On the anniversary of the cold-blooded murder of Dr Lambert Ehrlich by Slovenian communists, Janez Janša called for sobriety. He called on all well-meaning people to help banish the threat of death and violence from the Slovenian public sphere.
You can read Janša’s statement in its entirety below:
THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE COLD-BLOODED MURDER THAT MUST FINALLY SOBER UP SLOVENIA
The anniversary of the carefully planned, cold-blooded murder of the prophet of the Slovenian nation, Dr Lambert Ehrlich, in the middle of Ljubljana, must become a sobering moment. On the 26th of May 1942, a few minutes after eight o’clock in the morning, liquidators Franc Stadler – Pepe and Kamil Kratochwill, on the orders of Edvard Kardelj and Boris Kidrič, murdered Dr Lambert Ehrlich and the student Viktor Rojic in cold blood. “Who are these people who are capable of murdering their brothers in cold blood in the midst of a cruel war and foreign occupation?” the late Professor Justin Stanovnik once wondered. The people who gathered at Dr Lambert Ehrlich’s funeral could not understand, for the most part, how it was even possible that something like that had happened.
In his later writings, Justin Stanovnik found the answer to his previous question. Only people of a special calibre are capable of ordering or executing something as terrible as this. People who consider themselves to be worth more than others. Bolsheviks. People without shame. People who are capable of justifying the most heinous criminal acts – that the human mind finds hard to even comprehend – with the most sacred terms. Or, as Boris Kidrič taught in various versions, “A communist is a humanist even when he ruthlessly exterminates the class enemy.”
To apply this principle is to destroy the civilisation of our country, which has been built up over the centuries with all of its ups and downs, and which is based on the 10 Commandments of God and the instruction, “Thou shalt not kill.” This principle has been replaced by a culture of death which is, unfortunately, growing again today. Today, as in 1942, most people cannot understand how it is possible that in Slovenia, a country in the midst of the European Union and NATO, monuments to dictatorship and the drastic violation of human rights are returning to public places. They also cannot comprehend the following:
- That a minister of a parliamentary party bowed down to a statue of a mass murderer, while another minister, in her official capacity, celebrated the creation of the criminal Communist Party of the Republic of Slovenia.
- That the Museum of Slovenian Independence is being abolished, while at the same time, a monument to a bloody civil war and revolutionary terror is being carefully cleaned.
- That the MPs of the parties of the government coalition, during their speeches, publicly express their sympathy for the one-party communist dictatorship.
- That five Constitutional Court Judges made a decision, and then, after a while, four Constitutional Court Judges were able to overturn that same decision.
- That the government of an EU Member State abolished the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communist Violence.
This last one, in particular, should be very sobering to everyone. But is that really the case? Open, public death threats against political competition appeared in Slovenia more than a decade ago. First more timidly, but then the Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that they were practically permissible because they were not criminal. And then, a boom followed. The hanging of dolls made to look like politicians, playing football with replicas of our heads in front of Parliament, the burning of dolls that looked like ministers of our government, a square full of banners with the word DEATH, mass-produced in public institutions. The national media outlet RTV Slovenia and the largest commercial television station POP TV and all the other so-called mainstream media sent pictures and cries for death from these orgies of political cyclers, where physical violence also broke out on several occasions, cheerfully, without critical distance, day after day, week after week, into Slovenian homes, until the terrible word DEATH was domesticated once again. In this atmosphere, the Mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Janković, forbade the burial of Roma women and children murdered by the partisans in the Žale cemetery. Claiming that they were traitors. Not that those who preach the rule of law every day have asked themselves whether Janković has any authority to decide on this at all. And where is this written? Today, the Golob government is retrospectively removing the criminal penalties of the organisers of these mass calls for DEATH by introducing a special law. Even though most of them were formally imposed for breaches of health protection measures that were in force throughout the EU. Do we understand the message that this law is sending us between the lines?
