Thursday’s discussion by an MP of the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda) in the National Assembly shows that even more than 30 years after the break-up of Yugoslavia, a part of Slovenia is still unable to adopt a European attitude towards the three criminal totalitarian ideologies of Nazism, fascism and communism.
“I already said in my presentation of the bill that these three totalitarianisms are not the same. That Nazism and fascism are based on a criminal, violent ideology. What does communism stand for? For an equal society, for the ownership of capital to not be above the means of production, for peace and harmony between peoples, that is what communism stands for,” said MP Martin Premk, a historian and member of the Presidency of the Association of the National Liberation Movement of Slovenia (ZZB NOB)
The glorification of communism is not new in the Slovenian Parliament, much less in our society as a whole. The ideas and symbols of communism have not yet been properly lustrated as in some more advanced societies. Moreover, with the Golob government, a velvet restoration of the image of communism seems to be happening. The true face of the current government has been revealed by the abolition of the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communism, the abolition of the Museum of Slovenian Independence, the participation of the Minister of Culture in the celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Slovenia, and the repeated rejection of the proposal for a declaration of support for the European Parliament’s 2009 resolution on the European Conscience and Totalitarianism, which establishes an equidistance to all totalitarianisms.
Where is Premk wrong?
Premk’s statement that Nazism and fascism were based on criminal ideas is, of course, entirely correct, though not correct enough. What he is wrong about is that he excludes communism from the range of criminal ideologies. It, too, is criminal in ‘thought and deed’. To begin with, communism does not stand for an ‘egalitarian’ society, as the MP stated in his speech, but for the dictatorship of the proletariat. A social system in which one social group has a dictatorship over the others is not an egalitarian society.
The MP was also wrong when he cited the positive side of communism as being that it fights against the ownership of the means of production by ‘capital’. The creation of capital, of which (by the way) there is very little in Slovenia, is directly linked to the constitutionally guaranteed right to private property and free economic initiative. The interference with these rights is, in fact, the very foundation of communism, and communism is consequently criminal in its conceptual stage, just as the practical implementations of the communist classless society, which were created by nationalisation (theft), redistribution of private property and the murder of the opponents of communism, were criminal in their conceptual stage.
The process of creating a classless society was an exceptionally bloody one. According to the authors of the groundbreaking work “The Black Book of Communism”, more than 94 million people were murdered by communist governments. According to some other estimates, as many as 110 million people died because of communism worldwide.
Out of communist crime was born the ironically named “New Class”, the vanguard of the working class, which, by its very existence, denied the idea of a classless society.
In addition, the practical implementations of the new economic system also proved to be bad. The socialist “planned” economies lost out to the market economic systems because they misunderstood the anthropology of man. In this context, communism was not criminal, but “merely” terrible.
Ž. K.
