ABSTRACT In Croatia, the war of symbols and the rise of hate speech has been manifested most prominently through Za dom spremni (“Ready for the Homeland”); the official salute of the WWII fascist quisling-state the Independent State of Croatia. The case that triggered a broad public dispute occurred in November 2016, when a memorial plaque containing the inscribed salute was installed near the WWII concentration camp Jasenovac by radical right-wing politicians and war veterans. As a consequence of being intertwined with the controversial legacy of WWII and the 1990s Croatian War of Independence, the salute on the plaque gave rise to an enclosed meaning-making sphere characterized by the invocation of existing cultural texts and the creation of new ones, the reinforcement of the us-them boundary, and the strengthening of existing taboos. In line with the abovementioned, the overarching aim of the study is to place the Croatian WWII Ustaša salute into a broader theoretical meaning-making framework while demonstrating the importance of cultural functions of the salute and nationalistically fueled hate speech more widely.