The TENE guys often talk about nationalist contradictions, and there are historical moments, usually quite obscure(d), in which these contradictions are made very clear and totally bizarre. Today, gather round and hear a tale of three such moments... yes kids, it's the Wacky Adventures of Ustašas!

First, in a bid to compete with the far more popular Croatian Peasant Party, the rabidly nationalist Croatian Party of Rights seeks an alliance with the increasingly nationalist People's Radical Party in Belgrade. It's a bit of an embarrassment that key Ustašas like Milan Šufflay, Slavko Kvaternik, and even Ante Pavelić himself were begging for support and money from Serbia's most important conservative party. Failing to keep their attention or funds, the Party of Rights goes full-on Ustaša! Pondering this twist of fate, Rey is compelled to make a case for parallel universes. In his second tale, Rey narrates the lackluster "attack on the Brušane Precinct" which brought the Ustaša name to the headlines and kicked off the fascist career of bloodthirsty lawyer Andrija Artuković. Their so-called uprising fails to attract the peasantry but does garner some critically optimistic attention from the rising Yugoslav Communist Party. More importantly, it spurs the Yugoslav state to completely freak out and make everything a lot worse. In his third and final tale, Rey takes us all the way to Buenos Aires in the 1950s where escaped Serbian Nazi Milan Stojadinović and escaped Croatian Nazi Ante Pavelić develop a bizarre friendship. The story gets even weirder when Rey intimates a compelling State connection...

This is The Empire Never Ended, the Antifascist Amerikanski-Balkan podcast about (neo) fascist terror, the (deep) state and the alienation, nihilism and desperation produced by the capitalist system. And how to get rid of all that. Something like that...

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