In the Sarajevo Canton Assembly, it remains impossible to pass a motion to rename streets that currently honor individuals compromised by their collaboration with the Croatian fascist occupation regime of the Independent State of Croatia. Among those commemorated are: Reis-ul-Ulema (the supreme Muslim religious leader) Fehim Spaho; Ustaša colonel Sulejman Pačariz; Mustafa Busuladžić, a Croatian conservative intellectual of pro-fascist persuasion and a member of the Young Muslims movement; Muhamed ef. Pandža, a Nazi propagandist and one of the principal co-authors of the Bosnian Muslim memorandum to Adolf Hitler; Alija Nametak, a cultural figure, writer, Croatian nationalist, and director of the Croatian National Theatre in Sarajevo; Asaf Serdarević, an officer in Pandža’s unit; and Osman ef. Rastoder, a convicted war criminal.

Additionally, a stele (nišan) has been erected for Mustafa Busuladžić at Sarajevo’s Kovači memorial cemetery, serving as one of the central monuments, with the evident aim of elevating his ideological values to a national symbolic axis. This move attempts to establish a symbolic continuity between Busuladžić and Alija Izetbegović, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Muslims (1992–1995), who also emerged from the Young Muslims milieu.

But what precisely is the ideology—or, rather, the axiology—being celebrated here?

So let us turn directly to Mustafa Busuladžić himself—a figure today remembered in broader internet circles almost exclusively for his World War II-era writings on the “greed of the Jews,” the “animalistic nature” of the Serbs, and other stereotypes that fit neatly into the postwar Izetbegović-era narrative—rather than for his core ideological framework.

Writing in the Gazette of the Islamic Religious Community back in 1938, Busuladžić observed:

“People are losing themselves in empty formalities. Boxing matches, football games, and sporting sensations occupy the minds of a vast multitude. Greed and the frantic pursuit of wealth have become hallmarks of the modern man. Slavery to material things has degraded humanity and its dignity. Economic goods have been elevated to the highest principle of life.
Extremist ideologies, whether leftist or rightist, with their one-sided views of nation or economic class, deny the very idea of man, of individuality, of freedom. The essential values that make a man human are being lost. The denial of God and spiritual reality, as well as the brutal attacks on religion, are now seen as marks of scholarship and enlightenment. The chasm of hatred and hostility is growing ever deeper.”

What we are dealing with here, then, are the standard tropes still often heard today in average sermons across mosques and churches alike: everything has gone to hell, people have lost their way, the “good old days” are behind us, the young no longer respect the old, and godless ideologies now reign supreme. However, in the context in which these words were written, they acquire a completely different, far more dangerous and destructive meaning.

For instance:

“Materialism and atheism gained dominance across broad sectors of society only with the triumph of individualist thought. Once the individual became the measure of social value, thereby undermining the natural communities within which alone it could properly develop, it used its dynamic force to destroy the spiritual order of the preceding society, which had been founded on organic rather than individualist thinking. Indeed, it is difficult for the individualist not to fall into materialism and atheism once he has overthrown so many values greater than himself. Through Marxism, moreover, materialism and atheism have come to characterize vast masses of the people.”

These words, however, were not written by Busuladžić—although he could easily have signed his name beneath them. Their actual author is Dimitrije Ljotić, leader of the Serbian and Yugoslav fascist movement “Zbor.”

Busuladžić often appears to echo Ljotić when writing about the “paradoxes of the world,” explaining that states, in fear of impending catastrophes, have turned to extreme ideologies such as communism, fascism, and National Socialism. Ljotić, for his part, writes that “both fascism and Hitlerism are rooted in the pagan concepts of ancient Rome and ancient Germany,” further adding:

“Fascism is the deification of the state. Fascists say: ‘The state is a semi-divine entity; it is omnipotent and absolute.’ But we say: ‘God forbid it should be so. The state is a human construct, necessary for the human condition. It is a tool of national destiny, but it is neither a deity nor an absolute value to which we owe worship. Above the state there are infinitely greater things to which even the state must be subordinate.’”

Thus, Ljotić’s fear of the “deification of the state” and his anti-communism find a clear parallel in Busuladžić, who warns of “ideological divisions within the Islamic world,” emphasizing that “Islam is a natural opponent of both communism and fascist-racist doctrines.”

