4.3.1 Jasenovac i Gradiska Stara, 2003-04
Three events in 2003—04 publicly raised the question o f whether Thompson supported fascist ideologies or celebrated the memory o f the N D H , including its terror against Serbs, Jews, Roma and political opponents. When Thompson performed in Zagreb in February
2003 to welcome the Croatian handball team, a group o f audience members greeted
Cavoglavis ‘za dom spremni’ introduction with raised-fist salutes. Venue owners asked him to cancel two concerts in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in November 2003 after protests from a Jewish group, and the incident was usually remembered as Thompson being
‘banned in the Netherlands’. Finally, the online magazine Index obtained a recording o f Thompson allegedly singing a song called Jasenovac i Gradiska Stara (Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska) about the N D H concentration-camps. Thompson claimed the scandal had been
139 If not centuries o f symbolism (Schauble, forthcoming): see W olff (1994:318-24) on Venetian ideas about the hinterland’s barbarian ‘Morlacchi’.
concocted to discredit him, but his popularity among young people was nonetheless treated as a social problem and approached the level o f a ‘moral panic’ (Perasovic 2006).
During the Index case internet users petitioned the media and Croatia Records to sever their links with Thompson, the Croatian Bishops’ Conference distanced itself from him, and several organisations including Croatian PEN and the Jasenovac museum called for the public display o f Ustasa symbols to be banned. Thompson primarily responded through his website:
I’m not the author o f those songs [e.g. JGS] but I have sung them, as we all know [...] together with hundreds o f thousands o f Croats during the Homeland War when Cetnik aggression threatened the very survival o f the Croatian state and people (Thompson.hr 2004a).
Singing ‘those songs’ to the enemy had expressed ‘spite [inat], ‘defiance [bunt] and
determination’, and successfully ‘drove fear into them’. The songs had been revived ‘[a]fter 3 January 2000 when Croatia stumbled and the Communists grabbed power’, humiliating veterans and eminent figures (Thompson 2004a). Another statement condemned the current-affairs show Latinica playing JGS over archive concentration-camp footage.
Thompson said this had ‘sent us back 40—50 years and evoked [...] the fake trials carried out after 1945 against Croatian patriots, Church dignitaries and other citizens undesirable to the then regime’ (Thompson.hr 2004b).
Speaking to Vecemji list, Thompson distinguished JGS from his own songs because it was not his ‘authorial work’ and reiterated his online statements (Oremovic 2004).
However, the limits o f his control over his star-image were evident. His interventions may have helped perpetuate the myth o f Communist persecution o f Croatian culture among his core supporters, but did not significantly affect the general public or media response.
Indeed, liberal columnists ended up with more material for their attacks: e.g., Boris
Dezulovic (2004) wrote that Cetniks could have identically justified their notorious song on entering Vukovar. Coverage o f Thompson’s next public appearance, at a fundraising concert in June 2004 to rebuild a church in Skabrnja, maintained the case’s dominant frame: how much Ustasa iconography was visible in the audience and whether the singers encouraged people to sing Ustasa songs.
Information about Ustasa songs online had been available for some time — Feral had mentioned it in 2002 — but had not previously caused any outcry (Senjkovic and Dukic 2005:44—5). Even before the Index case there had been casual press references to
Thompson singing certain N D H songs: the Herzegovinan edition o f Slobodna Dalmacija had described a Thompson concert in Mostar where many spectators brought ‘pictures o f great
Croats from Pavelic and Francetic to Tudman and Norac’ and Thompson had sung Evo t^ore (along with other songs not mentioning the N D H ) with the crowd ‘in the original, as our grandfathers also sang them in the forties o f the last century [1940s]’ (Juka 2003). The brutality o f JGS may itself have made the story more newsworthy. So too may the
Netherlands incidents, when the Thompson ‘problem’ had reflected on Croatia’s international standing.
