POGLEDI USTAŠKIH MEDIJA PREMA PARTIZANSKIM ZASJEDANJIMA “SRPSKOG” AVNOJ-a
THE OPINIONS OF THE USTASHA MEDIA TOWARDS THE PARTISAN SESSIONS OF THE ”SERB” AVNOJ

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents a short overview of the Ustasha media during the Second World War regarding the partisan movement and its political body the Anti-fascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ). According to some theoreticians propaganda represents a systematic attempt to shape the perception and knowledge, and manipulation of the behaviour of an individual, with the purpose of generating reaction which the propagandists want to achieve. According to contemporary research, mass communication propaganda is a carefully places system of information designed in order to shape public opinion and behaviour. Even though propaganda, especially war propaganda, is a product of the earlier centuries it achieved its peak in the hands of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century when the authorities used this system to control the placement of information thereby achieving total control over society. Only recently did historians begin to pay attention to propaganda activities of western allies during the Second World War, in which Great Britain was the forerunner. Through the monopolisation of state propaganda in the totalitarian regimes (national-socialism, communism, Maoism, etc.), the term propaganda had a very pejorative character. In the April of 1941, after the defeat of the Royal Yugoslav army without any difficulties or resistance in the newly established Ustasha state under the tutorship of the forces of the Axis, total control over journalism and the complete propaganda space in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was established immediately. Gradually the propaganda machine of the NDH focused its point towards its most important political and military adversary – the Partisan movement. In order to discredit this movement among the population of the NDH, the Ustasha media wrote about the alleged Jewish and Freemason background of Marxism and Bolshevism, as well as the Partisan movement. Partisans were portrayed as criminal groups mainly composed of Serbs and Jews whose only aim was the destruction of the Croatian state and the whole Croat people. All Ustasha media proclaimed Partisans as a mixture of Bolshevism and Greater Serb tendencies, who in the end had a plan of eliminating the Croat people and returning them to Yugoslavia, i.e. the communist Greater Serbia. At the same time, the media of the NDH sought to devalue and delegitimize AVNOJ and its delegates, proclaiming it as a ”Serb construct” and another dangerous ”Serb plot” directed against the Croatian state.

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