By: Gašper Blažič
Perhaps someone will understand the title of this column as a kind of reflection on the Levica party and its members, who are actually destroying the party from within, without even realising it – precisely because of the current affair with “radiators” and sexual predators in the ranks of Ljubljana’s alternative culture.
Of course, it is not quite like that. Anyone who follows this affair and especially the reactions of the first man of the Levica, i.e., Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Luka Mesec, was able to quickly guess with whom Mesec really has the biggest problems. Even though the “forever young” Luka is already proverbially blunt in his statements and in one of the first reactions he even “slammed” the Domovina weekly and the portal Domovina (although at first, they did not write anything about it), it cannot be overlooked that the greatest nervousness of Levica party (and transitional leftists in general) are triggered by leftists. More precisely: those who come from the left camp and do not even hide it but refuse to follow predatory logic.
I often meet people who claim that they do not like converts. And they show a very dismissive attitude towards politicians who the regime media already dislikes. As to say, before they were staunch partisans, now they still are, except that they have changed colours in the meantime. In other words, the party members “painted to the right” who turned against the wind after and showed that their character is much worse than those who remained “proud successors of the League of Communists of Slovenia” (according to Marko Koprivc). Of course, at the same time, they do not realise that their sympathy and/or antipathy actually depends on the suggestions they receive every day from the propaganda channels of those who – according to Stane Dolanc – should remain in power forever.
This is where the big mistake of the democratic or spring camp showed, saying that the spread of social networks will eventually loosen the powerful effect of the so-called traditional media (especially newspapers) that serve the interests of the old transitional predators. Quite the opposite: Facebook, which initially seemed like an excellent opportunity to break the information monopoly, has long-term proven to be a tool of censorship and underground information targeting, especially in an age when people’s main hobby is the so-called instant information, which means that most of the time they only read the headlines and already “know everything”. Even a cursory comparison of the number of members of “left-wing” and “right-wing” online groups says a lot about the fact that the former have a very strong advantage, which means that left-wing “informants” have a much greater reach than the opposite side. If we add to this the effect of opinion extremists (mostly individuals who take care of “twisting the arms” of various FB “Janša’s supporters”), who also use personal attacks, insults and spreading false information with the aim of discrediting those who think differently, we can conclude, that it is actually dangerous to be “right-wing” in our country.
And not only that: the interest reach of the core of the new left is actually much greater, which was shown in the case of the water referendum. Even among the otherwise warm-hearted Catholics on Facebook, if you take a look at their profile photos, you will also find some who, in the manner of an active citizen, opposed the allegedly harmful government law on water last year. And they still have a positive attitude towards Nika Kovač because they see in her the embodiment of the definition of active citizenship, which in Catholic circles is still (deliberately?) very loose and limited to “serving society”, without concrete directions, how to even understand happenings in society considering recent Slovenian history and the main political currents.
Of course, I mention this information more casually. Because anyone who looks a little more closely around all the pseudo-informational mess that dominates the Facebook groups will be able to quickly notice that the thrust of the propaganda is directed most sharply against those who are considered “converts”, i.e., once “ours”, which are now “not-ours”. This is no longer just about Janez Janša, whom they like to stick the label of a once young ardent communist, while the information about his journalistic work, his views in the late eighties, and then his arrest, trial and imprisonment are of course censored. New and new generations of voters are now entering the electoral registers, who, for example, do not even know that in Slovenia we had a trial against the four as the last attempt of the communist authorities to continue their usual business. They “know” only that Janša is extremely disgusting to them with his tweets.
And of course, we still (!) underestimate the effects of mass psychology and the direction of the masses. Even after so many years of tragic experiences with “new faces”. Which bodes terribly bad for us all.
But let’s go back to the “converts”. Bojan Požar, certainly one of the most informed journalists in the country, who proved himself already twelve years ago by launching officially censored information about the affair with bullmastiffs, was among those more spit on. And, of course, we had to decide already then whether we would believe what was written, or whether we would believe the official sources of information, which of course kept the grotesque dimensions of this affair secret for quite a long time, from the sexual abuse of dogs to the involvement of influential political godfathers who they also achieved that the dogs (despite their previous aggressive attack on humans) were not euthanised (which they should have done by law), but were returned to their owners.
And of course, even nowadays, we have to decide who to believe in the case of the Smodej affair. Many still believe that the owner of the Fotopub is a hero and not a criminal, and Luka Mesec is said to be an even bigger hero, who tried to take him down, but, as Mediana reported, his popularity has grown even more. You can take away the value of alternative information by personally attacking the person who publishes such information, saying that he used to be part of the Communist League, but now he is trying to take revenge and therefore spreads lies. The decision is at least formally free. Unofficially, it depends on how receptive you are to suggestions that come not only from the media, but also from your immediate surroundings.
And if all the transitional-leftist scum, from the parties to the media and non-governmental organisations, are really so fundamentally critical of opportunism and conformism, on the other hand, this kind of attitude suits them very well, because they count on the fact that even those “non- ours”, who do not have thick enough skin, the pressure of the environment (family, relatives, workplace…) will break. In the case of this year’s elections, they succeeded. The engineering of human souls was once again celebrating its victory, as it had done many times before. And Christians console ourselves by saying that the well-known formula “vox populi, vox Dei” applies. The late Christian publicist Justin Stanovnik would probably also call this by its proper name: totalitarian damage.
Of course, it cannot be overlooked that the people in power are most afraid of their (formerly) own people, who know this community inside out. And that is why they despise them most publicly. Let’s see, for example, how much manure has been poured so far on, Jelko Kacin, who almost a quarter of a century ago, hit a former (for a time Gromovnik) SDS MP, who died in these days, on the head with a newspaper, and in the last Janša’s government, he participated as the government spokesman for the area control of the epidemic. And, of course, they did not spare those who “entered” the LDS in the 1990s, as long as the cunning master of the parallel mechanism, Niko Kavčič, reigned there. I am talking, of course, about Dimitrij Rupel, Igor Bavčar, Igor Omerza… And after all, Miran Videtič, a very penetrating political commentator, was part of this party at that time as well.
And let’s not forget all those members of the now former SMC party who, when the government changed in 2020, did not want to follow Marjan Šarec and threw in the towel. And let’s not forget, for example, the penetrating historian Jože Dežman, also a former member of the LDS, to whom it would be very difficult to attach the SDS label, even though he spoke a long time ago about what the system of preserving and developing revolutionary traditions looks like. But the easiest way to get rid of people who defect these days is with an “argument”, saying to shut up, because you have sold yourself to the “Janša’s supporters”.
The propaganda apparatus of the transitional-leftist privatisers cannot tolerate even those who have crossed the Rubicon as members of the SD: for example, Sebastjan Jeretič, Emil Rojc, and others. After all, Milan Balažic and also some prominent personalities who did not identify with any of the parties (Roman Vodeb, for example), but are fundamentally left-wingers – but not “leftards”, as they call extremists from the left in Twitter’s Slovenian.
Perhaps there will be someone who will notice that similar exits from the so-called right side are missing. But anyone who understands that the Slovenian political space is deeply asymmetric and that we cannot find arguments for equal opportunities for both basic camps, then it is clear to him why enumerating these examples here is superfluous. And if the transitional predators are afraid of anything at this moment, it is above all that another repentant member of their ranks would appear and present to the public many dirty details about the Fotopub orgies.
And finally: defectors from the ranks of transitional predators always present an unpleasant mirror to their former masters. This is also why the almost normal reaction is to throw stones at these mirrors because the mirror image they like to project onto their opponents is too shocking to accept as part of their identity.