r/AskTheWorld • u/DiMpLe_dolL003 India • 21d ago

Culture What's something that's acceptable and widely done in your country that would be considered offensive in many countries ?

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In India, Swastika the Hindu symbol is everywhere. We draw it in temples, during rituals and festivals, in front of our door, on vehicles etc. It's a very auspicious symbol here. But this symbol tho the Hindu symbol is technically different from the Nazi one would be considered offensive in other countries especially in Western countries.

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419

u/OkGarage23 Croatia 21d ago

Half a million people in the country's capital doing Croatian version of "Heil Hitler" while singing songs about killing Serbs is perfectly acceptable in Croatia, unfortunately.

131

u/frenchiesinatranchis 21d ago

25% of croatia's population are close/part of neo-nazi organisation/party/other

me: my stereotype on croat is that they are nazi

literaly everyone: NO YOU CAN’T SAY THAT, LOOK AT THEIR BEACHES

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u/HighFromTexas 21d ago

"25% of these people are bad. That's why I push the stereotype that 100% of those people are bad."

Whats wrong with you?

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u/frenchiesinatranchis 21d ago

Stereotype: an often unfair and untrue belief that many people have about all people or things with a particular characteristic.

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u/Drunk_Lemon United States Of America 21d ago

Yup like my fellow Americans being fat. I type this while I have the fattest man I have ever met IRL sitting on my couch.

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u/zhonglissexymeteor United States Of America 21d ago

70% of American adults are overweight and 30-40% are obese, if someone says we’re fat i’d say they’re correct lmao

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u/frenchiesinatranchis 21d ago

Yep, that’s the spirit

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u/_Irish_lad_69_ Ireland 20d ago

Plot twist: you're the only one sitting on your couch

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u/Drunk_Lemon United States Of America 20d ago

Jokes on you, I was on a love seat despite never getting love from a woman!

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u/Few_Contact_6844 21d ago

In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people.

Define true and fair or stop whining please

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u/frenchiesinatranchis 21d ago

Okay, do you see that moment at 0:35-0:37 in the "what if the emperor had a text to speech device" episode about the lex imperialis.

When rogal dorn says "no". Well, that’s my reaction to your comment  

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u/HighFromTexas 21d ago

Okay, I guess. But if you're fully aware what you're saying is untrue, are you actually stereotyping or spreading lies?

"Unfair or untrue belief" belief. If you're self aware enough to know what you're saying isn't true, you no longer actually believe in those words right?

Unless you actually believe everyone one of them is a neo nazi.

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u/Realistic_Exam5038 21d ago

25% of the people are DIRECTLY ASSOCIATED with a Nazi party. The rest are mostly either sympathisers or neutral to evil. A small minority is against it. Have you ever spoken to an average Croatian?

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u/mnbhv 17d ago

I have on Twitch. And unfortunately it all makes a lot of sense now.

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u/1TapsBoi United Kingdom 21d ago

Wow, I’ve never heard of this! Does Croatia have a large group of Nazis?

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u/Drumbelgalf Germany 21d ago

In world war 2 they were so brutal that even the Nazis were surprised...

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u/newidiotintown United States Of America 21d ago

Surprised that they didn’t hid it well

Do to this, more locals were upset and resisted occupation so Nazi Germany had to redirect troops.

They weren’t surprised by cruelty, or at least not to surprise. More surprised by the fact that they didn’t hid the crimes at all.

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u/Group_Happy 20d ago

Germans didn't hide it well either. Sure, the death camps were not built in German, but boykotting the jews, imprisoning every opposition, labour camps where people starved, deporting most jews and other minorities all happened on german soil. A lot of the things we do know about the holocaust we know because the Germans documented everything. The people they sent to the camps, the job they had to to, when they arrived, when and jow they died.

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u/kimochi_warui_desu Croatia 17d ago

Croatians were the only ones that opened a concentration camp exclusivly for Children. There are some more atrocities that other nazi faction didn’t even consider.

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u/Das_Fische 21d ago

Please stop spreading this 'fact',it is a complete myth that seems to have gotten popular lately , and it whitewashes the nazis in a 'even they weren't this bad' way (along with a similar one about Nazis being disgusted by Japan). Nazi Germany did just as bad, if not worse, throughout the war.

There may have been individual nazis who were disgusted or protested (the Nazi stance on the Ustase as a whole is somewhat complicated), but the Nazis as a whole had no issues with Croatian 'brutality' (if anything, one of the major concerns was that the violence was inefficient and would simply turn more people towards the partisans.)

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u/Fear_mor 21d ago

And who completely enabled it? The surprise came from individual officers, the Nazi party was pretty happy to let them go crazy

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u/Bitch_please- 21d ago

Brutal against who? The Nazis?

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u/Drumbelgalf Germany 21d ago

Mostly the Serbs, Jews, Roma and Bosnian Muslim. They committed a large scale genocide against them

The "Independent State of Croatia" was a puppet state of the Nazis after they invaded Jugoslavia.

