Erceg Heni: Sir, vrhnje i fašizam

Heni Erceg: Cheese, vhnje i fascism

This book contains a selection of texts written from 2008 to 2019 for the Slovenian weekly Mladina, whose oppositional independence has been going on since the eighties of the last century, from the time of Yugoslavia. It was, along with Senad Pečanin's Dane from Sarajevo, the only newspaper whose editors invited me to cooperate after the closure of Feral Tribune. Namely, in Croatia, such a thing was not possible. We are talking about the choice of mirrors whose common thread, in my opinion, points to the reasons why Croatia is still a democratically insufficient state, a state that does not respect minority rights, especially those of Serbian citizens, a state of hatred, buried in nationalism, clerical conservatism, inclined to teach and raise generations on the negation of historical facts, that is, on historical revisionism. I wrote, therefore, mostly outside of daily political topics, about the permanent danger of national exclusivity, about the reluctance of the judiciary to prosecute "our" war criminals, thus sending the fatal message that crime pays off, about political elites, mostly right-wing ones, based on the false myth of the Father of the Motherland, Franjo Tuđman, who, along with academic elitists, are the most responsible for the state, whose most important symbols are still the War and the Nation. Državu koja svojim upornim njegovanjem romantičnog odnosa prema zločinu ustaške Nezavisne države Hrvatske, poricanjem antifašizma i veličanjem zločinaca iz zadnjeg rata u Hrvatskoj i Bosni, okuplja zajednicu nesretnog naroda, zaluđenog pogrešnim, anticivilizacijskim vrijednostima. Today, it seems to me that this abundant reading is actually the result of many years of writing one and the same text, and that it can serve as a warning about how easy it is, in the blink of an eye, to turn from an apparently acceptable nationalism — as if such a thing were possible at all — to fascism and all the evil it entails. There is so much resignation in writing about the State of Illusion, a self-sufficient construct for the ruling predators and the silent mass of petty citizens for whom cheese and cream are national pride, and a Serb neighbor or some migrant is a national plague. Because how far, if at all, have we moved away from that ancient Krleža Croatian tavern from which "you can hear the song of drunkards and the echoing of the slurred and torn stanza 'that the Croats love their people'..."?