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295 w riting in May 1941, Ivan Šarić, bishop of Sarajevo, nostalgically recollected his clandestine meetings with Ustashas in South America in the 1930s. He recalled the Ustashas he had met as “good and self-sacrificing believers, men of God and the nation.” For their part, he wrote, the Ustashas were attached to their priestly followers. In their priests, he wrote, Ustashas saw a reflection of the nation and themselves.1 In fact, such faithful sons of the Catholic Church were they that, while incarcerated on the Island of Lipari , they built a church in which the local bishop blessed them, coming to see them as model Catholic men.2 Many Catholic commentators echoed these sentiments. Writing in Vrhbosna in April 1942, on the first anniversary of the state, Dragutin Kamber, a priest and Ustasha official in Bosnia, stated that the Catholic Church had welcomed the creation of the state with ecstasy because it knew that “hundreds of thousands of Ustashas” were the best Catholic believers.3 For the Catholic journalist Antun Jerkov, meanwhile, Ustasha soldiers were the most pious children of God, fighting for the victory of his morality. He described a soldier he had seen in the Shrine of the Immaculate Heart, his head bowed, carrying a rosary and prayer book in his callused hands, gazing at the altar: “In the convulsions and torture on the cross of the crucifixion of Croatia, a generation arrived in the world by the will of Providence . God’s avengers, heroic and noble, who in Christ’s name accepted the struggle for the victory of His principles and the freedom of the Croat HomeChaPTeR 6 “AN UNCEASING SEA OF BLOOD AND VICTIMS” The Cultural Politics of Martyrdom and Moral Rebirth 296 “an Unceasing sea of blood and victims” land. The greatest sons of our nation arrived to fight until complete victory.” The Catholic faith of the Ustashas enabled them to die with a smile on their face as Christ the King “lifted high the Croatian banner baptized in sprinkled Ustasha blood.”4 At the same time there was a sharp contrast between the extreme violence of Ustasha death squad members and their professed Catholic piety. Ustasha propaganda proudly declared that the most zealous members of Ustasha militias were seminary students and undergraduates of the theological faculty in Zagreb. These were the “nests” of the “seminary generation,” Ustaša declared, from which had emerged the new generation of Ustasha warriors.5 However, despite the apparent contradiction, the regime’s extreme violence and its pietistic outlook were inextricably linked. Its ideology glorified violence and killing as well as self-sacrifice and self-denial, and its rituals and imagery were infused with the mystic and sacral language of martyrdom, death, and resurrection. Although the Ustasha movement was not religious or led by priests, it nonetheless saw itself as a crusading organization that would return the nation to moral purity and virtue, reversing twenty years of Yugoslav liberal secularism. Through its cult of death, influenced by Balkan rituals of death, burial, and mourning, it created a form of “village Catholicism ” combining pagan customs with Roman Catholic traditions to form a new set of legitimizing rituals and ceremonies. Irrespective of its secular aims, the Ustasha regime’s mystical rites and festivals, apocalyptic language, and glorification of martyrdom and death reflected a religious attitude to life common to all fascist movements. Nevertheless, the sacral elements of the regime’s cultural politics—the cult of death and self-consciously religious image—also had strongly instrumentalizing uses. Through invoking the sufferings of Ustasha martyrs, the regime aimed to remind ordinary Croatians of the indignity and injustices the nation had endured in interwar Yugoslavia. The inculcation of a public culture of commemoration involving mass ceremonies in which the entire population could take part provided the regime with a collective means of legitimation . Through ritualized demonstrations of mourning such as the Day of the Dead and the Day of the Croatian Martyr, the Ustasha regime was not merely enacting the symbolic burial of interwar Yugoslavia but also reinforcing popular perceptions and memories of oppression under Serbian rule; it was also institutionalizing the monumental sacrifices Ustasha martyrs had made for national liberation. These served to reinforce the national myth, assiduously propagated by the regime, that throughout its history Croatia had only managed to liberate itself through the sacrifice and blood of its national leaders, something to which all Croats should aspire. Through public participation in the sacralization of politics, the masses would be...

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