It would hardly occur to anyone in Slovenia today to thank the Pope for his role in creating Slovenian Republic. Of course, first, without America it would never have happened. But the Pope did more than just risk his life in the battle with the Evil Empire. Yes, Gorbachev knew that he had lost the Cold War. He tried to hide it, although it sounds now that he spilled the beans to his buddies in Slovenia . In my 1989 book "The Party is Over" I wrote: "Gorbachev said at Stanford University that it is not important to debate who won the Cold War. I agree.... What is important is that the winner is the ideology which in practice respects individual human rights. The loser is the ideology which puts the rights of the state above the individual. " American citizens and President Ronald Reagan, who led the final charge are to be thanked, and not some two-bit politicians who simply picked up the fruit which fell down the tree. Slovenians should know that most Americans had a lot more to do to create independent Slovenia than all the former Slovenian communists put together.
I, Borut Prah, was born in Kranj, Slovenia as a subject of the Yugoslavian king to parents who were born as subjects of Kaiser Franz Josef to parents whose grandparents were subjects of Napoleon Bonaparte. In spite of such turbulent family history, the future turned out worse than the past.
I started school under Mussolini. For two years I was taught how to pray to the pictures of the Italian king - until these were replaced by pictures of Hitler. Like most Slovenians I never learned to pray to either. Unfortunately both monsters did not last long -- for they were replaced by even worse evil. Stalin sent troops to help Tito's Communists replace "Heil Hitlers" with slogans to Marx, Engels, Stalin and even Albanian premier Enver Hoxha. In such circumstances it made no sense to study the perverted communist business or law. I decided on electrical engineering, a subject which I assumed even Marxists could not subvert. As I explain in my 1989 book The Party Is Over, it was a wrong assumption.
In 1957 I left Yugoslavia to study physics in France. There I discovered that the computer has already been invented. Disappointed, I left for Australia being sure that with ten million people this was a place for automation. After discovering the paradox that one needs people to automate them I went to America where in August of 1963 I joined IBM in San Francisco as a systems engineer. From 1971 I held various management positions and by 1987, when I retired from IBM, our annual revenue has grown from $5 billion to over $50 billion. These were the heady years when new computer companies such as Microsoft and Oracle were forming in garages all over the West, so I too founded Da Vinci Group Consulting - an IBM business partner. But more significant events were in store. The Soviet Union was collapsing -- and to help it along I started to write a book on the accomplishments of Communism. This was a lot easier than starting a new business.
Yet, in 1990, I founded Macrosolutions, Inc., an Oakland, California software development company for interactive consumer systems and participated in venture capitalism. Then came Clinton and I needed more time for projects such as The Party Is Over to prevent the neo-marxists to do more damage to the United States of America.