/ world today news/ The scenario of today’s Bulgaria repeats itself and is endless, Angel Wagenstein says in an interview for Bulgaria ON AIR
– What is the worst scenario for today’s Bulgaria in your view? You usually write nice scripts. Now I ask you about the bad one.
– I think that we, in a shifted sense of the word, repeat in an infinity, in the cinema there is this concept of infinity, when a tape rotates and then returns and rotates again, that we experience the same events several times, several times times the same dashes of hope. It is difficult for me to find a regularity, a singleness of the things that happen. I always feel as I get older that everything that happens has already been. And everything that happens now will happen again. Are we now a nation?
– This is what I ask you – how can a united nation be made from pieces of foreign influence?
– This total disintegration of a very small country, of a very small nation, which currently represents in terms of numbers one neighborhood of Shanghai, no more than one neighborhood of Shanghai, we have destroyed deep sources of the concept of nationhood, national spirituality. We are currently rewriting textbooks, falsifying all history to suit us. Everything should be comfortable for us now, but it should be comfortable for the next few years, because after the lady who is now drawing the limits of how far you can admit something or deny something in a textbook, another lady, another minister of education, will come.
We are in a state of profound identity crisis.
– Then which influence is the most dangerous in Bulgaria?
– The most dangerous is our reluctance to try to decipher Levski’s four tragic question marks after the word people. Four question marks follow the word people. From then until now we have not answered these four question marks. In my opinion, these are four tragic questions that Bulgaria is now less and less able to answer. People????
Another one next to him says, “My poor, poor people, who is rocking you in this slave cradle”…
I’m not sure things have changed that much since then. I think we should give something back to this nation.
– What?
– Spirituality. My answer is too trite, but there are trite things like bread, water, etc. A nation must have spirituality, a sense of unity.
– Servant of how many masters are we?
– A lot. I think that our old inns had more sense of statehood and dignity than our current inn. He is ready all the time, the poor fellow, to listen to what he is commanded, what he is ordered. On the one hand, the Russians say – do you want “South Stream”, but do you want and hook against this “South Stream”. Are you going to build or not build a nuclear power plant? The Americans say – you built the nuclear power plant in Russian, and your mother is upset, you will do it as I want…
Those khans, of old, had perhaps the Asiatic self-confidence of the Asiatic tyrant. I don’t know if we don’t need a tyrant, I don’t know if we don’t need tyranny.
– How will you describe our inn now? Where is Bulgaria headed?
– The day before yesterday his greatest achievement was that he scored a penalty and the nation rejoiced. Well, we got there to enjoy the penalties of the Khans. How far will it take her? He’ll take her as far as he can, then another one will come.
– Is the direction correct?
– I don’t know. Suddenly I feel some nostalgia – I understand how vulnerable I am with this nostalgia, nostalgia for a strong hand of a regime that knows what it wants, where it is leading this country, that has at least 10-20-30 years ahead of it. Whatever we want to talk about, whatever disputable and indisputable truths we want to share, but these 45 years of so-called socialism had a distant, very far beyond the horizons strategy, there was some scheme of what kind of society we want to make.
Now do we know what we want? Libertarianism. We want freedom. What does it mean? Which freedom? Freedom is not an abstract concept. What do we want? Democracy? What type of democracy?
Suddenly it turns out that it is precisely the people who want less democracy and more order, if possible. More order in this country, which is falling apart because of this – I don’t want her to be good, I want Vute to be bad.
– Let’s make such a comparison – Kingdom of Bulgaria, socialist Bulgaria and today’s democracy.
– Kingdom of Bulgaria was a country, fascism was a system. Zhelyu Zhelev said something stupid, probably carried away by his passions – there was actually no fascism in Bulgaria.
Nonsense! I am a Jew, don’t ask only Jews if there was fascism or not. I don’t feel like arguing about this.
There was no Nazism in Bulgaria, but don’t doubt it – Bulgaria was a fascist country. But Bulgaria was an orderly country, a country with order, with laws that were generally respected. It was not broken into pieces, it was a complete fascist system.
45 years of socialism, like it or not, it was a system.
Now, at the moment, it’s a mess, a dead end.
This is what they say, a nation in bulk, a culture in bulk.
– Let me ask you about the left. Why are they at odds, why is there no understanding? A few days ago, a common candidate for president came out, then there is no common candidate. What divides the left, and how can people who believe in the left’s idea believe it when they see that they don’t believe it? How does a hereditary socialist like you see this?
– First, the so-called left is part of a whole – there is left, center right. If the whole thing is crap, why would anyone expect that if the left is crap, the right won’t be crap, or the center.
Bulgaria is in a state of disintegration, of self-searching. And so it is on the left. The old left is no longer possible – dictatorship of the proletariat, violent overthrow of the regime, and I grew up with that, I can show you the partisan weapon – I still have it here.
– Can Cornelia Ninova unite the left?
– The question is different. Her strategy. I claim that she is not there, that she is confused, inexperienced, too ambitious. She is a good person, but that is not her job, she is not the leader of a political party. The very fact that to his right is Georgi Gergov, the owner of half of Plovdiv, a part of Varna, an infinite amount of billions… A left-wing party cannot have such a person as Gergov in its leadership.
She is inexperienced. She thought in her insecurity that by surrounding herself with people from the left, from the center, from the right, poor people, revolutionaries, hermits and put here a patterned badge called Labmo, and from that she became more beautiful. It doesn’t work.
Lambo is a flower, a flower in the ear of a country girl.
Labmo is not the person who can be the right hand, the experienced, the strong, the decisive, with complete clarity where this party is leading. But I know that Lambo is an emotional boy, but he is not a party strategist. Another thing is the strategy, much more brutal, more rational.
With my emotions, with his emotions, with his tenderness, how much he loves the party and how it loves him and how much the people love him. I don’t know how much they loved Stalin, but he was a statesman. They may have hated him, but he was a statesman to such an extent that people went to their deaths “For the Motherland, for Stalin” and those who went to their deaths were released from the Gulag, from the camps. That’s being a statesman.
– Where do we see the statesman today? We are talking about the left, is Gen. Rumen Radev your president, is he your statesman?
– The Jews here, in Yuchbunar, say “I don’t know who this is”. Now I don’t know General Radev. There was once a song “I’m a private, I’m not a general” and so – I’m a private, I’m not a general. First time I heard it now, I don’t know.
What would be the right move for “Positano”? That if I knew it, I would be Marx.
– Does anyone know?
– I don’t think so, but there are forces that befall him.
– All the time of our conversation I sit and look at these photos – 212, 43rd year.
– This is my case number, now I don’t feel like showing you my death sentence.
– A young boy of 22 who understands and knows about his death sentence and has this look.
– Well, here I am broken, beaten by the Directorate of Police. The important thing is to believe.
The worst thing is to lose faith,
to lose one’s way, to not know where one is going.
Here we knew what we wanted, where we were going. Whether we got the trail wrong, but we believed in it, as one who is in Jomolungma believes and knows that he is going to climb Mount Everest – that is his task.
– The stars in the eyes, how to preserve them?
– For now, we have tears in our eyes and stars in our hair – this is in the theater. Let him stay like that, that’s the wonderful thing about the theater – with tears in his eyes and stars in his hair always. Laughter and tears and suffering – both together make art, that’s the most important thing to me, the other…
You can see the interview here
Set: Factograph
#Angel #Wagenstein #Bulgaria #left #state #decay #selfsearching
