"Dear gentlemen from the opposition, these uneducated violent people are also your creatures", said Prime Minister Radev. Whose political guilt is for the sadistic murder in Plovdiv and whose "creatures" are the perpetrators? By Georgi Lozanov:
Prime Minister Rumen Radev's statement on the sinister murder in Plovdiv was delayed by a week. And finally, the Prime Minister seems to have decided to hit the opposition. And not the DPS and GERB, whose governance model he was going to fight, but the PP and DB, who criticize him for pro-Russian positions and Euroscepticism. Radev has long been harsh towards them - he even called the PP charlatans, but now the clash is escalating: "Dear gentlemen from the opposition, these uneducated bullies are also your creatures. There is no place for fascist excesses in Bulgaria and we will do what is necessary", said the prime minister. What is "necessary": to ban parties with different positions from those of the ruling party, as Putin did with "Yabloko" - the only party in Russia that is against the war in Ukraine? It sounds far-fetched, yes, but anything is possible after being accused - no more, no less - of fascism. Or at least, if the "politicians and influencers" themselves are not fascists, encouraging and supporting "fascist excesses": "The same ones who declare themselves against the introduction of the subject "Virtues and Religion" in school. The same ones who methodically destroy monuments and erase the memory of anti-fascism…".
The methods of Russian propaganda
Let us recall this well-known method of Russian propaganda - those who accuse you, you accuse them of the same thing until they stop accusing you, busy justifying themselves. With this method, Russian propaganda some time ago managed to dispel the public debate about the most aggressive fascist ideology of the 21st century - racism (Russia from English and fascismo from Italian). According to it, the Russian nation is God's chosen one, and its superiority over the others is not racial, but spiritual, which gives it the imperial right to subjugate them, claiming to save them, and to wage a "holy war" with the "satanized West". And other nonsense, a manifestation of severe cultural infantilism, for which, however, a million people in Ukraine alone have already paid with their lives.
Russia's big argument that it is a fighter against fascism is the victims (far more than other countries) it gave in World War II, although it joined two years later (until then, Hitler and Stalin were allies). The point is, however, that it used the victory over one cruel dictatorship of the 20th century - the fascist one - to impose the other - the Soviet one - on half of Europe (millions passed through Stalin's camps). And Bulgaria has been under de facto Soviet occupation for almost half a century, and if it had decided to even slightly escape from it, Russian tanks would have immediately arrived, as happened in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The monument to the Soviet army in Sofia, which Radev alludes to, was built not in memory of the fallen Russian soldiers, but for propaganda of the victorious Soviet regime (we are forced to glorify our occupiers in stone and bronze, as one of its authors, Lyubomir Dalchev, testifies). The Soviet Schmeisser was stuck high in the Sofia sky for decades, so that it would be clear whose supreme power in Sofia was. And the eastern bas-relief of the monument, which has nothing to do with World War II, showed that this power was taken in 1917 with revolution and blood, so that it would be clear that it would not be given without blood. By putting together in his speech the topics of the dismantling of the Soviet monument and the resistance to the introduction of the subject "Virtues and Religion", Radev inadvertently aroused previously expressed concerns - that the study of Orthodoxy in school could be used to resume the mythologizing of Russia, but no longer in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, but of racism.
The main weapon of racism in the war with the "satanized West" is accusing it of sexual perversions, in order to imply that the dictatorial regime in Moscow is the bearer of its so-called traditional values. For this purpose, vague concepts with extremely broad content are introduced - such as "gender". So that Western society, despite its centuries-old Christian morality (unlike Russia, where ruthless state atheism has been rampant for nearly a century), turns out to be full of genders, whatever that means. And huge, factory-raised and multiplied waves of haters are directed at it, which subconsciously generate support for Putin and his proxies, simply because no one says they are perverted. And Russian propaganda has already identified sexual perversions, which every non-traditional orientation accepts, with the West in general and specifically with the EU in supports like "Geyrop" - and thus paired, has turned them into an object of hatred, which in turn can provoke aggression. And it, understandably, is strongest towards pedophiles, whom the exponents of Russian traditional values are ready to see in every second. And they do not look at him as a person, but have the self-confidence that they can judge and punish him themselves, which deprives them of human traits. Just as happened with the underage murderers in Plovdiv, for whose violence, in the final analysis, the only motive turns out to be the pleasure of the violence itself. "They used the broken skull of their victim as an ashtray" (according to the judge in the case Petko Minev), and the Russian neo-Nazi Maxim Marcinkevich-Tesak, who created the criminal network of self-proclaimed "pedophile hunters", seems to have served as their model.
The biggest defeats
The self-defensive edification in Radev's statement and his explanations for the crime - the lack of a regular subject "Virtues and Religion" and the dismantling of monuments to Soviet propaganda (although he was reminded from all sides that "Alyosha" stands in Plovdiv), perhaps betray that he is aware of the risks of Euroscepticism. Because it is precisely he who can stimulate violence in the name of some traditional values, which is the ominous opposite of the tolerance for differences characteristic of Western societies, which acts on dictators like a bull's-eye.
But the greatest damage to public consciousness was inflicted by Russian propaganda, including its "peacemaking" version, by justifying Russian violence (on a particularly large scale) against Ukraine. It drew water from a hundred ravines to prove that Putin has the right to kill people and that this is not a crime for which he should answer before a tribunal. For the creation of which, by the way, we did not vote.
Russian propaganda has not only trivialized violence, but has turned it into prestigious behavior of the powerful of the day, with which others must comply. And our children have been forced to listen for four years now how "politicians and influencers" they explain to them with Red Army fervor that the victim is to blame and that times have changed and it is now fashionable to be on the side of the abuser… It is precisely their creatures that are the minor sadists under the stone Alyosha.
This text expresses the opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State News Agency as a whole.