My Slovenia book tour: From Tito to democracy.

My dear friends,

As I announced in my previous substack: a little update from my book tour in Slovenia. Last Friday, my plane landed on Ljubliana Joze Pucnik Airport, the only public airport of Slovenia, It is situated about 25 kilometers North of Ljubliana, the capital of Slovenia, on a strip of flat land surrounded by snow-capped alpine peaks who guard it as silent giants – one of the most picturesque airports I have ever seen.

Just to give you a little bit of geographical context: Slovenia is a relatively small country (about two million inhabitants) at the Adriatic Sea in the south of Europe. It’s surrounded by Italy (West), Austria (North), Hungary (East) and Croatia (South) and it has a small strip of Adriatic coast, in between the Italian and the Croatian Adriatic coast.

As you might know, Slovenia was part of former Yugoslavia, which included, besides Slovenia, also Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Yugoslavia fell apart after the Yugoslav wars started in 1991. In most people’s minds, the narrative of the Yugoslavia wars goes like this: as the communist system weakened, the Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians started to fight, and large-scale ethnic conflicts and atrocities happened. Eventually the UN intervened, the major culprits were brought to the international court in The Hague, and former Yugoslavia was divided in several other countries.

Narratives are always narratives – they are not reality itself. And they are always written by someone. In the end, they are written by those who are in power. Narratives make you see a part of reality, but they also hide something from the eye. That’s why it is always interesting to learn about alternative narratives as well.

The recent history of Yugoslavia starts with Tito, the man who was in charge there in between the second world war and 1980. Tito was a World-War-II partisan. One of the many. The entire area of former Yugoslavia has a inborn inclination to resist oppression. These guys don’t like to be told what to do. No less than 50% of the population joined the resistance during World War II. Just mentioning here: during the corona crisis, the vaccination rate in former Yugoslavia was also about 50%, one of the lowest in Europe.

Tito, born in 1892, was first inspired by socialist ideology. Later on, after he spent some years in the Soviet union, he ‘upgraded’ to communism. After the war, he became prime minister (1948) and president (1954) of Yugoslavia.

Tito claimed the status of president-for-life and he installed a one-party system in Yugoslavia. He is recorded in the books of history as a communist dictator who used a communist-style secret police apparatus – the Directorate for State Security. Sure, it operated more restraint than the soviet secret police, yet it did trace, imprison and eliminate political enemies.

Tito was a communist, yet, at the same time, he is also known as the man who refused joining the Soviet Union. In this way, he stopped the march of Stalin to the south-west of Europe.

While driving to the wonderful Postojna cave, Rok and Andreja, the couple who owns the publishing house Sanje, which published the Slovenian translation of my book, made some interesting side notes about Tito’s communist one-party system. They explained that the party was quite heterogeneous in Tito’s time. It existed of many subgroups with opposing opinions. In contemporary Western democracies, we usually see the opposite: there are many parties, but in the end, the political landscape is quite homogeneous. No matter who wins the elections, it won’t make much difference.

Do we really live in a democratic state system in the Western world? Or does it only have the outward appearance of a democracy? Please read the following paragraphs from Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World - Revisited:

‘By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.’

Huxley wrote these words in 1958. Now, more than 60 years later, they sound familiar, if you ask me.

Are contemporary ‘democracies’ freer than Tito’s communism? That’s a good question. I want to push it even further: Is Western democracy freer than, let’s say, contemporary China? If I rely on the China-narrative in Western media, even asking the question is foolish. China is full of propaganda, indeed. But what we learn about Chinese propaganda is colored by Western propaganda.

If I rely on what people who live in China tell me from a first-person perspective, the question as to whether our democracy is freer than the Chinese one is less foolish. In China, people shouldn’t question The Party, that’s true. Yet many of them don’t seem to have a problem with it and seem to be quite happy with the current situation. The same holds for the social credit system: it is less palpable than we might think, and most people do not seem to be fundamentally unhappy about it.

Sure, the happiness of the majority of the population doesn’t mean that much if it comes to evaluating the ethical qualities of a state system. There are many things that show that the Chinese system is problematic. To give only one example: look at how the practitioners of Falun Gong are treated there.

China truly has a problem. But to be honest, I am less sure than I used to be that their problem is so much bigger than ours. If you think I am talking nonsense, please read the quote of Huxley again.

I have never liked communism. And I never liked Marx. I agree with Lord Bertrand Russell that Marx’ problem was that he didn’t want to make the proletariat happy; he rather wanted to make the bourgeoisie unhappy. And moreover, no matter how sharp minded Marx’ analysis might be in certain respects, I think it was naïve to believe that ‘economic equality’ would eradicate the problems in human living together.

