The reputation of the country put on display
© www.sramota.si
Just before the All-Slovenian Uprising, which will begin today at 6 pm on Prešeren Square in Ljubljana, Slovenia is richer with a new reference page, which richly documents international media coverage of our country after what became clear at the beginning of 2020, to get a new, Janša government.
On a domain with a meaningful address www.sramota.si and under the title International Shame by Informatics Marko Plahuta and the Today Today Institute has compiled a list of 882 articles in more than 25 different languages in 60 countries in 574 different media around the world. With this, they tried to answer a simple but burning question of growing discomfort: why do Slovenians blush so much when talking to friends abroad? An illustration of this coercive act is also the publication of the face of Janez Janša, who, when looking away, moves in a way that his hands, as a sign of blush, cover him. A gesture that acts like pious desires and otherwise we will certainly not live to see it.
The motivation of the authors after the creation of the site was published at the beginning: Slovenians, as residents of small countries, especially, perhaps traumatically, looked at their presentation in the world. We jump with pride at the achievements of our athletes, we passionately correct foreigners with “Not Slovakia, Slovenia!”, And every year we mention our country in American popular cultures, for example, and we are extremely proud to record it. And then follows that “but” in which we got to know each other uncomfortably. The authors describe the disappearance of the reputation of the state and the culprit in a pictorial and informative way:
“After the departure of Melania Trump from the spotlight, Slovenians have a correction with a new personified international embarrassment, due to which we will continue to blush in conversations with friends from abroad. The state is actually run by a man who endlessly craves attention and who has been addicted and radicalized by social networks to the extent that in his eternal (cultural) struggle against the flow of history he has abandoned all rules of decent, state communication and international diplomacy.
His mode of communication, along with numerous suspicions of corruption and the failed demolition of public institutions, democratic standards, and constitutionally guaranteed rights, quickly attracted widespread international media attention. All this is extremely symptomatic of modern autocrats in the reason why the foreign public easily classifies Janša among the representatives of the so-called aliberal democracies that are growing around the world.
The Supreme Patriot has done a lot for the promotion of our country – practically every week at least once from reputable foreign media problematizes the situation in Slovenia, and our “Marshal Twito” writes down the responses with primitive cynical tweets in broken English, using the clutch of foreign journalists or diplomats . With this, he confirms everything they accuse him of: that, unlike us, he is not ashamed of comparisons with Trump, Orban and Vučić, but that his incompetence separates him from the samples. «
The sensible side is in the assessment of the repeated dubious claim of the Janša government that its reputation abroad is immaculate and good. Is that true? A review of 882 published shows in concreteness something completely different and confirms the premonition or perception of every informed citizen: that our reasons for blushing are very well-founded and that it is no longer possible to convincingly manipulate the maneuver by which she conspired to conspire against Janša only the Slovene opposition, part of the Slovene media or part of the critical public. Because the conspiracy, this eternal trump card of psychopropaganda, has become global and has global dimensions. the collapse of democracy.
The authors have limited the list published so far, writing that they covered the time period from January 2020 to May 26, 2021, which refers to the time “from the beginning of Janša’s government to the moment when it became clear that responses to its methods will begin. multiply in the foreign public ”.
They also described the methodology: they prepared a list of search terms for the mentioned period or until the moment was made clear that the reactions to its methods would start in large numbers in the foreign public, then with the Google Search tool they mechanically searched for all contributions and results. were previously purified, leaving only those that in the selected period referred to Slovenia and the policy of Janez Janša. Then they enriched the results, automatically visited all the sites in the results instead of the abbreviated ones, inserted the right addresses, and strictly recognized and processed the dates.
** The article was first published on an online blog IN THE MEDIA RES**