By: Sara Bertoncelj / Nova24tv
“When Forum21 was created in Slovenia in 2004, some of us wondered where the name came from. The founders of the Forum were probably inspired by the Sao Paulo Forum, as the debates held by Forum 21 were very similar to those held in Latin America,” said former Prime Minister Janez Janša at a presentation of the book “Sao Paulo Forum and the Culture War” (“Forum Sao Paulo in kulturna vojna”), who is also the author of the foreword in the book in question.
On Tuesday, the book “Sao Paulo Forum and the Culture War” was launched as a starting point for a debate on the causes and consequences of, and the possibilities for successfully resisting, the dismantling of our civilisation. The President of the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS), Janez Janša, thus invited the participants to two events – in the morning, a presentation of the book took place in Nova Gorica, and at 5 p.m., the same event took place in the premises of Nova24TV media outlet, where Dr Ivan Štuhec also joined the event. “You are cordially invited to the presentations and to read the book. In it, you will find answers to many questions that a person who thinks with his or her own head is confronted with when facing the incomprehensible and illogical events at home and around the world,” Janša wrote on Twitter.
At the presentation, the SDS party President said that the book states that the Sao Paulo Forum also intervened in European politics and that some parties were directly financed by it. And this is not only true of Podemos – a Spanish left-wing political party. In Slovenia, we have the Left party (Levica). Some of the founders of the party were even employees of the Venezuelan embassy, he said. “Slovenia is unfortunately not a bright spot on the map; in some places, it is even very dark. When we followed the holiday greetings of multinational corporations, we noticed that in neighbouring countries, they wished the citizens a merry Christmas, while in Sloveni,a the same companies wished us happy holidays. They are deliberately leaving out certain words,” Janša pointed out. He also said that it is still possible to find books from the 1950s on how to build socialism in libraries today. “They wrote about how to get people off the farms and into collective farms, from houses into flats. They did not build apartment buildings with 60-square-metre apartments and TV sets for no reason. And today, the election results are visible,” he remarked.
Parallels with left-wing activity in Slovenia
The second half of the 20th century witnessed the rise of leftist ideologies, which made their way to the fore through a long march through institutions and a culture war. The Sao Paolo Forum brings together South American leftist parties and, as the author of the book in question, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, describes at length, uses social engineering and other subversive methods to achieve its aims. Although Latin America is a different environment from our own, parallels can be drawn with leftist activity in Slovenia and Europe, making this book both interesting and useful reading for anyone interested in how the left is promoting its views.
Janez Janša writes in the accompanying text: “Due to the incomplete transition to a democratic society, cultural Marxism in Slovenia did not have to make the long march through the institutions to take over the media, education, the judiciary, cultural institutions, and so on. The entire network of the former secret political police remained intact, just like in the Russian Federation. In the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin was therefore able to lean firmly on the KGB network to consolidate his power. And Milan Kučan, with his Forum 21, or the parallel mechanism, leaned even more firmly on the intact and unreconstructed network of the formerly subservient State Security Administration – the secret political police of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia.”
More about the book
“Our children are under attack. This is a new form of warfare. The attack is not targeting their bodies but their souls. Dozens of mechanisms are being used to manipulate the minds of young people to prevent them from distinguishing between right and wrong. It is about distorting values and principles in order to attack truth, love, family and the most intimate beliefs. The author explains who is waging this war and why they are doing it. And what is most valuable are his suggestions on how to defend ourselves against this new kind of conflagration. Alejandro Peña Esclusa is an expert on the Sao Paulo Forum and has written several books on the subject, but this time he presents a hitherto unknown perspective. However, his view is not that of an academic, but that of an activist who has been denouncing this organisation for twenty-five years,” wrote Carlos Sierra Galindo, President of the Verdad Colombia association, when the book was first published. You can order the book in Slovenian here, but you are also welcome to visit our new bookstore in BTC’s Hala A and buy it there.