XXX. Children of a Lesser Trump
XXX. Children of a Lesser Trump
Fact checking. The former US president's supporters in the Balkans react to the events following the Capitol riots: the left-wing violence, a new communist order and the social media censorship
Hi,
welcome back to BarBalkans, the Italian newsletter whose aim is to give a voice to the Western Balkans’ stories, on the 30th anniversary of the Yugoslav Wars.
Today we will try an experiment.
We will observe the reactions of Donald Trump’s supporters in the Balkans (politicians who are in positions of power) to the Capitol riots on January 6.
Then we will fact-check their statements.
Is it important?
Yes.
Why?
Look at this:
«It’s pretty clear that American people have elected Donald Trump and Mike Pence for 4 more years. More delays and facts denying from mainstream media, bigger the final triumph for the president of the United States. Congratulations for strong results across the United States»
This is the Slovenian prime minister Janez Janša’s tweet on November 4, the day after the US elections.
When the race wasn’t called yet (the news of Joe Biden’s victory came 3 days later), Janša publicly congratulated Trump.
Twitter had to specify that “official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted”.
That’s why fact checking is so important.
Because in the Balkans, as everywhere else in the world, people who have communicative power can use it to spread fake news for their own advantage.
Only fact checking can defeat fake news.
The ingredients are time, patience, critical attitude and reliable sources.
Dr Janša and Mr Twitter
Everyone knows about the events in Washington on January 6, 2021 [if you want to refresh your memory, I recommend you this visual timeline by the BBC].
After Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol (the death toll is now 5, plus several injured people), the European leaders issued strong words of condemnation.
The way they condemned the violent scenes says a lot about their intentions behind. This is the case of the Slovenian prime minister Janša:
Our fact checking starts here.
Violence and death threats - from Left or Right - are ALWAYS wrong. This is an opinion, certainly acceptable. But we have to consider one detail, that can be the basis for a fake news.
It is meaningless to refer to the Capitol riots with the leitmotif “violence from Right = violence from Left”.
The storming of the US Capitol was carried out by a mob of Trump’s republican and ultra-conservative supporters. Many of them are members of the alt-right and followers of QAnon’s conspiracy theory.
Violent leftists were not present. Comparing them with the responsible for the events of January 6 doesn’t make sense.
But it was useful to Janša (a conservative leader) to make a comparison with the situation in Slovenia. Where the alleged violence is attributed to the Left.
«Now that we have unanimously condemned the violence in the US, the time has come to condemn all the violence and the death threats in Slovenia. Can we?»
The death threats in Slovenia. The prime minister refers - as we can see in one of the pictures - to the opposition that invokes “Smrt janšizmu! Svoboda vsem!” in the Ljubljana protests.
“Death to Janšism, freedom to everyone”.
There is a big difference between “death to Janšism” and “death to Janša”. The first expression calls for the end of a political model (associated with a person). The second expression is incitement to murder.
It’s like saying “death to Fordism” - an economic model - and “death to Ford” (while the inventor of that model, Henry Ford, died in 1947).
Moreover, this is a wordplay based on the popular communist-led Yugoslav partisan motto “death to fascism, freedom for the people”, during the anti-Axis resistance in the Second World War.
In this case, people are asking for the end of the Slovenian Democratic Party’s leader political influence, started when he became Premier for the first time in 2004.
Since March 2020, when Janša was elected for the third time, protests have broken out within the civil society, accusing him of corruption (in 2013 he was sentenced to 2 years of prison for the Patria case) and of restricting freedom of the press.
All the violence. Janša refers to the protests of November 5, when demonstrators clashed with police (18 injured, including a journalist). However, we have to identify those responsible.
Due to the Covid-19 emergency, the Friday cyclist protestors announced that they wouldn’t take to the streets. A few hundred exponents of Anonymous Slovenia and Aware people of Slovenia (an organization of people who believe in Covid-19 conspiracy theories) showed up in their place.
These protesters were responsible for the attempted storming of the National Assembly, immediately condemned by the leftist civic platform.
The protests against Janša’s government proved to be peaceful. This single episode, the drift by small uncontrollable groups.
But let’s get back to the United States.
One of the most important issues in the last week was president Trump suspension from all the main social media (Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter permanently).
We will not discuss if it was a right or wrong decision. We just consider the facts: are the social media censoring Trump?
No, they aren’t. For a very simple reason. Because these private social networking platforms have clear terms of service that must be respected by users.
Think different. On the contrary, according to Twitter rules and policies, this was instead a violation of the glorification of violence policy:
“We have a policy against content that glorifies acts of violence in a way that may inspire others to replicate those violent acts and cause real offline harm”.
The reasons are all here. Trump will not recognize Biden as the legitimate president for real and he will not attend the Inauguration (a potential “safe” target). In his tweets he used the words “American patriots” to describe the rioters and he threatened to prevent a peaceful transition.
It’s not about thinking different. It is a violation of the guidelines of a private online platform, that can decide the suspension in its discretion, until public authorities will intervene to regulate their use.
Communism all over the world
Nebojša Medojević is the president of Movement for Change, one of the conservative parties in Montenegro that led the current prime minister Zdravko Krivokapić to the victory.
Some of Medojević’s statements in 2020 on the American and the global situation are quite famous.
