The author critically analyses hate speech and practices that have erupted in Slovenia in the summer of 2015 at the time of the so-called refugee crisis, and continued to this day. He interprets these practices as a process of othering in relation to the imaginary notions of “Slovenian” and “European”. This process is double-sided: refugees are first constructed as a unified mass that is completely different from us, which serves as the basis for making subsequent distinction between more and less acceptable. On these grounds, four different ideological images of a refugee are created: the refugee as a criminal, the refugee as an uninvited visitor, the refugee as a powerless victim, and the refugee as a global proletarian. This discourse completely overlooks the real reasons behind forced migration, which are inherited from colonialism, neo-colonialism, and a series of fallacious interventions in the Middle and Near East in the last 20 years. The mechanism of the displacement of hatred (Adorno, Mitscherlich) that allows the transfer of responsibility to various Others (refugees, members of ethnic communities from other countries of ex-Yugoslavia, Roma, LGBT, etc.) is often used in European and Slovenian society. The author concludes that the hate speech and politics of exclusion which appeared in Slovenia in 2015 closely resembled the rallies, protests and graffiti of right-wing extremists.
