I am writing this letter to esteemed European institutions as a patriotic Slovenian as well as a proud European in hope that European Union and its institutions take notice of systemic effort to shove our country back into the abyss of totalitarianism. I feel this is something that has to be expressed since our western neighbors and allies seem to be completely oblivious to our ever more apparent descent from rule of law to chaos of ex-communist dictatorship worshiping madhouse.
A single Facebook comment underneath a post of our ex Prime Minister Janez Janša was an inspiration for this exasperated rant.
Long story short: Mr. Janša expressed his dismay in a Facebook post about a recent gruesome murder case which was broadcast on Facebook via live feed, and subsequently became a media sensation. He added how there are many victims of the communist regime lying in unmarked graves around Slovenia and the media doesn’t really pay much attention to it anymore.
An ignoramus of the worst kind – one of those you hear yelling about the good old days in reeky old bars – commented with a vile reply, that encapsulated everything that is wrong with our country at the moment. I won’t dwell deep into his profanity laden comment, suffice it to say that he said something in line with: “Fuck you and your holes filled with (nazi/fascist) collaborators.”
First it has to be explained what these holes actually are. They are mass graves filled with victims of the communist regime. Some Croatian, some Serbian, others Slovene. Some that collaborated with Italian and German armed forces during the Second world war. Others which just had too much real-estate that needed to be pillaged and stolen by the communists. Then there were some who just found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The biggest mass grave discovered so far is Huda Jama. Huda Jama is an abandoned mine in which communists hid what they described as “nazi and fascist collaborators” after a mass slaughter that followed the (so called) liberation (which was actually thinly disguised 46 year enslavement of the Slovenian people). Those “collaborators” – as later forensic evidence showed – also included young women as well as males in their mid-teens, most of them being completely clueless about Hitler, Mussolini or the whirlwind of World War 2 around them, as they suffocated underneath an ever-increasing pile of corpses being unloaded on top of them. Some dead, some barely alive, some completely lucid and horrified. Huda Jama was just one of such post-1945 dumping grounds where communist revolutionaries tried to bury their crimes far away from reaches of history books. And they succeeded. Right until 2011 when the first burial site was officially found – after decades of murmurs from the local population. When first bodies were being evacuated and the industrial scale of the murderous endeavor of communist death-squads finally became apparent, the leftist government tried to play it down, going as far as the President of the Republic and one time candidate for the high position of UN Secretary General proclaiming the massacres "a 2nd rate topic".
At this point I would like to take you back to that comment made by the ignoramus that spurred me on to write this response. You remember – the kind you run into in bars of questionable reputation. It just so happens this man is no ignoramus. He is a secondary school history teacher that goes by the name of Blaž Mršić. He is teaching at a prestigious France Prešeren gymnasium in Kranj. Gymnasium secondary schools in Slovenia are usually attended by future intellectuals who intend to study further at the university. This far-left activist, akin to a Nazi supporter in Germany on the public payroll. He is being paid by our – supposedly center-left – government to present our children - future intellectuals, no less - with unbiased truth about our nation’s history. Yet he is an ideologue of the worst kind. An apparent anarchist, who does not believe in the rule of law and condones extrajudicial killings. This is the person who will tell our youth what happened during the second world war.
This would be an unfortunate anomaly if he was an isolated incident. But it’s far from it. A fetish of communism worship is running rampant throughout our country and is opportunistically yet tacitly supported by the establishment. You see, this teacher will never get suspended by the Ministry of Education. Not as long as the (supposedly) center-left government of Miro Cerar reigns supreme. Nor were the kindergarten teachers who dressed up 5 year olds in old revolutionary uniforms mimicking the look of Yugoslavian guerrillas from seven decades ago.
The worship of communist symbols in our country has become a strange obsession fully supported by the government that still calls itself center-left but is slipping ever more dangerously into demagoguery of radical regressive left.
