napolitano

I always had a bad impression of Napolitano.  he’s supposed to be a great big flaming red Commie but in reality he swings any which way the wind blows. He seems like most italian politicians left or right  to never grasp the matter in hand

BUT then  the Adriatic air seems to have gone to his head.

 HE wants to be seen as a hero in Italy, the senior citizen with a heart fulla god and a head wise in years instead of the moron that he really is in my opinion. SO he awarded commemorative medals of honor to a number of Italians killed in the massacres of them by tito forces but  one of the awards was given to a fellow named Vincenzo Serrentino. That name will probably mean nothing to most readers, but if you’re a Croat or an Italian it just might.

Serrentino was the Italian prefect of Zadar, a coastal town in occupied Croatia, during the war years. The Yugoslavs considered him a war criminal who had Partisan prisoners killed without trial. After the war, they gave him a swift trial and then had him shot and thrown into an unmarked grave. The Croats, while holding no brief for the Communist Partisans, are firmly in agreement that Serrentino was a bloody-handed murderer.In italian concentration camps thousands were murdered, starved and killed as well.

The Italian refugee community, meanwhile, considers Serrentino an innocent man, a patriot and a martyr. So while it may have been questionable to give him a medal

But the next bit baffles me. In his speech, Napolitano said that the ethnic cleansing had been “an exercise in hatred, bloody rage and a Slavic annexation plan”.

He then said that this plan had “prevailed… in the Peace treaty of 1947 [between Italy and Yugoslavia], which assumed the contours of an ethnic cleansing.”

“Today in Italy we have put an end to this unjustifiable silence and we are committed at European level to recognising Slovenia as a friendly partner and Croatia as a candidate country for EU membership,” he added. “But it should be repeated that truth is part of reconciliation – both in people’s hearts and in international relations.”

Now, this is just weird. “Slavic annexation plan”? That doesn’t even make sense. It was Italy, not Yugoslavia, that was the aggressor. True, the Yugoslavs grabbed the opportunity to snarfle up more of the coastline at the end of WWII, but, you know, Italy was a freakingAxis power. The Italians of Dalmatia and Istria were like the Sudeten Germans in Czecheslovakia.

Imagine a German President using the words “Slavic annexation plan” about WWII. Now imagine how the Poles and Czechs would take that. You’ll get an idea of how this was recieved in Zagreb.

So it’s not surprising that Croat President Stipe Mesic pretty much lost his cool. The next day, Mesic blasted Napolitano’s remarks: “it was impossible to not see overt elements of racism, historical revisionism and a desire for political revenge”.

Mesic also noted that “modern Europe was constructed on foundations… of which anti-fascism was one of the most important.”