Source: Politics<\/p>\n
BELGRADE, Serbia \u2014 When Croatian supporters flooded Toronto and Philadelphia this summer, draping city halls in the red-and-white checkerboards found on the Croatian coat of arms and belting out one power ballad after another, the loudest songs, as always, belonged to Marko Perkovi\u0107.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s become an inseparable phenomenon anytime Croatia plays or participates in any kind of competition, especially sporting events,\u201d said Hrvoje Klasi\u0107, the leading Croatian historian focused on the legacy of World War II.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople both at home and abroad view him as synonymous with love for one\u2019s country,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
Better known as Thompson, after the submachine gun he carried in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he is the country\u2019s most popular singer \u2014 and its most enduring embarrassment.<\/p>\n
Croatian fans have made his song, \u201cLijepa Li Si,\u201d the unofficial anthem of the team and a fixture at every match, a song whose chorus salutes the wartime Croat statelet in Bosnia whose leadership was convicted of war crimes.<\/p>\n
Thompson\u2019s wider catalog is more explicit still. One track opens with \u201cZa dom spremni,\u201d the salute that functioned as Croatia\u2019s answer to \u201cSieg Heil\u201d during the World War II Ustashe regime.<\/p>\n
In the past, his concerts have been banned or canceled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Germany.<\/p>\n
None of this is fringe within Croatia, however. Last summer Thompson drew more than 500,000 people to a single Zagreb concert, the largest in the country\u2019s history, where fans chanted the same Ustashe slogan while the authorities looked away.<\/p>\n
In 2018, when Croatia nearly won the World Cup, the second-placed team was welcomed back with Thompson aboard the victory bus and star midfielder Luka Modri\u0107 personally asking for him to perform.<\/p>\n
Croatia has spent three decades declining to reckon with the Ustashe past, treating the fascist puppet state\u2019s symbols as heritage rather than crime.<\/p>\n
Across post-communist Europe, the end of the Cold War brought a wave of historical revisionism, as nations that felt their identity had been suppressed under communism recast neo-Nazi and far-right figures as patriots. Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as Croatia, have all made a version of this bargain, folding once-condemned nationalists into their modern national myths.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese nations believe they were robbed of their national identities in the past century or are dissatisfied with their country\u2019s present achievements, so they reach back into the past for themes from a more distinguished past,\u201d Klasi\u0107 concluded.<\/p>\n