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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 12/27/14

Newspeak In The Language Of Politics In The Post-totalitarian Era: The Case Of Bulgaria

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Using similarly deceptive words and euphemisms, Prime Minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and his Foreign Minister Solomon Pasi defended their government's deeply unpopular participation in the military occupations of Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan and insisted that Bulgarian "peacekeepers" were only doing their "international duty" by rendering "selfless brotherly assistance" to the "liberation" and "democratization" of these "friendly" nations. (30) In a throwback to the incendiary and duplicitous propaganda of totalitarian times, Simeon and Pasi tried to convince a skeptical public that they were acting out of deep concern for "national security," as there was purportedly a very real threat that the Taliban and Al Qaeda could launch terrorist attacks against Bulgarian targets, while Saddam Hussein might attack Bulgaria with "terrorism" or even with his "arsenal of WMDs," including his "nuclear weapons." (31) Prime Minister Ivan Kostov (1997-2001) resorted to similar manipulative language (even boasting at one point about the country's "new independence in foreign policy" in his PR spin) to explain to a stunned and largely disapproving populace why his cabinet had allowed NATO aircraft to use Bulgaria's air space to rain bombs and missiles on Belgrade and other cities of neighborly Yugoslavia in 1999, while blocking Russian ships on the Danube ferrying humanitarian supplies for the Serbs. (32) And today the ruling GERB cabinet and its ideological allies in the media are trying hard to convince reluctant Bulgarians of the urgent need to accept U.S. anti-ballistic-missile defenses on Bulgarian territory (when neighboring Turkey and Greece, both close U.S. allies, have rejected a similar deployment on their soil) with apocalyptic warnings about some "distant countries" attacking "strategic targets on our territory" with "short- and medium-range missiles" or even about Al Qaeda acquiring nuclear missiles and possibly launching them against Bulgaria. (33)

When anti-NATO forces on the political Left--supported by a sizable majority of the population, according to all opinion polls at that time (34)--demanded the holding of a referendum on whether to join NATO, the pro-NATO parties on the anti-Communist Right (primarily the Union of Democratic Forces or SDS) responded with an aggressive propaganda campaign against the referendum idea, which was centered around a rather demagogic rhetorical question: "Since we did not hold a referendum on joining the Warsaw Pact in 1955, why should we hold one now on joining NATO?" Of course, no public referendum has ever been held in post-Communist Bulgaria on this or any other issue (for example, a Socialist-proposed referendum in 1999 on whether to permit NATO's use of Bulgarian territory and airspace to bomb Yugoslavia was similarly rejected), thus ignoring the principle (namely, the informed consensus of the citizenry) that, unlike totalitarian dictatorships, a democratic country like Bulgaria should allow its citizens to vote on such momentous foreign-policy decisions as NATO membership or the installation of U.S. military bases on Bulgarian soil. (35) No matter how advisable or even commendable the foreign-policy goals pursued in each of these cases may have been, the propaganda methods used to achieve them are still questionable from the perspective of having an open, honest, and democratic public debate.

Similarly, taking advantage of the sour antiwar mood of voters during the parliamentary election of June 2005, Socialist leader Sergei Stanishev ran a successful electoral campaign centered around his demagogic promise to withdraw immediately all Bulgarian "peacekeepers" from Iraq, but once elected as Prime Minister he chose not to deliver on this promise (as well as on other similar promises) until 2009--the very year he was running for re-election. (36) It is obvious that to the extent that members of the political elite have taken public opinion into consideration, they have viewed it as something to manipulate and deceive (rather than respect, let alone follow), if they bother to take it into consideration at all. This neototalitarian practice of using lies, deception, and manipulation has reached new heights during the current rule of Prime Minister Borisov, a charismatic strongman and an Il Duce-like demagogue with a shady ex-Communist past and rumored past ties to post-Communist Bulgaria's powerful mafia (37)--that is, the very criminal underworld which he now claims to be fighting.

As I quoted Orwell above, one of the priorities of totalitarian language is "the continuous alteration of the past." When the Communists seized power after their coup d'etat of September 9, 1944, they completely re-wrote Bulgaria's modern history to fit their ideological dogmas and current political needs. The totalitarian regime besmirched and vilified all their old political opponents, including the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty which was accused of having ruled in a "despotic," "autocratic," and "tyrannical" manner for nearly 60 years, as well as of bringing upon Bulgaria three "national catastrophes"--that is, the economically ruinous and territory-losing defeats in the Second Balkan War (1913), World War I, and World War II. The Communists also blamed the "fascist," "anti-Semitic," and "Nazi-aligned monarch," Boris III, for the extermination of the Jews from Bulgarian-occupied territories of Macedonia, Aegean Thrace, and eastern Serbia in World War II, all the while generously (and quite untruthfully) crediting themselves with saving the lives of the Jews in Bulgaria proper. (38) After the monarchy was abolished by a Communist-ordered referendum in September 1946, the royals were forced into exile abroad, their properties were confiscated by the Communist-dominated courts, and their names were banished from any public use. At the same time, numerous public places--from streets to major cities--were officially renamed after various domestic and foreign Communist "heroes," dead and living (even the Black Sea port city of Varna, which Bulgarians hail as their "maritime capital," was for a time named after Stalin).

