http://tinyurl.com/48g6q

Winter Travel Slovenian rhapsody
John Laughland on a tiny country with infinite variety
What d'you mean, you're fed up with making snowmen?

On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire a year or two ago, a woman contestant
was asked of which country Belgrade was the capital. ‘I don't know,'
she replied, ‘but I know we bombed it.' Geographical ignorance of
Eastern Europe has long been an English speciality and, like
gardening, it unites all classes. Posh people can typically locate
exotic places like Bengal or Kashmir on a map, but they shudder at
Bydgoszcz or Krk. Being vowelly challenged, these places offer little
opportunity for braying, and they are regarded as so terminally nerdy
that it is best not to mention them in polite company. But now that
the EU has embraced ten exciting new member states into the happy
Euro-family, we must move with the times and gaily consign such retro
attitudes to the same historical dustbin as fox-hunting.

As it happens, Yugoslavia — which, after inflicting civil war and
ethnic violence on itself for ten years, has now settled down and
renamed itself S&M (Serbia and Montenegro) — is one of the lucky few
countries which have not yet joined the EU. But the northernmost
republic of the old Yugoslavia, Slovenia, which fought a brief war in
1991 to escape the tutelage of Belgrade, has been happy to submit to
the diktat of Brussels instead. So it will soon become just like
everywhere else. Catch it while you can, therefore, because the place
is utterly delightful, providing, among other things, an excellent
destination for a long weekend's skiing this winter.

Slovenia is so small that nobody pays the place much attention. This
has allowed the country to pursue ‘steady-as-she-goes' economic
policies without anyone bothering to demand the mass larceny which is
known as privatisation, and which has so ravaged the economies of most
other former communist states. In Slovenia, the old Yugo-Commie
leadership which had made the place the most prosperous part of a
fairly prosperous country remained in power throughout the 1980s and
1990s. Consequently about half of the Slovene economy remains in state
hands. True conservatives will understand that this refusal to submit
fully to ‘shock therapy' — which is all shock and no therapy — has
been a good thing. The theory of ‘creative destruction' which has led
to the mass closure of industry and agriculture elsewhere in the ‘new
Europe' has not caused e-commerce and Internet start-ups; instead,
most of post-communist Europe is an unmitigated desert of urban
blight, prostitution, glue-sniffing and emigration. But Slovenia ticks
along quite nicely, thank you.

[...CUT...]

Full article at http://tinyurl.com/48g6q

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Jorge
--
LEEPCORE technology saves forests.
http://www.leepinc.com/

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"The conservative movement has been hijacked and turned
into a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology, which
is not the conservative movement I grew up with"
- Pat Buchanan, NY Times, September 8, 2002

http://www.theamericancause.org/
http://www.amconmag.com/