A bizarre ritual occurs every year on 5th of January as people gather to commemorate the battle of Dražgoše, a long forgotten incident during the second world war, where the communist army sacrificed a whole village of people as collateral damage, after they provoked Germans into attacking them. This infamous incident has grown into mythic status due to rewritten post-war history that portrayed the communist partisans as freedom fighters that stood up to Nazi Germany. Every year this embarrassment of our nation is being remembered as the nation-defining moment of resistance. The whole left establishment comes to greet the – ever fewer – surviving soldiers, as well as local aficionados of everything that has a distinct flavor of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, communism and anarchy. Together they rejoice, wave Yugoslavian flags with the infamous red star in the middle, carry banners sporting pictures Josip Broz Tito - our local Kim Jong Un - and dress up as partisan fighters, strapped with actual guns, like some ghoulish apparitions from a long forgotten battles.
The current President of the Republic gives a speech. Followed by the prime minister. Followed by the ever-present Milan Kučan, our first President of the Republic and coincidentally also the last President of the Communist party of Slovenia, as well as the ultimate puppet master of post-transitional Slovenia, who with tacit undercover support helped socially engineer the left establishment around his persona. A man who is still being viewed as an esteemed statesman in our country has actually been an enabler of the worst kind of radical left train of political thought. Alongside his faithful regime economists - many of them apologists of yugoslavian brand of communism - he helped concoct a policy of “national interest” as a natural successor to Yugoslavian self-managing socialism, wherein foreign companies have been demonized and systematically shunned, while local state-owned ones have been privy to political protection. Of course these state-owned companies are jam-packed with regime-friendly bureaucrats, which basically amounts to the end game of political elites stealing the whole economy in one self-protective, interventionist swipe.
For this to be achieved the iconography of yesteryear had to be employed rigorously. Yugoslavian flags, hammer&sickle symbols, anticapitalist movements, state-ownership supporting mobs which randomly - yet in reality instigated by the media and politicians - gather on main squares of our cities every time there’s a remote chance of a foreign company saving one of our state-owned businesses that’s been run to the ground by mismanagement and corruption… this is the face of new Slovenia. A country so convoluted with it’s past that it’s unable to ratify the 2009 European Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism, simply for the fact that it added communism as one of the totalitarian regimes that this partiuclar resolution condemned. How could we possibly ratify it as such, when much of the left establishment stems from the very same totalitarian tradition.
I feel it’s a Slovenia that the west is yet to pay attention to. Which is too bad because we need our western allies to get rid of this virus of pathological radical leftism. There are subtle hints in international polls every now and again, yet no notices. We are one of the most euro skeptical countries in the EU. We are one of only four EU countries that would prefer the protection of Russia, rather than NATO. Just two decades ago Bill Clinton was met with great fanfare, one that could only be matched to the one he got in Kosovo. Today we are one of the countries that hate USA most (next to such champions of Liberty and freedom as Somalia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran…). The signs are ominous. We aren’t just slipping to the past economically and ideologically, we are doing it geo-politically too. Two years ago the tip of this nasty iceberg surfaced on the European stage when one of our left's patsy prime ministers Alenka Bratušek embarrassed herself as she ran unsuccessfully for the European Commissioner. During her questioning the EU parliament members discovered more than just the fact that she's a political poseur with no worthwhile knowledge on the field she's supposed to be in charge of. They also discovered she proudly sang the lyrics of an infamous communist anthem Bandiera Rossa during an official event that was broadcasted on our national television. PMs - even those on the left - seemed to be puzzled how an ALDE member sees no problem esctatically screaming "Evviva il communismo e la libertà" during a public event. No one in Slovenia was surprised. It is the new norm.
You see this shift in national mindset is not just a freak show. It’s a methodological political guerrilla warfare that certain idealogues gathered around the ex President of the Republic Kučan spread throughout our political and economic landscape. These political elites on the left portray themselves as social democrats, yet they are thinly disguised last European remnants of the once terrifying Yugoslavian totalitarianism.
Their tyranny however is executed in a far more clever, efficient and sinister way, compared the strongmen of the 21st century like Xi, Lukashenko, Erdogan or Putin usually go about it – they rather rule our tiny little country incognito, while keeping appearances of a parliamentary democracy. It is a worst kept secret that the last 3 left-wing prime-ministers were hand-picked by a very tiny circle of the leftist elites. Zoran Janković would be the 4th but fell through due to his own political incompetence after having already won the elections. It is also proven public knowledge that they control pretty much all mainstream media through intricate network of their loyalists who own major newspapers and other media outlets in the country. In addition the courts are almost exclusively presided over by jurists who learned their jurisprudence in a communist dictatorship.
