By: prim. Janez Remškar, dr. med.
27 April 2026 has passed. In recent days, the national broadcaster has been filled with content reminding us of 1941 and the former Day of the OF, rather than the Day of Uprising Against Occupation as it is known today. Everything is happening just as it did before 1990, only the holiday has a different name. Why is that?
My memory drifts back to 1966, the year I graduated from high school. A few weeks before the OF holiday on 27 April, we wrote a mock final exam in Slovene. The title of the essay was: “On the 25th anniversary of the OF.”
We had four school hours to think and write. After fifteen minutes, one of my classmates asked the teacher if he could leave the classroom. When he did not return after ten minutes, the teacher sent another classmate to look for him. He quickly came back and reported that the first one was in the gym, saying he had already finished the assignment. We were all surprised, but continued “creating history.”
Socialism raised to enviable heights
When we received our papers and grades, the teacher was Dr Janko Kos, formerly a contributor to Beseda, Revija 57, Perspektive, all of which had been shut down, and not yet an academic at the time, we saw a grade of ‘1’ under our classmate’s essay, without any comment. Curious, we read what he had managed to produce in ten minutes. The text was short; I quote: “Today, 25 years later, when we have built socialism to enviable heights, we proudly remember the brave deeds of our daddies and mommies.” The end.
Today, after 35 years of democracy, or rather, attempts at democracy, we are once again “building and creating socialism and history” on RTV Slovenia, with memories of revolutionary times. And who stands at the forefront of this construction? I see no locksmiths, metalworkers, or high‑school students without a diploma (comrades Marinko, Leskošek, Popit), the professional revolutionaries once trained in the Soviet Union.
Today I see, in leading political positions, the successors of those revolutionaries, supporters of a Soviet‑style revolution, meaning the liquidation of all political opponents. Back in 1974, when I was a doctor in training in Belgrade, I was taught that the socialist Salvador Allende fell in Chile because he did not kill all his political opponents. One must admit that the revolutionaries were well trained in the Soviet Union; they exploited the Partisan struggle – the NOB – for revolution and settling scores (accompanied by executions and the exclusion of the religious). The result was 45 years of ideological uniformity.
We are returning to that uniformity, once again with the aggressiveness of the left, for whom some of us are “fascists”, and with the right hoping that hostility will eventually end. That hope is in vain. Perhaps the question is appropriate: is there any difference between the former revolutionaries, the communists, and their present‑day successors? A great one. The former, the most prominent among them, came from working‑class backgrounds, miners, metalworkers, high‑school students without a diploma, professional revolutionaries. Their successors have surpassed them. They are educated and, thanks to the naivety of the DEMOS representatives and those for whom an independent Slovenia was not the first option, as well as some “planted” individuals, they quickly found their way in the privatisation process. They are wealthy, many with questionably acquired assets, yet firmly on the side of the workers and in harmony with the trade unions, which rise up immediately whenever a centre‑right government is in sight. The latter is, of course, fascist, is it not, Robert Golob.
And so, as your second term slips away, you speak of political deceit by your competitors, and nothing about the content of the wiretaps made among your prominent allies, which clearly revealed your own style of corrupt conduct at the very top of the political left. Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Matej Arčon, an electrical engineer by training, dared to moralise throughout his appearance with Tanja Gobec, speaking, as centre‑right negotiations were taking place, about a performance for the public, a crisis of values, and in short, a great deal about morality. Perhaps he does not understand that governments must be formed far from the eyes of our journalists, and that it is better for them to be as little informed as possible. But this is merely about forming a government. He, Arčon, and his colleagues continue to stage a “performance” for the people through the laws they have adopted, some of which are already proving to be a performance for the public (the Long‑Term Care Act) and a socialist utopia (the amendment to the Health Services Act and the Health Quality Act), both of which contradict the legislation of countries with functioning health‑care systems.