The government that was led by the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) established two national days of commemoration for the victims of the mass killings of the last century. The Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communist Violence. While for almost 80 years, various celebrations and commemorations have been held practically throughout the year at the sites of the crimes of national socialism and fascism, and no one has ever disputed this, the Golob government has now abolished the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communist Violence on the very eve of the second commemoration. They have not yet dared to abolish the Holocaust Remembrance Day, but open anti-Semites of the Boris Vasev type on RTV Slovenia and elsewhere are becoming more and more vocal, despite protests from abroad, and the government’s Social Democrats party (Socialni demokrati – SD) continues to operate shamelessly in a villa that once belonged to the murdered Jewish Moskovič family. The barbaric act of abolishing the national Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communist Violence is something that is unparalleled in history. It sends the message that crimes against humanity in the name of their ideology are permitted, and the victims of such crimes are not worthy of remembrance. That the relatives of some are first-class citizens and the relatives of others are second-class citizens, even when it comes to the fundamental right to a grave, to mourning and to remembrance.
A barbaric act which, combined with the domesticated threat of DEATH, brings back the spirit of civil war to Slovenia. That this is the case is evidenced by the incredible multiplication of DEATH threats in every conceivable shade which have proliferated in the public arena and which the writer of these lines receives on a daily basis through every conceivable channel. The people who utter them or write them down show up at public events with weapons. The police officer who threatened to liquidate me from his work computer a few years ago was acquitted in court. The former head of the State Security Administration in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, Janez Zemljarič, who was buried with military honours by the Golob government, threatened to kill me. The weekly Mladina published an online game on how to throw people into caves. Events are being organised on how to become a partisan in 2023. Individual remnants of the cyclists, who often stop in front of the building of the National Assembly, threaten us with death in the presence of the police. Just as the people who gathered at the funeral of Dr Lambert Ehrlich were mostly unable to comprehend how this was possible, and much less what they could even do, so today the majority of well-meaning people in Slovenia refuse to grasp what the re-introduced word DEATH and the parallel creation of a hostile atmosphere actually means. That is why some people are more disgusted with those of us who have pointed this out than with those who are threatening death.
In today’s Slovenia, death threats are not hate speech. But pointing the threat out is. It is the actions of the rulers that we are witnessing today, when the noble word FREEDOM (instead of those who rule under that name being concerned with solving people’s problems and welfare) is once again being used to justify the deeply reprehensible, totalitarian practices, and to literally restrict freedom of speech, economic initiative and even the right to mourn, remember and bury the dead, while at the same time, the sinister spirit of the CIVIL WAR is being revived again, which should be clear at least to those who know the history of the 20th century on our soil. They know that whoever glorifies a crime is capable of repeating it. For everyone else, and especially for those who themselves threaten with DEATH, or who allow such threats or even encourage them publicly, the following warning applies. Those who ordered the murder of Dr Ehrlich in 1942, and those who carried it out and justified it, were deeply hidden underground, paradoxically protected also by the Fascists, since the Italian occupier did not allow any organised self-defence at that time, while at the same time, it suited the Communists to kill the elite of a nation they wished to subjugate. The murderers erected monuments to themselves only after the war.
But those who threaten DEATH today, who applaud such threats, or encourage them by introducing the government measures listed above, are mostly publicly known. The digital world holds all these records. So, beware. Should it occur to anyone to order or repeat an act such as that which took the life of Dr Lambert Ehrlich or Ivan Kramberger, it will not go unanswered. A revolt will break out, and there is no tax haven far enough away where those responsible can hide from the hand of justice. Today, as we commemorate the martyrdom of one of the greatest sons of the Slovenian nation, we call for sobriety. Sobriety of those who are well-meaning, to realise the danger and to help expel the threat of DEATH and violence from the Slovenian public space. And those who have again deliberately and aggressively imported it from the darkest and most tragic times of Slovenian history, to realise that the lady with the scythe is swinging it to both sides. In one of my last conversations with Professor Justin Stanovnik, he told me that they had realised too late that people of a particular calibre only understood this language. So, we used it, and we believe that they understood it.
