By: Jože Biščak
This year marks a quarter of a century since the publication of the famous book The Kučan Clan. The author Danilo Slivnik wrote in it: “… there is an Organisation within the Party… There are witnesses who claim that the closest circle of the Organisation in 1989 adopted a decision on urgent measures for the survival of its descendants and that it was explicitly said that regime change should neither affect nor socially endanger their children.”
Although the transitional left described Slivnik as paranoid at the time, today we can observe (with horror) that the decision of the Organisation, often called the Udbamafia, is being implemented in an exemplary and sober way: many blood and ideological heirs of the totalitarian regime are not only materially and socially provided, but also take very important positions in society and state subsystems where decisions are actually made. The occasional change of government with democratic and freedom-loving forces recognised as spring parties are just episodes that, due to short-term rule, cannot seriously jeopardise the continuation of communist practice in the new conditions. Shot through with many individuals selling their principles as a sandwich and Coca-Cola, they are fairly easy prey and under attack from within all the time.
To return to (formal) power ready to do anything
It is precisely because of such moles (who put their short-term opportunistic interests before the goals of establishing a free society and who never really understood the cunning “game” of nomenclature) that Slovenia is where it is today: we have a center-right government in which the majority really tries to make Slovenia successful and that the state would take as little from the people as possible and return more, but the Kučan clan ruled most of the time after independence and kept economic power at all times. This was only possible because he had under his control the judiciary, the media and civil society, which today organises itself into militant NGOs. They are willing to do anything to return to (formal) power: even with the victims of the epidemic of the Chinese virus, which they are accelerating by boycotting government measures and sending career criminals to the streets to create confusion and disorder. And if the government reacts to that, they accuse it in Brussels that the country is slipping into totalitarianism and threatening media freedom. In fact, the opposite is true: the desire to establish a new totalitarianism in a state of democracy on a declarative level.
Allies were (suddenly) found in Western Europe, where communism was never really understood. The man there has never lived in totalitarianism, for the inhabitants of the west of the old continent, communism is not as it is portrayed by former dissidents; though, wherever it was, it left corpses behind and proved to be not only unsuccessful but deadly everywhere. It is amazing that even intellectuals are not bothered by this at all. In some places also because the European man, according to the recipe of the cooked frog, is slowly slipping into totalitarianism in the latest fashion. Dressed in social justice and racial quotas, the use of undemocratic means justifies the goal of creating a mixed Europe where there will be no more nations and national cultures, where Christianity is a nuisance, the atomic family the worst evil.
The current reality is due to a lack of understanding and reckoning with the past. Not only with Nazism and Fascism, but also (and above all) with Communism. And this is not just any past, much less the normal history of post-socialist nations. The savagery of that time of all dissidents can be seen today at cycling protests, “artistic performances” in front of the Ministry of Culture, spitting at MPs and hysterical outbursts on Kredarica. Only a blind or corrupt villain does not see this continuity.
The Kučan clan still sustains the civil war and never intends to end it. That is the only way it can survive. The myth of their positivity (conservatives are, of course, bad; they were once labelled the imperialist bourgeoisie, today racists and Nazis) has been perpetuated for 80 years. The adoption of a resolution in which communism (socialism) would also be clearly defined as a totalitarian regime and which would lay a moral account for the past would be the first step towards ending the civil war. But they reject it because it would undermine the pedestal on which they built the myth.
Jože Biščak is the editor-in-chief of the weekly Demokracija, a long-term investigative journalist, and since 2020 also the president of the Slovenian Association of Patriotic Journalists and the author of three books.