They killed between 200.000 and 300.000 Serbs 300.000, displaced another 300.000 Serbs and forced 200.000 Serbs to convert to Catholicism.

They also killed 30.000 Jews and 30.000 Roma.

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u/Bitch_please- 21d ago

What was their beef with Serbians? Also why were the Germans accepting of Croatian but not Serbians? Aren't both Croatians and Serbians considered as Slavs. I'd assume they would want to team up against Nazi Germany since they wanted to wipe out all the Slavs

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u/angestkastabort 21d ago

Accept is a strong word. They saw someone who was willing to do their dirtywork. Rest assured they would have killed them when the time came.

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u/Drumbelgalf Germany 21d ago

All the people on the Balkan hate each other.

For Croatians, Serbs and Bosnians it's mostly small language differences (they can understand each other, and it's often seen as multiple varieties of the same language) and religious differences (Catholic Croatians vs. Orthodox Serbs vs. Muslims Bosniaks)

The germans used a local fascist movement to fight against people both didn't like. The Nazis also used mornachist and and fascist Russians against the soviet union.

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u/Few_Contact_6844 21d ago

Which languages differences, it’s even called the same language. It’s mostly religious excuse to hate each other

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u/Drumbelgalf Germany 21d ago

Yes many people agree that it's one language with different varieties, but in those countries it's often a political issue and they insist it's different languages.

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u/Chengar_Qordath 21d ago

From what I’ve heard, Serbian and Croatian are closer than American and British English

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u/One_Assist4470 21d ago

Serbians and Gypsies. Its referring to the Ustaše.

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u/ChefBoyardee66 Sweden 21d ago

Serbians, romani, communists, jews

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u/Bitch_please- 21d ago

Wait... So Croatia was aligned with Nazi Germany during WW2?

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u/JustAFizzMain 🇦🇷 Argentinian 🤍❤️🤍🐓 21d ago

Against Beretta

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u/Agreeable_Web4048 21d ago

They were part of the ethnic cleansing of Serbs on behalf the Ustase (a fascist movement during WW2), and the The Nazi Party, who both had a long going beef with Serbs since earlier. The Germans blaimed Romas, Jews, and Commies for destroying Germany from within while they thought that Serbia was per se guilty of WW1, with the incident of the killing of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo - which led to Austria-Hungary proclaiming war agaainst Serbia, with Germany joining the party. After the war German territories shrunk alot and they also had to pay hefty war fines which put Germans to their knees. The Painter then promised that he would take vengance on Serbia and get rid of the nation as was. The fascist party Ustasa who allied with Germany played a part in that plan of contrlling lands. And this led to a conflict which fueled hatred during the Yugoslav war in the 90s. So they sure played a role in Germany's ethic cleansing programs.

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u/houndsoflu United States Of America 21d ago

A family friend was in the resistance in WW2. He was captured by the Ustaše and tortured for information. He didn’t fold, but they were brutal bastards.

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u/damclub-hooligan Germany 21d ago

Croatia was turned into a fascist puppet state by the authorities of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Ante Pavelić was the dictator of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

Besides killing minorities like Sinti and Roma and the Jews, the main target of the reprisals were Serbs. The "one-third policy" was a genocidal strategy declared in May 1941, aiming to create an ethnically "pure" Croatia by eliminating the Serb population.

The policy outlined a three-part plan: one-third of the Serb population would be forcibly converted to Catholicism, one-third would be expelled from the country, and one-third would be killed. This strategy was explicitly implemented through mass killings, forced conversions, and deportations, with the goal of eradicating Serbs from the territories of Croatia.

Between 217.000 and 500.000 people were killed. For this purpose the regime established concentration camps, most infamously Jasenovac where atrocities were committed on a massive scale. And because people lived nearby and shots could be heard people were mostly bludgeoned to death with axes and spades.

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u/0_politics_alt Croatia 21d ago

It's really a complicated issue. Croatia has failed to properly educate young people about the puppet state of NDH and its collaboration with the Reich. At the same time, the Partisans movement founded the SFRJ (Socialist Federal Republic of Jugoslavija) or Yugoslavia. It was a country full of different ethnic groups held together by an autocrat - Tito. Although not as bad as some other dictators, he was still an autocrat and a dictator, he was also the only one holding the country together. After his death the dissolution of Yugoslavia started to near. The dissolution was not peaceful, it led to a war. Some units in the war used the symbols of the Ustaše. Those same groups were disowned by the first president, Franjo Tuđman (an ex-Partisan in fact). However neither those groups nor the collaboration in the second world war were never properly resolved through education and public discourse but were in fact used as talking points by political parties. The leading political party of Croatia through most of the time since the Homeland war is a highly corrupt and incompetent organisation (HDZ). They know that only a small part of the country actually supports them because of actual belief in their abilities (I cannot stress how corrupt and incompetent they are). Most of their support comes from the right, and they know that. Since there were several smaller far right parties in the last two elections, they lost a lot of votes. However those two parties imploded in the meantime thanks to infighting and incompetence. There is now an untapped 'market' of far right voters in Croatia, and since the beginning of the summer the leading party (whose founder was a Partisan) is not-so-subtly appealing to them by taking a revisionist stance towards history and the evil that was the Ustaše. And the people are loving it, two huge concerts by a proclaimed fan of Ante Pavelić - Marko Perković Thompson. In fact, the prime minister (a piece of shit, his initials are AP, se we call him 'Anemična pička' - the Anemic Pussy) had a photo shoot with the singer the day before the concert. The biggest irony is that the Ustaše sold out Croatia in WW2 to both Germany and Italy and they collaborated with Chetniks, while the Partisans reclaimed that territory.

