Janez Janša, the President of the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) recently spoke at the CPAC meeting of conservatives in Budapest. He spoke about illegal migration, the war in Ukraine and freedom of speech.
CPAC is an international meeting of conservatives. Originating in the USA, CPAC stands for “Conservative Political Action Conference”. In Hungary, the conference is organised by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
We are publishing Janez Janša’s speech in its entirety below:
“When we talk about the sovereignty of man, we are talking about his values, knowledge and property. When we talk about the sovereignty of a nation or a state, we are talking about its demography, territory, resources and security.
There is no state without territory and no sovereignty without control over it. This begins at the border. In the European Union, countries whose borders are, at least in part, also the external or Schengen borders of the Union, have the additional responsibility of protecting the common sovereignty of the Union.
In the aftermath of the major migrant crisis in 2015, it became clear that different political options have different views on the protection of external borders. In some respects, they are so different that they are practically completely contradictory. The decades of debate and compromise that followed have laid bare the heart of the problem, even for the uninitiated. The problem lies in values. It lies in the view of the value foundations of Western civilisation.
Simply put, it is a question of preserving or dismantling our way of life. For nothing changes the habits, customs, culture, and identity of an environment more radically than population change.
Radical, progressive, left-liberal, socialist paradigms advocate the most liberal possible attitude towards illegal migration, the so-called policy of open borders, because they want to dismantle the value foundations of Western civilisation. Which is actually nothing new. It was already written in the Communist Manifesto, in the textbooks of cultural Marxism, and now in the lessons of the so-called woke ideology. As a result, they are also directly counting on new voters or supporters. In Slovenia, two years ago, one of the first measures taken by the new left-wing government was to abolish the national office for demographics and to start removing the fence on the border to the Balkans, which they themselves had erected in 2015. Money and staff were reallocated from the demography office to the migration office. The radical left Prime Minister has even repeated several times that we need to formally equalise illegal and legal migration. The result of these actions and calls is a tripling of the pressure of illegal migrants arriving in Slovenia via the Balkan route. A further consequence is the prolonged and re-imposed border control at the borders with Italy and Austria. As a result of public pressure, the left-wing Slovenian government has introduced controls at the border crossings with neighbouring Croatia, however, there, it absurdly controls legal border crossings and causes huge traffic jams, while a few metres away, illegal migrants are peacefully crossing into Slovenia without documents, and the Slovenian police are then driving them to migrant centres that are bursting at the seams.
Conservatives advocate a strict separation of legal and illegal migration and the security of our borders that this entails. In doing so, we defend not only our territories, but also our values and our way of life. In essence, sovereignty is about deciding how you want to live for yourself.
Any person is prepared to defend and preserve what they value. The left has always wanted to dismantle the value foundations of Western civilisation, and illegal migration or, for them, the open borders policy, is their tool. But they can only be successful in this if they keep their true purpose well-hidden. It is human nature to want security, stability, and predictability. It is to want sovereignty, to be able to decide for oneself one’s own way of life. The left therefore hides its intentions like a snake hides its legs. It wraps them up in nice-sounding phrases about equality, solidarity, humanity, and fraternity. At the same time, it uses all sorts of tricks to bring attention away from the substance of its intentions. Viktor Orbán has become a thorn in the side of progressives, above all because he has exposed their true intentions so thoroughly in the wake of the great migrant crisis.
One Greek philosopher said that the greatest generator of change is war. It can make a man a corpse or a hero. It can destroy or save a city and profoundly affect one’s attitude towards people and things.
Today, a major war is raging in our neighbourhood – in Ukraine. Israel is at war with the terrorism of Hamas and its hinterland. Both wars have a profound impact on the West’s relations with the outside world, and on relations within it. The recent vote in the US Congress on billions in aid to be sent to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, has practically split the Republican Party in two. Meanwhile, the Democrats were united. The two wars are further dividing opinion and causing a stir in Europe, and not just between the two main political camps. I mention this because, in a global struggle to defend the value foundations of the West, it is difficult to count on success if there are major differences of attitude within the polis towards dilemmas that are either fundamental or merely portrayed and publicly accepted as such by the majority. A city divided within itself will not win.
And the times are becoming more dangerous in the shadow of wars and diversions of attention. The recent attempt to ban a conservative conference in Brussels is an ominous warning. Those of us who have lived part of our lives under a one-party totalitarian regime know exactly where this leads. As soon as someone succeeds in suppressing freedom of speech, they gain absolute power. All other rights, freedoms and institutions can exist on paper. But without freedom of expression, there is neither real freedom nor democracy. And there are no fair elections, either. There is just dictatorship, whatever name it gives itself. Of all the influential global social networks that today constitute the central public space of humanity, the main Agora, there exists only one without direct censorship. We are very close to the edge.
The fight for freedom of speech is therefore the fundamental point of confrontation where it will be decided whether the defence of the West will be successful or not.
Restrictions on freedom of expression have always been easiest to justify in a state of war. Indeed, war can always be both the cause and the pretext for many necessary or unnecessary restrictions. That is why the left likes to misuse the term. For example, by declaring war on global warming. Or, even more transparently, by launching the fight against hate speech. Where anything that exposes the left-wing paradigm is declared hateful.
But two real wars have recently erupted into this artificially created state of war. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel are reprehensible and disgraceful in themselves. The price paid in the dead, captured or destroyed lives of tens of millions of people is terrible. Those attacked deserve help and support. At the same time, both wars provide an additional alibi for those who seek to restrict and destroy freedom of speech. This fact simply has to be recognised.
Time is therefore complex. Complex and dangerous. Serious conversations about the underlying problems and dangers and their causes are needed now more than ever. So, congratulations to the organisers of this year’s CPAC and thank you to Hungary for hosting and facilitating this debate – without censorship.”
Ž. K.