4.3.2 The NDH in Thompson’s ideology
The ‘moral panic’ surrounding Thompson therefore involved several connected questions:140 (a) why Thompson was popular among young people; (b) why society
tolerated N D H symbols or ‘hate speech’ in public; (c) how far state institutions (particularly school history teaching) were responsible; (d) how widespread was sympathy for the N D H in Croatia; (e) whether Thompson was ‘an Ustasa’ and/or ‘a fascist’. The direct impression o f N D H revivalism at his concerts was the work o f certain concert-goers rather than Thompson himself, although Thompson had spoken approvingly o f the N D H leader Ante Pavelic on a HTV talk show in 1997. His statements about the N D H , the Ustasa
movement and Second World War history were much more revealing in the mid-1990s than later: indeed, his comments to Zeljka Ogresta in January 1997 led to HTV criticising Ogresta for encouraging the ‘impermissible glorification o f Ustasism and Pavelic’ (Lesinger 1997).141 Thompson seemed to understand Ustasism itself as a Second World War product which could not now exist in the same form, and asked ‘[hjow can I be an Ustasa when Ustase don’t exist today?’ (Lackovic 1997). However, he was proud o f receiving pictures o f Pavelic and Jure Francetic from diaspora Croats:
They always bow down to them over there. It’s like someone coming to Split and you give him a picture o f [Split’s patron saint] St Duje. I don’t know why a picture o f Ante Pavelic would bother anyone? And I don’t even know what Ustasa propaganda would be today. (Lackovic 1997)
He saw 1940s Ustase as a legitimate inspiration for Homeland War soldiers:142
140 On the wider issues, see Drakulic 1996; Irvine 1997; MacDonald 2002; Bellamy 2003; Brkljacic 2003;
Uzelac 2006.
141 However, that month HTV still showed an episode o f Smogovci ( The Smogovac fam ily) set during the Homeland War showing protagonists playing Cavoglave to captured Serbs (Lesinger 1997). Ogresta’s husband Dubravko Merlic, a HTV journalist campaigning for its independence from the state, later implied the affair might have been inflated to pressurise him into accepting a foreign correspondent’s job and thus leaving Croatia (Haznadar 1997a).
142 In 1992, the then HSP vice-president Anto Bapic had described HSP’s relationship to the NDH and
‘za dom spremni’ similarly - HOS were supposedly using it just ‘to restore the fighting spirit o f the Croatian soldier o f the Independent State o f Croatia’ (Naprta 1992c).
I think the Ustasa was a model to every Croatian soldier at that time, regardless o f where he or his granddad belonged before the war.
(Lackovic 1997)
Thompson’s family had also maintained a positive opinion o f Ustasism:
my grandfather was in the N D H army from 1941 to 1945. And in my house they always respected pravastvo [HSP ideology] and the Poglavnik [Pavelic]. (Tvancic 1997b)
In my family the Poglavnik and his idea o f the Independent State o f Croatia were always respected. I was brought up like that and I’m not ashamed o f it. (Lackovic 1997)
Thompson’s grandfather seemed crucial in Thompson’s political upbringing:
I’m just sad my granddad Simun didn’t live to see that flag [a flag o f Pavelic’s which a Croat-Canadian had promised Thompson]. My granddad died in 1990, happy to have experienced Croatia. He told me about Jure and Boban, about the Poglavnik, about Croatia.
(Pahlic 1996)
The Second World War history o f Thompson’s home village was also significant: it had defended itself both against Serbian royalist (Cetnik) forces and Communist Partisans, as acknowledged by a line on Cavoglave (2.3.4). Yet Thompson never actually identified the villagers with Ustase, and indeed stated once that it was not true ‘Cavoglave was an Ustasa village’ because the villagers had organised their own defence (Majetic 1992).
In contrast to his mid-1990s self-presentation, Thompson did not emphasise his personal or family relationship to N D H memory in 2002—04. Instead, his ideology o f national unity extended to reconciling Croats’ historical divisions because his generation had fought for Croatia, although deliberate glorifiers o f Communism remained beyond reconciliation:
why do young people wear Ustasa symbols? Well, you know what happens on HTV: you see them showing us Partisan films, you see individual politicians and presenters wearing Partisan caps [...] It’s clear that young people are revolted and want to answer that. I think they aren’t burdened by either Ustase or Partisans, but they want to be allowed to live their lives. W e’re the victorious generation which created Croatia and we’re those who should be creating wellbeing in the country, no matter what side we were on. (Kljajic 2002)
Thompson now preferred to be identified as a patriot with an audience o f patriots. His immediate reaction to the Index case was to say that ‘I’m not any kind o f Ustasa and I’ve never encouraged anyone into hatred against anyone’, but that he was constantly attacked by ‘the same team o f people who are bothered by my patriotism’ (Frlan and Strukar 2003).
After the Netherlands incident, he denied absolutely that he was a Nazi (or a Briton) as apparendy reported on television in Amsterdam, instead calling himself ‘a Croat and a patriot’ (Kasalo 2003).
