By: Dr Metod Berlec
These days we are commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which, with its horrors, deeply affected the European continent.
On Slovenian soil, one totalitarian regime (National Socialism) was replaced by another (Communism). Many people saved their lives by fleeing westward and northward. Representatives of Slovenian pre-war democratic parties, who met secretly on May 3rd, 1945, at Tabor in occupied Ljubljana and declared the national state of Slovenia “as an integral part of a democratically and federatively organised Kingdom of Yugoslavia,” were forced to leave the Slovenian capital in the days that followed. At the end of May, the British units treacherously returned the Slovenian National Army (from the Vetrinje field) back to Yugoslavia. To certain death. The suffering of the Slovenian people thus continued and escalated. At the end of May and in early June 1945, the new communist regime committed a barbaric genocide against part of the Slovenian nation – against the flower of the Slovenian people who believed in the motto “mother, homeland, God.”
Yet in recent days, the ruling Slovenian post-communist nomenclature has once again repeated and revived socialist-party myths that have no basis in reality. From the claim that the so-called Liberation Front of the Slovenian Nation was founded on April 27th, 1941, in Ljubljana (a day after a meeting where friends of the Soviet Union spoke about founding an Anti-Imperialist Front aimed against the Western Allies), to the claim that the “first Slovenian national government” was established on May 5th, 1945, under the leadership of Boris Kidrič – which is simply not true. The first Slovenian national government was the one established after the First World War. On October 31st, 1918, the Presidency of the National Council in Zagreb, as the supreme authority of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (State of SHS), appointed a government for Slovenia, led by Josip Vitez Pogačnik, on the proposal of the National Council in Ljubljana. This government ruled sovereignly over much of today’s Slovenian territory for several months. The first government of the Republic of Slovenia was the DEMOS government, which ruled from 1990 to 1992 and led Slovenia to independence and international recognition.
Today, however, we are in a situation where the ideological heirs of those who profited from the bloody communist revolution want to continue holding onto privileges they grew accustomed to under the previous totalitarian regime. One such privilege is the extraordinary pensions in the field of culture. Therefore, Sunday’s vote against privileged pensions in the cultural sector is not a vote against culture, but a vote for justice and equality among all Slovenian citizens. It is a vote against the harmful Golob government!
