Deception No. 1
Something from our history. What happened on the 27th of April 1941? Historical documents say that the Anti-Imperialist Front against the capitalists of the West, on the side of Germany and the Soviet Union, was founded at that time. After the German attack on the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, the revolutionaries renamed it the Liberation Front of the Slovenian Nation. Now, on this day in spring, we celebrate the Day of Resistance against the Occupier. The comrades have forgotten the revolution in their vocabulary, even though we have monuments to the revolution in Slovenia, including Ljubljana. What is written is not a distortion of history.
Deception No. 2
We must also remember how the revolutionaries came into possession of property after 1945. They did this through imprisonment, forced labour, loss of civil rights, the death penalty, and the confiscation and expropriation of business owners. For the Communists, you were a collaborator of the occupier simply because of the fact that your company, factory or shop continued to work after the occupation. And how did the courts work? Let us not forget! Aleksandar Ranković declared at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia that the independence of the courts did not mean that they were not dependent on the gains of the socialist revolution. The assets thus acquired were managed entirely, until 1990, by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, of course under the guise of self-management, with the help of the Socialist Association of the Working People of Slovenia and the trade unions!
Why did I decide on such an introduction? Because when the “so-called social” assets were privatised after 1990, all of us citizens were once again victims of the “proud successors of communists”, not as violently as after 1945, but still. Most of the assets were acquired by those who fought for the workers from 1945 to 1990, and they are still claiming that now!
Deception No. 3
Wealth has always provoked envy! Even wealth acquired through work, capability and knowledge has aroused and continues to arouse envy. Revolutionaries, who, with few exceptions, were uneducated (toolmakers, teachers, even thieves), clearly had no need for education. While constantly defending workers’ rights, in “freedom,” they afforded themselves a luxurious life in villas, even castles. And now, history is repeating itself in a slightly different form, and we are back to deception! People who live well at the expense of privatisation, whether by reselling electricity or by conducting business through offshore companies, cannot be called revolutionaries. I have no hesitation in saying that they care about the everyday man only in words. In our country, you come to power by calling someone a fascist, and by promising that the dark forces will not win. That is what the current Prime Minister did, and Ms Nika Kovač was silent at the time, even though it was a clear case of hate speech.
Deception No. 4
While the government is boasting, we need to take a look at where the current economic elite, namely the elite of political amateurs, is leading us! We are being overtaken in GDP by Romania (according to the latest OECD figures). We are being saved by our entrepreneurs, who provide jobs for more than 60 percent of people in Slovenia, but who are being burdened in every possible way by the current government. We have a government that knows how to spend and tax working and able people. We are not on the right track. In addition, we have too many people among us at the moment, including young people, who are not critical of the situation we are in. They would like to have a lot, but with as little work as possible, with as little learning as possible. That was typical of the revolutionaries, and something similar is now coming back to us.
Deception No. 5
Let us also remember how we came to have a state. With favourable foreign policy conditions, with the unification of Germany, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the support of Austria, the Vatican, Germany, and the opposition of the USA and France. Our independence was not welcomed by our communists, who, from the late 1980s, were opposed to an independent Slovenia, which, alongside democratisation, was the primary objective of the DEMOS party. They tried to obstruct DEMOS in its efforts in every possible way, for whom an independent Slovenia was a priority. They stopped for a short time when they realised, just before the independence referendum, that Slovenians were in favour of an independent Slovenia, but in 1991, they continued with their obstructions. I wonder what kind of unity that was?
Deception No. 6
This led to some major complications and repeated scams in the way in which the privatisation of the social assets up to that time was carried out, with the decisive role at the time being played by the Assembly of United Labour (Zbor združenega dela – ZZD), which was mainly made up of representatives of the old political structures and “red” directors. They were scared of independence because of the loss of the market in Yugoslavia. I was a direct participant in the first freely elected Assembly after the year 1945, which still had the old “self-governing” structure of three assemblies (the Social-Political Assembly – DPZ, the Assembly of Municipalities – ZO, and the Assembly of United Labour – ZZD), as a representative of the then “excellent” healthcare service.