Lukashenko is an evil dictator in the eyes of the world. These people are humble retired old men, who go out for a walk in the park every morning. Yet in the long run no less of a stumbling block in the process of democracy, freedom and free thought.
Now back to the main point of this text. The fact is strange things are happening in our country. Things that would have been unfeasible just 20 years ago. And a history teacher not just condoning, but celebrating extrajudicial killings of innocent people after Second world war is a line in the sand that needs to be drawn for the sake of sanity of this country and Europe in general. I titled this document a ballad but it can also be an ode to freedom.
It is up to you, esteemed European colleagues to have your say. It is your duty to tell our current Prime Minister, his Ministers and our government as a whole that it is not acceptable for a publically funded teacher to be condoning crimes against humanity and getting away with it without punishment. Remind them that such an outrageous act would not only be disciplined but criminally sanctioned in any modern, civilized country. You owe this to the rest of Slovenians. The ones who have not yet been swallowed by quasi-yugoslavian self-managed socialism movement. We - the libertarians, the free trade impresarios, the believers in the European idea - are your true allies. The ones that keep the public opinion at least 50 percent on euro-atlantic side of the fence. We are the ones who want a healthy EU, just like you do. We want to help you cleanse its infected regions which you don’t even know exist. I am pointing one out here. Have your say!
Tell our prime minister Miro Cerar that it is NOT acceptable for a public figure who is supposed to be teaching our kids unbiased history to sadistically support postwar extrajudicial slaughter fests.
Tell Maja Brenčič the Minister of Education, Science and Sport that it is wrong her ministry did nothing to make things right in this scandal. Tell her that countless, nameless victims still resting in mass graves across Slovenia are being shamed and humiliated for as long as this teacher is still a part of a workforce that she oversees
Tell them. I promise you, it will make a difference. Because one thing Slovenes care about the most – no matter if they are evil dictators or boring bureaucrats – is saving face. Help make Slovenia European again. Help make it sane again.
A single Facebook comment underneath a post of our ex Prime Minister Janez Janša was an inspiration for this exasperated rant.
Long story short: Mr. Janša expressed his dismay in a Facebook post about a recent gruesome murder case which was broadcast on Facebook via live feed, and subsequently became a media sensation. He added how there are many victims of the communist regime lying in unmarked graves around Slovenia and the media doesn’t really pay much attention to it anymore.
An ignoramus of the worst kind – one of those you hear yelling about the good old days in reeky old bars – commented with a vile reply, that encapsulated everything that is wrong with our country at the moment. I won’t dwell deep into his profanity laden comment, suffice it to say that he said something in line with: “Fuck you and your holes filled with (nazi/fascist) collaborators.”
First it has to be explained what these holes actually are. They are mass graves filled with victims of the communist regime. Some Croatian, some Serbian, others Slovene. Some that collaborated with Italian and German armed forces during the Second world war. Others which just had too much real-estate that needed to be pillaged and stolen by the communists. Then there were some who just found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The biggest mass grave discovered so far is Huda Jama. Huda Jama is an abandoned mine in which communists hid what they described as “nazi and fascist collaborators” after a mass slaughter that followed the (so called) liberation (which was actually thinly disguised 46 year enslavement of the Slovenian people). Those “collaborators” – as later forensic evidence showed – also included young women as well as males in their mid-teens, most of them being completely clueless about Hitler, Mussolini or the whirlwind of World War 2 around them, as they suffocated underneath an ever-increasing pile of corpses being unloaded on top of them. Some dead, some barely alive, some completely lucid and horrified. Huda Jama was just one of such post-1945 dumping grounds where communist revolutionaries tried to bury their crimes far away from reaches of history books. And they succeeded. Right until 2011 when the first burial site was officially found – after decades of murmurs from the local population. When first bodies were being evacuated and the industrial scale of the murderous endeavor of communist death-squads finally became apparent, the leftist government tried to play it down, going as far as the President of the Republic and one time candidate for the high position of UN Secretary General proclaiming the massacres "a 2nd rate topic".
