Oaths

In my life, I’ve only sworn a few oaths. The first time was almost in a kindergarten in Rojan, a district of Trieste, where I was cared for by the nuns who ran the first Slovenian kindergarten in the Italian borderlands. We didn’t really swear oaths there, but we did pray. There wasn’t much play. The sisters had a habit of pressing subtle messages through clenched lips, instructing us how to spend our Sunday mornings with our families so we wouldn’t fare poorly in this life—or the next. Subtlety was never my strength, so when I got home, I translated their veiled suggestions into terrified wailing that we’d all end up in hell for not going to church. In response, my father started waking me up on Sundays and taking me to church, waiting in the bar across the street while I attended mass. From a young age, my family raised me to respect difference.

Upon returning to Ljubljana, I swore another oath—this time as a Pioneer (the youth organization in socialist Yugoslavia). I even became the president of our school's Pioneer organization, which remains the only political office I’ve ever held. It impressed my parents about as much as my Sunday churchgoing.

The next oath was required of me when I joined the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). I’ll admit—I cheated. It was a few weeks after I arrived at the barracks on the outskirts of Zagreb. Along with a few hundred freshly shaven recruits, I stood in formation before the Yugoslav flag, mouthing the words of the official pledge. Except, instead of the formal text, I was silently reciting the lyrics to Lennon’s Imagine in my head. I didn’t know the whole song—my memory for lyrics was never great—so I kept repeating the lines I did know like a mantra. I made an exception only for the final line, where I shouted, “not wishing to give my life in doing so.” A small but deliberate change from the official wording, which in Serbo-Croatian required only the switch of a single vowel. Lost in the roar of the enthusiastic soldiery, my minor act of resistance brought me comfort and peace, a feeling that I had outwitted the forced ideological indoctrination of the Yugoslav “people’s” army.

Leaving for military service in 1984—during the Los Angeles Olympics—was deeply traumatic for me. Overnight, I was uprooted from the relatively liberal environment that had already begun to emerge in Slovenia, or at least hinted at its arrival, and plunged into an authoritarian, uniformed ideological operetta that I experienced as a violent intrusion into my personal freedom, beliefs, and individuality. My aversion to military matters ran deep—no doubt worsened by the ideological indoctrination we received in high school by an eager young teacher of the Fundamentals of General People’s Defence and Social Self-Protection, our future and recurring Prime Minister Janez Jansa.

JNA built its moral authority on the legacy of the National Liberation Struggle (NOB) against the occupiers. That, in itself, wasn’t the problem. From a young age, I was—and still am—a convinced anti-fascist. But even as a naive teenager, I could see that the primary function of the ritualized, mythologized WWII narrative was to morally justify the authoritarian one-party regime.

I didn’t cheat on the oath because I disagreed with the legacy of the national liberation struggle, but because I intuitively rejected the ideological instrumentalization of anti-fascism for goals and ideas that I personally felt were fundamentally at odds with that legacy. For the same reasons, I feel no nostalgia for the former country, Yugoslavia. Not because of nationalism, but because it didn’t align with the values of a free, democratic society in which I wished to live. The fact that it was more liberal than other Eastern Bloc countries was cold comfort. Just as “almost pregnant” doesn’t lead to childbirth, “almost democratic” doesn’t lead to freedom.

The next oath I took, I signed—with pride. It was at the beginning of my tenure at the Council of Europe, where I pledged to act solely in the interest of the organization and not to accept any instructions from any government, authority, organization, or person outside the Council. We employees are bound to uphold and defend the principles and values enshrined in the Statute and the European Convention on Human Rights. I have never experienced these obligations as a restriction, but as a privilege. I am faithful to them not only during work hours, but as a private individual and citizen as well. That is also the basis of my writing—in my personal name, but in defence of those very values.

If, in the early years, the emphasis on loyalty to the Council of Europe rather than to individual governments, organizations, or persons seemed merely formal, it has become increasingly relevant lately. The more some societies drift away from the civilizational principles they accepted when signing the European Convention on Human Rights, the more likely it is that a commitment to these values—whether in professional work or personal expression—will be met with hostility from one side or another.

Interestingly, and not coincidentally, the first signs of such conflict arose around attitudes toward the LGBT population. Homophobia—like other social pathologies—is latent in many European societies and erupts whenever political opportunism legitimizes it. While in the early post–Berlin Wall years, warnings about the violation of sexual minority rights were often dismissed as misunderstandings or a matter of time, in recent years, especially in Eastern Europe, the tide has turned. Equality and the protection of human dignity for some citizens have become politically targeted and legally curtailed—openly and deliberately—in the name of “traditional values.”

Through misleading interpretations of concepts like family, security, and national culture, populism seeks to fabricate a conflict between “traditional” and “Western” values. The latter group conveniently comes to include principles such as judicial and media independence, the functioning of NGOs—in other words, the checks and balances essential to democratic governance. It all gets wrapped up in the dogma of total national sovereignty, which rejects external or international standards of behaviour and demands full autonomy in defending the “purity” of the nation from the “decadent” influence of the West. The ideal of a “healthy nation” is served to citizens as consolation in exchange for freedoms and prosperity—both of which, for all its flaws, the West provides far better than the so-called traditional East. We may never be the most successful or truly free, but at least, they say, we can be the most intolerant.

An important part of this populist political and social paradigm is the ritualization and mythologization of history—a constant return to events and periods whose selective interpretations help populism portray itself as a victim and delegitimize any political opposition or democratic oversight. This is eerily similar to how the Yugoslav army and regime used history to justify authoritarianism—right down to the indoctrination of youth through military-themed high school courses. But our reaction to such manipulation also invites comparison. Opposition and critique of the manipulative use of history in no way exclude condemnation and empathy regarding the crimes committed on our soil after WWII. On the contrary: it is out of respect for the victims of extrajudicial killings of the captured Nazi collaborators, that we must morally reject the political instrumentalization of their—and our—shared tragedy.

This, of course, requires clarity in condemning what happened. Respect for all victims does not equate fascism with resistance to it. Postwar atrocities do not diminish the civilizational importance of anti-fascism—but nor can they be justified by it. Relativizing extrajudicial killings, regardless of context, plays right into the hands of those trying to turn our future into the second act of our past.