The Western world, including the USA, is rapidly devolving into a totalitarian state, similar to the communist totalitarianisms of the past, except with more sophisticated propaganda.
With that in mind, back in January I collected several accounts by volunteer translators who had lived under communism, and whom I invited to compare and contrast what they had endured with what is going on now in what was formerly known as the Free World.
Jože Bišcak, the editor of the Slovenian magazine Demokracija responded to my post by writing me the following email. I have been remiss in not publishing it until now, but yesterday’s election in Slovenia has made it especially relevant and timely:
The Slovenian experience is bad. After World War II, Slovenia was forcibly annexed to Yugoslavia, which became a socialist state. After killing off the managers, factory owners, priests, and louder critics of communism (the SD party, the direct successor to the Communist Party, is still based in a Jewish villa stolen after World War II.), the communist elite immediately started to look after its own comfort: it raised money by teaming up with the Italian mafia to smuggle cigarettes. Later, the Udba (the communist secret police that persecuted dissent) started setting up companies and banks (including abroad) and channelling money into them. After Slovenia’s independence (1991), which at least on a declaratory level became a democratic state, lustration was unfortunately not carried out; this is still evident today, when communists disguised as democrats control the judiciary and use it to settle scores with right-wing political parties.
While the centre-right coalition currently in power is trying to dismantle the socialist parallel system, the left-wing opposition is constantly causing problems by organising mass (and violent) protests. To do this, it uses money it stole decades ago (unofficial information says that more than $50 billion was routed abroad — mainly to tax havens — by the time of independence).
Last November, in an editorial for Demokracija, I talked about a book written by a young economist, Rado Pezdir, who researched what the Communist Party was doing, and used documents to expose the parallel mechanism of the communist Deep State.
Mr. Bišcak sent the English translation of the first chapter of Rado Pezdir’s book Parallel Mechanism (including a prologue explaining the parallel mechanism of the deep state) in PDF format. It’s too long to reproduce here, but it offers a fascinating glimpse into the way the communists, who kept their positions in the banks and formed the government at the time, laundered money for the Iranian terrorist regime.
It describes in detail the process outlined in Mr. Bišcak’s email. It sounds similar to what happened in Russia, but on a smaller scale.
Below is the editorial published in Demokracija. It mentions Janez Janša as one of the center-right people who struggled against the corrupt establishment that has emerged as the successor to the communists. Mr. Janša has been prime minister since 2020, and held the same office on two separate occasions before that. In yesterday’s election his party was defeated by the new SvoboDA party, which (as mentioned in last Saturday’s post) allegedly benefited from Russian interference in the election.
Parallel mechanism
by Jože Bišcak
November 3, 2021
The book Parallel Mechanism of the deep state by professor and publicist Rado Pezdir is not only important because it proves with documents the parallel economy of the former communist regime and reveals why the transition is not over, but also because it explains events in the first years after independence. In those days, there was already a lot of talk about the post-war massacres and murders of Udba [security service, analogous to the KGB]. Decades of fear of the Party police were still among the people, and even the Communists disguised as Democrats did not react excessively to their criminal activities; they were in sackcloth and ashes for a bit and tried to relativize and justify their actions with the legal system of the time. By doing so, they diverted the public debate about the legacy of the totalitarian system far away from the economy, for which they were genuinely afraid it would be revealed.
The only group of journalists who dealt with this issue more seriously was the so-called Slivnikova cetica (the late Danilo Slivnik and Vesna R. Marincic, Vinko Vasle, Igor Guzelj, me, and a few others). If the Organisation, as Slivnik called the Party’s leadership, manipulated and perfidiously blocked (even with moles within the spring parties) the work of various commissions, something happened in the first months of 1993 that caused all the red lights to go off in the deep state, the defence mechanism was triggered and in a good year it dealt with everyone who touched the parallel economy.
In Delo’s editorial “Casinò Royal”, Slivnik wrote about huge amounts of money flowing to the parties of the transitional left, Janez Janša spoke about the money you can use to buy elections. As they wallowed in Udba’s finances, the Udbamafia began preparations for Janša’s political liquidation, which led to the mounted Depala vas affair (later to the Patria affair), the group around Slivnik had to withdraw from Delo to the newly formed magazine Mag. Deep state soldiers, among whom Janez Drnovšek also played a prominent role, ended the purge (with some suspicious suicides) with the abolition of the Social Accounting Service, which was the only one under the leadership of Romana Logar to investigate the red mafia in depth. It took a quarter of a century for Pezdir’s book to be published, which confirms with documents what Slivnikova cetica wrote about, mostly on the basis of oral testimonies. Today’s defence of the deep state is that the parallel mechanism is presented as a system for the benefit of the Slovenian nation and preparations for financial assistance in gaining independence. Pezdir has already rejected this thesis, as no document proves it.
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