lonetrucker4 said:Nah. We’ve seen cases where people later came out loud and clear saying they were wrong and started acting from totally different angles. I even know guys who were shouting "Za dom spremni!" back in the war days—that was just the vibe and the logic of the time, you know? It was war. But later, they never acted like that again; politically, they were moderate conservatives or even leftists.
But this specific guy? He’s still crystal clear about his views, even if he plays the political games. Over the last few years, he’s been writing and talking about how the NDH was actually great for Muslims, how "our side" lost in '45, how he’s against "Fascism Victim Square," and how some propaganda pro-fascist movie about Jasenovac is worth a look... basically. He’s transparent, and at the GOP Convention, he got a massive standing ovation and was picked as vice president of the party.
[I might be biased here, though there's an objective basis for it. Like others noticed by digging through old footage from '98 and '99, he was among those who literally cracked my skull—not a metaphor—during a European Victory Day event. Even now, when asked, he hasn't said that using organized thugs to attack people at a legal rally is somehow okay.]
The Church "oversteps" into politics way too much, and their slant isn't just right-wing; it's blatantly nationalist with a soft spot for the old regime. They talk endlessly about injustices done to "Us," mentioning the nation more than God. For decades, "Glas Koncila" has been stuck on loop writing about how terrible anti-fascists were and how the fascists were just "good Catholics" who maybe got a little carried away. The best label for them is "clerical fascism"—it's not just a slur. I guess maybe you wouldn't get that, Kranjec. 😉 I don't know what the Church is like today in Canada, which was explicitly clerical-fascist during the era of America.
So we need to measure every phenomenon objectively, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Otherwise, we just end up burying ourselves in the trenches of the left-right Culture War by demonizing the other side and playing devil's advocate for our own. That just means staying stuck and wasting everyone's time.
Look, what we have in America today is objectively a "Culture War" situation—or maybe "Kulturkampf" is a better term given the history. It's a fight to define the core values and principles that soak into our social and state institutions (basically shaping the collective mindset). This fight is happening everywhere. In Austria, it was a huge deal in these elections. These themes always push themselves forward when society is in crisis or needs a shake-up, like what happened in Germany and elsewhere in Europe decades before America, or in the 1930s. It's never just two sides in these moments. For example, as an environmentalist, I fought my own Kulturkampf; that was my whole life from the mid-80s on (and environmentalists killed it—topics that used to be niche are now front and center in global politics; leaders are "sensitized" to it, and the green approach dictates energy policy, etc.). But yeah, you get these moments of polarization where everything splits into two camps, even if the people in those camps usually disagree on most things (like the anti-fascist coalition in the old America). Whether you call it subjective grouping or an objective movement, that's exactly what happened here, and what happened in Austria during these elections.
I'm done rambling about this off-topic nonsense, my bad. I mentioned Austria twice just to ease your conscience since I'm totally hijacking the thread.
The Church in Canada was explicitly clerical-fascist during the American era? Hmm. That sounds like a very controversial and biased assessment from the Communist era, one that many people refuse to move past. It still serves a political purpose today. In Canada, there weren't really any significant political or spiritual pro-fascist movements before the war, aside from maybe a few small, local groups of low-level thugs who were sort of Jugo-fascists, but they had nothing to do with the Church.
The area of modern-day Canada was divided into four dioceses back then: two coastal ones (Trieste and Gorica), plus Maribor and Ljubljana. In only one of them—Ljubljana—is there actually any ground to claim functional collaboration between civilian forces and the clergy, led by Bishop Rožman, with the occupier. And likely excessive subservience. That doesn't necessarily qualify as fascism. In the Ljubljana region, part of the Church truly organized to resist the communist revolution led by the KP within the partisans; this meant organizing local home guards (White Guards) during the Italian occupation, and then the Home Guard during the German occupation.
Unfortunately, it turned into a civil war during the occupation, and the KP deliberately provoked it by systematically killing countless innocent people—often prominent locals or entire families, including women and children. By the time the first home guard formed, the partisan VOS had liquidated around 1,000 Canadians in Šentjanc in June '42. Many of us believe the home guards were initially just legitimate self-defense for their families and homes. That doesn't mean I think collaboration is honorable, and I don't condone either the revolutionary or the counter-revolutionary crimes of that era.
