/ world today news/ “We are now like children – so much time has passed and we still cannot decide how to live in the new democratic society. What should be our path from now on?…Yes, it turned out that the most difficult, the most terrible thing about communism is what comes after it!” – Prophetic words, right?! I am quoting them from an interview of the great Polish journalist-democrat Adam Michnik, which I translated nearly 30 years ago for a wonderful and, alas!, now defunct newspaper / “Century 21″/ of the literary critic, and later politician, Alexander Yordanov, without a doubt , a complex and contradictory personality.
Really, what happened after what Adam Michnick said? Perhaps the worst thing that could happen to a nation today is decline: moral, financial, demographic. Poverty, disease, high mortality, negative growth. Yes, on all three indicators we are the undisputed “leaders” in Europe. And why did it happen? Because we were not ripe for this long-awaited, dreamed of change. We weren’t prepared for her? Indeed, we lived in a certain closed society, but still, we had enough information about the normal world, we were not, for example, like North Korea. The reasons are many and of a different nature. I would say that to a certain extent they are also based on our national character. Broken during the long years of slavery – counting from 681 for 13 centuries – more than 7 and a half centuries / Byzantine, Turkish, Soviet/. And our boundless patience, on the occasion of which Botev, our genius poet and publicist, whom some are now trying to censor in our children’s textbooks, wrote: “Be silent like a fish, be patient like an ox!”. A spiritual laziness indeed. But here I will ask: who should wake us up, speak first, by us, on our behalf? And yet, isn’t this primarily the job of the intellectual, of the more highly educated person? And why our intelligentsia, which should be the first and without prompting to “set the tone” for our common chorus, be the leading voice, has been shamefully silent for a long time. Shut up about everything! It is silent about the outrages of power, about the plundering and destruction of Bulgaria, about our vassal foreign policy, about corruption and lawlessness, about our imperfect judicial system, about crime, about the destruction of education, health care, culture, and even about the hasty recognition of this mistaken project “Northern Macedonia” and in the “Macedonian language”/?!/… So, at the very beginning of the transition, although it showed some activity, our intelligentsia resigned too quickly to the situation, more precisely to the decline and was silent, is silent now. Besides being disconnected. There are only four writers’ unions in our country, while in neighboring Romania, for example, a country three times larger than ours, with many more writers, there is only one. And so it is difficult to unite for any cause. So do political parties. Most of them can hardly be called “political”, because they have no ideology, programs, vision for the country, but rather a means, a goal for certain people to get into power, knowing that in our country they get rich precisely through it. And in small Bulgaria, there are more than 300 parties! Absurd, but true! Moreover, in a country of individualists, where it is very difficult to reach any social agreement and unification even on the smallest issues. And when there is a protest, it is done in a general, shop-like manner, on a small scale, without undertaking anything large-scale and big.
I recently reread the Diary of our great literary critic Boyan Penev / 1882-1927/ and found the following valuable thoughts:
“Only herd ambition, political malice and vengeful despotism, only dubious goals and dark pursuits create deeper bonds and collectivity in our country. Bulgarian society knows enmity, knows cowardice and indifference – but not the creative rhythm of a harmonious collective will… The Bulgarian is not capable of reacting and resenting. Politically we have freed ourselves, but the end of spiritual slavery is not yet in sight. The second slavery is much more terrible than the political one. No external force will free us from it – we must free ourselves, become a great power for ourselves. But where is the effort?”
These days I wrote a sharp article against the tax – the killer of the Bulgarian book. As much as 20 percent is taxed in our country on books, textbooks, study aids, printed publications in general. In the poorest country, this tax is the highest, truly murderous for authors and publishers, and also for readers, while in rich countries like France it is five percent, in England even zero /!/, and in Erdogan’s Asian Turkey it is also already zero, in our northern neighbor a book costs three times less than a Bulgarian book with the same volume and printing. And the gambling that wins huge money is still without any tax. Absolutely absurd, isn’t it?! And then we ask ourselves: why does the Bulgarian read less and less and buy books so rarely? And from one of the most reading nations in the world, with the most affordable books, we are now at the other pole. But for many in power, this is welcome. Illiterate people are loyal voters, right?!
Zhelio Zhelev was not a successful president and failed to unite the people, although he was initially elected with hopes and enthusiasm. Yes, he made mistakes and compromises, but he said something very important, which we had not thought of, that after a situation of chaos, democracy can only be passed through a dictatorship. And only after its overthrow, a true legal order and democracy can be established. The example: Spain after the Civil War, through the Francoist dictatorship to the democracy of today. And didn’t the Greeks have them after the war, a military dictatorship before today’s democracy? Didn’t the same thing happen in Chile – after the chaos under Salvador Allende, through Pinochet’s dictatorship to the now normal state in which citizens achieve their demands and freedoms themselves. Lo and behold, they recently raised the fares for transportation there, and that made all the Chileans, except one, raise their voices, take to the streets, and win. While here?! What happened, for example, amid the unprecedented, drastic hike in transport prices in the capital? And after the electricity is turned on in July, a bunch more “pleasant surprises” await us…
But it looks like we haven’t quite hit rock bottom yet, the final, ultimate rock bottom, so to speak. And there is no one to lead us? In the 19th century, our great men led us: Rakovski, Levski, Botev, Karavelov – a whole constellation. But now we don’t have any. Part of the intelligentsia has been bought, the other – the larger one is desperate and resigned and silent, and time flies and Bulgaria sinks…
Unfortunately, the Bulgarian intelligentsia, like no other in Europe, is pushed “tight, in a corner”. She is not allowed to power, even as an adviser, consultant. Even the ministers of culture, who are imposed on us by the authorities, are far from the true values in culture, they do not enjoy the respect not only of the intelligentsia, but also of all citizens. Here is just one phrase of one of these ministers: “Theatres, operas and orchestras are a cyst in the body of the Bulgarian taxpayer!” You guess who it is, right?! The great sculptor and friend of B.B. Vezhdi R. So what can we expect from this part of the Bulgarian “intelligentsia”…
#worst #communism #it..
