History Lessons Forgotten

They are the last ones who should be playing with this fire:

Croatia probes Hitler likeness, jokes on sugar packets:

Small packets of sugar bearing the likeness of Adolf Hitler and carrying Holocaust jokes have been found in some cafes in Croatia, prompting an investigation, the office of the state prosecutor said on Monday. "The local district attorney in (the eastern town of) Pozega has opened an investigation and is currently looking at the matter," said Martina Mihordin. The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory in Pozega have confirmed the sugar packs were produced on their premises.

The incident will embarrass the government which has been keen to play down the country's past links with Nazism. Croatia's Ustasha regime sided with the Nazis in World War Two and enforced ethnic laws under which thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, as well as anti-fascist Croats, were killed in local concentration camps in 1941-45. The Jerusalem-based anti-Nazi Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement it had protested the matter to Croatia's authorities. Its director, Efraim Zuroff, expressed his "revulsion and disgust that such an item could be produced these days in a country in which the Holocaust not only took place, but was for the most part carried out by local Nazi collaborators."

"If nothing else, this is a disgusting expression of nostalgia for the Third Reich and a period during which Jews, Serbs and Gypsies were mass-murdered (in Croatia)," it said. Zuroff urged Croatia to force the factory owners to recall the sugar packets immediately, in line with a law against racial, religious or ethnic hatred.

Under President Franjo Tudjman, who governed Croatia from its 1991 independence until 1999, some of the Ustasha symbols were tolerated and their crimes often dismissed in public, which strained relations with Israel. Subsequent Croatian leaders, who set the country on the road to European Union membership, apologized publicly for the Ustasha crimes.

More like this

Have you reported this restriction of free speech/expression to Ed the Dispatcher?

Sounds like restricting these sugar packets would be a violation of the natural right of man to poke the neighbors with a sharp stick. I'm told that the proper response to poking with a sharp stick is more free speech.

Besides, don't Serbs historically exaggerate the atrocities the Ustashe allegedly committed? Even wikipedia swings wildly on the numbers.

42 members of my family, including my maternal grandparents, perished in Jasenovac. My mother spent some time there as well and lived to tell her story, both in a book and on video. I do not joke about it. And I tend to know a little bit about it, too.

I'm sorry to hear about your personal tragedy; I understand that part of the world has a large number of personal tragedies.

But I was talking more about the fluctuation in academic numbers that vary from 25,000 to more than 700,000 dead even at the US Holocaust Museum:

The estimated number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac ranges from 25,000 to 700,000.

I guess that tells us something about the academic commitment to truth. Subjective, objective, does it really matter?

I suppose that to some it matters objectively, and to others it's more of a subjective thing.