The conception of the self-appointed elite or the “avant-garde” was an import from Moscow and its birth was extremely bloody. The continuation of that story, coming from a direct source, was written by Milovan Đilas in his book “The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System”. (Those who would like to gain a more detailed insight concerning the Slovenian situation, should also read the book by authors Igor Omerza and Rado Pezdir: The criminal foundations of the Territorial Defence Forces of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia and the NLB, 2018)
A documented study about the privileges of elites in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, published by the Study Center for National Reconciliation, offers the reader even more comprehensive insight. Those who were in command in a political system, based on (an impoverished) equality, had unlimited rights, unattainable in any capitalist systems. These included vacation homes at the Brioni islands and at numerous other prestigious locations all over Yugoslavia, stately hunting areas, top quality health care in Dr Peter Držaj Hospital, fresh vegetables, meat, venison and all other culinary delicacies originating from Supply Center Gotenica, staff housing and (later granted for free) accommodation in Murgle for a ridiculously low rent, study abroad for the progeniture of the elite and immunity from criminal prosecution in the event of committing even serious acts of terrorism. In the 1980s, however, socialism as a state system in Europe morally and economically collapsed and the winds of change started to blow across the Balkan foothills. With the protest manifestations at the Congress Square and Roška cesta in Ljubljana, “people happened” in Slovenia and the single-party elite became aware of its illegitimacy.
The elite has seen what the changes brought about in Poland, the perestroika in the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall and lastly, the organised uprising and execution of the Ceaușescu couple in Romania. This was happening on Christmas Day 1989, when Slovenian Communist Party Congress was in session.
They drastically sped up the preparations leading up to the changes, all the while assuming they would happen within the framework of Yugoslavia, since the West would never have allowed its breakup. The “communist withdrawal from power” in 1990 was in fact the scenario aiming really at “staying in power” in the new circumstances. Hundreds of millions of dollars from Slovenian banks and state exporting enterprises were transferred into tax havens. The financial network of the former State Security Administration that managed slush funds abroad was reinforced with new personnel and protected by the functionaries sent to work in international financial institutions at the posts that by quota belonged to Yugoslavia. Particularly interesting are the dates when Mitja Gaspari, Marko Voljč and France Arhar were sent to those institutions.
At the beginning of the mandate in 1990, Demos government had a meager majority of delegates in all three assemblies of the parliament, with the constitutionally guaranteed possibility of systematic blockade of each of those three assemblies. In the assembly of the united work, whose delegates were not elected by virtue of universal suffrage, the relabelled communists had a two-thirds majority which they then used to almost endlessly delay the adoption of the key independence legislation. Demos in reality had only one representative out of five in the presidency of the Republic. The government was tasked with the care of the emptied state banks which were then still under the control of their own predators. Disarmed Territorial Defence Forces were the sole means of protection against the Yugoslav People’s Army, most of the media and with the trade unions announcing the strikes simultaneously with the process of independence. The syndicate of militia even declared their strike on 27 June 1991.
The Demos coalition still managed to carry out Slovenia’s independence, but only barely. This was partially due to the belief of the key members of the communist elite that such an action would never be successful. Even after the Slovenian Independence war was won and Brioni Agreement signed, the communists still had high hopes that the West will not recognize the independent Slovenian state. After the Yugoslav People’s Army suffered a disgraceful defeat, Slobodan Milošević estimated that the possibility of retaining Slovenia within Yugoslavia by military force couldn’t be fulfilled. Therefore, on 18 July, 1991, his members in the Presidency of Yugoslavia voted to withdraw the two army corps from Slovenia and to deploy them according to plan B, which had foreseen the formation of Greater Serbia. This is also the subject of the book by two Serbian historians Vladimir Petrović and Kosta Nikolić, entitled War in Slovenia.
Two collections of documents, The White Book of Slovenian Independence (published by Založba Nova obzorja, 2013) and War for Slovenia (published by Založba Nova obzorja, 2014) offer a more detailed insight into key decisions, antagonisms and risk assessment of those times. No answers have been given to hundreds and hundreds evidence pieces, demonstrating betrayal of the self-proclaimed elite. The only response were ignorance and intensified attacks at the authors of both collections of documents.
Those who had opposed Slovenian independence are featured on a long list in The White Book of Slovenian Independence. Those very same people have been the objects of unimagined attention. They were elected as President of the Republic, speakers of the parliament, they were nominated ministers (even of defense), ambassadors, rectors, deans, Governor-General of the Bank of Slovenia, bank managers, heads of institutes and state enterprises, presidents of courts, public prosecutors, members of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts … and even officials of the Union of Veterans of the War for Slovenia and Sever Police Veterans Association. Those who passed away were buried with military honours.
The first generation of the self-selected elite, who had blood on its hands, was thus joined by the second generation, which carried the burden of betrayal of the historical choice of the Slovenian people. The two generations are linked familially and politically, and also by the common effort to hide their activity and fight the truth about the formative period of the value system of the Slovenian nation. They snatched the independent state, created against their will, almost immediately after the international recognition of Slovenia and also with the naive assistance of Demos’s liberal wing.
