Slovenia is still full of Tito’s roads, streets, squares and bridges. His statues and portraits still haunt this country like an evil ghost of the past (we can even find his photos in law enforcement offices!). Every day, as we walk from a Tito’s Road to Kidrič’s Road and onwards to Kardelj’s, we are reminded that we do not live in a normal country. We are a country where not only has there been no lustration, but in fact, the reverse is true – communism has been completely rehabilitated. The burial of Janez Zemljarič, who was the head of the State Security Administration in Yugoslavia, with military honours, is just the tip of the iceberg. If some people still want to console themselves with the idea that they are civilised liberals (or at least justify their views by claiming that in public) and are trying to achieve that by saying that Zemljarič has never been proven to have killed anyone, it is clear that one of the heroes of the Slovenian far left, Josip Broz Tito, is a proven murderer and one of the worst dictators in the history of Europe.
In a video that recently went viral on social networks, Tito, the son of a Slovenian mother, even bragged about how many people he had killed in his life. In the video, he says that “for the first time in his life, he stopped shooting [he was probably speaking in the context of a hunt he was attending] because he had killed too many of everything in his life.” He and the man who interviewed him had a nice little chuckle about it, because they both knew what Javeršek’s Jože was alluding to. Namely, he was alluding to the countless tunnels dug in Slovenia and other parts of the Balkans, where innocent men, women and children lay, the flower of Slovenian intelligence that we are now so desperately lacking.
People are well aware of his crimes, as they even make fun of them. Not of Tito, but of his victims. You know, the old “we did not get rid of enough of them” and “Christians, we slaughtered you in 1945, we will slaughter you today” statements. What they are really saying with this is: we know that Tito is a murderer, and that is fine with us. We are a nation with a perverted sin from the past, for which the perpetrators and their descendants do not repent, but instead justify and glorify it.
Therefore, we should not be surprised that the government of the Republic of Slovenia has decided to bury Janez Zemljarič, the head of the infamous communist secret police, which operated more like a terrorist organisation than the CIA, with military honours. This is Slovenia’s current psychosis, reflecting the fact that we have not yet come to terms with the sin that has fatally scarred us.
Tito and Zemljarič are a perfect illustration of Slovenia’s abnormality: one who boasts of killing and the other who, in his last years on Earth, attacked a journalist who wanted to ask him something about his dark history. Together, they show us that Slovenia is not a core European country, but a socialist, morally bankrupt flop in the middle of Europe.
Andrej Žitnik