After the fall of Communism, the conservative parties and the more openly monarchist groups set out to "correct" the historical record and repair the tarnished image of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty by praising the reign of both Ferdinand I (1887-1918) and his son, Boris III (1918-1943), as having been generally "free," "democratic," and "prosperous." Even before Simeon II (King Boris's only son) returned to Bulgaria for good in 2001, the monarchy's "unjustly" and "illegally" expropriated properties, valued at hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, were returned to him. Numerous streets, boulevards, squares, roads, schools, urban parks, hospitals, towns, villages, and other public places have been since officially renamed after the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha royals, past and present. (39) The new GERB government of Boyko Borisov angered the political Left and Bulgaria's few remaining Jews by renaming one of the capital Sofia's central streets after Bogdan Filov, King Boris's controversial prime minister, who had been tried and executed as a war criminal after World War II for his close wartime collaboration with Hitler and harsh persecution of the Bulgarian Jewry (a major public monument has been erected and dedicated to Prof. Filov and other WWII-era fascist politicians).

There has been a particularly fierce propaganda battle over the validity of the September 1946 referendum that had abolished the monarchy. (40) The more conservative politicians still reject the results of this "illegal" vote: "We have always declared that the 1946 referendum was illegal. We believe that the Bulgarian nation was given no free choice in 1946. That is why the question about Bulgaria's future form of government and the validity of the Turnovo Constitution remains an open one." (41) But that view is sharply disputed by more centrist politicians (such as the first SDS leader and anti-Communist president Zheliu Zhelev) who recognize the validity of the 1946 decision in favor of the republic and oppose the resurrection of the monarchy, given its discredited historical record:

"Some people maintain that the 1946 referendum was illegal because it was held under undemocratic conditions. Therefore, it must be repealed now and the Turnovo Constitution should be restored, together with the monarchy.... But I am absolutely sure that, despite all manipulations and falsifications which, no doubt, accompanied it, the 1946 referendum reflected the will of the vast majority of the Bulgarian people. And this is easily understandable...since the Coburg-Gotha dynasty was responsible for the two national catastrophes of 1913 and 1918, then it plunged Bulgaria in a third national catastrophe by siding with the Axis Powers during the last world war. It was also involved in coups d'etat, autocratic government, political assassinations, violations of the Turnovo Constitution, and so forth. I am not surprised that immediately after the war Bulgarians--like the Italians, the Romanians, and the Hungarians--placed their hopes for a better and more democratic future on the republican form of government." (42)

Amid endless mutual accusations and recriminations, the propaganda war for control over Bulgaria's historical past continues unabated to this day. As the ironic motto of Oceania's "Ministry of Truth" in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four proclaims, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." (43)


Plus à §a change, plus c'est la mà ªme chose

In the old totalitarian days, the propaganda machine incessantly and ritualistically waved the scarecrow of numerous domestic and foreign enemies--"the enemy within," "reactionary counter-revolutionaries," "bourgeois elements," "remnants of the old monarcho-fascist regime," "the enemy with a (Communist) Party card," "dupes of hostile Western propaganda," "rabid anti-Communists," "agents of Western imperialism," "American imperialists and warmongers," "anti-Communist and anti-Soviet chauvinists," "petty-bourgeois ideological traitors," "Mao's dogmatists and revisionists," "Turkey's irredentism," "religious (Muslim) extremism and fanaticism," to name just a few--in order to justify the regime's totalitarian rule and mobilize the populace for new ideological campaigns and/or more economic sacrifice. Political jargon may have drastically changed now, but not the government's need for domestic and foreign foes, real or imagined, to explain away persistent domestic problems and justify unpopular public policies. The only change are the different incantatory names of the present-day array of villains--"the old Communist nomenklatura," "the Communist secret police" (the DS), "the Red Mafia," "returning Communism," "neo-Communist propaganda," "surviving socialist mentality," "reactionary monarchist forces," "ethnic Turkish separatism," "organized crime," "Moscow's neo-Bolshevism" (even under President Yeltsin), "Slobodan Milosevic's ultranationalism," "Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction," "international terrorism," "Russia's imperialism and expansionism" (especially under Putin), "faceless and arrogant EU bureaucrats," "the global economic crisis," "Iran's nuclear-weapon program," and so forth. Even the way the names of the chosen "villains" of the day seem constantly to change in tune with the changing political needs and foreign-policy priorities of the government in Sofia is surprisingly similar. In the old totalitarian days, for example, the "fraternal Chinese Communists" of "Comrade Mao Zedong's glorious Red Revolution" eventually became "Mao's dogmatic revisionists" and "Great-Han jingoists." In quite a similar fashion, the "Muslim freedom fighters" and "heroic Mujahedeen" of the 1990's (in places like Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, etc.) eventually became the "Islamic terrorists," "fanatical jihadists," and "bloodthirsty killers" in the age of the "global war on terror" (in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Indonesia).

