By: Mag Andrej Aplenc
The elections are over, and we have a new government. Now that the things calmed down a bit, let’s take a look at where we are and where we are going. Regarding the elections, I believe that the media scene, where the media murder of SDS and Janez Janša took place, played a key role. This media murder will go down in the annals of the history of our transitional media.
In Dignitas magazine, no. 13–14, where the editors were Dr Janez Jerovšek and me, the poet Dane Zajc wrote: “Research… point to self-censorship and to the censorship that is characteristic of our press. To how many of our journalists allow themselves to be dictated to and order opinions that they publish as their beliefs or discoveries, although they probably have no beliefs or their own view of what they are writing about. And that is how they shape public opinion. To cover the truth, they cover it with half-truths. Slovenian public opinion, which is already shaky and ignorant anyway, is being encouraged towards relativism, nihilism, and philistinism.”
Prof. Dr Janez Jerovšek wrote in Dignitas magazine: “The reason for such a non-plural and undemocratic state of the media is that approximately 80 percent of the elite from the time of socialism survived the collapse of socialism and retained their positions even during the transition period.”
Now it is even worse.
On May 9th, 2016, at the meeting of the RTVS programme council, the journalists of the RTVS TV Journalists’ Activity developed a poster with the inscription “death to janšism”. The RTVS management did nothing about it, and there were no consequences for the journalists. Such speech constitutes hate speech, which is punishable by law. The slogan “death to fascism”, which threatened the occupiers with death during the war, was used against the then legal government. It is impossible for this to happen anywhere in Europe, for national television journalists to appear in Germany with the sign “death to merkelism” or in France “death to macronism” or in England with the sign “death to johnsonism”. It is also a fact that in our country these journalists still report on RTVS. And now, under the new government, an amendment to the Act on RTVS is being prepared, which will turn national television into a tool of the government. According to Prime Minister Robert Golob, we should have freedom of speech, but what we have and will have is complete media unanimity from the previous regime.
The representatives of the current government had a lot to say on how to improve the Slovenian health care system. According to OECD data, Slovenia has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants. Only Poland, Albania, Montenegro, and Romania have fewer. In Slovenia, there are 326 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants, while in neighbouring Austria there are 524. Healthcare depends on state money. Slovenia’s GDP is around 24,000 US dollars per inhabitant, while Austria’s is around 51,000. This is the explanation for Slovenian doctors leaving for Austria, where they are paid twice as much. That is why I think that any talk of significantly improving our healthcare system is just plain populism. Why is our GDP so low?
During the Watergate affair, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, journalists of the Washington Post newspaper, received advice from an anonymous source they called Deep Throat to “follow the money” in their research. If we take this into account and follow the money in our country, then “follow the money” is very well described and analysed in the book “Parallel mechanism of the deep state” by Dr Rado Pezdir. There is an explanation of where the state money is and where it all went, and as a result, it is also the answer to why our GDP is twice as small as Austria’s. And, among other things, the answer to why our health care system is like this, while the Austrian one is different. For those who will not read Dr Pezdir’s book, just this: more than one billion euros of terrorist Iranian money was laundered in NLB. So far, no one has been responsible for this.
Since I am not a gypsy, I cannot reliably predict what will happen with the current government. But I think that it is very likely that, in addition to everything else, we will be faced with two problems: with the covid virus and with health problems, with inflation, rising prices and the cost of living. This will significantly reduce our standard of living. In about half a year or at the end of the year, it will be much clearer to many Slovenians who they voted for, despite media propaganda and unanimity.