By: Jože Biščak
I do not know how it is with you, but I was really scared when I listened to the frantic left opposition in the days of December. Igor Zorčič said that if the majority outvotes the minority, it could lead to a dictatorship. Think. The Chairman of the National Assembly believes that parliamentary democracy is a dictatorship. The leader of the Levica parliamentary group, Matej T. Vatovec, went a step further. According to him, the interpellation against Minister Andrej Vizjak is not enough, as we should interpolate capitalism. Robert Golob, (for now) the former President of the Management Board of GEN-I, described the policy of the centre-right coalition as fascist in the framework of the new Be Change movement. Really, a vocabulary worthy of the toughest totalitarian times.
The resurgence of socialist ideology and party terminology, which can be observed not only in Slovenia but also elsewhere in developed western countries, is unusual given the gruesome history of this doctrine. The indisputable evidence is that socialism has not worked and is not working anywhere and ever. The scale of the cataclysmic devastation it left behind and the way in which at least 100 million people have had to die are beyond the bounds of common sense. The madness goes so far that even couched history professors and academics from SAZU, who certainly know socialist poverty, hunger, and camps for ideological opponents, are still advocating for what caused the greatest evil of the 20th century. Why, then, is socialism so attractive and never really thrown into the corner of history?
One of the reasons is that Western democracies have never clearly condemned it and placed it alongside other totalitarianisms, so its proponents also selectively deny socialist catastrophes. At the same time, they are boasting with successes that are not the result of socialism, but if something happened by chance, it is the result of artifacts of circumstances and the counter-revolutionary activities of the bourgeoisie. But the main attraction of socialism is the linguistic and semantic art of its apologists, who play on emotions. What they say is only possible in the imagination, in the real world their ideas fail. For them, emotions and empathy are primary, above reason and reality. That is why leftists also reject the IQ, saying it is racist and fascist, and they also want to replace it with an emotional (EQ) and social (SQ) ratio.
It is no coincidence that the terms socialism and capitalism are the work of socialists. The first was “invented” by Pierre Leroux, a supporter of the utopian socialist de Saint Simon, the second by the socialist Louis Blanc, who defined capitalism as “the appropriation of capital to the exclusion of others.” Although this interpretation is completely wrong, it has remained so to this day. Capital is not an essential feature of capitalism. Capital is needed by all social systems, including socialism. The difference is who controls the capital. In capitalism by a private citizen, in socialism by the state. In capitalism, the free market and the law of supply and demand operate, in socialism, leaders who are not leaders because of their abilities but because of the ownership of the party booklet imagine that they know what individuals need and produce it. Because the latter does not work, as it is incompatible with human nature, the socialists always resort to threats and the use of force. Therefore, a better term for socialism would be state slavery, and for capitalism a free market economy, where economic freedom is also a condition for political freedom. Therefore, the latter works and is the most successful system, and socialism is not suitable for anything other than gaining political power and authority of the “new class”, where there is no mechanism to check the ability of the authorities.
Next time you hear the slogans of leftists about neoliberalism, fascism and racism being smuggled into Slovenia (or they are already here), how capitalism is an unjust system and how they will eliminate all this when they throw out “fascist cowardice” in the upcoming elections, know that their words are common sense and that they cannot be accepted in a language that would not offend human intelligence. They are threshing over old straw, indicating a lack of concrete programme. And if the electorate accepts something like this without critical distance and serious consideration, then God have mercy on us. Keep this in mind when you go to the polls in 2022.
Jože Biščak, editor-in-chief of the conservative magazine Demokracija, the president of the Slovenian Association of Patriotic Journalists and the author of the books Zgodbe iz Kavarne Hayek, Zapisi konservativnega liberalca in Potovati z Orwellom.