By: Borut Korun
Márton Békés, a Hungarian conservative philosopher, wrote a book titled The National Bloc, which explains the political situation in Hungary and Orbán’s path to political ascendancy.
Reading this book feels like traveling through a parallel political universe, everything Békés writes could just as easily be written about Slovenia’s political past and present. One of the key points in the book is his explanation of how the political right and left in Hungary differ when it comes to the nation. According to Békés, Hungarian left-wing parties have never included the adjective “Hungarian” in their names. Hungarian leftists have always seen themselves as representatives of international global movements, not of the Hungarian people. The newspaper of Hungarian communists used to carry the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” on its front page. The Slovenian newspaper Delo retained this slogan, a motto of the Communist International, for years. There are no real differences in party names between Hungary and Slovenia. On the right, all parties include the word “Slovenian”: Slovenian Democratic Party, Slovenian People’s Party, New Slovenia. On the left, there is no mention of Slovenia: Freedom Movement, Truth, Social Democrats, The Left, Democrats, Greens, Vesna.
Our leftists, too, primarily see themselves as representatives of a global left-liberal agenda. They do not represent Slovenian national interests. They have discovered rainbow flags and pride parades, they coddle the Roma, and they befriend Palestine. They open borders to migrants, thus eroding Slovene identity. These are people for whom the fate of thousands of murdered Slovenians is a second-rate topic, yet they shed crocodile tears for fallen Arabs. The fight against Israel, for them, is a fight against Western imperialists, after all, that is the fight in which they once formed the Anti-Imperialist Front in April. The battle lines were the same then; the enemies included “capitalist Jews.” That only changed when the Comintern gave the order for a political-military shift.
The Slovenian government speaks of genocide in Gaza, yet it still has not officially recognised the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when Islamic Turks slaughtered, butchered, and starved to death between 1.5 and 2 million Armenian Christians. That story recently reached a tragic epilogue, more than 100,000 Armenians fled from Nagorno-Karabakh to escape a similar fate. In Slovenia, this is barely mentioned. Is it simply because Armenians are Christians? Are Christians automatically labelled “imperialists”?
The Slovenian people, their lives, especially those in rural areas, farmers and the elderly, are the last concern for Slovenian leftists, particularly those from central Ljubljana. They are cosmopolitans, they attend pride parades and engage in “feminist foreign policy”!!! They are interested in cats, which will soon have to be microchipped by law, in chickens and cows, almost as if they were household pets. They show no interest in the hard work of Slovenian farmers, who continue to keep our country green and well-maintained. Instead, they pile on more and more regulations. One gets the feeling that, in their minds, farmers exist for the sake of cats, chickens, and the well-being of cows, and not the other way around.
This erosion of Slovene identity also reaches into the past. For instance, in the recently published book On Both Sides of the Alps, which is an absurd attempt to create some kind of shared Slovenian-Austrian history. Even our historians (though not all of them, of course) stretch Slovene history to fit an ideological mold. At the beginning of this book, there are no Slovenians at all, just some vague, undefined Slavs. Meanwhile, the book mentions Bavarians, Croats, Moravians, and others! Even the Carantanians are not considered Slovenians in this narrative. The Freising Manuscripts, written in Old Slovene, are merely described as “Slavic texts.” The left claims that we as a nation only “emerged” in the 19th century. The aim of this kind of “history” is clear: to depict Slovenians as a people from “just the day before yesterday,” without roots and without identity.
That is why it is crucial to recognise these manipulations, to become aware of the ideological red thread that runs from Békés’s observations all the way to modern-day Slovenia. A story written by current politics, and another shaped by an ideologically “corrected” version of the past.