Even Ljotić and Busuladžić’s contemporary, the Archbishop of Zagreb and future collaborator with the fascist regime of the Independent State of Croatia, Alojzije Stepinac, shared the same—still popular—narrative of the “two totalitarianisms.” Stepinac lamented the looming danger of German or Soviet domination over the world, all the while emphasizing that Yugoslavia was supposedly ruled by “Freemasons and Jews.” Unsurprisingly, he had no qualms about the Catholic Gazette, published under his episcopal blessing, serializing openly antisemitic tracts, such as Bolshevism and Jewry by Hermann Pfest, which proclaimed:

“The Jews tear everything apart, destroy everything, criticize everything. They think they know everything, yet contribute nothing good; cosmopolitans without patriotism, cunning mongrels, slithering creatures, people who are at home everywhere and nowhere.
They seek to merge all mixtures. They sell and destroy everything.”

Indeed, neither Ljotić nor Busuladžić—nor the Archbishop of Zagreb—found it particularly difficult, after all their pious lamentations over a world supposedly doomed by immorality, to choose between the “two totalitarianisms.”Their choice naturally favored the one that was evidently closer to their hearts and worldviews. Ljotić, who once styled himself a cautious patriot and utopian dreamer of a corporatist society “who is not an antisemite,” ultimately became commander of the Serbian Volunteer Corps and an ideologue who saw alliance with Hitler as the only salvation for the Serbian people—from a fate that, of course, was well known.

“Whoever, before our national catastrophe, dared to view the world not through the eyes of the English, but through the eyes of the Jews of London—not through the French, but the Jews of Paris—not through the Russians, but the Jews of Moscow—not through the Americans, but the Jews of Washington—whoever dared to see with Serbian eyes and think with a Serbian mind, was immediately branded a traitor. The Jews and their spiritual progeny—the devotees and adherents of democracy, capitalism, Freemasonry, and communism—would instantly denounce him as a traitor. They sought to silence his voice, to prevent the masses from learning the truth, to steer them away from it. Only they were not traitors—those who, knowingly or unknowingly, drove their country and their people into ruin.”

Busuladžić, for his part, just as suddenly revised his earlier musings on fascist and Nazi racism, now portraying these regimes as righteous movements—indeed, as “the reaction of the Italian and German peoples against the Treaty of Versailles.” Busuladžić’s vile references to exploitative Jews who had “disappeared from the marketplace” during the Second World War cannot be read separately from his broader geopolitical musings, in which he argued that “even before the outbreak of the present great conflict, the Islamic world was engaged in a difficult struggle for liberation against Great Britain and its allies,” a struggle in which “the spontaneous and unified political will of the Islamic peoples regarding their right to political freedom and independence—guaranteed both by history and by nature—clearly crystallized. Hence the Axis-oriented sympathies among Muslim peoples, and especially among Muslim communities in Europe, which interpreted their affinities for the Italians and Germans as reflective of the sentiments of the broader Islamic world. These communities intuitively sensed a fateful bond with Italy and Germany. Thus, Muslims in Croatia and the Balkans more generally were seen as intrinsically linked to the greater Islamic world, which closely followed the development of Muslim communities in Europe. Muslims in these lands, fully aware of their national identity—both as members of their nations and as part of the global Islamic community—reacted collectively to any danger that could directly or indirectly threaten their existence. Living at this crossroads between East and West, possessing both the dynamism of the West and the spiritual values of the East, we are destined to bridge Europe—especially Italy and Germany—with the Islamic world, to the benefit of both our countries and our religious communities.“

How, then, can we interpret Ljotić’s lament over the generations that abandoned the way of life “bequeathed to us as a sacred trust by countless generations of our ancestors” and instead began “to live the life recommended to us by them (the Jews)—a life cunningly greased, sweetened, but ultimately dishonored by the crafty Jew”—alongside Busuladžić’s poisonous commentary, written during the time of the Holocaust, that “our people fought against the Jews and their speculations, against their fraud and exploitation,” and that although “the Jews have disappeared from the marketplace, the Jewish spirit of speculation, deceit, price-gouging, and usury remains so pervasive that the corruption of certain merchants, regardless of religion, now even outshines the deeds of the vanished Jews”— other than as a logical extension of a single text, a single axiological framework? Could this all be understood as anything other than the seamless continuation of a single ideological and axiological pattern?

