Penologist Petrovec together with Ksenija Horvat relentlessly pounded about the right wing: They don’t even try to play scientists anymore!

By: Aleš Ernecl

In Intervju show on RTV, Ksenija Horvat hosted a Slovenian penologist, dr. Dragan Petrovec, who she presented as international authority in his fields, although his international colleagues, by his own admission, did not comply with him in all these years. In the interview, he also complained that hate speech was produced only by the right wing and hinted that the violent protests on November 5^th last year were actually organised by the right wing.

Slovenian penologist, Dragan Petrovec, whose authority in the field of penology is extremely questionable, given that he is known for wanting to change the institutions intendent for punishment into a kind of clubs, societies, not to say hotels, where besides sleeping you also attend socio-psychological therapies (while to this day the international community in the net sense has not followed him enthusiastically), did not even try not to turn out to be an “ideozof” instead of a scientist on the fourth programme of the National Television.

In support of the claim that he is an “ideozof”, not a scientist (the compound is not mine, but from Jacques Maritain and means scientists and philosophers who do not look at all reality as it is, but look at it in parentheses), we list some indications from the interview itself:

1. He sees hate speech as a bigger problem than violence, as he shows clear tendencies to want to penalise it, wherein he is also not clear how to define it.
2. Vaguely, between the lines, we can read how he would define it. He easily claimed that hate speech was produced only by the right wing, hinted that the violent protests were organised by the right wing, he nodded to the biased host when she wondered why the law enforcement authorities protected government representatives (Because violence against the authorities was announced?), he equated articles in Demokracija magazine and Mahnič’s statement with (neo)Nazism, he compared the Erased to the post-war massacres – there were a whole bunch of these million times abused clichés, that are circulating in the mainstream media. These are obviously Petrovec’s only readings, on the basis of which he thinks about the Slovenian political situation.
3. For Petrovec it is a horrible fact that a woman was the first to be proposed for a life sentence. Just this, even though we disregard the fact that Petrovec repeated the clichés of the mainstream media about Janša and the right wing, should be enough to show that he is an “ideozof”, not a scientist.
4. Petrovec wondered: “First a woman, the second a Chinese. Will the third one be čefur?” (čefur = pejorative expression denoting the inhabitants of Slovenia that are of Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian ethnic origin). From the fact that a woman and a Chinese were the first to be proposed for a life sentence, Petrovec concluded that it was sexism and chauvinism in the background. Another clear indication that he is an “ideozof”, not a scientist.
5. Petrovec said that Ig, a women’s prison where he worked in the 1970s and participated in the anarchic-liberal experiment, was no longer so democratic as it had been, but compared to most European prisons it is still the most democratic. This pattern, that he has always been and still is swimming against the current and that the national television presents him as an authority in the field only because he is swimming against the current, is constantly appearing with Petrovec. A whole bunch of things are controversial about the experiment, but it is enough to know that women usually do not commit the most serious crimes and manifest their aggression less in practice. Women and women’s prisons cannot be paradigmatic examples for penology. Especially when it comes to an isolated case or just a few cases. Even interpretations of what the experiment is actually supposed to show are not unambiguous.
6. Petrovec claims that the moment we introduced the life sentence, we were the only country in the world that still did not have it and that we introduced it unnecessarily. This is arbitrary and not unambiguous. It is arbitrary in the sense that you have to believe in Petrovec’s anarchic-liberal approach in penology. It is not unambiguous because, according to his own admission, most countries have already had and still have this punishment.

We know that in the past, Petrovec used to call right wingers rabble. He never said anything like that about left wing, about Antifa, about BLM. As we have seen, he is a proponent of the conspiracy theory that the violence was caused by the right wing, despite many indications that the involvement of cyclists and the mainstream media led to violence, which, after all, was last predicted by Jaša Jenull.

He is a strong “ideozof” and “agitpropovc” (agitation + propaganda) another academic on-call, a controversial scientist who is controversial because of his anarchic-liberal approach to penology, which is nothing but rebellion for no reason, swimming against the current. And the national television recognised his authority because he is swimming against the current.