Yesterday we watched the 1970 Sophia Loren wartime drama Sunflower which I had high hopes for, but found myself just as disappointed as the characters in the movie itself. Sunflower is a story about reconciliation, both between people and nations, but meanders to the finish line with no reconciliation at either level. While I was disappointed, I was also not surprised. This is a flaw with basically every western WWII movie, though they express this silliness in different (and sometimes ugly) ways.
In 1942 Italy, Giovanna (Sophia Loren) convinces her her boyfriend Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni) to get married so he doesn’t have to go to war in North Africa. During their honeymoon, the couple hatches a plan. Antonio hits her and acts crazy in public, causing the police to forcibly hospitalize him. But doctors at the asylum aren’t fooled and order him to go to war anyway… at the Russian front. Needless to say, 1942 wasn’t a particularly good year to be an Italian soldier on the Russian front. Antonio goes missing and is presumed to be dead. But Giovanna refuses to give up, and waits for years in vain. Finally, another former soldier gives her the bad news. During a chaotic retreat Antonio collapsed in the snow and froze to death. But the soldier did not actually see Antonio die, so Giovanna is still hopeful he might have survived. She decides to take matters into her own hands and travels to the Soviet Union to search for him. Giovanna does manage to track him down in a small town in the Ukrainian SSR, just to discover that he is with someone else. Masha (Lyudmilia Saveleva) had dragged Antonio home, nursed him back to health, married, and had a daughter with him.
It’s a great premise for a movie and touches on some famous Russian memes. The tenacious female medics of the Great Patriotic War who dragged their larger comrades to safety, sometimes dozens or hundreds of them in a single day. And if you venture into the Russian internet, you’ll see an anecdote about one of these grateful soldiers who named his own daughter after the girl who rescued him. There’s also the meme of Russian women falling in love with enemy prisoners. More than one western army has ventured into Russia just to be defeated, but not utterly destroyed. Survivors are resettled across the country. The punishment for invading Russia is to have to live there. It is indicative of an attitude of forgiveness, and also indicative of a larger tragedy. Defeating the nazi invasion of the Soviet Union killed such a frightening number of Russian men, some Russian women had to make due with the very foreigners who participated in it. But a much larger number of women simply were unable to marry at all.
Sunflower is about reconciliation. After a war individuals and nations must reconcile with eachother, which requires forgiveness. This is a story that with a need to be told, both then in the Cold War and now in the present day. And it needs to be a western story. Only Nixon can go to China, as the saying goes. Unfortunately, Sunflower fails to deliver and there are several reasons for this failure.
The first point of failure is the strength of the story itself. The majority of it was filmed in the Soviet Union, but this has no meaningful impact on the plot. Antonio being sent to Russia instead of North Africa is supposed to be a fateful moment that changes the course of his life but it’s not. In fact, him going to Africa would have actually changed nothing. I would bet a large sum of money that someone could do a remake of Sunflower, shot for shot, but set in the USA instead of the Soviet Union, and the plot would not change at all. Antonio goes to the African front, gets lost in the desert, is rescued by an American nurse, gets sent to a POW camp in Iowa, and marries the nurse. It wouldn’t even be necessary to change the title, as there are sunflowers in Iowa too. A nay-sayer might claim I’m wrong, because war is a timeless subject and that’s why there’s at least some interchangeability. That’s true, but missing the point. There isn’t a need for reconciliation between the USA and Italy, but there is a need for reconciliation between Russia and Italy, and the “west” in general. Sunflower purports itself to be such a vehicle of reconciliation, but completely misses the mark.
I have to ask why even bother filming in the Soviet Union at all when the director and writers made no effort to localize the story. It’s actually a problem shared by many Hollywood films, particularly action flicks, which manufacture flimsy excuses for heroes to jet off to exotic locations, usually to find an important object or meet a person (we need to find the magic crystal, and the villains took it to Egypt!). These exotic locations add nothing to the plot except as an excuse for a beautiful shot of the pyramids or Red Square. There typically isn’t a real reason for a Hollywood movie’s heroes to leave the USA except the producers wanted an excuse to fly abroad and vacation in a nice 5 star hotel and see the local sights (which is better, to go on a European vacation on your own time and dime, or do it while making a “movie” and write it all off as a business expense?). Sunflower has the same problem.