At this point I would like to take you back to that comment made by the ignoramus that spurred me on to write this response. You remember – the kind you run into in bars of questionable reputation. It just so happens this man is no ignoramus. He is a secondary school history teacher that goes by the name of Blaž Mršić. He is teaching at a prestigious France Prešeren gymnasium in Kranj. Gymnasium secondary schools in Slovenia are usually attended by future intellectuals who intend to study further at the university. This far-left activist, akin to a Nazi supporter in Germany on the public payroll. He is being paid by our – supposedly center-left – government to present our children - future intellectuals, no less - with unbiased truth about our nation’s history. Yet he is an ideologue of the worst kind. An apparent anarchist, who does not believe in the rule of law and condones extrajudicial killings. This is the person who will tell our youth what happened during the second world war.
This would be an unfortunate anomaly if he was an isolated incident. But it’s far from it. A fetish of communism worship is running rampant throughout our country and is opportunistically yet tacitly supported by the establishment. You see, this teacher will never get suspended by the Ministry of Education. Not as long as the (supposedly) center-left government of Miro Cerar reigns supreme. Nor were the kindergarten teachers who dressed up 5 year olds in old revolutionary uniforms mimicking the look of Yugoslavian guerrillas from seven decades ago.
The worship of communist symbols in our country has become a strange obsession fully supported by the government that still calls itself center-left but is slipping ever more dangerously into demagoguery of radical regressive left.
A bizarre ritual occurs every year on 5th of January as people gather to commemorate the battle of Dražgoše, a long forgotten incident during the second world war, where the communist army sacrificed a whole village of people as collateral damage, after they provoked Germans into attacking them. This infamous incident has grown into mythic status due to rewritten post-war history that portrayed the communist partisans as freedom fighters that stood up to Nazi Germany. Every year this embarrassment of our nation is being remembered as the nation-defining moment of resistance. The whole left establishment comes to greet the – ever fewer – surviving soldiers, as well as local aficionados of everything that has a distinct flavor of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, communism and anarchy. Together they rejoice, wave Yugoslavian flags with the infamous red star in the middle, carry banners sporting pictures Josip Broz Tito - our local Kim Jong Un - and dress up as partisan fighters, strapped with actual guns, like some ghoulish apparitions from a long forgotten battles.
The current President of the Republic gives a speech. Followed by the prime minister. Followed by the ever-present Milan Kučan, our first President of the Republic and coincidentally also the last President of the Communist party of Slovenia, as well as the ultimate puppet master of post-transitional Slovenia, who with tacit undercover support helped socially engineer the left establishment around his persona. A man who is still being viewed as an esteemed statesman in our country has actually been an enabler of the worst kind of radical left train of political thought. Alongside his faithful regime economists - many of them apologists of yugoslavian brand of communism - he helped concoct a policy of “national interest” as a natural successor to Yugoslavian self-managing socialism, wherein foreign companies have been demonized and systematically shunned, while local state-owned ones have been privy to political protection. Of course these state-owned companies are jam-packed with regime-friendly bureaucrats, which basically amounts to the end game of political elites stealing the whole economy in one self-protective, interventionist swipe.
For this to be achieved the iconography of yesteryear had to be employed rigorously. Yugoslavian flags, hammer&sickle symbols, anticapitalist movements, state-ownership supporting mobs which randomly - yet in reality instigated by the media and politicians - gather on main squares of our cities every time there’s a remote chance of a foreign company saving one of our state-owned businesses that’s been run to the ground by mismanagement and corruption… this is the face of new Slovenia. A country so convoluted with it’s past that it’s unable to ratify the 2009 European Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism, simply for the fact that it added communism as one of the totalitarian regimes that this partiuclar resolution condemned. How could we possibly ratify it as such, when much of the left establishment stems from the very same totalitarian tradition.
