Croatia: 500,000 fans cheer fascist singer Marko Perković and openly display Ustasha fascist salutes
- The Left Chapter
- Jul 16, 2025
- 5 min read
Image of the concert via video screenshot
By Slavko Stilinović, junge Welt, July 16, 2025. Translation and notes by Helmut-Harry Loewen. [1]
German fascists, who generally hold their right-wing rock concerts for a few hundred neo-Nazis in the barnyards of provincial backwaters, can only dream of such numbers. “With this concert, we are showing our unity,” Marko Perković shouted from the stage in Zagreb, while around 504,000 spectators cheered him on. The concert by the fascist rock star — who calls himself “Thompson” after the submachine gun developed in the United States during World War I for trench warfare — broke a world record. [2]
No one before him had sold so many tickets for a single music event. It can be assumed that most fans traveled from abroad to the July 5th concert in the city of some 700,000 inhabitants not despite, but precisely because of Perković's openly fascist stance. The right-wing rocker is particularly popular among Croatians living abroad. [3] But many Southeast Asian migrant workers were also there to witness the spectacle at the Hippodrome.
It was the largest concert in Croatian history. The state authorities had taken appropriate action. Days before the event, the venue was largely cordoned off and traffic in several neighbourhoods was diverted. The authorities deployed thousands of police officers and set up a special control centre and a mobile field hospital. The state television station HRT reported that snipers secured the area and helicopters circled above the venue as visitors poured in.
In his speech, Perković called on the rest of Europe to “return to its traditions and Christian roots.” The audience included fans wrapped in Croatian flags, while others wore black T-shirts with the word “Thompson” or neo-Nazi iconography. The organizers had previously emphasized that any hate symbols or incendiary insignia would be strictly prohibited at the concert. Video recordings, including those from the news portal Index, show fans chanting the Ustasha salute “Ready for the Homeland!” [“Za dom spremni!”].
The clerical-fascist Ustasha dictatorship in Croatia during World War II operated concentration camps in which tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs, Jews, Roma, and antifascist Croats were brutally murdered. Some of Perković's songs contain the Ustasha salute, which is prohibited by law in Croatia, as well as other references to the “Independent State of Croatia” (NDH – Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) led by Ante Pavelić, which was in reality a puppet state under Hitler's control. Nationalist Croats revere the leaders of the Ustasha as the founding fathers of the Croatian state, despite their atrocities, including the Holocaust and genocide of Serbs. [4]
The Ustasha salute was also used by paramilitaries in the 1990s who helped establish the modern state of Croatia. During this period, during the bloody war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Marko “Thompson” Perković became well known. He took part in combat operations, carrying the aforementioned US machine gun with him.
Ironically, many of the right-wing rocker's most popular songs are based on rewritten Partisan songs and Serbian and Montenegrin folk music. Perković claims that his songs merely celebrate Croatia's victory and independence. Despite international criticism — he has been banned from performing in several European cities due to his pro-Nazi performances — he remains extremely popular in Croatia and regularly performs at political rallies and sporting events.
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Notes:
[1] The author of this report, Slavko Stilinović, is a member of the Zagreb Antifascist Network (MAZ: Mreža Antifašistkinja Zagreba), founded in 2007 as the Association of Young Antifascists of Zagreb.
From a declaration by MAZ: “If we understand the fascist movement of the twentieth century, its genesis and function as a response to the crisis of reproduction of the capitalist system, which is essentially always about attacks on the rights that stand in its way, antifascism appears in the form of a broad front as resistance to such reactionary policies. In this sense, antifascism must be the production of knowledge about this "reactionary response," or rather about the socio-economic mechanisms that condition it, but also the consideration of alternatives that could replace the existing political system, as well as the practice of networking and mass mobilization of the movement – the creation of a front.
“Antifascism as the production of knowledge is also a politics of memory, resistance to the aforementioned revisionist cleansing of historical antifascism of its emancipatory content and consistent struggle for economic and political equality, but also the investigation of the systemic conditions for the emergence of fascism, or rather its political economy and social content.”https://www.maz.hr/o-nama/
[2] A song by Marko Perković opens with the fascist chant “Za dom spremni!”, the Ustaše version of the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil!”. Dr. Katarina Damčević of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (Regensburg, Germany), who wrote her doctoral dissertation on “Semiotics of Hate Speech and Contested Symbols: The ‘Za dom spremni’ Ustaša Salute in Contemporary Croatia” (2023, University of Tartu, Estonia), analyzes this event in a superb article: “Half a Million Voices: Mainstreaming the Ustaša Legacy at Thompson’s Zagreb Concert,” ostblog, July 9, 2025: https://ostblog.hypotheses.org/7963...
See also the following three articles by Katarina Damčević:
"'Ready for the Homeland' in Croatian media: Commemorations, victory, and foundation”:
“Cultural texts, enemies, and taboos: autocommunicative meaning-making surrounding the 'Ready for the Homeland' Ustaša salute in Croatia”: https://www.tandfonline.com/.../10350330.2021.1883404...
“Ready for Memory Wars: The Case of the HOS Memorial Plaque in Croatia": https://www.hlc-rdc.org/.../ready-for-memory-wars-the.../...
[3] See the following reports on Perković-Thompson’s 2007 tour of Toronto, Vancouver, Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Jose: “Croatian singer plans secret Toronto concert,” The Globe & Mail, November 1, 2007; “Venue [Kool Haus] cancels gig by Croatian rocker linked to fascist slogan,” CBC Arts, November 1, 2007; “Controversial Croat band locked out of Canada venue,” Reuters, November 2, 2007; “Controversial Croatian rocker stages concert. Despite being rejected by two Toronto venues, the controversial Croatian rocker Marko Perkovic took to the stage last night at a “secret and private” concert in Norval, west of Brampton.” The Toronto Star, November 5, 2007.
[4] The Ustaše movement functioned as a fascist terrorist organization prior to WWII. The Ustaše founded the "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH) after being brought to power by the Axis forces in April 1941. The regime was responsible for the perpetration of massive atrocities and the implementation of genocidal policies against Serbs, Jews, Roma, and antifascist Partisans. With the assistance of the Nazis, the Ustaše established the Jasenovac concentration camp (August 1941 - April 1945), one of Europe's largest and most notorious sites of torture and extermination.
(Note that "Ustasha" and "Ustashe" are anglicized versions of "Ustaše.")
Original German article: “Rekord für Rechtsrocker. Kroatien: Mehr als 500.000 Menschen jubeln faschistischem Sänger Marko Perković zu. Fans zeigen offen faschistische Grüße der Ustascha-Diktatur.” By Slavko Stilinović, junge Welt, 16.07.2025, p. 15 / Antifaschismus.
Screenshot above: Half a million people attended the spectacle put on by the Ustasha disciple at the Hippodrome in Zagreb on July 5, 2025. Goran Mehkek/HANZA MEDIA/imago. - Photos below: via euronews
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