By: Mitja Iršič
As you read this, we have already passed the second day of the new year 2023. I can hardly believe that we are already almost in the middle of the decade, but it seems to me that it was only yesterday when I returned from China in February 2020 and NIJZ’s aunts told me that – despite coming from a covid-19 hotspot – I can go peacefully among people if I do not have symptoms, because scientific evidence shows that transmission of the infection between non-symptomatic people is not possible. Today, almost three years later, the same SD’s aunts are roaming around NIJZ again. The circle is closed. The pandemic has turned our lives upside down. It flushed out a whole bunch of latent psychopathy that was previously hiding in society, similar to how National Socialism flushed out the worst that humanity can offer from the Germans. Slovenia is the most tragic story in this regard. World War II happened again.
Communists and socialists are children of emergency. American rocker and adviser to the Czech government, Frank Zappa, once said that communism does not work because people like to own things. This is all that capitalism means – the means of production owned by private individuals, not the state. Those in power who fight against this are, by the definition of their ideology, at odds with human nature, which can create optimally only when people as individuals with their own interests unwittingly help society together. Ever since we abandoned the nomadic life and devoted ourselves to the cultivation of the soil, collectivism has favoured individualism and the accumulation of personal property.
Socialism is a return to a nomadic, collectivist, tribal way of life, which was closely associated with eternal poverty, the struggle for bare survival and living at the level of hyenas in the African savannahs, poverty, dying for meals and as such completely alienated from modern man. It succeeded only in times of historical upheaval when violence and demagoguery spoke instead of rationalism. That is why the October Revolution overthrew the Russian Empire just as it was being done after the horrors of the First World War. That is why Yugoslavian communists took power in a large part of the Balkans, when the Second World War returned the world to the time of nomadic cruelty and thus brought out the most brutal psychopaths who had no moral qualms about killing people with whom they shared blood and tradition.
Golob’s government is also a child of emergency situations. If there was no pandemic of the coronavirus disease, there would be no Golob’s government. The Slovenian socialists have a powerful propaganda machine, consisting of the majority media, extreme left factions, so-called civil society, the judiciary (these days it is difficult to perceive the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court as anything other than a branch of left-wing parties), trade unions and other state institutions (agencies, institutes, councils…).
But they have never been able to create a government that was completely to the taste of the penultimate president of the Central Committee of the Union of Communists. In every declaratory left-wing government, there were “disturbing state elements”, consisting of actors at least conditionally friendly to entrepreneurship (pro-Western, pro-capitalist faction within the LDS, Državljanska lista, the non-extreme part of the SMC…) Now everything is different. We got the first government, as Milan Kučan envisioned, in 1989, when he said that an independent Slovenia was the least desirable option and that all forces would be directed towards the survival of Yugoslavia. At the time, the Communists presented a vision of an autonomous socialist government within a new confederation that would replace the federation. That is, more autonomy and equal socialism. As for the socialist component, they succeeded with Golob’s government after 33 years of efforts.
They got a government that directly attacks the economy, capitalism, entrepreneurship, meritocracy… the president of the National Assembly criticises entrepreneurs because they are too “capitalist”, the minister of labour scolds people who own more than one property, saying that they “grabbed” them, the minister for the economy does not understand why someone wants a high salary, and he shares the opinion with the millionaire prime minister that people will spend more money on nonsense – it is better to leave the funds to the authorities, who will distribute it between NGOs on Metelkova Street and “civil society”. But these are not only words. As of January 1st, thanks to Golob’s income tax reform, you earn less – if you are an assembly line worker or a director. Even if you are a self-employed person or have a company, you pay more taxes than you did under Janša’s government. In return, you get a government that, six months after the start of the government, is still dealing almost exclusively with the previous government, while the health system is collapsing before its eyes, and while the businessmen are begging it to stop destroying them, because they support the entire society.
Such a government is against Slovenian and human nature. It is contrary to what has led us to survive centuries of storms of history and to stand as a nation as an independent and sovereign state-ethnic entity. We got a government of emergency like in 1945. At that time, we were pushed to extremes by a war storm, this time a pandemic.
At that time with actual violence, this time fortunately mostly only with the propaganda of the mighty agitprop machine (but this machine is only an echo of that 80-year-old violence). We got a government that hypnotised us so much with its “liberal” anti-covid rhetoric that we do not even see how step by step they are deconstructing the foundations of the country as we knew it. We only saw how much it hypnotised us after the referendums. People voted that their parents and grandparents will not receive state-guaranteed long-term care for decades, for the complete takeover of RTV Slovenia by the extreme left, and for us to get the largest state apparatus in the history of the European Union before the start of a severe financial and economic crisis. These are not rational decisions. These are emotional decisions that echo the trauma of a bygone era that freelancers and their background enablers have tapped into so effectively.
We got a government that will harm us – but how much depends on how long it will last and how long its consequences will last after its fall (remember the PID robbery from the 1990s, we are still feeling it today). Unfortunately, less than 40 percent of the population is currently aware of the danger. Otherwise, there are only about 30 percent of Robert Golob’s ardent supporters, while the rest of the population has been successfully “depoliticised” with the help of the media and they no longer think about politics, similar to the Russians and Belarusians.
But we will wake up from this stupor. That is clear. This farce of a leaky socialist boat in the middle of the turbulent ocean of the capitalist world will not last forever and sooner or later it will run aground on the surface of reality. We were among the most economically successful countries after the fight with the corona crisis, now we are among the least successful in the fight with the post-corona world. The economy is already showing signs of slowing down (and more importantly, compared to European countries, our economy is moving faster). We are on the verge of a collapse of the health care system. The government, however, promises even more income stabilisation in a country where the universally harmful socialist income adjustment is winning. Something bad is on the horizon in 2023, and it looks like the Slovenians will pay for the post-pandemic depression much more expensively than other countries, because it gave us the first real socialist government after 1987 (Marković’s reform government was, compared to the current Golob’s, a real pillar of neoliberalism). However, this time it will be an opportunity for self-reflection and purification. We have finally tried socialism (again) and we will finally be able to find out for ourselves (again) that it does not work. Although this will make us lose another decade again, like that lost decade of 2010-2020. 2022-2030 will thus again be an opportunity to find ourselves and become what we were a little before independence – entrepreneurial, capitalist, innovative, and anti-socialist. But this period is the last train to finally understand that socialism does not work. And the world goes on. I absolutely do not want Slovenian women to go to Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Poland as cleaners in 2035, and Slovenian men to be masons and ditch diggers. Golob’s government will be a lesson that socialism does not work. I hope that this time we will internalise this lesson.