I feel it’s a Slovenia that the west is yet to pay attention to. Which is too bad because we need our western allies to get rid of this virus of pathological radical leftism. There are subtle hints in international polls every now and again, yet no notices. We are one of the most euro skeptical countries in the EU. We are one of only four EU countries that would prefer the protection of Russia, rather than NATO. Just two decades ago Bill Clinton was met with great fanfare, one that could only be matched to the one he got in Kosovo. Today we are one of the countries that hate USA most (next to such champions of Liberty and freedom as Somalia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran…). The signs are ominous. We aren’t just slipping to the past economically and ideologically, we are doing it geo-politically too. Two years ago the tip of this nasty iceberg surfaced on the European stage when one of our left's patsy prime ministers Alenka Bratušek embarrassed herself as she ran unsuccessfully for the European Commissioner. During her questioning the EU parliament members discovered more than just the fact that she's a political poseur with no worthwhile knowledge on the field she's supposed to be in charge of. They also discovered she proudly sang the lyrics of an infamous communist anthem Bandiera Rossa during an official event that was broadcasted on our national television. PMs - even those on the left - seemed to be puzzled how an ALDE member sees no problem esctatically screaming "Evviva il communismo e la libertà" during a public event. No one in Slovenia was surprised. It is the new norm.
You see this shift in national mindset is not just a freak show. It’s a methodological political guerrilla warfare that certain idealogues gathered around the ex President of the Republic Kučan spread throughout our political and economic landscape. These political elites on the left portray themselves as social democrats, yet they are thinly disguised last European remnants of the once terrifying Yugoslavian totalitarianism.
Their tyranny however is executed in a far more clever, efficient and sinister way, compared the strongmen of the 21st century like Xi, Lukashenko, Erdogan or Putin usually go about it – they rather rule our tiny little country incognito, while keeping appearances of a parliamentary democracy. It is a worst kept secret that the last 3 left-wing prime-ministers were hand-picked by a very tiny circle of the leftist elites. Zoran Janković would be the 4th but fell through due to his own political incompetence after having already won the elections. It is also proven public knowledge that they control pretty much all mainstream media through intricate network of their loyalists who own major newspapers and other media outlets in the country. In addition the courts are almost exclusively presided over by jurists who learned their jurisprudence in a communist dictatorship.
Lukashenko is an evil dictator in the eyes of the world. These people are humble retired old men, who go out for a walk in the park every morning. Yet in the long run no less of a stumbling block in the process of democracy, freedom and free thought.
Now back to the main point of this text. The fact is strange things are happening in our country. Things that would have been unfeasible just 20 years ago. And a history teacher not just condoning, but celebrating extrajudicial killings of innocent people after Second world war is a line in the sand that needs to be drawn for the sake of sanity of this country and Europe in general. I titled this document a ballad but it can also be an ode to freedom.
It is up to you, esteemed European colleagues to have your say. It is your duty to tell our current Prime Minister, his Ministers and our government as a whole that it is not acceptable for a publically funded teacher to be condoning crimes against humanity and getting away with it without punishment. Remind them that such an outrageous act would not only be disciplined but criminally sanctioned in any modern, civilized country. You owe this to the rest of Slovenians. The ones who have not yet been swallowed by quasi-yugoslavian self-managed socialism movement. We - the libertarians, the free trade impresarios, the believers in the European idea - are your true allies. The ones that keep the public opinion at least 50 percent on euro-atlantic side of the fence. We are the ones who want a healthy EU, just like you do. We want to help you cleanse its infected regions which you don’t even know exist. I am pointing one out here. Have your say!
Tell our prime minister Miro Cerar that it is NOT acceptable for a public figure who is supposed to be teaching our kids unbiased history to sadistically support postwar extrajudicial slaughter fests.
Tell Maja Brenčič the Minister of Education, Science and Sport that it is wrong her ministry did nothing to make things right in this scandal. Tell her that countless, nameless victims still resting in mass graves across Slovenia are being shamed and humiliated for as long as this teacher is still a part of a workforce that she oversees
Tell them. I promise you, it will make a difference. Because one thing Slovenes care about the most – no matter if they are evil dictators or boring bureaucrats – is saving face. Help make Slovenia European again. Help make it sane again.
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