By: mag. Igor Omerza
Whatever we may think about the United States and Americans, whether we love them, hate them, or are indifferent to them, it is an undeniable fact that for more than a century they have preserved the freedom and values of most of Europe, and after the end of the Cold War, of the entire Europe except Russia, which with its Putinist stance departed “value-wise” from the old continent and became more Asian than European country.
We might be surprised about and lament the dismal American healthcare system, which our own system is successfully approaching, but such massive and derogatory media attacks against our doctors, as those during the current strike, are unknown there. There are reasons for the poor American healthcare system; wealthy Americans do not feel it, but I do not intend to write about that here. I just want to say that many European countries are light years ahead of the United States in this regard, and this wealthy country cannot be a model for us here.
However, the United States serves as a powerful bulwark for us Europeans in the defence sector. In World War I, they hesitated to intervene for a long time, but when they did, German imperialism was defeated. The same happened in World War II. Does anyone need proof of how brutally the United States crushed imperialist Japan, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany with its economic and military power? Even Stalin would have been in a tight spot without immense American military aid. Unfortunately, for Eastern European countries, victory over Hitler meant a new enslavement, in some aspects even worse than under foreign occupation.
After World War II, Americans defended Western and democratic Europe for decades against post-war Soviet totalitarianism, which spread to Eastern Europe and even Yugoslavia. Hence NATO was established, which without the United States would be a toothless tiger! Even communist Yugoslavia survived the rift with Stalin, but it would not have happened without the American umbrella! Who, if not they, politically, financially, and militarily helped Tito at that time!? Unfortunately, the rift with Stalin and the beneficial American aid did not turn Yugoslavia into a democratic European country; only the Titoist direct violence subsided.
THAT IS WHY THERE ARE ALL THESE RUSSIAN WARS (CHECHNYA, GEORGIA, UKRAINE), AND IF THE AMERICANS DO NOT STOP THEM NOW IN UKRAINE, THERE WILL BE NO END TO PUTIN’S VIOLENCE.
Even the mighty Soviet Union could not compete to the death with the United States and literally disintegrated territorially along with its violent communist regime. Putin is now trying to restore it territorially, and internal violence in Russia has already been reinstated, although now within the framework of a state capitalist system and no longer a communist one. That is why there are all these Russian wars (Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine), and if the Americans do not stop them now in Ukraine, there will be no end to Putin’s violence.
What about Slovenia in this geopolitical scenario? Now we are safe under the American umbrella, but historically all the ideological giants of Slovenian independence trembled at the thought that independent Slovenia could become an easy prey for the Romanovs and Germans (and also Russians). That is why they planned alliances of countries into which Slovenia would join, and only if that were not possible, would they remain alone with their own country. The only important advocate of Slovenian independence who did not pay attention to this was Franc Jeza, a forgotten but the most “fanatical” advocate of independent Slovenia. During the war, he immediately joined the Liberation Front and consequently experienced fascist prisons and Nazi camps. In November 1948, disappointed by the repression of the Slovenian Soviet Republic (not in form, but in substance), he emigrated to Trieste. There he immediately began to condemn the undemocratic regime in the motherland and wrote about the necessity of establishing an independent Slovenian state.
Jeza thus gained the “favour” of our secret political police (commonly known as the UDBA), which constantly monitored him, even during Zemljarič’s “UDBA era”, and gave him the code name Separatist. In September 1963, they even tried to kidnap him, but what bad luck for the UDBA, the operation failed due to, I quote the UDBA, “due to the paranoid behaviour of Franc Jeza, who was afraid to come to certain places”. One of the informants (code-named Kačur) sent by the UDBA to Jeza in Italy was my gentle high school principal Franček Bohanec. Anyway, more about this, much more will be known when my book The Giants of Slovenian Independence and UDBA with the subtitle Franc Jeza – Separatist is published in September in Trieste (Mladika Publishing House).