ABSTRACT
On 3 December 1917 in Vienna, some ferocious language was employed in a debate in the Austrian parliament (the Reichsrat). On behalf of the club of South Slav deputies, Vjekoslav Spincˇic´, a Croat from Istria, lambasted the monarchy’s wartime regime: ‘How we have been treated during the war exceeds anything that has occurred in the history of humanity. Never, nowhere, have governments dealt so badly, so terribly, so cruelly, so criminally with their own citizens, as our governments with us Croats, Serbs and Slovenes during this ever lasting war’. In short, it had been a veritable ‘reign of terror’. It was a genocidal image, conjured up again a few months later when a Serb deputy described the wartime ‘reign of terror’ as comparable only to the Spanish Inquisition or the atrocity of St Bartholomew’s Night. Yet out of this nightmare, he claimed, the final victor would be the idea of freedom for all peoples and, in particular, an independent southern Slav state.1