Sunflower is basically a slightly repackaged version of the 1964 romantic comedy Marriage Italian Style, a movie by the same director Vittorio De Sica, and the same story about a dysfunctional war and post-war relationship between stars Sophia and Marcello involving a love-triangle. During World War II, an Italian aristocrat visits a brothel, but is interrupted by an air raid. While everyone else flees to the bomb shelters, he comes across a young prostitute. This starts a lifelong but intermittent relationship that, eventually, ends with a comedic episode of her trying to trick him into marrying her. Marriage Italian Style is overall a much stronger and better written story, and I think the biggest reason why is that it is all set in Italy without the window dressing of going to the Soviet Union. This is maybe a personal attitude of the director, or maybe a sign of Italian culture.
Here’s impression of Italy, just judging from the way it’s portrayed in Italian movies. Italy is a unique country with a rich culture that occasionally get occupied by strange foreigners like Germans or Americans, but none of those other countries are interesting or worth closely examining. They’re just the source of mean guys with guns who sometimes come and occupy Italy for no reason. That turns out to be a huge problem for Sunflower, because the writers were too lazy and uninterested in humanizing Russians. But it’s not a problem for Marriage Italian Style because all of the characters are Italian, even minor ones. As Italians they’re interesting and noteworthy, not boring Russians or Americans. So they’re all well developed people who make meaningful contributions to the plot. At one point in Marriage Italian Style, Sofia Loren’s character reveals to her rich lover that she has three secret sons – one of them is his but she won’t elaborate which. He extensively interacts with all the sons to try and figure out which one is his. The guy never figures it out but bonds with them anyway. So he agrees to get married, despite her earlier attempt to trick him, and everyone is happy. There are no losers in this story – even the teenage girl he was about to marry isn’t harmed. She is no doubt disappointed, but can easily marry someone else.
None of this enthusiasm for characters or culture carried over into Sunflower. Masha and her daughter with Antonio are the only other human beings in the Soviet Union, and they’re props with almost no dialogue. This was a huge disappointment to me while watching it. We get to see Masha rescuing Antonio, which is exciting and well-filmed and acted, but the rest of their relationship is never delivered on screen. Masha presumably put him in her bed like a sick pet she found outside, which would be appropriately humorous and romantic but we’re never shown this scene. Aside from being fun to watch, this was too important a part of the story to leave out. Antonio starts to fall in love with Masha, decides to fake amnesia so he doesn’t have to explain his past life. And, of equal importance, he decides to just let Giovanna believe he is dead, not realizing that she’ll continue obsessing with him to the point of going on her own personal search. I find leaving all this out an incomprehensible decision to make, as Sunflower is a two-hour movie so there wasn’t some shortage of screen time to work with. Refusing to give Masha any depth as a character harms the story so significantly, I can’t imagine how it could be produced in its entirety without anyone involved pointing this out.
Weirdly, even Antonio himself is a bit of a prop. He’s never in control of his personal circumstances, entirely at the whim of other people, and drifts wherever the current takes him. He also doesn’t develop or learn anything, despite the fact that Sunflower takes place over many years so he should have matured just through age if nothing else. Antonio’s character suffers in part from the film’s failure to flesh out Masha. She’s the woman he spent most of his life with so by not learning anything about her we don’t learn anything about him either. I think he doesn’t develop as a character because his wife’s influences on him were never thought about. Obviously, this leaves their daughter as just a prop too (in sharp contrast to the sons in Marriage Italian Style), and she probably doesn’t exist for any other reason except to be an anchor preventing Antonio from simply leaving.