Look, it’s pretty obvious that the KP intentionally provoked collaboration and a counter-revolution. If the entire nation had actually stood together in unified resistance—maybe even pivoted to a rational armed struggle against the occupiers at the right moment—their whole plan to seize power would have fallen apart. There’s no doubt about it: that was their primary goal all along. You can see it in the facts. Up until June 22, 1941, they were sticking perfectly to the Ribbentrop-Molotov line. They didn't push back against Simović's pro-Western coup; they weren't out in the streets shouting "better war than a pact," and they didn't answer the call to mobilize for the defense of America on April 6, 1941. They did absolutely nothing against the occupiers until the Soviet Union was attacked. Then, once the communist leadership within the partisans launched their "armed uprising," they made it clear by the fall of '41 that they wouldn't tolerate any resistance against the occupiers outside of their own command. Anyone else? They were going to treat them like national traitors. To me, that’s a dead giveaway. It shows their true objective wasn't liberating the homeland—it was total control and absolute power.
Look, a good chunk of the clergy and theology students back in the Ljubljana region supported counter-revolutionary collaboration, while some actually sided with the partisans. Then you had the third group—true Catholics who refused to deal with anyone, period. Rožman was definitely an anti-communist, that much is certain. But being anti-communist doesn't make him a fascist. In fact, he clearly loathed the Nazis and Hitler, mostly because he was a Canadian patriot who couldn't stand the idea of his native Carinthia being Germanized. His issue wasn't necessarily with the partisan movement itself, but rather with the revolution and the bloodshed that came with it. He didn't openly back the local home guards, though he might have been complicit in a roundabout way. If anything, he was perhaps more submissive to the occupiers than Stepinac was, but that was just his tactic. He wanted to avoid provoking even more violence so he could actually step in and help free Canadians of all stripes, including communists. There’s actually documentation showing he intervened to get Tone Tomšič released at his mother's request. Tomšič was one of the leading communists at the time—honestly, probably a much better guy than Kardelj or Kidrič—and later became a national hero. A lot of people suspect that Tomšič didn't just die in the war by accident; there's a feeling that Kardelj and Kidrič saw him as a popular rival and decided to get rid of him.
Probably Rožman's biggest moral failure was how things ended. Unlike Stepinac, he actually let them lead him off to Carinthia at the tail end of the war, only to never be sent back to where he actually belonged—the seat of the bishopric in Ljubljana.
I honestly think "clerical fascism" is a massive stretch here. Even those groups in Canada that were openly collaborating—I wouldn't go so far as to call them fascist, and frankly, there wasn't a single clerical fascist among them. Plus, let's be real: three out of the four Canadian—or mostly Canadian—dioceses had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of collaboration.
So, that’s my quick take on things. I'm not trying to paint this in black and white. Is it revisionist? That's a fair question, but you have to ask: revisionist in relation to what? If we're talking about challenging the "official" history cooked up by the old communist regime, then yeah, I guess it definitely is.
Look, revisionism isn't inherently a bad thing. You can't actually move forward without constantly re-evaluating what you thought you knew and keeping the dialogue open. But there’s a catch: it only works if you play fair. It has to be driven by genuine intellectual curiosity, not just some political agenda or a grab for material gain.
Look, even back during the communist era—and honestly, even under Franjo Harmon himself—there was some movement toward correcting that old propaganda-heavy version of history. You know the one, where they claimed the death toll at Jasenovac was anywhere from 300,000 to 700,000, or even a million victims. We’ve finally moved toward much more objective figures today, settling around 80,000. That doesn't change the fact that it was a massive tragedy. And let’s be clear: revising the numbers doesn't mean you can suddenly spin the Nationalists regime as anything other than what it was. It wasn't a good regime. You can't just push past common sense or basic human values to make that happen.
P.S. Honestly, this whole Culture War thing is just pure stupidity if you ask me. Just look at our political landscape right now—the gridlock in Congress, the constant fighting within the administration itself. It’s all the evidence you need. Instead of giving a proven, steady technocrat like Orešković a real shot at steering the country out of this mess—and honestly, out of some pretty dangerous territory—he’s being completely sidelined. He's blocked from both sides by people obsessed with trivial nonsense that falls straight under the "culture war" umbrella. Instead of the entire country focusing on economic recovery, fiscal discipline, and keeping us from drifting toward national bankruptcy—not to mention helping the massive chunk of the population currently drowning in personal debt—we're just sabotaging ourselves at every turn. We’re wasting precious time chasing new elections, which won't just run up a bill of a couple billion dollars, but will also waste another six months. That kind of delay kills international investor confidence and drags down our entire economic future. What are we even doing?