Monument to the Victims of all Wars

The call for reconciliation of all the sides involved in the World War II became a dominant ideology of political class in the independent Slovenia after 1991. It is internally marked by a more liberal trope that we should orient ourselves to future, while trying to reconcile fascist and antifascists in the following sense: it does not matter if victims of totalitarian terror were partisans or local fascist collaborators. In the final instance, what matters is that they were all human beings. War is absurd. What counts is to heal the wounds of the Nation and cover up the splits of the past. This apologetic and moralistic stance of false universality equalizes the fascists with partisans and white-washes the past. The best example of the monument Slovenia received recently in the very center of Ljubljana.

The Monument to Victims of all Wars already in the very title tries to move beyond the World War II, but choosing and taking out of the context the quote of the partisan poet, Oton Zupancic! The quote reads: “Homeland is one that is given to all of us, and one life and one death”. But the story behind this poem inscription needs to be retold: first of all, Oton Zupancic wrote this poem in 1949 and explicitly dedicated it to the sarkophage to partisan fighters (stands in immediate proximity of the Slovene parliament), and it continues the above quote in a verse: “We are loyal to freedom, for the struggle we were chosen, what is life, what is death, the future is belief, who dies for it, it elevated in life when he falls into death.” Thus, it becomes quite vivid and determinant that to give life for the antifascist cause was and is the political necessity in harsh conditions of war. To take this out of the context and pacify it in the reconciliation discourse that wants to forget the antifascity legacy speaks on its own of the gesture.