There are some other contributing reasons to why Antonio isn’t a worthwhile character. He simply does not have any redeeming values as a person. Marcello Mastroianni’s character in Marriage Italian Style, despite being a playboy and a womanizer, is still a likeable person with good qualities. He talks well and is apparently well educated, puts effort into how he dresses and presents himself to others, and is able to make clever remarks on the fly. He can even be called brave, as he is unconcerned about an air raid that terrifies everyone else in the building. The other characters in the movie treat him with respect – and that’s partly why Sunflower doesn’t do Antonio justice because the plot doesn’t develop any other characters to begin with. At the end of Marriage Italian Style he marries his long-term mistress solely because he wants to, and there is absolutely no social or legal pressure against him. As a result of his choice and acceptance of responsibility, he’s rewarded with happy marriage, and sons who can manage his business affairs for him. And that’s why developing the children as characters can make or break a movie. The sons are respectable young men, which reflects extremely positively on their mother, and their new father figure. The daughter in Sunflower is just an unhappy burden.
After he goes to war in Sunflower, Antonio and the other Italian soldiers are easily routed, and spend the entire montage being chased down like dogs by the Red Army, but it’s not a compelling or even particularly interesting sequence. The only Italian soldier we get to know well in the movie is Antonio, and he’s pathetic. So of course the Italian army must be pathetic too and it’s no surprise that the Russians beat them. If Antonio was a confident and proud patriot, it would be much more compelling to see him and his fellow soldiers get defeated. I actually really like the scene from Sunflower when Antonio and his companion find a house with lit windows just to open the door and see it already filled to the threshold with zombie-like troops desperate for the warmth of the fireplace. It’s such a simple yet despairing visual, but since Antonio was a feeble and weak character to begin with, this scene did not have the impact it should have.
His inadequacies might be partially to blame on a need to separate him from fascism. If he was an enthusiastic Mussolini supporter who willingly goes to war, that would be a moral problem that Sunflower’s writers were unwilling to grapple with, so just avoided it by painting him as a coward. There’s a similar trend in German war productions like Das Boot, Stalingrad, or Generation War, all the characters are against Hitler and against nazism, which doesn’t make any sense. It also makes the characters look really pathetic, because they know the regime is wrong but are too weak and cowardly to opposite it. Rolf Gruber, the daughter’s boyfriend who joins the nazis in The Sound of Music, is a much more interesting and human character with good intentions, but his story is too difficult for movie writers to deal with. Rather than watch Antonio cower and blunder his way through life, I would much prefer to see Rolf Gruber go to Russia, a die-hard nazi every step of the way, and be humbled. Yes, really. I would much prefer to see a nazi who is a good person, rather than a person who is only pretending to be a nazi because he’s a coward.
This would actually make the war scenes in Sunflower more compelling. I really wish we had a Rolf Gruber the nazi rather than miserable Antonio the pseudo-nazi. After Rolf is humbled by seeing his “invincible” army broken and scattered, the rest of his redemption arc would come naturally. Waking up to Masha would at first be a bewildering and possibly terrifying experience, as it would make no sense to Rolf why she would rescue a mortal enemy rather than kill him or simply leave him to die (and that’s what he absolutely would have done if the roles were reversed). He wonders if maybe this is GULAG and she’s going to torture him to death. But it’s not and she’s just genuinely helping him. After interacting long enough with her, Rolf has to have a moral reckoning with himself. Guys like Antonio feel no shame because they’re not capable of shame. But guys like Rolf are capable of shame to the point of being suicidal. He confesses all of his sins to Masha, expecting her to hate him for it. Instead, to his astonishment, she forgives him. That may come as a surprise, but she points out that if he wasn’t worthy of forgiveness, he’d be a popsicle outside. As for how she could know he was worthy of forgiveness, it’s simply because he’s human and she’s human, and it’s inhuman to leave another person to die in the snow. Masha forgives him so profusely, in part, because watching someone torture himself to the point of insanity is agonizing and scary. Really, Sunflower did a huge injustice to all the characters, because the actors all had the talent for emoting, but everything was so whitewashed there wasn’t any opportunity for them to do it.
To think about it, if we pulled Rolf Gruber from Sound of Music into this story there would be an extra level of contrast and irony here. The Austrian girl he loved had cancelled him on the spot for being a nazi with no chance to even explain himself, and the Russian girl who didn’t even know him saved his life. To think more about it, maybe this would be particularly relevant story now, with that story in the news of adventure tourists leaving a Pakistani sherpa to die in the snow – and he wasn’t even a nazi, saving him would have been inconvenient.