Firstly, in August he denounced the Covid-19 pandemic as «the work of global satanists and the Deep State pedophiles [the Deep State theory is amplified by QAnon conspiracy] led by Bill Gates and George Soros, whose real purpose is to overthrow Donald Trump».
On November 4, he warned that «Biden’s communists attempted a coup d'état through mail-in ballots». Then, he celebrated Trump’s victory «even though all the mainstream media, networks, corporations and NGOs, rotten segments of the intelligence and soldiers of the Deep State - the enemies of the American people - were against you».
On January 9, he paid his personal homage to the US president after the events in Washington D.C. in this way:
Is this true?
It is pure fantasy that The Donald is the first president since J. F. Kennedy to speak of freedom, sovereignty, state and nation. Only to mention George W. Bush, who signed the Patriot Act in 2005, and Barack Obama, who introduced the Freedom Act 10 years later.
Trump has flaunted slogans like America First, or Make America Great Again. But this is another matter.
Concerning the family, Trump has been married three times. He had three children (Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric Frederic) with the Czech model Ivana Marie Zelníčková (married between 1977-1992), to whom he was unfaithful. He had a daughter, Tiffany, with the actress Marla Maples (1993-1999). And he had his last son Barron William with his current wife, the Slovenian model Melania Knauss (since 2005, but the relationship dates back to 1998).
The only “inspiration” that Medojević can refer to is having many families.
Referring to the religion, Trump is loved by the conservatives, the evangelicals and the Christian fundamentalists. By extension, is he loved all over the country for this reason?
No, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. For the majority of the Americans Trump is not very religious (23%) or not at all (40%). Only one out of three knows that he is a Protestant (33%), while almost one out of five thinks that he is atheist (16%).
It seems an impossible mission to be a spiritual leader in a secular state in the third millennium.
But let’s put personal business aside and let’s focus on the res publica.
After president Trump’s suspension from the social media, the hunt for the “grand puppeteer” has begun.
«Globalism is communism in the capitalist variant. Censorship, government control, imposition of single thought, media control. Global Central Committee. What’s next?»
Silencing this tweet of rambling words would be too simple.
Globalism is communism in the capitalist variant. Not at all. Communism can have a global dimension - the Communist International - but its aim is still the collaboration between proletarian parties to overthrow capitalism. Moreover, the No Global movements has established a struggle against the capitalist globalization.
Censorship, government control, imposition of single thought, media control. These are the characteristics of any dictatorship, including all fascisms (Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and Ante Pavelić’s Croatia, for example).
Global Central Committee. In 2021, five countries are ruled by communism: China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba. Only there you can find the Central Committee (even if the most famous was the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the CPSU, disestablished in 1991).
The alt-right’s heaven
[In this part, we will fact check screenshots without hyperlinks. The choice is motivated by the desire not to increase the traffic of contents that incite violence and discrimination on the analyzed online platform]
«It’s not your nation White man». In the picture: “Greetings from… zionist occupied USA”
This is Ivan Pernar, the leader of the Croatian populist movement Živi zid (“Human Shield”). And the post you just saw is on his Gab page.
Here you can find what this social platform is and how it works.
Let’s analyze the contents.
It’s not your nation White man. Considering the composition of the US Congress (in the picture), white members of the House and Senate represent the 78%, three out of four. The other ethnicities all together the remainder 22% (source: Pew Research Center).
Greetings from… zionist occupied USA. The same thing: Jewish members of the Congress are 34 out of 534, 6 percent. All the Christians are 456 (293 Protestants and 163 Catholics), 85% (source: Pew Research Center).
The data speak for themselves. The identikit of an American congressperson is a white and Christian man (women are a quarter of the total).
You can find countless similar contents on Gab (especially among the thousands of QAnon followers).
No one delete these posts. Never.
The reason was explained in 2016 by the founder of the social media, Andrew Torba, in an interview for the Washington Post:
«I felt that it was time for a conservative leader to step up and to provide a forum where anybody can come and speak freely without fear of censorship».
Anybody can come and speak freely without fear of censorship. There’s no doubt that this is what happens on the social network loved by the American alt-right.
Up to the limit of inciting to sedition.
This is just one of the many Gab pages that gathered Trump’s supporters in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riots:
Together, we fact checked all these statements.
Now it’s right that you draw the conclusions by yourself.
Pit stop. Sittin’ at the BarBalkans
We have reached the end of this piece of road.
After observing the last weeks’ events in the US, the host of BarBalkans has decided to stay on topic.
He puts on the bar a bottle of red wine: First Lady - Limited edition. It is the wine dedicated to The Donald’s Slovenian wife, Melania Trump.
In 2017, some Slovenian producers near Sevnica, the birthplace of the almost former American first lady, released 300 limited edition bottles to celebrate their fellow citizen for the first time in the White House.
The wine is made from Blaufränkisch grapes in eastern Slovenia: a dark and tannic wine, with a delicate acidity and a cherry aroma.
All the limited edition bottles were sold out in 3 days. Another 2 thousand bottles were put on sale in the 12th century castle’s gift shop and in the town centre’s tourist office.
Let’s continue the BarBalkans journey. We’ll meet again in a week, for the 31st stop.
A big hug and have a good journey!
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