The root of the problem of humankind is not to be situated in the economic system; it is to be situated in the human heart. The real revolution we need is a revolution at the level of the ethical awareness of humanity. Without that, you might eliminate economic inequality as much as you want, the world won’t become a better place.

To the contrary, the focus on the economic level, suggesting that the root cause of the problem is to be situated there, will draw the attention away of the ethical level and let evil flourish even more than before.

A society in which people lack ethical awareness will always be inhumane, no matter what state system is used. And the opposite holds true as well: if the ethical awareness of people is well developed, society will be a place where human beings can live a life worthy of a human being, no matter which state system is used.

Indeed, I have never been enthusiastic about communism. But I am willing to admit that under certain conditions, communist leaders created social conditions that were better than the conditions we live in now. And I realize that our view on communism is colored by Western propaganda, just like almost any dominant narrative in the West is partially a product of propaganda.  

This is a good question as well: are the social conditions in the ex-Yugoslavian countries now better than under Tito? I doubt it. For instance: throughout the last two decades, the price of an average apartment in Ljubliana increased from about 50.000 euro to more than 400.000 euro. And a little bit earlier, in Tito’s time (Tito died in 1980), everyone could buy a house.

Now, it seems more and more impossible for young people, hard working or not, to buy a place of themselves. That holds for Slovenia, just like it holds for major parts of the rest of Europe. I don’t think this is normal. No matter how well hidden it might be, this is not democracy, it’s tyranny.

This is also worth considering: under Tito, the crime rates were twenty times lower than they are now. People even didn’t close their doors. Of course, such figures are always hard to interpret. Maybe the crime rates were lower because the dictatorial Tito relentlessly punished crime. That’s questionable. In many respects, Tito seems to have made a rather mild impression. In ’68, for instance, Tito might have been the only head of state who openly supported the student revolts.

I think it’s fair to say that Tito’s mild communism, in many respects, was better than contemporary ‘democratic’ systems and that Tito’s authoritarianism was replaced by a Western ‘velvet glove’ totalitarianism which cared less about the interests of the people.

Just like Ceausescu in Romania – who for the rest, in my humble opinion, was a different type of leader – Tito created a financial system that was independent of the large international banking system. After Tito died, this international banking system seized its chance. It helped Slobodan Milosevic rise to power, knowing that he would be willing to give up financial independence of Yugoslavia. Milosevic was a lawyer and a banker before he became a politician. The pictures where Milosevic posed with some of the foremost international bankers are available on the internet. The story goes that these bankers gave Milosevic a symbolic present: a golden pistol.

A picture doesn’t tell that much. of course. But then again, it seems that big finance had something to do with the sequence of events that eventually led to the Yugoslav wars. Here’s the narrative about Milosevic I heard from Rok and Andreja.

Milosevic rose to power in the second part of the eighties. He was a radical fascist at that time. To change the financial system of Yugoslavia, he realized, Yugoslavia’s social coherence had to be broken. He and the people who supported him realized that the only way to destroy Yugoslavia was to destroy it from within. This was the most obvious strategy to do so: to stir up hatred between the Muslims, Orthodox and Christians who coexisted under Tito.

And it worked. The Yugoslav conflicts that started in 1991 demonstrated all the horrors of hatred. The systematic rape of Bosnian women by Serbian troops, often intentionally aiming for pregnancy as to destroy the Bosnian racial identity, is only one of the examples. And it was not only the Yugoslavians who surrendered to absurd cruelties. It is well-known that ‘tourists’ of Europe and abroad came to Sarajevo to buy a permit from the Serbian army allowing them to shoot a kill a citizen of Sarajevo with a sniper rifle. Depending on whether one wanted to shoot a child, a woman or a man, the price of the permit was slightly different.

Why am I telling this? To show that it was not only the international bankers that played a role in the horrors of the Yugoslavia wars. ‘Ordinary people’ did so as well. It makes me think of this quote of Alexandre Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago): ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’.

I am happy to say that there is more than evil in a human being. I sincerely thank Tim Butara for organising my book tour: Tim, you did a wonderful job, and I am grateful that I met you as a human being. Thanks also to the rest of the organising team: Rok, Andreja, Maja, Ivan, Tanja, Esmeralda, and all the other who contributed - thank you for everything. I hope to see all of you again soon!

I’ll leave you with that for now. I will come back to you, maybe with one or another travelogue – I come to Nashville next week – or with another narrative. Mattia

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