If Sonya could forgive Raskolnikov for murdering two people with an axe, Masha can forgive Rolf/Antonio. But the plot of Sunflower was not up to me.
While it is easy to pay lip service to the Biblical idea of forgiveness, turn the other cheek, very few people are much good at applying the principle in real life. It was and still is particularly difficult after the calamity of World War II, as it was the bloodiest war in history and one side was the clear aggressor in it. The Soviet Union and China suffered the highest losses but apparently, were able to forgive their respective aggressors. Ironically (considering his reputation as an “evil madman”), Stalin was clearly the most forgiving person of WWII. China was still embroiled in their own civil war and not in a position to dictate terms. But the Soviet Union was indisputably in a position of strength, and chose the difficult path of forgiveness. Stalin’s Soviets were so forgiving in fact, Poland’s regime is still enraged about it up to the present day. They surely could have milked Germany for much more if it weren’t for that damned Stalin.
I would go so far as to say it is actually easier for the victor to forgive than it is for the loser. To lose a war is humiliating for anyone, and it’s especially humiliating if you built your whole culture around being the superior race. As Zhukov said, “we have liberated Europe and they will never forgive us.” To see which cultures have a forgiving attitude about WWII, and which ones do not, simply look at what those people themselves say. These modern statements can also give a clue about who played the larger role in winning WWII.
“Japan, as the only nation to have suffered atomic bombings in war, will continue efforts towards a nuclear-free world,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at a ceremony in Hiroshima.
“The path towards it is becoming increasingly difficult because of deepening divisions in the international community over nuclear disarmament and Russia’s nuclear threat,” he said.
Interesting choice of wording, isn’t it? Kishida went out of his way to not name the USA as the country that nuked Japanese cities. And yet by excluding any reference to the USA, he is by extension not forgiving us for nuking Japan (in the same way how, after a nasty divorce, you might avoid mentioning your ex by name). He also did not cite Japan’s own long list of atrocities during the war. Russia is the villain, and the only villain. So from this statement we can infer that Japan has not forgiven the USA, and is our ally. But to ally with someone you haven’t forgiven isn’t allyship at all. It means you’re only partnering with him out of fear, or because your hatred of the shared enemy is stronger than your hatred of him. Both of these possibilities are equally contemptible.
So we love to make movies about reconciliation, but refuse to actually directly deal with the topic. Instead, we make movies that are silly nonsense like Sunflower or Stalingrad and pretend nobody (except Russians) can be a nazi. Or, conversely, we make movies like Saving Private Ryan that are just nasty and portray everybody as nazis and it isn’t even possible for people to be good.
Ian Kummer
Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty
All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
It’s a great story and I love your allusion to Dostoevsky. Here’s my post abt this movie, it’s in Russian, but it’s easy to auto- translate, there’s nothing complex in it)
Вчера посмотрели фильм “Подсолнухи” с Лорен и Мастроянни. Я очень люблю этих актеров и итальянское кино тех лет, но вот этот фильм неожиданно раскрылся с неприятной стороны.
Я раньше его целиком ни разу не смотрела. Даже вообще не смотрела можно сказать, больше слышала о нем от других, и что-то там урывками видела. А тут посмотрела целиком.
Задели страшные кадры итальянских “эрои” (почти херои), бредущих по снегу из последних сил. На них надвигается тьма с красными флагами, лыжами и конями. От меня какая реакция на эти кадры ожидается? Сожаление? Сочувствие? Не дождетесь. Кстати, в сцене возвращения итальянских вояк на родину виден транспарант на вокзале, где именно что слово “эрои” (ну оставим процента два на то, что я неверно прочла, кадр короткий, а мой итальянский — теоретический).
