By: Dr. Metod Berlec
The writer Drago Jančar wrote a highly resonant socio-political essay in 1995 titled Egyptian Pots of Meat. In it, he recalled a biblical story as old as the foundations of our Western civilisation. “This is the story of Egyptian pots of meat or, in other words, nostalgia for the old oppressor. When the sons of Israel happily come out of Egyptian slavery across the Red Sea, they start complaining at the first difficulties in the desert. In an instant, the hardships they, as slaves, endured – whips and sticks, violence, and scarcity – are forgotten. Nostalgia for the old oppressor awakens with full force: yes, he oppressed us, but we had pots full of meat.” The story resonates with the events in the independent Republic of Slovenia, where, for years, part of the population has been grappling with nostalgia for the former socialist Yugoslav state, which collapsed in the late 1980s and finally disintegrated in 1991, a period when Slovenes successfully gained independence.
Ahead of us are the Christmas and New Year holidays and the Day of Independence and Unity. As Dr Žiga Turk writes in the book Holidays – Why and What For, “this is the day when the nation decided to be independent, on its own.” It is a day when the nation remembers its departure from Egypt or, in this case, from socialist Yugoslavia. With this, Slovenes fulfilled the “millennial dreams of the Slovenian nation” and did what “the Bible advises nations”. Turk, referring to the American distinguished professor Leon R. Kass and his book Founding God’s Nation (2021), suggests that the biblical exodus can be read as a fundamental text of political theory. In the second book of the Old Testament (Exodus), we can learn how a community deserving of a state is formed, settles in it, organises a polis – public affairs – politics, and establishes a social contract. “Exodus places the state community on three pillars: (1) on common history, on suffering, longing, and struggle, (2) on common rules, statutes, and laws, and (3) on the common sacred and inviolable.” According to Turk/Kass, the genesis of every nation could be found in three archetypal steps derived from slavery: the fight for freedom, rules of common life, and a symbolic, incorruptible, sacred centre of the nation. Slovenes, according to Turk, “finished the Egyptian slavery in Yugoslavia”. “Our common suffering is the terror through which the second Yugoslavia was established in the years 1941-1945, and violence through which it was maintained. Egyptian slavery is slavery to the previous regime. Our common longings are ‘millennial dreams’ and, factually, more or less precise myths of how we, Slovenes, were oppressed now by one, now by another master.” Turk states: “The decision to leave Egypt was made by Moses, the decision to leave Yugoslavia was made by Slovenian voters in the referendum the day after Christmas 1990. /…/ The nation was united. The elite was not.” However, the communists almost until the last moment believed that Yugoslavia could be patched up. But because it was not possible and Demos, with the support of the people, decisively led the policy of independence, “the communists at some point assessed that they would retain more influence, positions, and money if they stood for independence than if they bet on Yugoslavia”. According to Turk, we thus gained independence at that time, “but we did not really free ourselves” because “we brought golden calves from the previous country, and they stand in the streets and squares”. In other words, we are still wandering in the desert…
Now, we have a coalition in power (GS, SD, and Levica) that increasingly flirts with imaginary Egyptian pots of meat, as it is clear that we lived much worse in the previous country than we do today. The government coalition led by Robert Golob is taking concrete steps to transform the Republic of Slovenia into a kind of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. One of its first steps was the abolition of the Office for Demography, which, during Janša’s government, began to take care that the Slovenian nation would become more vital and numerous again. Another anti-Slovenian measure of Golob’s government was the abolition of the Museum of Slovenian Independence, established by the previous government. Abolishing the memory of the brightest event in Slovenian history. The latest action of the government coalition is the submission of a proposal for a law “on the realisation of cultural rights of members of national communities of the SFRY” to parliamentary proceedings, and how symbolic it is, precisely on November 29th. This is the day when the former country celebrated Republic Day in memory of November 29th, 1943, when the second session of the AVNOJ took place in Jajce. With it, the communists under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito laid the foundations for the “new socialist Yugoslavia”. Golob’s government wants to grant minority rights to immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, even though they are not indigenous minority communities and are not entitled to them according to the constitution…