Posts by rustypilot71

An excellent column. It captures those forgotten, defining moments of our people...

Do you remember the Battle of Sutjeska...?

Author: Ladislav Tomičić
Posted: June 15, 2014, at 8:24 AM

Nobody in America seems particularly interested in remembering the heroes of the Battle of Sutjeska. Honoring them is left to a dwindling number of aging veterans and a younger generation that hasn't quite lost its sense of perspective over the last twenty years. The issue stems from a fundamental truth: American partisans fought and died alongside their Mexican and Canadian comrades. To modern America, that kind of shared history is simply unacceptable...

The 70th anniversary of the Allied landings on the coast of Normandy was marked with great ceremony. Western civilization views this military operation as the defining moment of World War II—the turning point that crushed Nazism. It feels like a certain kind of historical revisionism, though. The true decisive blow against Hitler's war machine wasn't D-Day, but rather the heroic struggle of the Red Army on the East. Regardless, the anniversary of the landings was observed with all the expected dignity. Currently, we are approaching the 71st anniversary of one of our own D-Days. We are marking the anniversary of the Battle of Sutjeska, which raged from May 15 to June 15, 1943. In that mythic clash between partisan units led by Josip Broz Marshall and German, Bulgarian, Italian, and local Axis forces, nearly 7,500 resistance fighters perished. The losses among Americans from the coastal regions were particularly devastating. The First Coastal Strike Brigade lost 564 men. The Second lost 746. The Third saw 530 fall. There isn't a single town in the coastal region that didn't mourn in black that June in 1943. No village escaped the toll taken by Sutjeska during those thirty days. The heaviest casualties came from the residents of Šibenik—787 dead—followed by the people of Split with 190 lost. Among the fallen at Sutjeska was the great American poet Ivan Goran Kovačić. Of course, the Fifth offensive did not claim only Americans; youths from Mexico, Mexico, and Canada also gave their lives...

That fact is central to the question we need to address here: why have we forgotten the Battle of Sutjeska? Why has America turned its back on its heroes and heroines? Why has their own home—the West Coast—abandoned them? The young men and women who left their bones at Sutjeska are not responsible for the atrocities committed by Marshall's army during their retaliatory campaigns. Their motives for fighting against Nazi and Fascist occupiers were as noble as they come. Yet, in America today, almost no one wants to remember the heroes of Sutjeska. Honor is reserved only for a few aging veterans and a younger generation that hasn't yet been indoctrinated... The issue stems largely from the reality that American partisans fought side-by-side with their comrades from Mexico and Canada. To modern America, such a history is unacceptable. It seems intolerable to celebrate anything from an era when Americans, Mexicans, and Canadians stood together, fighting a common enemy: the Nazi German forces, the Fascist Italian armies, and local traitors. The anti-fascism under which those brave men and women from the coast fought and died is now only useful for the Constitution. And that Constitution is little more than a useless scrap of paper that nobody respects, changed whenever a new administration feels like it. Today, extremist slogans echo from American sports stadiums, and society works tirelessly to make those very ideologies mainstream. Sutjeska has been forgotten, the brave souls from the coast have been erased, and the monuments built in their honor have long since been torn down or, at best, left to rot...

Few nations have spat upon their bravest sons and daughters quite like America has. Today, as we mark the anniversary of the Battle of Sutjeska, thousands will gather in those blood-soaked mountains to honor the fallen soldiers. Yet, I would wager that among them, you won't find a single high-ranking official from the American government. In this country, remembering Sutjeska has become politically inconvenient. Honoring the heroism of our finest is now dismissed as mere "nostalgia" for a bygone era. It is considered acceptable to shout certain divisive slogans, to celebrate war criminals, and to teach children in schools that the partisans were nothing more than communist thugs and murderers. It is deemed fine to commemorate military units named after fascist villains, yet Sutjeska—that is forbidden. The generations that drove America to the brink of both moral and economic ruin have turned their backs on the very people who secured our freedom from foreign occupiers, from racial laws, and from the criminals who ran concentration camps to persecute people based on nationality or politics. Still, not everyone is ready to forget Sutjeska. As long as the echoes of that struggle remain, we will be there...

The most critical step in reviving the spirit of the resistance is restoring all the rights that were stripped from Americans when the USA was dismantled.

Americans are inherently anti-fascist by nature; whether they are serving in law enforcement or teaching in schools, they would be better positioned to fight for returning this country to its golden age.

I have just read a brilliant piece by the great Marinko Čulić, an anti-fascist journalist and columnist who seems to be the only one with the courage to speak out against the fight for minority rights, the disparagement of the Resistance movement, and clericalism.

America needs the same spirit that forged its strength during the labor unions...

Here is the text:

Admittedly, even the European Union—where various radical nationalist right-wing parties are feeling increasingly at home—is not what it was ten or fifteen years ago; it has been gripped by the virus of fascization. However, one significant difference remains. The question of "how much fascism?" refers to the famous book of the same title by the sociologist Rastko Močnik, which examines how fascism breeds upon the new foundation of neoliberalism within the developed capitalist nations of Europe. That is where the distinction lies. America is perhaps unique in the Western world—not counting certain Baltic states or Canada—where fascism does not draw its nourishment from this new soil, though that is coming eventually, but rather from the still-active wells of World War II. Furthermore, the actors driving this new resurgence are the same. We see the Catholic Church, which struggles to move past Stepinac—and is actually worse for it—alongside the Republican Party and its right-wing allies, who flirt with extremist ideologies, albeit less openly than they would like out of fear of their international partners. Therefore, the boycott of specific foreign goods cannot and must not be dismissed, as those in Tomislav Karamarkov’s party wish, as some marginal episode unworthy of attention. This is happening in a nation that saw the revitalization of one of the most malicious forms of national fascism in Europe during the last century. Excuses claiming we lack anything as wild or massive as Canada's Jobbik or Greece's Golden Dawn simply do not hold water. Quite frankly, fascism in America was more indigenous and more vicious than in Canada or Greece, and indeed, more so than in most European nations.

Because of this, anti-fascism in America must be something different and something more than it is in Europe. Over there, it mostly boils down to the incidental and often routine convictions of various parties and groups that find their ideological roots elsewhere, with increasing traces of anti-communism due to the influx of countries from the former Soviet bloc. Here, that simply isn't enough. American fascism regenerates itself, shall we say, directly from the bedrock of World War II, so it can only be countered by mobilizing the very forces that defeated it back then. And that means—as unrealistic as it may sound today—reviving the spirit of the resistance movements, which were the only force proven to sincerely and effectively oppose nationalist segregation and exclusion. Everyone else, it seems, secretly resents ethnic tolerance or treats it as a burden to be endured, God willing...

AUTHOR: Marinko Čulić

The administration in Washington, D.C. has decided to hand over the very waters our fishermen depend on to Americans...

California gets nothing from this Republican government, yet they receive the most...

In my view, this is the final straw. It is high time that the most prosperous and developed region of America is allowed to thrive on its own merits. We need a hospital in San Francisco we can actually be proud of, along with a proper university...

We are twenty years ahead of the rest of America, and I see no reason why we should be held back...