Далее сюжет. Главгерой мотается, как ekskremento (простите мой эсперанто) по проруби, от бабы к бабе. На первой он женится, чтобы на войну не идти и сексом заниматься. Цели благие, грудь у Лорен красивая. Ладно. Вторая женщина находит его полудохлым в снегу, тащит в избу и, видимо, обнаруживает, что не все у него там отмерзло. Я ее понимаю, живой мужик в послевоенное время, не совсем немец, даже совсем не немец, экзотика такая. Надо брать. Ну и он по старой привычке женится, ребенка делает. Живут как-то.
Безутешная итальянка его ищет и едет в Союз, ведь “Сталин умер, и там все по-другому” (то есть, Сталин – зло, кольнем страну-победительницу). Как-то она объясняется с бабульками в деревнях и находит своего Антонио. Видит его новую Машу и убегает.
Антонио внезапно вспоминает, что обещал ей меха из России (нормальная такая европейская забава, мародерство). Но теперь меха придется покупать по госцене. Нацелился он на меха за 2000 советских рублей. Круто. И таки их купил и привез, и подарил. Что там от семейного бюджета осталось, сценарий умалчивает. Маше он подарков не делал, а Джованне ажно два раза: серьги и меха. Хотя Маша его спасла. Типичное мужское поведение, говорит феминистка во мне.
Джованна однако уже замужем и родила. Поэтому Антонио едет домой к Маше.
Честно говоря, это сентиментальный бред, где единственный более или менее адекватный персонаж Маша, которая радуется квартире в хрущевке (без иронии, есть чему). И ни на какие мысли об историческом примирении эта лента меня не навела.
How about a movie set in 1935 when Antonio is sent to Ethiopia, is abandoned in the scrub after his unit is routed by spear-carrying Ethiopian tribal troops in white cotton shammas, is found half dead of exposure by an Ethiopian woman and nursed back to health by her, falls in love with and marries her, and is then discovered by Giovanna just before Italy’s entry into WWII? The race of the saviour woman would have been of extreme significance, as would the irony of the fascist “civilising” soldier being rescued by the black “savage”. If it were up to me I would have made a film like that.
It would be very bold but I don’t think anyone in Europe is in a hurry to talk about African colonialism
they are in a hurry to repeat it
…lest we realize it was not as malign as actually painted… and that “colonialism” may, just may, have started after it supposedly ended.
I’m Portuguese -went through the “descolonização” process as a kid/teenager in the 70ies here- and I can assure you that it’s much more nuanced than what the official narrative tells us.
It may be “realistically” impossible as the hosts note, but that’s still an infinitely superior idea even by its very concept. Sadly it would’ve taken a whole different Italian popular mentality and understanding of things to even contemplate producing. Which is a shame – that story would have had everything “Sunflower” lacks.
In talking specifically Italy (as well as Spain and a couple other places such as Croatia), I feel there’s a dark but simple logic to it – this movie and potential others like it doesn’t work for “reconciliation” because, to have reconciliation, you need to have remorse and an understanding that you were in the wrong somewhere. And from all my contacts with Italian and Spanish culture (and I happen to speak Spanish fluently enough and be able to experience their content with no difficulty), I never got a sense that they feel any remorse about their role in WW2 when it comes to Russia (or about their role in North Africa in and around WW1, for that matter). They don’t feel they did anything wrong by joining the Nazi attack on the USSR, if anything, they’re still a little angry that the USSR dared rout their humble contributions to it. Not even the better relations the USSR had with Italy in later decades change anything about it. Thus, no sense of guilt or shame = no reconciliation possible.
(And of course, the less said about the situation with that in Croatia and the like, the better. “If we could do it again we would” sums it up, and they’ve been proving that in the Donbass since 2014; they only started thinking twice even a little once their neonazi expeditionary heroes got harvested in Mariupol together with Azov.)
Ironically, though, I’d say Sunflower illustrates the real state of affairs between Russia and those parts of Europe well. They purport to disavow their past as Nazi allies, but in truth they feel no guilt about being part of it and they still resent and look down on Russia. As a result, it’s just a sad and grim muddled mess where the best course of events seems to be separating and never looking back, instead of trying to interact where the non-Russian party clearly doesn’t even want it.
