Distracted Croats
Sir: Messrs Waugh (for whose speedy recovery let us all pray) and Pivcevic are entitled to support Croatian autonomy, but the fact remains that pro-Pavelic sympathies strongly persist among exiles; for example, the affiliation of Ustasa devotees --along with pro-Codreanu Romanians— among otherwise ostensibly liberal-demo cratic members of the 'Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations', led by Ukrainians in Munich and connected with the Taiwan-based World Anti-Communist League which recently also admitted Latin American anti-semites to its command-structure.
As Elizabeth Wiskemann stated in Hitler's Europe, 'the notorious terrorist, Ante Pavelic', set up a Croat State Council, in cluding peasant leaders and German minority representatives, whose 'most positive performance' was 'an atrocious series of massacres; the Serbs in Bosnia, and Jews, wherever they were found, were the victims of the unbridled fury of the savage Praetorians of Pavelic, ably seconded by groups of Muslims': it resembled 'a new religious war' of Catholics and Muslims against Orthodox and Jews.
The relative scale in percentage of population terms, and the sadistic brutality, of the bloodbath strike many as by far the worst—anywhere—in the last war. I have seen the photos of Croatians grinning as they slowly saw the heads off the bodies of living Serb partisans. The sheer cruelty and religious fanaticism in some respects exceed that of German Nazi and Soviet Russian crimes; and the role of the Catholic clergy remains an enigma inexplicable even to those familiar with the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades, not to mention the comparatively gentle Irish conflict.
Revisionist writers like Paul Rassinier and Arthur Butz have exposed the elements of propaganda exaggeration in accounts of Nazi brutalities, but has anyone—I challenge the British-Croatian Society in your columns—ever produced a conclusive, scholarly refutation of evidence accumulated in such works as Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941-1945 by Edmond Paris and Terror over Yugoslavia by Avro Manhattan? And can Messrs Waugh and Pivcevic seri
ously deny that the later communist repressions were largely reprisals against the perpetrators of fanatical atrocities which apparently were a shock and embarrassment even to the Hitler regime?
Mosica F. Clissold Box 2832, San Diego, Ca 92103, USA
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