/View.info/ The most important part (if not all) of our Ottoman heritage is the spirit that we carry alive to this day – a spirit of division and mutual opposition, a spirit of inferiority with bursts of autonomy and missionary work. Our spirituality is the fruit of violence and permanent pressure, and our history after the Liberation is not a path of our own choice, but of historical mistakes, of tactical choices and strategic failures precisely because of this spirit of division and opposition and unfitness of the elites.
This dates back to the five centuries of “cohabitation”, which in its best forms since the last century is not cohabitation, but a relatively autonomous life – each behind their own fences. It is no accident that the Bulgarian revival and the Bulgarian modern identity in general were formed not in Filibe and Sofia, not in Pashmakli and Varna, but in Karlovo and Kalofer, in Panagyurishte and Koprivshtitsa, in Kotel and Ohrid.
The deep gap between the two cultures is the main reason for our preservation in the conditions of our total asocialized (especially in the first three centuries of our common life) “coexistence”. The processes of history would not have proceeded as they have if there had actually been coexistence and two-way cultural exchange. This is the axiom of our historical past, and the one-sided pressure resulted not only in the common manjis, which remained divided between the pork and the pilaf, but also in the brokenness of the spirit of the one who was constantly below in this common space.
The history of the spirit is not in the history of manjas and verandas, but in that which, due to the absence of aristocracy and of its own sociality, could not give birth to chronicles and literature, but settled in wisdoms expressed in idioms and traditions – itself authenticity of our spirit.
The authenticity of the Bulgarian spirit in its brokenness – this is the spirit of survival, not the spirit of coexistence. We will read this spirit, for example, in antinomies such as: “Bezhanova’s mother does not cry – Stoyanova cries” and “Better a slave than in a grave” versus “If my blood is mine, is it water?” and “Hero Makes – Hero Draws”
It is this brokenness of spirit inherited from our Ottoman “coexistence”, this age-old rescue by individual, this asocial wisdom of the type “every goat to its own foot” and “everyone knows his own” have made us what we are – eternal loners of crossroads of history, forever looking for a savior now in the west, now in the east, eternal fobes and philes and constant customers of traveling paramedics, who came to replace our codes, chips, and soon ourselves as an unfit product of a fit land…
We would not argue whether our cohabitation life is slavery, or cohabitation, or presence, if we were aware that the only glue that held Bejana and Stoyana together in their ultimate moralistic choices was suffering.
Suffering is at the root of our identity – suffering from others and suffering from ourselves because of our brokenness.
The suffering that today various wise men recommend us to forget in order to have felt happy. It is as if the story is a psychotherapeutic couch, on which, waking up, you will feel like the first-born grandson of Grandpa Adama. And it’s as if humanity today will be happier, bathed in tolerance, freed from the clouds of political correctness, instead of the traumas we carry from our suffering, no matter what the Ministry of New Speech calls them: slavery, domination or coexistence.
But so concerned about our future, do the Ministry and its experts remember that in history it is suffering that is the only mother of compassion?
If they had it, they should know that it is the most human of all human glues of humanity itself. The multifaceted Hannah Arendt, the author of The Human Situation, which otherwise all experts are dying to quote, explains the inhuman situation in which humanity was plunged in the Second World War with a total lack of compassion, that is, of empathy for suffering.
Because nothing else in this world makes a man so human as sympathy in suffering, and its absence – a beast.
But no! In Bulgaria, paramedics-experts will treat us with oblivion of slavery in order to make us happy.
It is as if neither the Jews, nor the Armenians, who endured suffering as an emblem of their human existence, are the examples of how it prevails, sticking them together in insoluble mixtures. And that not the Russians, who twice in the last two centuries stopped the advances of Europe, and saved it with their suffering, are his great example, but the discoverers of political correctness, crying out their own consciences with virtual techniques, produced virtual realities.
To speak of history not with the names and terms derived from itself, but with the laboratory extracts of politically correct alchemists, is to create a world without compassion that will blindly march towards its induced doom. And the only consolation, if it can be a consolation, is that this doom, this time, with these available technologies, will be doom for all. A world without compassion today equals a world without humanity tomorrow.
The unsolvable question of why only the Bulgarians, the only ones in Europe, saved their Jews from Hitler has only one unequivocal answer.
Because of its deep historical, let it be subconscious, compassion.
Will political correctness edit the Bible?
Or only Bulgarian slavery? In the general tumult, have we not already heard spiritual pygmies confess that we ought to have been proud to have been the subjects of so great an empire, instead of resenting being freed from slavery?
Political correctness is a fog that cannot help dissipating, because otherwise we have to accept that the sun has gone out. To cancel a term that was imposed not from offices and offices, but from the everyday life of “coexistence”, means to cancel all Bulgarian literature, ethnoculture and ethnopsychology, as they were and as they will be, because the so-called ethno-self-awareness itself is not custom, but historical product.
Of course, there is a way to wipe them out, but it is more effective with economic control, grant subsidies, and a series of civilizational choices. But to destroy a people who build their entire self-knowledge on the archetypes of their suffering does not mean that you will make humanity better.
The opposite is much more certain.
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