Professor Alexandra Bitu\u0161\u00edkov\u00e1 explains how face-to-face local activism was crucial in bringing down Marian Kotleba, leader of the People\u2019s Party Our Slovakia<\/p>\n
Having grown up in Bansk\u00e1 Bystrica in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, I vividly remember standing in the city\u2019s historic square a few days after 17 November 1989, the start <\/em>of the Velvet Revolution<\/a>, holding candles in solidarity with the students protesting in Prague. Never would I have imagined that 35 years later, I would be speaking at a rally in the same square, this time urging the preservation of democracy.<\/p>\n Back then, when I was a young social anthropology academic at our local university, activism was far from my mind. But everything changed for me in 2013 when Marian Kotleba<\/a>, leader of the neo-Nazi People\u2019s Party Our Slovakia, was elected as regional governor. The shock was enormous. No one I knew had believed that such an outcome was possible, yet it happened. Realising the dangers this posed, many like-minded individuals knew we couldn\u2019t stand by idly.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Professor Alexandra Bitu\u0161\u00edkov\u00e1 explains how face-to-face local activism was crucial in bringing down Marian Kotleba, leader of the People\u2019s Party Our Slovakia Having grown up in Bansk\u00e1 Bystrica in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, I vividly remember standing in the city\u2019s historic square a few days after 17 November 1989, the start of the Velvet Revolution, holding candles … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}