As an extra note, though, it’s notable just how different Russian and Western war movies are down to the simple philosophical level. It was said well before, in other places as well, that European war movies are mostly made in the “mindspace” of the defeated and the powerless, who knuckled down to Germany and have to cope with the fallout of their nations following the Nazis while still trying to see themselves as morally good. They’re the “stories of the victims”. (And as for American war movies, you mentioned Saving Private Ryan yourself, plus there’s the almost perverse “based-on” stuff like Pearl Harbor.) Meanwhile, USSR war movies are completely tonally different, even when they too examine stories of little people in a big war and aren’t epics glorifying war heroes. Instead of victimhood and trying to deal with the fallout of compromising one’s principles and surrendering, they’re about various dimensions of battle to the end for one’s home.
I really enjoy Ian’s blog and I consider your comments here to be very informative and well written. But this came completely out of the blue, so I just had to stop lurking and address it:
“(And of course, the less said about the situation with that in Croatia and the like, the better. “If we could do it again we would” sums it up”
Where did that come from, exactly? Would you mind sharing your insight with us? Also, “my friend from Serbia told me” does not count. You wouldn’t consider take some hohol’s opinions about Russia seriously, now would you?
Only first-hand experiences, if you don’t mind. And no generalizations, because that would be highly regrettable and very, very sad.
Well, “hohol” is only a state of mind that knows no bloodline barriers. There’re regrettably enough “ethnic” Russians who are “hohol” mentally, without ever realizing they’re such or calling themselves such, both in Russia proper and in the 2014 Ukraine territories. The same is true for West and South Slavic nations.
No friends from Serbia told me anything (I don’t believe any of my friends I’ve been talking to in the past few years are Serbian or from Serbia, anyway). I haven’t personally come up against Croatian neonazis on the street. But if we’re talking Croatia specifically, there’s enough evidence showing that there is at least no apparent public opposition towards Ustase-style outlook Eastwards.
In a public-facing sense, recall the outbursts during the World Cup when Croatia came up against the Russian team. Sure, it’s easy to wave it off as things being heated by sports fevers, but it is in precisely such times that undercurrents of prejudice and deeper-seated feelings come to the fore. What we saw then was the Croatian team treating playing and winning the match against Russia as engaging in battle and scoring a military victory against a hated enemy, complete with Maidanite-style slogans and, in the case of one particular player, direct ethnic hatred outbursts. I well recall that the Croatian president even had to speak up in the spirit of “#notall”. But did any of that find disapproval among the regular Croats? Never heard a peep about that.
In a less public facing side, I hope you are familiar with the stable presence Croatian volunteers kept up in the Donbass since 2014, shoulder to shoulder with Right Sector and Azov types, wearing somewhat revised Ustase insignia. Over the years, mentions of them did not leave reports. They remained jointly with Azov in Mariupol, and I well recall seeing Croatian alarm at the fate of the many adventurers who’d gone to “crush the ruskies”; if my memory serves, some two hundred Croats were being talked about as dead and wounded in the city. Sadly this particular story thread went murky as the Azovstal shebang wound down, but it was the last time I saw apparent gung-ho sentiments sourced back to Croatia and the first time it seemed like some realizations began to set in that this is serious business.
It is my hope that, at least, this has had enough of an effect to reduce the appetite for adventures against Russia within Croatia itself. But given what I already noted above, I don’t think it’ll be a peaceable and friendly outlook in the best of times. Within Croatia itself, Ustase past may be reviled, but looking outwards is another story.
I always found it quite funny that Russians are probably the only people in Europe that actually take these funny little ex-SFRY statelets seriously. I also see how that attitude could result in this explanation that you gave me, which would seem quite hilarious to anyone who had the misfortune of living in any one of said statelets.
I’ll address your arguments in no particular order, just as they struck me while reading. Mind you, I am not saying that your perceptions are off mark, but I actually live here and know how the locals tick. I hope our kind host will forgive this disjointed, rambling essay, but I think these claims need to be addressed.
Warning, TLDR-ish and so on and so forth:
1. There is no “Ustase-style outlook Eastwards”, if by “Eastwards” you mean “Russia”. Some nationalist hotheads (extremely few in numbers and politically completely irrelevant) might entertain the thought of “Eastwards outlook” towards Bosnia or Serbia, but these people are considered crazy and are able to voice their opinions only on the Internet or on some weird local TV station (very, very late-night talk shows, ofc).
