I am NOT a communist. I had to say that right away because these days almost everyone connects the "Internationale" to the communist movement. But that's because very few people know that the song was in both the Baptist and Methodist hymnals in North America quite sometime before the modern communist movement sprang up. The song is about brotherhood and holding hands across all social boundaries in a spirit of cooperation for the good of all. All in all, unless you are an avowed autocrat, the "Internationale" is really a wonderful song no matter what your politics. Its too bad politics has marginalized the song in a lot of the West.
I'm putting the "Internationale" here for the sake of one very wonderful young person still full of ideals. I was young once and full of ideals. I'm not young any more but guess what? I'm still brimming with ideals. My young friend, you know who you are. This is for you. I saw that you did not have the "Internationale" on Croatian language, so this is for your collection. By the way, you can not watch this on my channel. You have to have the URL to see it, or watch it here.
The first image is Marshall Tito who led the Balkans in the quest to throw out the Nazis and the Fascists of all sorts. Then there is the Bleiburg Memorial commemorating the deaths of perhaps a million Croats many of whom were also idealists and dreamers. They had dreamed of an independent and free Croatian nation after nearly a thousand years of foreign domination. History precluded them from trusting the Americans or the West. They trusted someone who, as it turned out, was not to be trusted. Their dream turned into a nightmare - and for this they were massacred.
And then there is another image of Tito followed by the flag of the new dream, a "people's" dream. Look at the flag again please. The traditional red and white checker board is missing. We are asked to follow the dream of the "Internationale" without being allowed to be us. How can we stand with the nations of the world when we have disappeared from among them?
Came the spring. The Croatian Spring. Savka Dabčević-Kučar was the first female head of state in Europe outside the monarchical system. Woot!!! We Croats were way ahead of the game! Savka made a mistake. She trusted the people. For this she was asked to resign her position.
Are you beginning to get the picture? The people's" government couldn't stand one of the "people" who trusted the people. In a way they were right, you know. The people can't be trusted. Ooops, that sounds so un-marxist, but that's the one place Marx went wrong. The people, not any of them, not any one person even, is to be fully trusted. The Holy Scriptures say "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." The Scriptures are right in this of course. All.
So now there are two choices left. One is to accumulate all the power into the hands of one, or a few. Bam! That's fascism. That's what happened, and in the Balkans, Fascism wore a Red Star on its cap.
The next image is an image of the water tower at Vukovar and shots of the Vukovar monument commemorating the atrocities committed there in the name of the people against the people.
Next you see a photo of a young man half carrying an old man who is a victim of the aggression against the people. Then you see some soldiers escorting some young men out along a road way and then you see the shadows of the soldiers as those same young men lay there dead, executed, massacred. The old man in the graveyard, Srebenica, the woman weeping tell their own stories. Don't see these as just some Muslim radicals like the ones who did the Twin Towers or someone from Grozny. These people are Hrvatski just like us who happen to be Muslim largely because of history. They are ours, people like us, and they were killed because of that.
The power was collected into a central government controlled by people not like us who wanted our language, our history, and our churches and mosques and synagogues to disappear into thin air. And they didn't mind a bit if we disappeared too. I'm not blaming the Serbs. That's not it. Read a couple of posts back where I commemorate the life of a wonderful Serbian singer. I am not anti-Serb. Its not the Serbian people who are to blame. I am blaming the system. The system did not respect the people and did not trust the people to take care of themselves like they had always done for thousands of years. We Croats had our selo system long long before Marx thought it up. We predate him in this by about three thousand years so don't nobody go telling us how to do this. For us, Marx is kind of like Al Gore "inventing" the internet. We know how to do communal when its in our interests to do communal and we know how to do it individually when that's best too. The problem here is that the central system felt threatened by us and so it had to kill us. Fascism wore a red star in its cap.
A better system would be to see the people as sovereign, to keep the government severely limited, to stay out of the people's business, to trust the people, and to let the people do their own thing in their own best interests the way they want to do it. Until we have this, the dreams and the ideals of the "Internationale" are just idle dreams and nothing more but idle dreams that lead to a swath of dead bodies and tears.
Canovals a.k.a. Slavonac
7 Listopad 2011
