Most health experts agree that the anti-government protests, orchestrated by the media and far-left civil society, contributed significantly to the spread of coronavirus disease and the prolongation of the pandemic. But it is precisely these protests that have enthroned the current government “freedom” that we have been enjoying for more than six months now. That is why the authorities apparently feel obliged to somehow legitimise and retroactively legalise last year’s unannounced, illegal, and often violent protests.
The entire state apparatus was significantly involved in this campaign, through several ministries – from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Public Administration and the Ministry of Justice. Namely, after the publication of the report on the extraordinary professional supervision of the police’s conduct in protecting the 2020 and 2021 protests, the Minister of Public Administration, Sanja Ajanović Hovnik, stated that, as a citizen, she was “appalled by the findings of the report, and as a minister, she is obliged to make sure that such abuses never happen again.” Of course, this was a report that was already being drafted by Golob’s operatives, after the police had already been thoroughly “depoliticised” – so depoliticised that the extensive and brutal depoliticisation even led to the resignation of the former Minister of the Interior.
She is assessing the work of the police, even though she does not have any knowledge in this area
More recently, the Minister has gone even further and even threatened civil servants – who have dutifully done their jobs and put their lives on the line to protect the public – with dismissal from their jobs, as if she is some kind of a ruler. “Even some dismissal would have been in order. What they did and how they did it was brutal and deliberate. I have no words,” said the emotional Minister, who has no experience in managing a repressive body or of controlling large violent crowds.
Two-thirds of the protests were violent
What is more, as former Minister of the Interior Aleš Hojs pointed out, the report found that four out of six rallies were violent on the part of the participants. “So, two-thirds of the demonstrations were violent, and she was talking about firing police officers. Not only were the left-wing anarchist hordes ravaging around Ljubljana, but apparently, they also run the government of the Sun King,” Hojs warned.
The Minister’s words are not only controversial from a political point of view – we are used to inexperienced Golob officials making new embarrassing statements every day. It is the message that the Minister’s words deliver between the lines of criminal gangs, thugs, and brutal political activists. If you are fighting for the ‘right thing’, then you will be forgiven, and the police officers who protect the public from you will be condemned.
This was also the message that the national media outlet, Radio-Television Slovenia, had sent to the criminal underworld last year when it interviewed the dangerous criminal and drug dealer Anis Ličina and presented him as a “protester”. But it is one thing for a public institution, infested with left-wing activists, to do this, and quite another for a public official to do it. From now on, the violent gangs will certainly be braver, because they know that the authorities are on their side. We could soon become like Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco.
There also seems to be a general global trend of left-wing governments and city authorities siding more with criminal gangs and thugs than with civilians. It is this attitude to policing that gave rise to the American far-left movement called “Defund the Police”. And our government seems to be part of this global pogrom against the police. The more criminals there are on the streets, the bigger the state apparatus the people will want. The bigger the state apparatus the people want, the more they will vote for socialists.
Andrej Žitnik