Croatia is a dying nation and it can barely fill the borders of its own state, let alone anyone else’s.
Also – if you consider WWII Ustaše to have their own “Drang nach Osten” towards Russia, it wasn’t their idea in the first place. Their German overlords needed cannon fodder for the Eastern Front and they obliged by sending very few units, since manpower was needed on the Home Front, to fight Yugoslav Partisans.
Unlike almost all of SSSR’s enemies, Ustaše never sent an SS-unit to the Eastern Front. Again – locally raised SS Units (7th and 13th SS Divisions) were needed to fight Partisans and butcher civilians BACK HOME.
2. I don’t watch football so I wouldn’t know how Croatian fans and players acted during their game with Russia, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We aren’t sending our “best and brightest” abroad, football-wise. Our football fans are notorious for being ultras and our players are not particularly intelligent. Also, some of them played for Ukrainian soccer clubs and got hohol-dipped there.
Most Croatians don’t care about Russia and are not really disturbed by hate-speech directed at Russians. Unfortunately, last 30-ish years (since the destruction of Yugoslavia) were utterly lethal for common decency around these parts. Ethnic hate and violence used to be suppressed. Not anymore and that’s a pity.
In recent years, hate-speech directed towards Croatian minorities or neighborly states tends to be somewhat muted and there are civic groups that will raise the alarm when something like that happens.
It’s different for Russia, of course. For a certain type of nationalist retard common in Croatia, “Russia” is the equivalent of “Serbia”, their real target. And since they cannot “let go” like they did in the Nineties, they will pick on Russians. After all, Russia is far away, Croatian public does not give two shits about either Russia or common decency and will not react.
It is what it is, unfortunately.
You have noticed that hate-speech towards Russia and Russians is alarmingly common in the West, haven’t you? It’s only gonna get worse.
3. Croats who fought for Azov and other hohol Nazi outfits are very few and overwhelming majority of them are ultra-nationalists who went “over there” to kill Russians, since they cannot kill Serbs anymore. They aren’t considered “heroes” here or some shit like that. They are considered dumbasses and public treats them accordingly (media treats them mildly positively, ofc, but no-one in their right mind gives a hoot about media here).
Unfortunately, neither police nor courts are doing their duty to bring these idiots to justice, since fash gets off the hook in this country rather easily.
And no, I disagree that inglorious end of several of those meatheads during fighting in Mariupol will “reduce the appetite for adventures against Russia within Croatia itself”. There is no appetite for those adventures among “common people” (and there never was), only among retards who will continue to go to Ukraine for their own shot at “glory to heroes”.
And I certainly hope they will continue going there, since that means that Russians can kill them and thus get them off our backs. This country is fucked anyway, last thing we need is more fash scum.
Honestly it seems we’re more or less on the same page here. It is very nice to see a detailed overview from “eyes on the ground”, however, so I’m very grateful for the extended comment.
Ultimately I see basically what I meant in your words, perhaps my lines just came off as prejudiced or “blanket statement”y because I only mentioned it in passing.
The key thing with any nation, big or small (but it seems so with F.R.Y.s in particular, going by your notes), is that the majority of the population is, most of the time, apathetic and sort of weathervane-y. They are not easily disturbed and do not possess any sort of strong civic position, and it takes a great deal to jolt them out of focusing only on their personal lives and make them take a real decision. Witness how long it took for Russians to reattain any real semblance of a cohesive national consciousness – even with the Maidan and Donbass fires burning since 2014 nonstop, even in 2022 it was several months until it got into the majority of the population what is truly going on. (I suspect that the mobilisation orders were held back until Autumn in part for this reason – by then, the general apathetic population had woken up enough that it was not longer a surprise or felt to be the government intruding into people’s lives to play unrelated games.)
