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A street sign on the waterfront of Umag, Croatia.
I don’t really understand why so many streets are still named after Tito or other Yugoslav communists. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be. Maybe there’s no point in denying history, and who can argue that Tito didn’t play an enormous role in the collective past of the former Yugoslav republics? But still. One would think that politicians would be eager to wipe the slate clean, especially when it comes to underlings like Edvard Kardelj, who still has numerous streets and squares in Slovenia dedicated to him. After all, it’s not like Slovenia doesn’t have plenty of other possibilities.
Perhaps it’s inertia more than anything. Perhaps changing the names would cause more confusion and chaos than it’s worth.
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Heh heh, check out the awesome statue in front of the main entrance to Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana
(it was intended as the main entrance I beleive, but because entering from the Trg Republike square is easier, it seems like it’s the rear entrance)
You have found an interesting site again (about Kardelj). It seems there are lots of secrets still hidden from us, ordinary people, for instance that Kardelj was responsible for the assassinations of the political exiles and that there might be a connection between Kardelj and Arkan. Very interesting indeed.
Kardelj was a tough Stalinist. Like other Slovenian revolutionaries: KidriÄ?, MaÄ?ek, RibiÄ?iÄ?… he was instructed in the communist ideology and methods in Moscow. His book The Development of Slovene National Question is based on a Stalin`s book, actually, it is an almost literal translation.
Sometimes our communists surpassed Stalin`s NKVD in cruelty. While NKVD was liquidating people dressed (the Polish officers in their uniforms with all personal belongings) our OZNA and KNOJ were killing their victims NAKED, from June 1945 on.
Read:
www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/jurak.html
to understand why.
(Warning: this is hard core pornografy.)
It is obvious that things are related, though nobody wants to see it.
Stalin (NKVD): Katyn, Vinica…
Tito (OZNA, KNOJ): Rog, Teharje, Tezno…
MiloÅ¡eviÄ? (Serbian military formations, KOS (?)): Srebrenica
I.THE TECHNICAL PROCESS OF KILLINGS:
1. Detention in a camp.
2. Selecting men. (When there were also women and children in the camp: Slovenia, Bosnia.)
3. Interrogation (accompanied with abuse and torture).
4. Deciding who will live and who will die.
5. Transportation by trucks (or Black Crows - special NKVD wagons in case of Katyn) to the chosen secret killing site. Binding the hands of the victims behind the backs with rope or wire (using phone wire in Slovenia and Bosnia).
6. Killing during the night, by shooting every victim individualy in the back of head when forced to stand at the edge of a pit.
7. Covering the mass graves. Planting trees on top (Katyn), sometimes putting dirt and rubish on top (Teharje, Srebrenica). In Vinica a children`s park was built over the graves.
8. Silence.
(Sometimes the victims were killed in a basment of a building during the night and bodies were after that taken to mass graves: Katyn, Srebrenica.)
II.THE MOTIVES OF MASS MURDERING:
to get rid of potential political opposition.
“Beria suggested to the Soviet Politburo that the Polish officers be exterminated, since they were ´…involved in anti-Soviet propaganda. Each of them is only waiting for his release from imprisonment in order to enter into a struggle against Soviet power.´”
Tito didn`t stand any opposition; the domobranci and others were anti-communists, so he simply killed them all to prevent any possible future troubles.
“When Mladić seized Srebrenica, he would treat every able-bodied male, armed or unarmed, in uniform or out, as a fighter, a warrior - as a killer who, if allowed to survive, must one day return, seeking vengance in his turn.”
III. It is interesting how naively the victims (the Poles in NKVD`s hands, the domobranci in camps in Carinthia, the Muslims in Srebrenica) trusted the West and how they were all betrayed.
“For the West, however, Katyn serves as a grim indicator of the moral weakness and practical impotence of the West`s political and intellectual leaders and institutions in dealing with a careful, calculating totalitaran regime prepared to use mass extermination as a tool.”
The post totalitarian countries should take these Solzhenitsyn`s words seriously:
“Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly, `Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer´.”
“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surfice, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the `weakness of indoctrinational work`, that they are growing up `indifferent`. Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horroble, to live in such a country.”
In Slovenia “the ideological apparatus of the State” (a Marxist term?): mass media, education, culture(?) are still under the Party`s control.
But it will not last for ever.
A few days ago the first history book based on facts and documents about the traumatic war and post war time has been published.
Tamara Griesser-PeÄ?ar
Razdvojeni narod (The Devided Nation)
Slovenija 1941-1945
It will be followed by others. Poems, novels, short stories will be written…
Czeslaw Milosz:
You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed,
the date.”
(The quotes are from Web sites.)
Andreja
the adress is:
www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/jurak.html
In Ljubljana they renamed the main street/road "Titova Cesta" to "Slovenska Cesta", they wanted to change also others (and probably changed some of them), but people objected, at least here, coast/obala, but then again here are the most left oriented people in the country. I’m against renaming streets or puting down statues or whatever. It is still part of the history, the death of Tito wasn’t celebrated but cried upon. So people didn’t hate him afaik. So why would you rename something that you like/miss. The point of having streets named after someone and statues is to remember and make him immortal. But Slovenians also honour some people that are totally unknown to others and forget about some. Like Herman PotoÄ?nik - Noordrung, which was a pioneer in astronautics they even wanted to name the ISS (international space station) after him. He ‘invented’ or rather been the first to write about: space station, colonization of space (how to), geo-stationary satelites (mostly communication satelittes), a rotating space station for arteficial gravitation,… his ideas were quite modern (i’ve read a little of his book), i mean they were kind of like now except for some "archaic" (like solarpower based on boiling water) things. JLA (jugoslovanska ljudska armada/yugoslavian people’s army) streets were renamed.