When a nationalist T-shirt shop and online store in the Croatian city of Split wanted to celebrate the World War II fascist Ustasa movement without getting into trouble with the authorities, it came up with a novel idea.
It created a T-shirt with a stylised letter U – which stands for Ustasa – incorporated into a Smiley-face emoticon. ‘Uncle Smiley’, it called the garment.
The shop, Patriot Hrvatska, sells a wide collection of shirts with nationalist and more or less subtle fascist motifs, including ‘Za dom spremni’ (‘Ready for the Home(land)’), a slogan used by the Ustasa movement.
The slogan – whose use is banned in certain circumstances in Croatia – is again slightly disguised in Patriot Hrvatska’s T-shirt print, which omits the word ‘home’ and replaces it with a picture of a house to avoid any potential legal consequences. Meanwhile the shop’s catalogue features controversial Croatian right-wing pop star Marko ‘Thompson’ Perkovic, who has sung for war crimes defendants, as a model.
A staff member called Filip declined to talk to BIRN about Patriot Hrvatska’s wares, explaining that “since the Republic of Croatia is not in the Balkans and thus automatically does not belong to any kind of imaginary region, I consider every conversation on the subject pointless as well as futile”.
But after the ‘Uncle Smiley’ story was reported by some local media, Patriot Hrvatska released a statement on its Facebook page saying that everyone sees the things that he or she wants to see, describing the T-shirt as “something like a Rorschach test, just with political connotations”.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
