THE LIFE OF CROATIAN PUBLICST MILIVOJ MAGDIĆ (1900–1948)

Komunistička se partija nakon Drugog svjetskog rata krvavo razračunavala sa svojim političkim i inim neistomišljenicima. Mnogi su živote izgubili bez ikakva sudskog postupka, a i onima koji su se pojavili pred sudom bila je u mnogim slučajevima unaprijed određena i presuda. Jedan u nizu takvih bio je i do tada jedan od vodećih hrvatskih političkih publicista Milivoj Magdić.Since his student days in Zagreb, Milivoj Magdić, one of the leading Croatian political publicists in the first half of the twentieth century, was well-disposed towards Marxism. On a result, he gained a prominent place in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. But in his writings he soon divorced himself from official communist ideology. As a result, he was proclaimed a traitor to the party and a provocateur in the pay of the police. He nevertheless remained a committed Marxist until Stalin\u27s purges in the USSR in 1935 left him disillusioned. Thereafter, he became the Yugoslavian communists most dangerous ideological opponent. Magdić believed that Marxism was flawed because it attempted to build socialism by controlling people, because it left the responsibility of establishing socialism exclusively at the feet of one social class, and because, most fatally, it relied too heavily on materialism. For holding ideas such as these, the communists at one point even attempted to murder Magovac. During the period of the Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945) he wrote mostly for the periodical Spremnost (Readiness), but he held no political office. At the end of the Second World War he emigrated across Austria to Italy, but he was arrested in Rome in 1947 by the English and handed over to the Yugoslav government. He was proclaimed a war criminal, brought before the court, and sentenced to death. This was primarily due to his writings against communism and Marxism