Leftists have attacked a conservative newspaper for launching a creative writing competition where authors are invited to write a “patriotic Slovenian fairy tale” for children depicting the dangers of multiculturalism, progressivism, and illegal mass migration.
The centre-right Demokracija advertised the competition last week for established and amateur authors to write a child’s fairy tale intended to instil in them the “right values” and ensure “they love Slovenia”.
“Fairy tales must be original, yet unpublished and written in the Slovene language. The fairy tale should address the dangers posed by multiculturalism and illegal migration,” the terms of the competition explain.
Slovenia, the home country of U.S. First Lady Melania Trump, found itself a thoroughfare for almost half a million asylum seekers heading to Western European welfare states in 2015, after Germany’s Angela Merkel unilaterally opened up the EU’s borders to an unlimited number of migrants from the Global South.
The newspaper explains that the fairy tale must “encourage children in patriotism [and] belonging to a traditional family” and “should have a happy ending, or at least give hope that justice and truth, national consciousness, patriotism, and family will always win.”
Authors are also instructed to write villainous characters as well as heroes, who may be depicted as animals in a traditional Slovene fashion where the “heroes are the domestic animal species, while intruders are invasive species”.
“Make sure that the end portrays that it is nice to live in a traditional family (father, mother, children) and surrounded by ancestors/their kind,” the stylistic instructions conclude.
This week, the Slovenian Writers’ Association condemned the competition as “racist propaganda” and said that children “deserve humane, open, and tolerant tales that promote empathy”.
Demokracija called the assaults from the writers’ association an “attack on free speech”, condemning the “cultural Marxism” which seeks to “compete” with the European nation’s “patriotic agenda”.
Western Europe has embraced ‘progressive’ narratives in children’s books, with a Swedish publisher releasing a book last year introducing the subject of transgenderism to toddlers in a story about a man who identifies as a woman and a horse that identifies as a dog.
A council in the liberal, left-wing Nordic nation has also admitted that libraries were throwing out copies of the Swedish classic Pippi Longstocking because they contained words and characters deemed offensive to modern sensibilities.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Transport for London was condemned by Muslim moderates for producing a book on child safety depicting a very young girl wearing a hijab, saying it “sexualised” children and imposed fundamentalist Islamic modesty standards.