We did not change this before the elections because of the still great political power of the old political structures (the League of Communists – ZK, which hastened to rename itself to the Renovators, the Socialist Association of the Working People – SZDL, and the trade unions), or perhaps because of the naivety of DEMOS, and for the Assembly of United Labour, we kept the special, old way of elections instead of the two-round system that was used for the elections in the other two assemblies. In this context, the method of standing candidates gave a distinct advantage to representatives of the former socio-political organisations.
And that had its consequences! In the Assembly of United Labour, the ratio of DEMOS delegates to opposition delegates was 26:54 (a big advantage for the old political structures). It is also not insignificant that among them, there were 10 (ten) so-called independent delegates, among them the President of the Assembly of United Labour, Mr. Zupančič and, interestingly, at that time still a colonel, comrade Milan Aksentijević. This says everything about the independence of the members. At the same time, the chairman of the Assembly, Mr. Jože Zupančič, the headmaster of the Celje grammar school, wrote in his book “Between the school and deputy benches” that DEMOS considered the Assembly to be an opposition assembly! He also wrote, after he was elected President of the Assembly, to quote, “I got an absolute majority (with 74 ballots cast, he got 48 votes, and the opposing candidate, Mr. Andrej Muren, got 26!). This means that DEMOS, now in my Assembly, is a minority, they are the opposition in the Assembly. The Assembly of United Labour, however, is a kind of opposition in the Assembly and can support or stop anything that is passed in the legislative field. The Jurisprudents in the Assembly (DEMOS has a majority in the Social-Political Assembly and the Assembly of Municipalities) will try to thwart us, if necessary, of course. And besides, such people get into arguments where there is no need for it. ” End of quote. (From the book by J. Zupančič: Med šolskimi in poslanskimi klopmi, pages 317-323).
It is important to remember that all legislation had to be considered and decided on by all three assemblies individually, before it could go forward to a joint sitting of all three assemblies. And so, it is no coincidence that privatisation legislation was stalled in the Assembly of United Labour until it suited the directors in the Assembly and, unfortunately, also some members of DEMOS, which was clearly not united on this issue!
Dr. Mencinger, as Deputy Prime Minister of the DEMOS government, publicly expressed his preference for management buy-outs at a conference of economists in Bled in November 1990: “If I were to make decisions as an economist, I would divide up all the property among the leading businessmen.” (this was published in the Delo newspaper on the 10th of November 1990). This was followed by the so-called “Sachs” privatisation concept of broad shareholder democracy, which limited the privatisation power of a narrow managerial class. There were other proposals, but the Assembly of United Labour, which was then the interest group of the “red directors”, blocked them all until the “real” proposal for directors was adopted in 1992. The subsequent long-lasting privatisation process, which, during the 20-year period of transition, was most marked by the very management buy-outs of large companies with bank loans that the adopted legislation made possible, confirmed the correctness of the privatisation warnings of the American economists of 1991!
Can anyone still believe that things happened by accident, without a clear intention on the part of the old political structures to get hold of former social assets, and thus, political power? The consequences of this are still being felt at every turn today!
In Slovenia, with the politics of the ruling Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda) and its violence in Parliament, without the protection of the Constitutional Court, which in the past was set up in the judiciary to control the elected majority in Parliament, we are on the way to starting classes in primary schools again as we did in the 1950s: a comrade teacher, when entering the classroom, said: “Death to fascism, freedom to the people”, and the pupils replied as one: “for the Fatherland, onwards with Tito“. The Freedom Movement wants something similar now, which, along with the Left party (Levica), to exclude Tito, never ever mentions the
Fatherland. Where is my homeland heading, where is our identity? We are drowning in all kinds of newcomers and foreigners who are more important to the current rulers than our values and our culture. Slovenians, let’s wake up.
prim. Janez Remškar, dr. med.
