škoro organized the guitar festivals, a picture of Nin Raspudić coming out on a portal during the blockade of the Faculty of Philosophy in 2008 led a debate with a Palestinian scarf and a T-shirt with the inscription "Cuba". Shortly before that, the media revealed that the leader of a hard veterans' association from Koprivnica, as a factory journalist, had written moving essays about going to Tito's grave. They discovered that the conservative historian was Ivo Banacas a student he published Maoist essays in the student newspaper. That Hloverka Novak Srzić published panegyric essays about Tito. That Josip Jović, as the party secretary, publicly opposed the elections with several candidates. That Dario Kordić walked around Sarajevo with a knitted sweater with the Yugoslav flag. Many similar things have appeared in the Croatian media in recent years, so there was a picture of a tent puppet Đuro Glogoški leading a party meeting in Tito's Baranja village, which is now called Ivanovac, formerly called Jovanovac, and even earlier called Johannesdorf. Even the name of the village in our country is convertible, so how the hell wouldn't people be?
Every time the media in our country discover such a convert prehistory of a prominent ideological or political figure, the celebration on the opposite ideological side begins. It is as if it is implicitly implied that the discovery of "early works" will severely harm the political integrity of Comrade Škora, or Comrade Jović, or Comrade Raspudić. However, such thinking is completely wrong.
No voter belonging to the famous "silent majority" will resent Škori in the least for being an active youth, just as Raspudić will not resent the Palestinian scarf or Kordić's knitted Yugoslav sweater. No, simply because they are like that themselves. And that mysterious member of the conservative silent majority has gone through his ideological arc that connects point by point one opportunism with another opportunism. And this implicit conservative Croatian voter remembers the times when he moved into a communist skyscraper, when he went on communist union trips, got communist halves from the union, when he sent children to pioneers and ran away from work in a factory at three to build a cottage with inflationary credit. He himself knows that somewhere in the thick corner of the cupboard he has Tito's badge, a pioneer scarf or a commendation from the quiz "Tito-revolution-peace".
He also remembers the time when, through his friend Stanko or uncle Pavle, he solved the telephone connection, or the student dormitory for his daughter, or to bring them electricity in a wave on Šolta. Of course, he will not be too happy to mention it, he will place these episodes in his life in a hidden corner, as Kuščević swept the ancestor from Tjentište into a corner. But he knows full well that everyone is bloody under the skin, so if you don't take him for evil in 1985, he won't take another Škori either. And that is exactly the behavior with which this country has decided to live. We exchange washed, polished, lying versions of history, fabricated biographies, and fabricated continuities with each other, just as, as Koltès would write, the poor exchange bags of rice. In this multilateral exchange of lies, Škoro is just a liar of a smaller caliber, undoubtedly smaller than many giants of Croatia who will be on his list.
As a politician, Skoro is happy and often appeals to the people. Like all populists, people gladly take it in their mouths in the first person plural. In a way, it can be said that only now - when we have learned its socialist realist history - Skoro is entitled to it. It can only be seen now. Indeed: Comrade Škoro is an authentic representative of the "people"
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