The monument to the uprising of the people of Kordun and Banija is a modernist war memorial situated on a mountain in Croatia’s Petrova Gora range. Unveiled in 1981, the structure commemorates the Yugoslav Partisans and local Serbs who comprised the resistance against the fascist Ustaše regime during the Second World War. Although it once stood immaculate, the geopolitical fracturing of the 1990s abandoned the site to the elements, and today, after decades of weathering and vandalism, it remains only as a hollowed-out shell.
It’s also, at least to me, a sad depiction of the current American state of affairs.
At first glance, a dilapidated war memorial in the mountains of Croatia seems worlds away from the corridors of American power. Yet, I can’t help but discern a haunting parallel between the remains of the Petrova Gora monument and the current trajectory of our own republic. If that monument was raised as a testament to the defiance of fascism - and the imperative of democratic governments to reject it - then its ruin symbolizes the gradual, systemic betrayal of that very duty. With that interpretation in mind, one could argue that it has become a grim portrait of our present reality: an America that, in just the past few weeks, has aligned itself with the fascist impulses it once fought to defeat more ardently than at any point in our history.
To understand the architecture of this collapse, we should look to the past. In The Three Yugoslavias, historian Sabrina Ramet defines fascism - specifically in the context of the aforementioned Ustaše regime the Partisans fought against - as:
a system based on the superiority of the leader over the law, collective rights, intolerance of designated “outgroups,’ the infliction of harm on members of designated “outgroups,” and the glorification of violence, civic inequality based on racial [and religious] grounds, and the manipulation of religion to serve the purposes of state.
While this is a diagnosis of a government from the 1940s, Ramet’s criteria serve as a terrifying checklist for present-day America:
- The “superiority of the leader over the law” is no longer a historical abstraction; it is now a daily political ambition. President Trump has constructed an edifice of immunity and infalliability around himself, shifting the burden of criminality onto anyone he perceives as being a member of the opposition. We witnessed this brazen inversion on January 22, when Trump called for the prosecution of former Special Counsel Jack Smith, calling him a “deranged animal” simply for daring to investigate him. We’ve also seen the Trump administration at large engage in a relentless campaign of historical revisionism designed to absolve itself of guilt, an effort consecrated by the pardoning of over 1,500 rioters last year and currently deployed to justify the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on January 7 and January 24, respectively, by scurriously branding them as “domestic terrorist(s)”.
- The “infliction of harm on members of designated outgroups” and “civic inequality based on racial [and religious] ground” has escalated from fringe rhetoric and theory to executive fiat. This has been made plain by the Trump administration’s continued enforcement of restrictions and bans on travel from mostly Muslim-majority countries and, more recently, targeting of the Somali community in America. During a speech at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump called Somalians “low IQ people” and dismissed their homeland as “not a country”. He’s also threatened to strip naturalized Americans of Somali descent of their citizenship, has already terminated deportation protections for Somalis, and authorized ICE raids in Minnesota and Maine that target Somali people, along with other immigrants from Guatemala, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
- The “glorification of violence” has become the operating standard of this new America. The legal architecture for this was laid out in April 2025 with the issuance of Executive Order 14288, which codified federal indemnification for officers accused of misconduct. This promise of protection has emboldened federal agents to act with a terrifying confidence, secure in the knowledge that they are “untouchable”. It is this culture of impunity that led to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, whose deaths were not met with accountability, but with applause from the highest levels of power: Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino has perversely insisted that the agent who killed Pretti was a “victim” and made unsubstantiated claims that Pretti had been “there for a reason”, and Vice President J.D. Vance has called for “absolute immunity” for the ICE officer who killed Good.
It’s absolutely fucking infuriating. It isn’t just the naked fascism that is so upsetting; it is the fact that it is being welcomed with open arms. We are watching our neighbors, our friends, our compatriots gunned down in the streets by federal agents acting on the orders of leaders who lie with pathological ease, regardless of the evidence. And instead of rioting, half the country cheers, because the politicians and talking heads have told them that their dead neighbors were “terrorists”.
The propaganda has been so effective, so total, that these people are quicker to justify the murder of an innocent person simply because the killer wore a uniform than they are to recognize the humanity of the victim. They would rather deny a human being their right to exist than accept their difference. They would rather cling to the fantasy of a benevolent government than confront the moral void that now defines it. It is a sickness: a blindly sycophantic worship of authority that overrides all conventional morality. It is a suicide pact where people enable the very tyranny that will eventually crush them - too stupid or too hateful to realize that a government isn’t supposed to hunt its own citizens. They don’t understand that once the “opposition” is devoured, the monster will need fresh blood. They think they are safe. They are not.
In the end, the ruin of the Petrova Gora monument is not just a tragedy of Croatian history; it is a prophecy for ours. That hollowed-out shell of concrete and steel, stripped of its skin and abandoned to rot, is what happens when a society chooses comfortable lies over hard truths. If we continue on this path - if we continue to sanction the violence, excuse the brutality, and accept the dehumanization of our neighbors - then we are not just betraying the legacy of those who fought the Ustaše. We are dismantling the very foundations of the Republic, ensuring that the only monument left to our democracy will be the silence of its ruins.