So it is with Croatia, since it is the same normal human nature at play. By and large, people do not particularly care, and that leaves the actual agenda-driven (or comprador) groups to enact what policies they desire to which people will respond with ambivalent support. After all, as you note, the real beef for Croats has been, is and will be the Serbs and generally with close neighbours. (Indeed, I suspect we would not see a Croatian volunteer force in the Donbass to begin with had it not been for that persistent “Serbs = Russians” mental meme. Personally, I never put stock in any such preconceived constructs, but that’s me, not a regular Joe/Jan/Ivan.) It is largely to this section of the population which I referred to in the “we’d do it all over again” line – being that, as I noted above, 90% of the population will just let them go about this grim business so long as it does not hurt them personally. And as you did note yourself, it very much does exist, and they do run amok unopposed. I think that we share the wish that, preferrably, they may not drag Croatia at large into anti-Russian hostilities but rather send themselves to the front lines personally, where the artillery corps will help the matter resolve itself.
Much the same is true of other former “junior” Axis members, even if their history is not as near-fully home-focused as the Ustase one. Italians are by and large ambivalent towards Russia and will support hostility against it or peace with it equally, just so long as it doesn’t harm them too much; they feel no historic guilt before Russia and are not full of any particular friendliness towards it either, as far as they’re concerned it’s just the dark, cold and evil place far out northeast. It goes to show just how much that is so when one looks at the rallies and protests in Italy that profess disapproval of the anti-Russian course – they achieve absolutely nothing save for making their participants feel better about it. Spain is even further down that sliding scale – Frankist thought never went anywhere, and I would even argue that the “Socialists” of Spain had unwittingly adopted a Frankist spirit in how they enact their beliefs and supposed ideals; foreign policy-wise, they’ve been making it feel like Franco never left power in the first place for years now. Regular Spaniards are remarkably happy to jump on Russophobic bandwagons, as I’ve seen myself (and those that aren’t, can be quite shocked to find out that Russians can in fact possess the same virtues as Spaniards and be decent people as well).
In this light, they’re much more “troublesome” than Croatia, I will easily give you that. And in this sense, it was not really right for me to mention them in the same breath. I mostly brought Croatia up due to the involvement of the volunteer corps in the war (well, for as long as they lasted there anyway).
I will still state, however, that I possess no prejudice towards Croats in particular or peoples of the FRYs in general. In regards to Croatia itself, as far as I’m concerned, the faces of Croatia are Croteam, the game dev studio behind the oldschool silly Serious Sam shooters and the artistic and philosophical Talos Principle puzzler game, and Podravka, whose Vegeta packets I can hardly imagine my kitchen without (goes amazing with potatoes in particular, somehow, virtually the only thing I put on them).
Have to agree with you on US WWII movies. If watch Private Ryan, watch beginning and skip to the end. Ridiculous story. Sort of liked Dunkirk but no real character development (aside from the family on the boat), simply visual. Maybe A Bridge Too Far.
Can recommend some foreign WWII movies.
German
Stalingrad (1993)
Land of Mine (2015)
The Bridge (1959)
Russian
Come and See (1985)
Beanpole (2019)
Ballad of a Soldier (1959)
The Star (2002)
China
City of Life and Death (2009)
The Eight Hundred (2020)
Meanwhile in Ukraine, the oh-so-invincible Challenger 2 tank: https://i.imgur.com/K7DWjfk.png
“But to ally with someone you haven’t forgiven isn’t allyship at all. It means you’re only partnering with him out of fear, or because your hatred of the shared enemy is stronger than your hatred of him. Both of these possibilities are equally contemptible.”
Japan does it because it because it has to. It’s a permanently occupied client state of the US. A protectorate, in the most positive possible framing of the relationship. It doesn’t have a choice.
Part of the dynamic of post-war relations between the US and the unsinkable far east aircraft carrier is that we allow them to keep up the cute pretense of being a functioning democracy and independent power with its own agency, while in reality ‘post-occupation’ Japan has been ruled by a CIA backed right wing party for virtually its entire existence. In the 60s when ‘free’ Japan ‘negotiated’ a new ‘security treaty’ with the US it elicited the largest protests Japan has ever seen. The government just went ahead and signed the treaty anyway.