Pilar Ivo: Južnoslavensko pitanje (pretisak iz 1943)

Ivo Pilar: The South Slavic Question (reprint from 1943)

Dubravko Jelčić, writing about Pilar's main work The South Slavic Question, points out:

"In a long series of years, Pilar's book was really the only systematic and comprehensive, historically objective breakdown of the Great Serbian imperial idea, its genesis, its goals, its method, a book of true textbook value in the most positive sense those words, and those who were lucky enough to draw their first thorough knowledge of it, and of Croatian-Serbian relations in general during the last 140-150 years, from it, and based their orientation on the knowledge it provided them, were spared many delusions and wanderings, to which others were condemned, whose thoughts and beliefs were formed by writers of Yugoslav-Serbophile orientation, who were extended in the first, royal Yugoslavia and in the second, the Tito-communist one, even the only possible one. At the time of the first world war, when the fate of the Croatian people was also being decided, Pilar alias Südland represented mature political concepts that were fundamentally opposed to the tragic defeatism of Trumbić and Supil. Pilar knew in advance what Supilo never realized, and Trumbić saw only after his personal experience, that a Croatian-Serbian state union was possible only to the detriment of the Croats. and that, in the end, it can lead, and must lead, only to their disappearance in the face of the aggressive mythomaniac invasion of Great Serbian barbarism. Pilar, not only with a deep, sincere Croatian consciousness, but also with the sensibility of a humanist and moderate intellectual, literally made many Croats aware of and sobered up from Yugoslav drunkenness, who at any time, during the last seventy years, came to know his South Slavic question, fundamentally our work of epochal meaning, to which we do not know a better and more thorough counterpart on the subject; a work which, from its creation until today, has been literally confirmed by numerous events, without disputing it in a single detail. Today, we could cite hundreds, if not thousands, of new evidence in support of Pilar's theses, which means that his insights were not the result of intellectualist-political animosities, but, on the contrary, were deeply grounded in Pilar's book is particularly interesting to the modern reader because it shows how Serbia expanded its influence by using all the means at its disposal on the one hand, and on the other hand, Croatia's inability to oppose Serbian penetration with appropriate means and methods (Jelčić's text was published 1993), both in Serbia and Croatia, and especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with today's experience, we read Pilar's book, we are not only amazed by the shrewdness of his analyses, carried out seventy-five years ago, but also horrified by the short-sightedness of the majority of our then and later, just yesterday's politicians, in the first place those who held the main speech and did not understand either what was happening and is happening, or where these events are leading." (D. Jelčić, Pripravni za problem?, pp. 116-117 and Politics and destiny: essays, variations and glosses about Croatian politicians, pp. 229-23