The Scripts of the Nation: How Thompson’s concert staged Croatian fascism6 min read
Performing fascism makes it a reality – but what does this mean for the Croatian music scene? Applying Judith Butler’s theoretical stance to Marko Perković Thompson’s concert at the Zagreb Hippodrome might offer some answers.
On 5 July 2025, half a million people gathered at the Zagreb Hippodrome in Croatia’s capital for what the BBC described as either a “neo-fascist Woodstock” or “patriotic, anti-establishment fun”. The journalist could only ask. The singer, Marko Perković Thompson, wasted no time answering the question; he opened the concert with “Bojna Čavoglave” (The Čavoglave Battalion), his first song, released in 1991 and popularised during the Croatian War for Independence (and a song which has an incredibly bizarre Beach Boys parody cover on YouTube).
The song’s opening lyric “Za dom spremni” (“For the home(land), ready”) refers to the salute of the Second World War fascist Ustaše regime, who killed hundreds of thousands of mainly Serbs, anti-regime Croatians, Bosnians, Jews, and Roma people. The crowd roared the salute back.
This article asks a different question: not whether this was a nationalist concert, but rather how nationalist performances work. The philosopher Judith Butler argues that gender is not something one is, but something one performs. The same logic applies here: nobody is born a nationalist, but some people act like one. Butler’s central insight is that identity is constituted by performance rather than expressed by it. Perform an act enough times, and it begins to feel natural – inevitable, even.
Fans arrived for the concert from across Croatia and beyond – Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, and Austria – many in black berets bearing the insignia of the Croatian Defence Force (“Hrvatske oružane snage”, HOS), the paramilitary wing of the Croatian Party of Rights known for its use of the Ustaša ideology and symbols. Drones projected images of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Cross into the sky above the concert.
Thompson himself wore a black T-shirt with the number “03941158” printed on it – the prison number of Zvonko Bušić, who hijacked a Trans World Airlines Boeing 727 in 1976, killing a police officer. Bušić hijacked the flight to force American newspapers to publish his manifesto demanding Croatian independence from Yugoslavia. The name “Thompson” comes from the singer’s favourite American submachine gun, which he used while fighting with the Čavoglave Battalion during the 1990s.
Butler emphasises that performativity requires repetition, the same acts rehearsed time after time until they become second nature. The concert at the Hippodrome was ritualistic: the singer and the crowd engaged in quasi-religious calls and responses. The crowd chants “kill a Serb” over and over until it becomes second nature. One visibly intoxicated man earned his own article on the Croatian news website Index.hr for singing a song that glorifies the Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška concentration camps. The song, called “Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara” was not performed at the concert, and the police chose not to act.
Performativity, for Butler, is citational. Each act draws on and reinforces previous ones. The first person to raise their arm in salute makes it easier for the second. By the time half a million are chanting, not participating becomes the harder choice. The crowd generates its own permission structure, a feedback loop where each voice licenses the next.
None of this absolves anyone. Nevertheless, it does help explain why someone who would never shout “kill a Serb” alone might find themselves doing so surrounded by several hundred thousand people already shouting it, or choose not to react or condemn it.
Using Butler is ironic. Their work on gender shows how drag subverts traditional gender roles and reveals their constructed nature. One could see Thompson’s performance as a form of nationalist drag – elaborate, theatrical, yet deadly serious.
But, this was no hidden subcultural event. Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković posed for a photograph with Thompson during the concert’s rehearsal. The country’s Minister for Defence admitted to joining the crowd’s chanting of the controversial salute. The Zagreb Youth Initiative for Human and Minority Rights declared it “the most massive pro-fascist gathering held in Europe after the Second World War”.
After the concert, the Croatian Ombudswoman lamented that the mass performance of the Ustaše salute seemed “something acceptable and legal”. In a sense, it is. In June 2020, Croatia’s High Misdemeanour Court ruled that Thompson’s use of “Za dom spremni” did not constitute a breach of public order, a decision that the Human Rights House Zagreb called appalling.
The verdict contradicted the same court’s rulings from 2015 to 2019, which had penalised individuals for shouting the salute in public. In July 2025, the same court allowed the salute in certain “commemorative contexts”. The legal ambiguity enables the performance. Plenković’s explicit approval makes it a political act rather than a cultural one. What does it mean when Croatia, as a state, participates in a nationalist drag performance?
In Butler’s terms, the state is not simply tolerating the performance; it is co-performing it. When Plenković poses with Thompson, when courts rule the salute permissible, they lend institutional legitimacy to what might otherwise remain subcultural theatre. The audience expands: not just the half-million at the Hippodrome, but everyone watching the news, seeing the Prime Minister’s smile.
Croatia joined the European Union in 2013, a club nominally built on the rejection of fascism. Twelve years later, its head of government is lending his image to an event that opens with a Ustaše salute. At the time of writing, Brussels has said nothing.
Croatia also has a sizable Serbian minority, who watched this performance with some alarm. Serbs face discrimination in public employment and daily life; in some cases, they conceal their ethnic identity to avoid prejudice. For them, half a million people chanting Ustaše slogans with state approval is not an abstract theory.
Butler’s framework offers a grim kind of hope. If nationalism is performative rather than essential, it can be performed differently – or not at all. The people at the Hippodrome were not born nationalists. They chose to buy a ticket, put on a beret, and sing the songs. They could have chosen otherwise.
Yet there is a paradox here. The Ustaše symbols appear transgressive; they nominally violate Croatian law. Croatia’s Constitutional Court has repeatedly criticised the salute as unconstitutional. But when the Prime Minister poses with Thompson and the courts rule the salute permissible, the performance reinforces rather than subverts state power. Audiences experience themselves as provocative whilst performing the establishment’s script.
The Ustaše regime murdered hundreds of thousands of people. The chants at Thompson’s concert glorify and perpetuate that regime. The BBC asked whether Thompson’s concert was neo-fascist theatre or patriotic fun. The framing was wrong; it was both. Nationalism, like all identities, is a performance. The question is what happens when the Croatian state writes itself into the script?
