On May 15, 2025, exactly eight decades had passed since the end of the Second World War and the collapse of Nazi fascism on Yugoslav soil. Nearly two weeks after General Helmuth Weidling’s Berlin garrison surrendered to the Red Army, the remnants of the Ustaše-led Croatian Armed Forces (HOS) of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) continued to resist the Yugoslav People’s Army under the command of General Milan Basta, a Serb from Lika, in a desperate attempt to break through and surrender to the Western Allies in the forested surroundings of the Carinthian town of Bleiburg.

The determination of the remaining Ustaše units—who, from the earliest days of the uprising and throughout the National Liberation War, had been denied the opportunity to surrender under the terms offered to other enemy forces—to seek refuge with the Western Allies in the waning days of war and amid the foreboding onset of the Cold War, was significantly influenced by the presence of numerous individuals burdened with wartime guilt among the disorderly columns moving toward British positions in Austria. The retribution that followed against thousands of captured members of the defeated collaborationist formations—many of whom were low-ranking participants in the apparatus of the Independent State of Croatia, who had neither accepted the 1944 amnesty offered to home guardsmen nor surrendered to the Partisan forces, instead opting for emigration or continued resistance through guerrilla warfare—is now a well-documented historical fact, widely known to the public.

As long as the Serbian ordeal of 1941–1945 continues to be lightly equated with the tragic historical experiences of other nations, there will persist a failure to recognize that the Young Turk genocide against the Armenians—whose doctrinaire ideological foundation and centralized policy of extermination and assimilation served as the very model upon which Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide”—and the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, were, in terms of the intent of their architects—namely the physical annihilation of the non-Turkish population in Anatolia and the eradication of European Jewry—largely successful genocides.

Had Pavelić’s Ustaše fully realized their envisioned project of eradicating the Serbs from east of the Drina and Sava Rivers—territories demarcated by the so-called Croatian state right—and subsuming the remaining population into a multireligious, racially exclusivist concept of “people of Croatian (Gothic) blood,” the Serbian people in those regions would have shared the fate of the Armenians and Jews. Today’s generations would recall the Orthodox churches of Banja Luka, Sarajevo, and Tuzla no more than they do the Sephardic synagogues wiped from the face of the earth—at best remembered through overgrown Jewish cemeteries, like ruins left behind by Pavić’s Khazars or the citizens of Atlantis.

However, the good news from the past is that this fate did not come to pass. The Serbs drove out their executioners not once, but twice—between 1914 and 1945—all the way to Klagenfurt. The Serbian masses of Bosnia and Herzegovina did not share the fate of Native Americans, Congolese, Armenians, Jews, or Palestinians. Instead, through their organization within the Partisan movement—guided by a strategy of mass national-liberation warfare and the ideology of brotherhood and unity—they not only defended themselves against extermination, but also irreversibly dismantled the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Few nations can boast, in the annals of history, of such a victory—a triumph of self-confidence and belief in their own strength—as that achieved by Basta’s Partisans, who hailed from one of the most devastated regions in Europe, second only to Belarus. They defeated a fascist military force that had slated them and their families for death in the karst pits of Velebit, Herzegovina, and beyond.

It is, of course, hardly surprising that Serbian revisionist pseudo-historiography simultaneously clings to inflated figures—claiming a million Serbs were killed in the NDH—while diminishing the Partisan role in the destruction of that nemesis of the Serbian people. Nor does it show much sympathy for the revolutionary justice dealt to Nazi collaborators as one of the outcomes of the People’s Liberation Struggle. It would be equally naive to expect otherwise from historians with shallow bibliographies, such as Gideon Greif, whom Dodik lavishes with money in hopes of awkwardly interweaving the Serbian experience with Zionist narratives of Holocaust uniqueness, aiming to curry favor with Western “Judeo-Christian” cultural racists.

It is well known that nationalism founded on a cult of victimhood and martyrdom typically leads either to criminal revenge or to paralysis—paralyzed by the fear that the catastrophes of the past might repeat themselves. So what, in truth, have we gained from the fact that, on October 5th, 2000, the grandchildren of the Chetnik émigrés (Serbian nationalist royalist émigrés during the Cold War (editor’s note)). from the West deluded themselves into thinking they were fulfilling their grandfathers’ dreams of an American landing in the Balkans? And from the fact that today, every January 9th, in the heart of the Krajina, we hear anti-Partisan tirades that sound as though they’ve been copied straight from the émigré Ustaše press of the 1950s—out of Canberra or Toronto?

What have we gained from replacing, in the early 1990s, the victorious myth of the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB) with the defeatist myth of the Serbs as a so-called “people of the camps”—a pseudo-analog to the Jews or Armenians, the so-called “remnant of a slaughtered nation”?

We have gained both: the shame of fratricidal crimes committed against unarmed and innocent Muslims in Srebrenica and Prijedor from 1992 to 1995—ostensibly in the name of “avenging Kosovo” and preventing “another Jasenovac”—and, afterward, a new wave of victim-centered catastrophism, completely detached from any form of action (save for the desperate adventurism in Banjska), in the wake of all the defeats and setbacks in Kosovo: in 2004, 2008, 2013, and 2024… For, losing times demand losing myths.

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