crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Jože Dežman
Communist repression and transitional justice in
Slovenia
In the 20 th century, the leaders of the seemingly most civilized countries of Europe were capable of
unleashing the most debased murderous passions of their citizens. The epicentre of totalitarian massacres
during and after the Second World War was Eastern and Central Europe. In the European totalitarian
crescent, Poland and the Baltic States were victims of National Socialism and Stalinism; Germany and
Austria were agents of National Socialism and Germany was also the victim of Stalinism; the Soviet
Union was an agent of Stalinism; Yugoslavia, and also Greece, were victims of Fascism and National
Socialism and agents of Stalinism; among the countries with a high percentage of dead population in
the totalitarian victimological centre of Europe were also Hungary and Romania. Compared to the
countries in the totalitarian crescent of Europe, which lost around five percent of their population (but
some also more than ten percent of their population), losses of Italy, France, the United Kingdom and
the United States of America were around one percent of their respective populations. 1
Characteristic of the territory now known as the ‘Alps-Adriatic’ region of Europe, are the strained
relations that followed dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – six nations competing for the
same territory (Italians, Friulians, Austrians, Hungarians, Slovenians, Croats). 2 Those tensions broke
out immediately after the end of the First World War.
Among all European countries, Slovenia experienced the most intensive activities of all three forms
of totalitarianism on its territory from the end of the First World War until the dissolution of Titoism. 3
1. Totalitarian machines
Let us mention briefly Fascism, National Socialism and Titoism in Italy, Austria and Slovenia. 4
Three Christian nations, with nationalist tendencies, were infected with totalitarianism. The descent
into barbarism has comparable structural elements:
– Abuse of national sentiment to carry out racial and class revolutionary projects;
– Cult of a great leader, who permits his fanatics to murder, steal and lie;
– Dictatorship of one party;
– Militarization of society, police state – almighty secret political police;
– Collectivism, subjection of the citizen to the totalitarian state;
– State terrorism with systematic abuses of basic human rights;
– Aggressive assumption of power and struggle for territory.
However, their paths to power were different, their lengths of rule and dissolution were different,
and modern reactions are different. The characters, criminals and crimes were being covered-up in Italy
and Austria and Slovenia. Slovenia lived in the lies and half-truths of the Titoistic system for preserving
and developing revolutionary heritage. Austria avoided the truth with the myth of Austria as the first
victim of National Socialism and Italy is only now starting to confront the crimes of Fascism.
1
Nial Ferguson, The War of the World – History’s Age of Hatred, London–New York–Toronto 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_
War_II_casualties.
2
Helmut Rumpler, “Verlorene Geschichte. Der kampf um die politische Gestaltung des Alpen-Adria-Raumes”, in: Andreas Moritsch (ed.)
Alpen-Adria. Zur Geschichte einer Region, Celovec–Ljubljana–Dunaj 2001.
3
Perhaps it could be compared with Greece, but there the period of the Second World War and the civil war, with activities of Fascism,
National Socialism and Communism, lasted less than a decade.
4
Even though the Hungarian occupier’s goals for ethnic cleansing were no less extreme, there was no significant partisan movement
developed there during the Second World War and thus no revolution. After the War, the Titoists were less brutal to the Hungarian
minority than to the German and Italian.
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