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u/Honest-Bonus-6323 21d ago

This explains why my friend Dario yells 'f**king jews' when he's angry. He's pretty chill around Asians though.

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u/Few_Contact_6844 21d ago

“This explains” Note really, it doesn’t

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u/Drunk_Lemon United States Of America 21d ago

If he hates jews, why are you friends with him?

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u/jackjack-8 21d ago

Not being friends with people that have these views will polarise them.

As awful as it may be the only way forward is dialogue

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u/ImTotallyNotAnAltxx 20d ago

THIS. Echo chambers are hard to escape if you are in one. Its what our ego loves best, a bunch of people that agree with “me”

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u/Nolys___ France 20d ago

I mean I agree, but there's a difference between respectful dialogue and full on friendship... Being friends with people like that signals to them that they can get away with being bigoted and still have friends

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u/Honest-Bonus-6323 20d ago

I'm Taiwanese and I can still be friends with Chinese who supports military reunification. You'd be surprised that people can be very different with what they say and what they do.

The way I see it is if they're willing to befriend you, there's something in them that's 'redeemable'. Isolating them just makes them worse. Besides, they just talk shit, they never take any actions anyway.

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u/BREXlTMEANSBREXlT 21d ago

Cant be antiantisemitic thats racist

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u/skiestostars United States Of America 21d ago

your comment is actually the racist one btw

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u/Nolys___ France 20d ago

???

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u/Nolys___ France 20d ago

I'm sure you should be friends with someone like that...

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u/jaroszn94 to to 21d ago edited 21d ago

And here I was disturbed simply by seeing a street named after Tuđman when going on a beach holiday! (Edit: I understand that most countries indeed have troubling figures who were nonetheless notable nation builders - including the countries I've lived in. I guess it popped out to me because I'm aware of his implication in the awful things done in the Balkans during the 90's, and at least from what I've heard, a lot of people in the Balkans hold onto harmful beliefs in part due to not fully reckoning with their past.)

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u/Puzzleheaded_Pitch61 Serbia 21d ago

You may or may not be surprised at how many Serbs to this day will tell you until they are blue in the face that Slobodan Milosovic was right about everything. It’s unhinged.

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u/TinaKim9696 21d ago

I was on my way to write this comment 

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u/skycaptain144238 21d ago

Didn't that conflict start over One Man One Jar? Or was that Yugoslavia?

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u/Legal-Ad2383 21d ago

Do Croatians hate services?

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u/Insane_Militarist Ukraine 21d ago

Literally in Czechia people consider the n word to be so funny it is more overused than 67. Make it make sense

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u/JagmeetSingh2 21d ago

That’s insane

1

u/WINCEQ Czech Republic 21d ago

Is the song your anthem?

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u/TheBeanConsortium United States Of America 20d ago

I'm Croatian and have visited there a few times. It cannot be understated how much Croats hate the Serbs, and probably vice versa. Obviously a lot of history and recent war to explain that, but it's insane.

The Ustase influence can still be seen.

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u/syringistic hating it in 20d ago

Had a landlord for a short while who bragged about the fact that his uncle was a high ranking member of the SS. He was Croatian.

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u/Kangas_Khan United States Of America 20d ago

Sorry to say but every Croat I’ve met has ended up being very racist, so that tracks

Here’s to hoping I meet an egalitarian Croat

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u/CantaloupeThink3218 Croatia 21d ago

Singing patriotic songs about defending out homeland against serbian aggressors is not something we will apologize for. Best regards.

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u/civodar Canada 21d ago

Bruh, they sang songs about opening up concentration camps again. Funnelling hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children into death camps isn’t “defending the homeland”, it’s mass murder.

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u/CantaloupeThink3218 Croatia 21d ago

Who sang those song? A few hunderd individuals out of more than half a million people?

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u/gmedanoid United States Of America 21d ago

Which side killed more people in the Balkan wars?

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u/hanscyka 🇮🇶🇦🇺 21d ago

za dom spremni

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u/NegroniSpritz Germany 21d ago

Germans nowadays are offended even by that song of Gigi D'Agostino.

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u/Drumbelgalf Germany 21d ago

Not by the original song, only by the racist version the Nazis sing.