Thompson’s own songs never mentioned the N D H or Pavelic as explicidy as some o f his mid-1990s interviews. The closest allusion was the ‘za dom spremni’ shout on
Cavoglave, though Thompson argued it was historically much older than the N D H . After the handball scandal, he traced it back to two great Croatian leaders:
the salute ‘za dom, za dom!’ was already used by Nikola Subic Zrinski when he breached the Turkish forces. Is he an Ustasa? Impossible, because that happened a good 400 years before the emergence o f the Ustasa movement. The salute ‘spremni!’ was already used in 1074 by one o f the greatest Croatian rulers Petar Kresimir IV, who wanted to emphasise that the Croats were prepared to defend their state from Venice. (Thompson.hr 2003b)
Whether or not certain other lyrics related to Ustase or more broadly to Croats depended on one’s historical interpretation o f Yugoslav Communism. When Thompson sang on Geni kameni that ‘[19]45 was bad, it spread us around the world’ (‘losa bila 45ta, rasula nas preko svijeta’), did he mean Ustasa loyalists regrouping in the diaspora or the Croat people escaping Tito’s political persecution? General Ivan Tolj, the Ministry o f D efence’s chief propagandist, spoke in 1996 about ‘what happened in 1945 to the Croat people, and how that hell lasted from ’45 to [19]90’ (Galic 1996), suggesting that a broader interpretation was possible. A handful o f other Thompson songs contained potential references to Ustasism: Moj dida ija (My granddad and I) remembered the same grandfather who had educated him politically, but no lyrical or visual material connected the line ‘my granddad and I, two friends/a different time, the same destiny’ (‘moj dida i ja, prijatelja dva/drugo vrijeme, ista sudbina’) to their military careers, let alone the N D H .143 The warning on Red, brate moj that ‘a heavy mist will fall again’ (‘opet ce se gusta magla spustiti’) could not be explained away quite so easily, given the similarity to the title o f the N D H song Spustila se gusta magla i^nad Zagreba (A heaiy mist fell over Zagreb) where the ‘mist’ was actually the
Poglavnik’s brave army (‘hrabra vojska Poglavnikova’).
4.3.3 Ustasa ideology in popular music
Certain other Croatian singers had identified themselves more unambiguously than Thompson with Ustasism, especially during the Homeland War. Drazen Zecic, who served in the 4th Guards Brigade and 72 Battalion o f the military police, recorded Evo ^ore 143 None o f my informants associated this with Thompson’s grandfather fighting for the NDH.
in 1992 for a market-stall cassette with a B-side called Sve do Zemuna (A ll the way to Zemun) (Pukanic 1992b).144 In 1993 Zecic called it ‘an Ustasa song which says Serbia ought to be burned down’ - which he agreed with — and said that his father had been an Ustasa
imprisoned for eight years (i.e. by the Communists) after the war. However, he denied (like Thompson) that he was an Ustasa because the term was now inapplicable:
N o, I’m a Croat, and Ustasa [is what] the Cetniks, Serbs and Yugoslav centralists [orjunasi] who wish for Belgrade call me. They used to call people who went to church Ustase. Ustase existed in 1941, now there aren’t any. (Vulic 1993)
Both Zecic and Thompson saw active service and became popular as a result o f patriotic songs, although Zecic did not incorporate his wartime career into his post-war public persona nor record patriotic music after the war.
Other performers too directly presented themselves as 1990s Ustase. A HOS member and bodyguard named Bosko Landeka, who enjoyed a brief recording career, was probably the most unambiguous ‘neo-Ustasa’ in Croatian music (2.2.6). Jadranko Lesina Panta, from Osijek, also recorded songs like Svi smo mi Ustase (We are all Ustase) for soldiers in
Herzegovina and Posavina (Rizvanovic 1994), although a few years later was performing narodnjaci (Milicevic 1998). Mario Mihaljevic, the composer o f Hrvatine and a wartime HSP press spokesman, associated himself with Ustasa tradition afterwards when he said that his Croatian football anthem ‘was based on the principles o f the greatest Croatian victorious songs, like “Evo zore, evo dana” about the knights Jure and Boban’
(Maksimovic 1997b). The above examples offered more detailed present-day support for Ustasism than Thompson’s recorded music.
