Hang the Doggy

There are things that only occur to you when someone writes them on a big red bus, or repeats them to you as many times as Dr. Joseph G. prescribed, or when you read them on the Nova24TV website. That media outlet recently devoted a long article to me, in which I was described as an extreme leftist because of my criticism of hate speech and my defense of human rights. They hit the nail on the head with the claim that in my privileged youth, made possible by my “privileged communist” father, I acted in a youth propaganda film, Sreča na vrvici (Luck on a String). This statement, especially its last part, stirred up quite a lot of dust on social networks. I was more cautious in my reaction, above all because you can think what you like about Nova24TV, but you cannot deny their expertise and experience in the field of propaganda. So I decided to watch the film again, frame by frame. And damn it, they were right. You may remember that seemingly innocent scene on the Cobblers’ Bridge where I return to Milena, dressed in pink frills, the balloon I rescued from a wicked black-clad villain by jumping into the Ljubljanica. Hello? A rubber balloon? Forty years of New Year’s Eve reruns, and before Nova24TV no one noticed that this was not kitschy teenage romance but an attack on the reproductive duties of Slovenian girls and women. In the light of this realization, the limping bandit with a wooden leg who, fleeing a rampaging invasive Newfoundland dog, overturns a stall of non-native watermelons was no villain at all but a Slovenian patriot. A guardsman of the homeland, so to speak.

The accusations about my late father being an agent of the former regime were quickly upgraded by a disciplined phalanx of internet trolls into charges of having been in the UDBA, the Yugoslav secret police. Unfortunately, Nova24TV offers no evidence for its claims other than a photograph showing my father, dressed up in tails, together with then Slovenian President Kučan and the Queen of Denmark. The problem is that in the picture my father is bowing not to Kučan but to the Queen. If this is proof of my father’s collaboration with secret services, one would first think of the notorious Danish secret police, famous for interrogating suspects by making them walk on Lego bricks. With their shoes on, of course; they are not monsters. It is quite possible he was recruited when he studied in Denmark in the 1950s, a country that stayed in his heart for the rest of his life. He began and ended his television career with a documentary about that country, which he saw as the ideal of a democratic, open and caring society. After retiring, he founded the Slovenian-Danish Friendship Society, and Queen Margrethe II thanked him for all this with the Order of the Dannebrog. In his admiration of Denmark and the Danes, which in my opinion was sometimes rather uncritical, my father came closest to being a “regime journalist,” as a former respected judge of the European Court of Human Rights called him, in a statement that says a great deal about the judge and very little about my father. Whichever way you look at it, in the end the only reason my father is being called a regime agent and secret policeman seems to be my defense of liberal democracy based on human rights and political freedoms. The fact that these are not values traditionally associated with the former regime, still less with the UDBA, nicely illustrates how illogical, and indeed how stupid, such accusations are.

At first sight, such insinuations may come across as rather comic, but the cognitive weakness of the arguments cannot hide the fact that beneath the avalanche of idiotic insults lies a clearly worked-out strategy. The media lynching carried out by Nova24TV and its like has a purpose and a goal. Those who defend human rights are today declared “children of the UDBA,” critics of hate speech are traitors to freedom and the homeland, humanism and solidarity with our fellow human beings are branded extreme leftism, Pope Francis threatens Christianity, and Soros has become a Jew you can hate out loud. In the Newspeak of populist Slovenia, the civilizational values of post-war democratic Europe are stigmatized as a conspiracy of left-wing totalitarianism. Before our very eyes, on a pitch we won at independence in defense against authoritarian nationalism and in the name of human rights and political freedoms, someone is moving the goalposts and changing the rules of the game. Gradually, but ever faster, the civilizational foundations of the Slovenian state, which we wrote into the Constitution a good quarter of a century ago, are being undermined. Unfortunately, we cannot count much on the head referee either, who lacks the authority and courage to blow the whistle even when the offside is obvious.

I thought for a long time about whether to write this column, as it is very personal and may rub some people the wrong way for that reason, but in the end I decided not to leave the primitive abuse of my late father unanswered. If you must hang Jakob the dog from a verbal willow, you will not get my father. My last memory of him is from the railway station in Kehl, on the border near Strasbourg, around Christmas a good twelve years ago, as he and my mother boarded the train for Ljubljana. Only a few weeks later he died during the annual commemorative march to Dražgoše. Even this was used as crowning proof of his regime corruption. In today’s Slovenia, for some people it is enough to label you an anti-fascist to carry out your media execution. My father was a man I kept discovering all my life. At fifteen I learned that in his youth he had played basketball for Enotnost, as Olimpija was once called. A few years later he surprised me by being able to play the piano. Just a few days ago, a former colleague of his mentioned to me that while serving in the Yugoslav People’s Army he testified before a military court in defense of a fellow soldier accused of espionage, a well-known Slovenian intellectual who was eventually acquitted. In those days, my dear Nova24TV, doing something like that took not only moral principles but also balls. After retiring, for eleven years in a row he took a group of fifty final-year students from all Slovenian grammar schools to Denmark. For free. He raised money from sponsors for these trips, and only after his death did we discover that the sponsorship money was often not enough and he had covered the difference from the family’s savings. If someone proves to me that he really was in the UDBA, then I hope he was in charge of finances. My father was not without faults, but he had qualities that are the complete antithesis of everything the UDBA and Nova24TV have in common. He was someone people respected and loved, and above all someone who loved people. He and my mother passed this on to their children. And on this point Nova24TV is absolutely right. Thanks to parents like these, we Gruden brothers really did have a privileged youth.