But what kind of axiology are we speaking of? Christian? Islamic? Or Abrahamic in general? Neither. For the Abrahamic principle cannot, when faced with a choice between communism—with all its faults—and the pagan idolatry of Nazism and fascism, adopt as “closer to the heart” something that offers freedom only to fundamentally annihilate it.
In that sense, it is entirely irrelevant whether Ljotić and Busuladžić genuinely considered themselves Christian or Islamic thinkers; for in essence, what they followed were the antimodernist ideas of the Italian fascist and pagan theorist Julius Evola, which can be summarized by his thesis that:

“When the very last remnants of the force ‘from above’—of race and spirit—have been exhausted across generations, then nothing remains: there is no longer any vessel to channel the current, which now dissipates in all directions. What follows is individualism, chaos, anarchy, humanistic hubris, and degeneration in all spheres. The dam has been breached.”

All of this was articulated by Evola in his seminal neo-pagan programmatic work Revolt Against the Modern World, a book that, in the author’s own words, was written “for a renewal beyond Bolshevik-American barbarism, beyond the materialistic and individualistic leveling, beyond the atheism of a people wielding scepter and crown, and beyond the rationalism and humanism of the profane culture of modern times.” In this sense, both Busuladžić and Ljotić must be understood as fascist thinkers, regardless of their attempts to cloak a global neo-pagan renaissance in the trappings of Christian or Islamic traditionalism and ritualism.

Thus, there is virtually no difference between contemporary commentators like journalist Hamza Ridžal, who claims that Busuladžić “turned against the partisans, believing that communism was the greatest scourge threatening humanity,” or historian Senija Milišić, who maintains that Busuladžić and his ilk were “simply fighting for their people and their faith” and “trying to stop the slaughter of Bosniaks by the Chetniks (Serbian royalist nationalists from World War II who, at first tactically, and then from 1944. completely, also collaborated with the Nazis, author’s remark)” and Ljotić’s own self-exoneration before Milan Nedić, the leader of Serbian collaborationists with the Nazis, in which he claimed that collaboration was necessary to save his people:

“We, the ‘traitors,’ are saving the heads of the Serbian people, including the heads of many ‘patriots,’ who bear the greatest responsibility for the downfall of our state and the loss of our people’s freedom.”

In the twisted, demonic logic of hypocritical and duplicitous worshippers, it is not the occupiers who bear responsibility for the loss of freedom and the collapse of the state, but rather those who, by every means available, attempted to resist them—striving to rally all the peoples of Yugoslavia to the cause, regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation (in this case — the Yugoslav communist partisans).

Just as, in Ljotić’s reasoning, polishing the boots of German soldiers who were executing students in Kragujevac (a city in Serbia where the Nazis, in retaliation, executed nearly 3,000 high school students) could somehow be rationalized as “helping the people” being exterminated for daring to fight for freedom, so too in Busuladžić’s ethical framework, serving the Croatian nazi genocidal occupation system was not seen as the basest, most immoral form of careerism, but rather as “caring for the survival of one’s own people.” According to this logic, it was not the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and its followers who unleashed the spiral of violence and horror across Bosnia and Herzegovina, but those who fought against that violence, who defeated it, and who brought its pious and humanitarian-masked perpetrators to justice.

And so, what precisely is this Ljotić–Busuladžić ideology and axiology? It can best be described as an ideology of the most abject spiritual poverty and misery, of plagiaristic anti-intellectualism, of primitive suspicion and provincial, hermetically sealed minds—minds that revel in their own narrowness, baseness, and moral corruption while cloaking themselves in quotations from sacred texts and great thinkers. It is a faith without faith, a science without knowledge, a humanism without humanity, thought without consistency—a monstrous construct designed solely to cultivate slavish characters eager to outdo one another in submission to tyranny and occupation. In essence, it embodies everything upon which the ruling ideologies on the ruins of socialist Yugoslavia have been founded. That is what they are, no matter how much they attempt to discredit each other as pro-Nazi while humanizing their own role—through the reductionism of basic facts—to the point of unrecognizability.

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