Between 1941 and 1945, the partisan fight led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia grew into Europe’s biggest popular uprising against fascism. The people’s liberation struggle fought not only against the German and Italian occupation, but also the domestic traitors and collaborators of the Ustaše and the Chetniks. This was, at the same time, a fight for social revolution, the democratization of the economy, and the complete emancipation of a semifeudal and largely illiterate society.

Despite these successes, historical revisionism is today rampant in the former Yugoslavia. It is most visible in the relativization and denial of the crimes perpetrated by fascist movements, which works in tandem with a mounting hostility toward national minorities and migrants, and a steady rise of the Right, also characteristic of most European countries today. But this process first began with the mass destruction of anti-fascist monuments — in Croatia alone, more than 3,000 monuments have been destroyed.

This has meant criminalizing the partisans who helped liberate Yugoslavia from fascism, exaggerating the number of their “victims,” and equating socialist Yugoslavia with fascist and Nazi regimes — all counted as bloody totalitarianisms. Recently, there has been a relegitimization of the Ustaše salute “Za dom spremni!” (“Ready for the Homeland!” — the Croatian version of the “sieg hail”): it appears, for instance, in a song by far-right singer Marko Perković Thompson, but has also been used by some politicians and war veterans.