The Croats are a South Slavic ethnic group– and I hate to sound like a broken record, but if you think all Slavs are a single unified culture, see what happens if you mistake one Slavic group for another to their faces (spoiler alert: they don’t like it). I’m still studying up on the history of Croatia, since it’s not the kind of thing they taught me in Seton Home Study School and since histories from that part of the world are extremely complicated– imagine if the Wars of the Roses lasted for a thousand years. But so far I’ve gleaned that, though the Nazis viewed Slavs as sub-human in general, they declared Croatia “more Germanic than Slav.” It probably helped that Croatia was engaged at the time in a massive and barbaric genocide against the various minority white European cultures living in that one country, the savagery of which reportedly even stunned some of the Nazis. You couldn’t have said “White European Culture” in 40s Croatia and been understood. I don’t know if the Cvjetanovics themselves counted as “more Germanic than Slav” at the time, and what’s more I’ll bet Peter doesn’t either.
Looking at that one bit of Croatian history just cements my point: historically, the people who wanted something like a single “White European Culture,” intended to get it by murdering most of the cultures in Europe. There has never been one “White European Culture.” There have been Europeans with light skin, of various diverse cultures, usually in bitter rivalry with one another, for millennia, but anyone who claimed there was only one culture set out to make it so by murdering everyone who didn’t fit.
And that’s what’s happening in America. Spoiled, narcissistic white guys like Peter Cvjetanovic believe there is a thing called “White European Culture.” They want “White European Culture” to exist, not in Europe, but right here in the United States– and not only to exist but to be regarded as the supreme race. They want to “celebrate” the shared “heritage” they don’t actually have. They say they have a right to be here, and they do– all humans, including those from the countless diverse cultures that are from Europe and usually have light skin, deserve to exist. People of those cultures have a right to migrate here, if they want to, they deserve respect, and they certainly have a right to like themselves and the color of their own flesh.
But America isn’t theirs. It doesn’t belong to Peter Cvjetanovic or Mary Pezzulo or Rosie O’Grady or John Smith.
People of white European heritage like Peter and me do not have a right to hurt anyone else. It was wrong every time Americans of European heritage committed atrocities against non-whites in the past, and they are wrong when they band together to intimidate and terrorize today. It’s horrendous sin to commit acts of racist violence in the name of being a Celt, an Anglo-Saxon or a German; it’s both sinful and ridiculous to do so in the name of a single “White European Culture” that never existed in the first place.
Peter Cvjetanovic and the other White Supremacists who participated in that riot in Charlottesville have every right to like their skin color, if they wish. But they can’t be proud of “White European Culture,” because there’s never been any such thing.
(image via Pixabay)
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