Judging whether Thompson deliberately promoted Ustasism also requires a definition o f Ustasa ideology. Many components o f Pavelic’s ideology were radicalised versions o f earlier nationalist ideologies — anti-intellectualism based on an idea o f the authentic peasant nation, a cult o f statehood for which even death was an acceptable price — and its
innovation was introducing the racism o f German Nazism and Italian Fascism into Croatian nationalism (Uzelac 2006:159—60). Yet one right-wing perspective held that Ustasa symbols and fascist symbols were not identical. The writer Dubravko Horvatic distinguished them ‘because the Ustasa struggle was first and foremost a struggle against
144 An early HSP war aim had been expanding Croatia as far as Zemun, across the river from Belgrade.
An internal army report on Zecic’s brigade printed by Globus in 1999 stated: ’We all know well that Mr Zecic goes around singing even the occasional Usta§a song at his concerts in halls and nightclubs which badly damages the Rep[ublic] o f Croatia because o f the international public’ and that the battalion commander had done nothing about it (Cigoj 1999a).
Serb imperialism, and not for German national-socialism or Italian Fascism’ (Lukic 2002).
Tudman’s defence minister Gojko Susak had similarly denied that there had been a fascist party in Croatia during the N D H (Bellamy 2003:71). However, according to Ivo Zanic (1994), the practical meaning o f ‘Ustasa’ cannot be separated from its historical context and has to include the N D H ’s ‘barbaric methods’ as well as ‘the righteous aspiration for
statehood’. Two irreconcilable interpretations o f Ustasism and the N D H were therefore at work.
Thompson did not consider himself an extremist, but claimed to speak for the whole Croatian people, strongly emphasising Catholic values.145 The internal-enemy discourse throws up a paradox in claims to speak for the entire nation, since ethnic Croats who have betrayed the nation by adopting foreign goals and values are excluded from the people in practice and the nation ends up politically defined (Uzelac 2006:226—7). Thompson, Tudman, Ante Pavelic (the N D H leader) and the influential 19th-century nationalist Ante Starcevic (founder o f the first HSP) have all used this rhetoric. Thompson’s ideology has sometimes identified its enemies (HMINTs ‘antichrists, Communists and Masons’ or the
‘vampired Communists’ o f his JGS statement) and sometimes metaphorised them (e.g. as conspirators against King Zvonimir). The result is a narrative o f conflict between ‘the Croat people’ and enemies, rather than acknowledgement that one ‘people’ can
accommodate different values and political options.
A definition o f fascism like Roger Eatwell’s, which classifies it as ‘an attempt to create a holistic-national radical Third Way’ without necessarily defending ‘past dictatorships’
(Eatwell 1995:xxiii), might be wide enough to include Thompson, although his intense Catholic faith would exclude him from some wider ideas o f fascism as anti-clerical (see Griffin 1998:8). Yet within right-wing Croatian understandings o f fascism as a
foreign/transnational ideology, it would be inappropriate to classify Thompson as ‘a fascist’: his historical and political views were based on earlier Croatian ideologies, not primarily on wider European ones, and he most directly associated himself with Ante Starcevic’s ideology o f ‘pravastvo’.146 As to whether Thompson was ‘an Ustasa’, he himself publicly ruled that out as a present-day political identification. However, he did appear to come from a family background with strong sympathies for the Ustasa movement’s Second
145 Mark Biondich (2007:396) argues that Pavelic was not directly interested ‘in revivifying Croatia through Catholic principles’ but in deriving legitimacy from the Croatian Catholic Church’s support.
Catholicism seems better integrated into Thompson’s ideology than into Biondich’s instrumental view o f the NDH.
146 Yet 19th-century nationalists like Starve vie still drew on transnational thought about race and language (see Carmichael 2002).
World War role, and had also expressed admiration for Ante Pavelic in the mid-1990s. The extent to which he discussed this as part o f his public image varied with political and commercial circumstances, and became much less likely as his star status increased.
In 2006, the marketing o f Thompson’s next album illustrated the tensions between what he and Croatia Records saw as desirable meanings in his star image and the meanings drawn by many journalists and members o f the public from the components o f his star text. Although CR expected Thompson to be a first-class domestic star, the Index case had compromised his image, and in the meantime Miroslav Skoro’s success had shown that one could convey politics and war memory a similar way but without Thompson’s connotations o f extremism. Skoro’s biographical narrative was subtler, drawing on his regional
belonging more than his wartime actions. However, he expressed his chief preoccupation
— support for Croatian war crimes indictees — the same way as other patriotic musicians or non-musical campaigns for the indictees.