Although delayed by an unforeseen event (the independence), the first-class citizens started to passionately implement the pre-established plan of keeping the power and maintaining the system of the self-proclaimed elite in the new circumstances. They still predominantly had all the necessary means in their hands: the money, the media and the tools of repression. The newly established Slovenian Army represented the only major problem as it could not have been easily transformed back into the Territorial Defense Forces of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. The process of its regression was longer, but ultimately attained. They focused with all their might on disintegrating all the measures brought about by the short-lived Demos government. They strengthened their monopolistic positions in the public education system, the trade unions and the so called non-governmental organizations. In order to become the president of a sports association, you had to move in circles close to Social Democrats. After a few years of their activities, everything was back in its place. This “stability” was most representatively illustrated by the statement of the grand ayatollah of the first-class citizenry, given at the beginning of the new millenium, after being asked about the position of the working class and the whereabouts of the proletarians. He placidly replied that they are at their posts, where the proletarians have always been.
More than twenty years ago, dr. Peter Jambrek, the then president of the Constitutional Court of Slovenia, proposed in his speech at the Independence Day celebration the introduction of the positive discrimination instead of lustration.
This approach would enable an open system wherein each individual would be promoted on the basis of meritocracy or competences and new candidates would be favoured. Up until the coup of 2008, this approach seemed promising, because for some brief moments, optimists presumed that the socialist elite would adhere to the reformative Partnership for Development and would agree to this gentleman’s agreement by temporarily abandoning the hostile rhetorics in the parliament. Unfortunately, in the background, they prepared Petition 571 against the alleged censorship and political pressures against the Slovenian journalists and the politically motivated Patria case. Not for a moment did the ayatollahs of the self-nominated elite think about reconciliation, the completion of transition and the constitutional promise of prosperity.
The rational core of dr. Peter Jambrek’s proposal was reflected by the experience of Slovenian independence. To Kučan, Ribičič, Potrč, Kocijančič, Smole and other leading communists, this has never been their intimate option, which they publicly expressed without any restraint (reflected also in their actions regarding the disarmament of the Territorial Defense Forces, as well as voting against the legal acts intended for the protection of Slovenian independence with real force in the then Socialist Assembly). However, a significant part of the lower personnel, up until then charged with implementing one party governmental decisions, sincerely supported the steps, leading to the creation of a new Slovenian state, especially since Demos coalition formed the first government. Demos’ inclusive politics attracted even some of the considerably radical elements of the former communist regime. Three ministers of the Demos government were formal members of the renamed communists and regarding the world view, at least seven of them gravitated towards the communist sphere. If Demos had the constitutional majority (which is what would have happened given the number of votes received, had not the communists reserved for themselves the third chamber, called the Assembly of United Work), he would have successfully carried out the second key point of its political program. This is the reason why its government struggled and barely managed to carry out the process of independence, while democratization was stopped halfway. However, the exemplary collaboration with the renamed communists at the lower levels of state management and in numerous municipalities in the first year of Demos’ government nonetheless created the hope of obtaining an open system if the democratic political parties won the election with inclusionary politics and gradual reforms. That was tried once again in the governmental mandate 2004−2008, but Janša government was in the end stabbed in the back not only with the knife, but also with the bayonet of Bolshevik doggedness.
The mandate itself was not running idyllically. While the Partnership for Development has coordinated with the majority of the opposition and together uniformly passed more than 50 organic laws, 571 Slovenian “journalists” sent a petition to several European governments, wherein our government was accused of totalitarianism and was even painted as a threat to the EU. While we nominated the representatives of the opposition into the supervisory boards of the biggest state-owned enterprises and banks at their behest, Slavko Gaber, member of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia, fulminated in the parliament about the personnel tsunami.
The representatives of the self-proclaimed elite have been using these vile “reversal tactics” for a long time. It started when they proclaimed their political opponents as traitors in 1941, but at the same time, they celebrated the International Workers’ day together with the Nazi occupation forces in Trbovlje. When Kučan was preparing a mini coup d’état in 1994 (in Depala vas) he declared in Nova Gorica that his opponents believed that all means are allowed to combat the internal enemy. Just before the parliamentary election of 2011, Zoran Janković kept repeating how he would never collaborate with Janša as Janša supposedly talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk (although it’s quite difficult to imagine someone who fits this model more than Janković himself does). The self-appointed elite brought these “reversal tactics” to the point of absurdity in the spring and summer of 2018, when representatives of the leftist political parties sounded like a broken record, repeating that the coalition rhetorics precluded beforehand their collaboration with Janša because of his alleged exclusionism.
The notion of human rights played a central part in such reversal tactics. In the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, human rights were labelled as a capitalist hoax, incompatible with the class struggle. That is why Yugoslavia never ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, created in 1988, was unsuccessfully attacked after its creation. They then tried to overtake it from within and at the same time developed its competition in the form of Human Rights Council within the regime-led Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia (SZDL) under the chairmanship of dr. Ljubo Bavcon, the creator of the Yugoslav totalitarian criminal legislation and the former executor of OZNA who was appointed none other than Danilo Türk as aide. Persistent erosion of the importance of human rights followed and led to today’s absurdity when the self-proclaimed elite rebrands illegal migrations, gender theory, adoption of children by the homosexual partners as human rights, while at the same time tenaciously refusing the burial to the Roma families, brutally murdered by the partisans in the spring of 1942 in Iška. And while the remains of the assassinated men, women, children and even infants are not allowed to be laid to rest in the Žale Cemetery, each year before the 1st of November, there is an idolatrous gathering of the ideological core of the first-class citizens at the tomb by the Slovenian parliament, wherein lies the “unknown hero”, who out of his lowest racist inclination had given the orders for those people to be slain. He even went so far and bragged about it in his book.
Janez Janša (61) is a Slovenian Prime Minister. Janša also led the Slovenian government from 2004 to 2008 and from 2012 to 2013. Biography of Janez Janša HERE.