Ready for the Homeland

Abstract

The article analyzes nationalistically motivated online hate speech on selected right-wing public Facebook pages in Croatia. The rise of historical revisionism and populism paved the way for the growing presence of hate speech, with the most salient example being the resurfacing of the World War II fascist salute Za dom spremni (“Ready for the Homeland”) across different communicative situations. We account for the online dynamic of Za dom spremni as well as for the most frequent expressions of xenophobia that accompany the salute by presenting data gathered between 2012 – 2017 using Facebook Graph API. From the total of 4.5 million postings published by readers, those containing Za dom spremni and its variations were filtered and followed by the frequency and prevalence of the accompanying notions. By relying on cultural semiotics, we highlight the socio-communicative functions of hate speech on two levels. Firstly, the notion of the semiosphere helps us illustrate how hate speech is used to reproduce the idea of Croatianness as the dominant self-description. Secondly, we examine how the dominant self-description maintains the boundary between us and the other by merging diverse textual fragments and how their perseverance depends on the communicative situations they enter online.

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…Frequent attention ( N = 22 works) was dedicated to the legacy of WW2 in Europe (Arrigoni and Galani, 2019a, 2019b; Baumann, 2020; Birkner and Donk, 2020; Braun, 2016; Brentin, 2016; Damcevic and Rodik, 2018; Dobysh, 2019; Kaprāns, 2016; Khlevnyuk, 2019; Kist, 2020; Koskinen-Koivisto, 2019; Makhortykh, 2018; Makhortykh, 2020; Matila, 2021; Pogačar, 2011; Rutten, 2013; Sawczuk, 2020; Wells, 2016). Some studies focused on specific WW2-related topics, such as the Ustaše regime in Croatia between 1929 and 1945 (Brentin, 2016), the Finnish war (Matila, 2021), D-Day (Braun, 2016) and the Battle of Kyiv (Makhortykh, 2020).…”

“…Several studies engaging with the post-war period in Europe focused on the dissonant heritage of the collapse of Yugoslavia and its aftermath on SNS (Baumann, 2020; Brentin, 2016; Damcevic and Rodik, 2018; Mahmutović and Baraković, 2021; Pogačar, 2011; de Smale, 2020; Knudsen, 2016). Other topics in the second part of the 20th century included the difficult heritage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1968–1998 (Crooke, 2018; Murphy and Aguiar, 2019) and the collapse of Portugal’s colonial power and subsequent fall of Salazar’s dictatorship in the 1980s (Peralta, 2019).…”

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

“…symbols are particularly important for culturalist approaches as a means of assigning meaning (Gibson & Jones, 2012) to places and events, but the notion is often used in an untheorized manner. Visual symbols discussed include gestures (Damcevic & Rodik, 2018), drawn images (El-Farahaty, 2019), photographs (Farquhar, 2013; Garduño Freeman, 2010; Ryzova, 2015), or material objects appearing as visual content (Adriaansen, 2020; Kozachenko, 2019). symbols also appear in verbal communication, for example, nationalist slogans chanted during football games (Sindbæk Andersen, 2016), or anthems (Bosch, 2020), or take the form of complex symbols, such as past events functioning as political symbols (Rodríguez-Temiño & Almansa-Sánchez, 2021).…”

“…symbolic reality permeates actual reality (Ibrahim, 2016) in places which, after pierre nora , are identified as lieux de mémoire , both offline (Arrigoni & Galani, 2019; Zalewska, 2017) and online (Sumartojo, 2020). social construction here is situated in the process of semiosis (Damcevic & Rodik, 2018; Mahmutović & Baraković, 2021). symbols and symbolic memory are also actualized through rituals (Brentin, 2016; Koskinen-Koivisto, 2019; Rutten et al, 2013; Wight, 2020), which, along with narratives , produce and sustain myths (Ibrahim, 2016, 2017; Khlevnyuk, 2019; Kozachenko, 2019; Makhortykh, 2020; Ndlovu, 2018; Peralta, 2022; Rutten et al, 2013).…”