By: Gašper Blažič
I remember that famous Andersen tale about the emperor’s new clothes many times. Perhaps because it is very informative for today’s events in society. In fact, it points to several aspects concerning both political marketing and social psychology.
Let’s take a look at an example: if the emperor appears naked and his court propagandists convince people that this is just some kind of new outfit that is not visible, it soon happens that the vast majority begins to believe in this construct, not knowing that they in their head, under the influence of suggestions from the outside, create a kind of surreal image of this new “dress”, which does not exist. So it is a kind of simulation of a dress that should exist, even though we do not see it – but we also do not see the wind, yet we feel it anyway? And this delirium lasts until a child is found who escapes the herd instinct and loudly declares that the emperor is as he really is – naked. People then suddenly become aware of the falsity and perversion of the construct they just believed in.
This tale is, in fact, only an indication that we are not sufficiently aware or are not aware at all of the mysterious mechanisms that make humanity, as a mass, completely materialised today. For example, when a counter-informant announces (dis)information to a medium, s/he chooses one that corresponds to the psychological profile of the people who work for that medium. This means that they will react to it instinctively, thus processing and publishing it in the way that the person who brought the information (or the mystery subscriber) wants. And the end result of this will be a benefit to the client, while this medium will dig up damage. This is the case when Denyens bring gifts and you accept them without hesitation.
Moreover, one of the psychological mechanisms for coping with crowds is also instilling a sense of guilt. And this is exactly what is happening now during the debate on media freedom in Slovenia. The old centres of power, through all their possible channels, exported this debate to Brussels, so that Slovenia found itself in the company of “problematic” Poland and Hungary. We could have expected that. As the pressure from the transitional left on its international friends (from the Euro-socialist group and the liberal ALDA) is very high and has a strong influence on the European People’s Party, it was expected that European priests would play the same strings as “Club 571”, as an influential and strong group of media and political activists has been called in recent years, gathered in the Slovene Association of Journalists, the Peace Institute, and through various phantom portals financed with Soros money.
Of course, many will wonder why such aggression and haste and why so many lies, when it is already possible to empirically prove that left wing media jihadists have nothing in their arguments? For example, one of these activists, Marko Milosavljevič, a professor of journalism at FDV, announced a blatant lie in Brussels about how the government, through its pit bulls in the programming council, achieved even politically motivated early dismissal of the controversial RTV Slovenia director general Igor Kadunec. Who, by the way, is still in office, as his term has not expired yet, although his successor has already been elected. This is, of course, just one of the many untruths and half-truths that the political underworld brings under the noses of confused European bureaucrats who do not even have time to check what is happening in Slovenia. Therefore, even after Milosavljevič’s apology, they will take this misinformation for pure gold. For a simple reason: because it is just one pebble in the mosaic of a construct that seems real. But this export-import mechanism is actually just about multiplying the effect of psychological control. Europe is not the goal. Europe is just a tool. The goal is the class enemy, that is, the SDS and everything that goes with it.
What am I talking about? I am talking about a so-called preventive guilt mechanism. If you want to “democratically prevent” your opponent (or class enemy) from making changes and breaking Dolanc’s old spell (“… if it were not us, it would mean it was someone else…”), then you have to blame him/her for something that has not even happened yet through a hysterical and orchestrated propaganda. Thus a kind of simulated leap into the future. So: according to leftists, media freedom in Slovenia is not threatened because the government has done something, but because it could have done it. So it is about preventing potential change! Let’s look at an example: STA director Bojan Veselinovič was given his second term to run a news agency in 2016, during Cerar’s government. This means that the current government cannot afford to dismiss Veselinovič without the consent of the SMC, where President Zdravko Počivalšek also has problems, as some would like to replace him for insisting on a coalition with the SDS and NSi. This is just one of the cases where the government is forced into the status quo due to the sensitive relationship in the coalition (for example, also in the case of the judiciary and migrants, where changes were promised before, but for now there are not here yet). So the pressure of the old centres of power on the government is here in the function of prevention.
Another mechanism that occurs here is the mechanism of mimicry. There is probably no need to closely explain how the old centres of power, as well as the political parties stemming from continuity of the previous regime, encroached on media freedom while the “guardians on-call of freedom” looked away. In comparison, the interventions of the opposing political option in the media were disproportionately small. So we can say that the aggressors are portraying themselves as victims and pointing fingers at their opponents, saying that they are the perpetrators. And the mechanism of mimicry is precisely about the psychological change of roles – the role of the perpetrator is attributed to the victims and the role of the victims to the perpetrators.
And it is precisely these mechanisms that need to be known and ruthlessly exposed before the eyes of the Slovenian and European public, because they represent the pillars of the structural lies of the successors of the red regime, which is maintained through the abuse of democratic mechanisms.
Gašper Blažič is a publicist, a long-time journalist of the weekly Demokracija, and the editor of its website.