Long Live All Nations

In February 1921, Vienna saw the premiere of Dracula’s Death, a horror film shot in Hungary. Although the film, directed by Károly Lajthay, was quite popular across Central Europe, every copy has since been lost, leaving only a few yellowed promotional photographs. A year after its premiere, this first screen adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula was completely overshadowed by the success of the German film Nosferatu, a shameless but brilliant plagiarism of Stoker’s story, with the remarkable Max Schreck as Count Orlok. To avoid paying royalties, the Germans simply changed the name of the villain from the original and the Hungarian version. Almost a century later, plagiarized Hungarian productions designed to spread fear are coming our way again.

A good example is a poster that the Slovenian National Party (SNS) published on its website. Although the post is apparently not new, in the run-up to the elections the poster has once again attracted attention. The black-and-white image shows the silhouette of a clawed phantom, with the words “No migrants” in bold letters across it. If I wanted to be undeservedly generous to the SNS, I would say it is merely stating the obvious: the figure in the picture is not a migrant, it is Count Orlok. Opinions on his manners may differ, but he was a native Transylvanian. Unfortunately, it is more likely that this is not a mischievous prank but a serious political message. The SNS is telling us that if they win, they will defend the Slovenian nation against migrants. Because migrants are repulsive, have claws and drink our blood. Migrants—the term the SNS, along with most of Slovenian politics and media, uses for all people on the run, regardless of what they are fleeing—are therefore vampires. They are not like the good-natured barber who cuts Ljubljana residents’ hair for free in the Rog squat, nor like five-year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned and whose body the sea washed up on the Turkish coast near Bodrum in September 2015. For the SNS, migrants are not people but monsters. Although the SNS claims it is a provocation, it is much more than that. It is hatred. It is evil. A symphony of horror, as the subtitle of the Nosferatu film that so inspired the SNS propagandists put it. Dehumanizing people is not a provocation. In history, it has often been the prelude to crime.

Among the examples we have recently adopted from Hungary is the relentless witch-hunt against George Soros, the American billionaire of Hungarian-Jewish origin who, alongside migrants, was the main target of our neighbors’ recent election campaign. The story of the wicked rich Jew was evidently effective, so it quickly found imitators here too. One Slovenian media outlet recently published an article about the “frightening links” between Soros and some Slovenian members of the European Parliament. Among Soros’s cardinal sins, besides the “systematic suppression of the right” and the “deliberate destabilization of Europe,” this outlet also lists efforts “to prevent violence against migrants” on the US–Mexico border. Whether Slovenian MEPs work with Soros, I do not know, but I confess that I have worked with him myself in the past. Years ago, we met in his office in a Park Avenue skyscraper in New York, with a wonderful view of Central Park. We discussed cooperation on Roma integration, which has long been one of the priorities of Soros’s Open Society Foundations. One of the results is the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, based in Berlin, which started work a little less than a year ago with the support of Open Society, the Council of Europe and the German government. I do not remember anyone mentioning the suppression of the right or the destabilization of Europe during our conversation in New York—unless, of course, these terms also cover efforts to achieve the social and cultural emancipation and integration of Roma into European society. Nor was there any talk of preventing violence against migrants, although, to be fair, it is not entirely impossible that Soros does in fact disapprove of violence against people, even if they are migrants. At the end, the article reveals that Soros does not act alone: he is part of a conspiracy that also involves Ronald Lauder, the owner, if I understand correctly, of POP TV and Kanal A, as well as a “political activist” and “president of the World Jewish Congress.” So once again we are dealing with an international conspiracy of rich Jews plotting against honest ordinary people. If this reminds you of something, you are absolutely right.

For populists, Soros offers a propaganda hat-trick. First, he is a tool for discrediting civil society, an important democratic safeguard and a thorn in populists’ increasingly jackbooted heels. Second, he makes it possible to surf on the waves of latent antisemitism, which, despite Europe’s horrific historical experience, has evidently not yet had its last word. Finally, Soros has been saddled with an entirely fabricated accusation of deliberately Islamizing Europe. This last one is particularly stupid, but no less effective or dangerous for that.

The increasingly aggressive discourse, based on stoking hatred and fear, on lies and on poorly disguised antisemitism, should worry everyone, but especially the parties on the right of the political spectrum. The trap that populism sets for them is to present the institutions and values on which post-war (above all Christian) democracy built European stability and peace as a political conspiracy of the left against the right. If the heirs of Schuman, De Gasperi and Adenauer accept that their political project be equated with an increasingly ruthless populist attack on the democratic institutions of the European political and social model, with nationalism, chauvinism and scaremongering about Jewish conspiracies, then of course there is no helping them. What is incomprehensible is why so many of them accept the destruction of their own reputation, historical achievements and political future, or even take part in it, without clearly distancing themselves from it and condemning it.

In one of my earlier columns, I wrote that the words of the Slovenian national anthem read as if they had been written by some Soros scholarship holder. I am beginning to wonder whether I made a mistake. In our country, those who consider themselves patriots are people who claim to love the state but evidently do not understand, or do not want to understand, the message of its symbols, nor the values on which Slovenia built and won its independence. Once they have finished with Soros, they may well turn on Prešeren.