Hundreds of drones lit up the night sky in the shape of the Virgin Mary, angels and a cross as the singer Marko Perkovic romped across the stage. Pyrotechnics sent flames and fireworks into the air. Then the distortion-heavy intro of his most famous song began its crescendo.
The huge crowd roared; flares went off. The singer, known as Thompson (after the gun), led his fans in the call-and-response war salute of Croatia’s fascist government during World War II, a regime so brutal that it shocked even its Nazi allies.
“For the homeland!” he cried.
“Ready!” the crowd responded.
For three decades, Thompson, 58, a hard-rock singer and songwriter who is a veteran of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, has used nationalist rhetoric in his songs to cast himself and fans as unapologetic guardians of Croatian heritage.
He is now attracting the largest crowds of his career, recently performing before what organizers say was a crowd of 500,000 on July 5 in Croatia’s capital, Zagreb.
At that show and at another a month later in Sinj, in the southeast, many of Mr. Perkovic’s fans wore black berets and shirts that resembled the paramilitary uniforms of the Ustashe, the fascist group that led the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Germany formed during World War II. Some shirts were emblazoned with the words of the Ustashe war salute.
The Ustashe regime’s brutality was so extreme that the Nazis’ top-ranking military commander in Croatia said they had “gone raging mad” as he witnessed scenes of mass murder, rape and torture. Historians estimate the Ustashe killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, mainly Serbs, as well as Jews, Roma and political opponents.
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The post A Singer’s Fascist-Era Salute Evokes a Bloody Time in Croatia appeared first on New York Times.
