“With such writing and writers, the Delo newspaper is becoming a growing national disgrace,” Janša reacted to a scandalous piece by the Delo journalist Mojca Pišek, who said that instead of an independence museum, she would rather have “one attractive museum of Yugoslavia.” Miss Pišek, we already have one of those, it’s an open-air museum, and you are obviously one of the “artefacts” that bring the stuffy Yugonostalgia into the space. It is time for a modern Slovenia. It is time to archive the mental paraphernalia that does not serve us…
In her latest article, Mojca Pišek, the Delo newspaper journalist, wished for “one attractive museum of Yugoslavia,” instead of a museum of Slovenian independence. Pišek wrote: “Slovenia has a single good story, in which it acts as the protagonist of its destiny. It is a story that it shares with its former brother republics.” Her statement highlights at least two aspects. The first is what the birds in the trees have been chirping about for a while now – that Slovenia’s independence really was not the “preferred option” for some… And the second is that she has a short historical memory. The “good story” she mentioned ended in a bloody, fratricidal war. We Slovenians managed to get away more or less unscathed, but things were much different in Croatia, which is why they value independence much more.
Peace, prosperity and independence are not goods to be taken for granted. The world is at a historic turning point. Globalisation is moving towards deglobalisation and regionalisation, and the war in Ukraine is only the first of what could soon be a series of Napoleonic wars that could well shake our continent. There were also various people like Pišek in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine before the war… But with the sound of sirens, the cracks of grenades, the empty fridge, the nights spent in the subway station and the constant fear of death, the appetite for this kind of (Yugo)madness quickly becomes rotten. A person is instantly cured of arrogance when their leg is blown off by a mine, when their house is burnt down, when their loved ones are dismembered, when they have to listen to people’s cries while they’re being massacred… When they are surrounded by “sexually starved” Wagner Group fighters…
To tell the truth, the whole of Slovenia nowadays functions as one big open-air “museum of Yugoslavia”! The degenerate images of Yugonostalgia are with us at every turn. We have an independent Slovenia, now we need the real, modern, liberated Slovenia. Janez Janša reminded us of this on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of independence: “25 years ago, we became independent, but we did not become free.” It is time to finally archive this sick Yugoslav mentality and similar zombies, which do not serve the healthy development of our society and the country, and put them away in textbooks. Let us simply bury them like dead lepers… Yugoslavia and its totalitarian regime were one big disappointment for all the peoples of the former common country. Otherwise, it would have stood. It is utterly perverse to glorify the former regime!
She should apologise to the relatives of those who died for Slovenia, as they are the ones who made it possible for her to live in a country that provides the conditions for her to write nonsense!
But Pišek does what she does because she is comfortable in Slovenia … Because there is really nothing bad happening to her … “It is easy to complain when you have everything,” the saying goes. For the likes of her, the experience of deprivation that has befallen most of those who have not been at the party trough would suffice. War might not even have been necessary. It would have been enough for her if she had been forced to queue in the morning for a loaf of bread and in the afternoon to go to Trieste for coffee and bananas, hoping that her Trabant would not break down somewhere near Razdrto. Otherwise, she would not have fantasised that “if she had been old enough in 1990, she would have voted against Slovenia’s independence in the plebiscite.” Which country is it that allows her personal freedoms, comfort and benefits? Surely not Venezuela?!
We Slovenians are lucky to live in a security bubble, to be surrounded by NATO members for the most part. The younger generations have been given a golden historical time. They grew up in peace and abundance, which they often do not know how to appreciate. Hence the delusional ideas of the Left party (Levica) and its obsessive need to disarm the army. Pišek: “No one will go to a museum to learn about a war whose key event is that the Yugoslav People’s Army changed its mind after ten days under the unofficial slogan ‘Who gives a f*** about Slovenians!’” Do you need any more proof that we won our independence too easily? Finally, it would be a good idea for the journalist to apologise to all the veterans of the war for Slovenia and to the relatives of the fallen. They are the ones who made it possible for her to live in a paradise where she has the conditions to write such rubbish. If we had stayed in Yugoslavia, she would have already packed her bags by now and left in search of better conditions…
Domen Mezeg
