They say that the man who condemned the government’s abolition of the Day of Remembrance is the one calling for civil war, not those who actually took the barbaric decision to abolish it. However, it is worth noting that last February, many of these same people also claimed that Ukraine had attacked Russia and not the other way around. Today, it is abundantly clear to everyone that the government’s abolition of the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communist Violence has once again openly returned the sinister spirit of the civil war to Slovenia. No government of any country has ever done anything like this. But this is not something that only came to be in recent days, Janez Janša pointed out in a long Twitter post.
Since 2012, they have been threatening us with death very publicly, massively and with extreme support from the mainstream media. They are even paying back the fines imposed on the perpetrators of these death threats, who even threatened death during an epidemic, endangering the lives and health of weak fellow citizens, burning puppets made to look like politicians, and kicking replicas of their heads around the square in front of the National Assembly. At the same time, they accuse us of hate speech, said Janez Janša.
They bury the head of the terrorist and criminal State Security Administration of the former Republic of Yugoslavia with military honours, celebrate the creation of the totalitarian Communist Party, return statues of the dictator to protocol buildings and, at the same time, abolish the Museum of Slovenian Independence. If anyone publicly condemns this, they are accused of trying to bring back the past. And being intolerant.
They glorify the bloody revolution and the fratricidal war, they call the time of the one-party dictatorship a time of progress, they erase from historical memory the great Slovenian names who publicly stood up for democracy and a democratic and independent Slovenia in the last century. But look. If anyone publicly opposes this, they are accused of authoritarianism.
From week to week, they parade with guns, in uniforms with totalitarian symbols, singing songs of blood and revenge, sending us to Argentina and to the shooting range. Without a single reaction from the prosecutor’s office or the judiciary, Janša said in his post.
This has already happened before
When an individual realises that this has already happened before and calls for defence, he is immediately accused of calling for violence. This, too, is something we have already seen before. Before Kardelj and Kidrič ordered the physical liquidation of the Slovenian elite in the spring of 1942, they even banned, under the threat of the death penalty, any armed resistance to the occupier outside the National Liberation Front. Then, in just a few months, their troikas and hordes, led by Zdenka Kidrič and Ivan Maček, massacred almost 1,000 Slovenians and Roma people in the Ljubljana province, while only a few Italian occupiers fell at that time. At a time when there were no village guards or Home Guards, Janša pointed out.
In the last year, the government coalition has made a series of moves that represent a revival of ideological conflict and the cultural fight. Some of them have been topped up with a heavy dose of topical revanchism. None of these moves were proposed or initiated by the opposition or civil society. Some of the government’s moves are fundamentally at odds with the constitutional values of the Slovenian state.
The government has done very little good for Slovenia, but a lot of harm
At the same time, the government coalition has failed to address people’s everyday hardships and, even more so, to deliver on its promises of reform. It has even implemented two anti-reforms. It halved the net pay rise for all employees and stopped the implementation of the law on long-term care for the sick and elderly. It has deleted the construction of roads, kindergartens, schools and sports halls from development programmes, while increasing funding for those who have been threatening with death in recent years. Pensioners have been completely let down, and the attitude towards farmers and entrepreneurs is condescending and, on occasion, even insulting. In a year, the Golob government has done very little for Slovenia, and more damage than any government to date. The obviousness of the disaster, the narcissism of the key players and the total control of the government by the godfathers from the background are at the same time fracturing relations within the government coalition itself, wrote Janša.
Such a situation creates additional space for the totalitarian concept of the most radical elements of the government coalition and the deep state to infiltrate its moves. They are also supported because of the expectation that the noise this makes will drown out the sirens of the sinking Titanic that is our government.
They will not succeed
They will not. Just as Putin failed to blame the aggression against Ukraine on the Ukrainians themselves, so, too, will his honouree Kučan fail to blame the spirit of the civil war on those who, at the ceremony for the Day of Remembrance, at the very time of its abolition, asked only for death certificates, a decent burial for the victims and the right to truth and memory, Janša believes.
Nothing could reveal more clearly the neo-communist essence of the Golob government
When we first commemorated the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Communism last year, no one in Europe reported on it specifically. Everyone took it for granted. But with the shocking abolition of this day by the current government of the Republic of Slovenia, this barbaric move was widely publicised, and questions are still being asked. Nothing could reveal more clearly the neo-communist, proto-totalitarian essence of the current rulers than an action that is in total contradiction with a series of declarations and conventions of the European institutions. Even in the totally left-wing environments of the European Union, there is no support for actions that deny the right to the grave and to remembrance. The left-wing propagandists also fail to explain how the murdered Roma children from Iška could have been collaborators of the occupier – which is how Zoran Janković has described them. And as they often try to do in justifying some other crimes, wrote Janša indignantly.
At the same time, I also meet many individuals in Slovenia who did not know we even had last year’s Remembrance Day in the face of media silence. They only found out that it existed when it was abolished. At the same time, many people are asking in shock whether it is true that the famous partisans, the men from the Tomb of the National Heroes, murdered entire families with children and pregnant women in cold blood in May 1942. And is it true that the Mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Janković, does not allow their remains to be buried in the Žale cemetery? With its barbaric decision, the Golob government has paradoxically spread the knowledge of the domestic and foreign public about the hitherto hidden dark sides of the so-called National Liberation Movement (NOB).
The barbaric decision of the coalition parties – the Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), the Social Democrats (Socialni demokrati – SD), and the Left (Levica), probably suggested by Milan Kučan at that famous conversation at Ljubljana Castle, was thus not only a deeply anti-civilisation act, but also a big shot in their own foot.
Neither the concrete barriers in the Huda jama cave, nor the mined masses of rock above the karst chasms of Rog, stopped the truth. Despite the fact that they tried to stop it with an immense amount of repression and ordered silence. And despite the fact that today, they are trying to do the same thing again, with an immense amount of lies and repeated threats of repression.
The power of remembrance will overcome the power of forgetting, and the culture of life will always be stronger than the culture of death. That is why the 17th of May will remain the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communist Violence. Next year, it will certainly be one of the most commemorated days of remembrance in the country, concluded Janša.
Sara Kovač
