By: prof. dr. Andrej Umek
I read Michael Knowles’ book Speechless with great interest. One of the book’s central arguments is that the far left seeks to increase its political support by renaming things and actions according to its own preferences, with the ultimate goal of gaining power.
The author limits his analysis of these developments to the United States and focuses on events in the 21st century. While reading the book, I found myself wondering what has been happening in Slovenia. After some brief reflection, I came to the conclusion that, in our case, the distortion of reality began almost a hundred years earlier and continues to this day. Between the two world wars, Slovenian communists began using tendentious and false descriptions of reality, and today the same tactic is employed by their “proud successors.” Because of the limited length of this column, I will discuss only three examples.
I will begin with one of the slogans used by Slovenian communists in the 1930s: “Democracy is dead; you can choose either communism or fascism.” They hoped that everyone who believed the first tendentious and incorrect claim, namely that democracy was dead, would choose communism. At the time this slogan was being promoted, there were around 300,000 Slovenians from the Primorska region who had fled fascist terror. Although the first claim was clearly false, as demonstrated by developments in Western Europe during and after the Second World War, the slogan achieved noticeable success. It therefore paid off for the communists to use a false description of reality, and they continued employing this tactic.
A second example of communists gaining support through a false characterisation of reality was the establishment of the Liberation Front (OF). On April 27, 1941, however, the Liberation Front was not established; rather, the Anti-Imperialist Front (PIF) was founded with the aim of having communists fight alongside the occupiers, fascists and Nazis, against the Western democracies. They were bound to this position by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. After the split between Hitler and Stalin and Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, the communists quietly renamed the PIF as the OF. The latter’s task was to carry out the communist revolution in Slovenia, or to recruit fellow travellers for it. According to the author, the events following the Second World War demonstrate this.
A third example of misleading the public is that the communists called their revolution the National Liberation Struggle (NOB). The falsity of this name becomes evident when one asks what the Slovenian nation experienced after the end of the Second World War. The leaders of the NOB, being among the victors, dictated postwar developments. What followed were mass killings, concentration camps, staged political trials, and the confiscation of property from broad segments of the population. In short, the Slovenian nation was far from free after the war. A communist totalitarian system prevailed. The term NOB therefore represents the practice of giving something negative an appealing name in order to gain political support.
At first glance, it may seem that the examples I have cited are outdated and irrelevant. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Today’s Slovenian left, as a “proud successor,” seeks to gain electoral support through these deceptions. As a democrat, I advocate for genuine dialogue in which A is A and B is B. Therefore, I propose that we stop lying to ourselves. Either April 27 should cease to be celebrated as the Day of Resistance Against the Occupier, or a more appropriate date should be chosen for that holiday. In all school textbooks, both primary and secondary, the terms OF and NOB should be replaced with expressions that describe these institutions and events more accurately. And finally, the Dictionary of Standard Slovenian (SSKJ) should provide factual and honest descriptions of these and similar institutions and events. A functioning democracy, which I hope we all desire, can only be built upon respectful dialogue grounded in honesty, free from deception and false insinuations. Let us not lie to one another.