By: Bogdan Sajovic
The progressive and supposedly very tolerant left went into an uproar when Zoran Stevanović was elected as the new president of the National Assembly.
Just a day earlier they had been ingratiatingly inviting him into their coalition, but once he was elected with votes from the right – what could be worse. Online, comments poured in claiming that “someone like him” simply cannot be the president of parliament.
That reminded me of Radio Študent from about a quarter of a century ago. Radio Študent was a stronghold of tolerance, progressivism, and brotherhood and unity. Day and night they broadcast Yugonostalgia and Balkan culture; their hearts bled for the erased, the overlooked, and other suffering victims of Alpine chauvinism and racism.
Until Dr Dejan Jelovac was appointed as the new director of the radio. He quickly discovered that the entire institution was riddled with corruption. A pile of equipment and around a thousand CDs were missing, taken by employees who used them to play music at private parties, in clubs, at village festivities… Some hosts, who were supposed to broadcast live, would record an hour or two of tape and play it, while they themselves – though being paid to be in the studio – spent that time elsewhere. Often in nearby bars, drinking with friends, settling the tab with company order forms.
When the director tried to put an end to this corruption, Ljubljana’s media‑cultural progressive scene – intertwined with the relatives, friends, and drinking companions of the corrupt radio staff – shifted from progressive tolerance to a kind of “blood and soil” fanaticism, protesting that a “southerner” could not possibly be the director of a Slovenian radio station and shouting that he had to be removed immediately.
It seems that in all this time the left has not changed much at all; they still speak loudly about tolerance and high principles, but only until those principles clash with their personal interests. Then it quickly becomes clear that, at their core, they are simply acting hypocritically.