By Jovan Dučić
First published in Amerikanski Srbobran, 1942
VIII
This was all “Yugoslavism” of Bishop Strossmayer in action.
But there is something even more drastic. That was his so-called TRIALISM.
And what is that now? a politician of ours will ask, always far away from our and Serbian, and Croatian, and finally, our mutual problems, which he never wanted to know about for almost a quarter of a century.
Trialism was at its time a Croatian doctrine about the egality of Austria and Hungary and Croatia as the base principle of the Habsburg monarchy!… These were, according to the politicians from Zagreb, three leaves of a clover grown from the same patriotism and the same loyalty to the Crown and the Catholic dynasty, the symbol of its strength, the affirmation of unity. But already after the Compromise of 1866, becoming a dual monarchy, Austria came to a settlement with the Hungarians (the monarchy was divided into two parts, Hungary and Austria), so that in the Austrian part Germans would have supremacy and Hungarians in the Hungarian part. The Compromise destroyed “Croatian state independence”.
This caused a difficult feeling and indisposition of Croats. Dissatisfied by the weak compensations, they demonstrated this dissatisfaction in a way which led to the terror of baron Rauch. Since the law of the Compromise was passed in 1866. until its revision in 1873. lasted a struggle which led from Rauch to Khuen-Héderváry! There was not even a mention left of the Croatian State Rights and the Magyarisation of Croatia almost derailed the organisation of Bosnia its unification with mother Croatia.
Now comes that which is most characteristic for Strossmayer and which needs to be especially kept in mind.
In the time after the Compromise of 1866, there was the founding of two great Croatian parties: “the unionist party” whose head was Strossmayer and the “rights party” whose head was Dr Ante Starčević, a well-known Serbophobe, who negated that Serbs even exist as a people and who gave the battle cries “Srbe o vrbe”* and “Za Srbe sjekiru”**, mottoes which have a place in the Croatian people even today.
Do not even think that Strossmayer’s party went for the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy, even if called itself independent! It did not go for the separation of Croatia from this monarchy, even if it called itself national! To the contrary, the programme of Strossmayer’s party was as follows: “All the Slavs (south) united under Habsburgs and the Pope”… And the programme of Starčević’s rights party (which after his death became the party of the Jew Frank and was called Frank’s party), was as everyone knows, this: “All Croatian lands united under the Habsburgs”… And Bishop Strossmayer himself in 1883 stated that Serbs are the main enemies of Croats and thus showed that he was the first to renounce his Yugoslavism. These so-called “Nayers” or negators of Austria, do not want for anything but a union of Croatia with Austria!
What do the Oblomovs from our party clubs say to these words, when they believed blindly that Strossmayer is a revolutionary who wants Austria in Yugoslavia, not Yugoslavia in Austria… And who wished for the fall of the Austrian dynasty for the sake of life and happiness of the Serbian or Bulgarian dynasty… And who dreamed of democracy of an Orthodox Balkans and the teachings of St. Sava in place of the Church of St. Peter for which he lived… And by putting such a “Yugoslavism” into the foundations of a new a big state of Yugoslavia as opposed to the idea of the Nemanjić dynasty which once managed to hold together the strongest Empire in the east, our state-makers, not knowing a letter of truth about this Yugoslavism from Zagreb, inserted dynamite into the foundations, which would one day blow it up.
* Tran. note: in Croatian it means “Hang the Serbs on the willows” and rhymes
** Tran. note: in Croatian it means “For the Serbs the axe”
Translated by Books of Jeremiah