Even Communist propaganda's "two camps" doctrine, with its neatly fractured view of the world (44) (as Stalin famously declared, "You are either with us or against us"), has been revived, but with a new ideological twist. The old totalitarian propaganda divided the world between a "progressive camp" comprising the Soviet-led "community of socialist nations," leftist and "anti-imperialist" Third-World regimes, and pro-Soviet insurgent "Movements of National Liberation," versus an "imperialist" or "bourgeois camp" consisting of the American "hegemonic warmongers" and other "imperialist" and "neo-colonial" Western powers as well as their "puppets" and "lackeys" around the world. If the rather familiar "two camps" rhetoric of anti-Communist politicians today is to be believed, the world continues to be ideologically split between the "Free World" of liberal-democratic and capitalist nations, to which Bulgaria now "proudly" belongs, and a veritable "axis of evil" which groups together all kinds of "dictatorial," "totalitarian," and even "terrorist" regimes ranging from Russia, China, and Belarus to Venezuela, Iran, Syria, and North Korea.

Blaga Dimitrova has criticized the related overuse of the superlative prefix "the most" in the bombastic "anti-language" of the totalitarian era, with its high-flown bragging about "Hyper-production. Hyper-crops. Hyper-gains. Hyper-plan. Hyper-words." (45) But the "hyper" mania of those days obviously lives on. For example, each post-Communist government has typically boasted of being by far the "most democratic," "most open," "most transparent," "most honest," "most incorruptible," "most industrious," "most caring," and even "most business-friendly" ever in the country's modern history, while lambasting the previous government(s) as being the "most incompetent," "most corrupt," "most dishonest," and even "most criminal" (a self-serving practice that has reached new heights under the ruling GERB party). The post-Communist mass media, which seem to be almost as much under the government's thumb as they were in the totalitarian era (46), have contributed to this trend, praising various government leaders with pompous and flattering epithets in their superlative form--as, for example effusively praising "our Boyko" or "Uncle Boyko" ("Bat' Boiko"), the current autocratic prime minister around whom a real cult of personality has been created (as the perennial "Man of the Year," the "Conqueror of All Women," the "Idol of Journalists," the "Fearless Fighter against Crime," the "Best Friend of Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Angela Merkel," and so on). (47)

As a Bulgarian academic recently complained about this unbridled media adulation of Bulgaria's current prime minister, "The new Messiah has been enthusiastically greeted by the orchestrated chorus of the mass-media guild which quickly raised their voices in hymns of praise. There is no end to the oratorios and dithyrambs sung in Boyko Borisov's honor, as the flattery of the new Bulgarian Pharaoh is reaching unprecedented proportions. Journalists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and the like have all been left breathless, praising him to heaven". The glorification of our beloved new Pharaoh represents Bulgaria's latest contribution to the idea of building cults of personality."(48) But such rhetorical flattery of the national leader is strongly reminiscent of the atmosphere of official adulation and glorification surrounding Todor Zhivkov, which prompted Dimitrova to complain that "Eulogies addressed to the sovereign are a characteristic sign of an autocracy." (49) And speaking of the widespread use of inflated "hyper-words," even the siupermarket ("supermarket") of Communist days has become the hilariously-named hipermarket ("hypermarket") of today.

Such rhetorical blasts from the totalitarian past should not come as a surprise, however. The majority of Bulgarian politicians grew up and were educated under the previous totalitarian regime and still tend to think and express themselves--frequently without even realizing it--in the categories and terminology of Communist ideology and propaganda (50), which tended to reduce every problem to a Manichean, heaven-or-hell confrontation between "socialist" Good and "capitalist" Evil. Even the few anti-Communist dissidents who are still active in politics today are better known for their rebellious nature and anti-Communist militancy than for being particularly liberal-minded, politically tolerant or democratically-oriented. A lot of old-guard Communist cadres (many of them Soviet-educated), now posing as either Socialists, independents or even anti-Communists, still occupy high-level positions of power, authority, and prestige in politics, business and the media, as many of them have become presidents (such as the current President Rossen Plevneliev), prime ministers (such as the current Prime Minister Boyko Borisov), cabinet members, high-ranking government bureaucrats, top bankers and businessmen, influential media figures, ambassadors and consuls, EU administrators, and international civil servants (one of them, former Communist apparatchik Irina Bokova, is the current Director-General of UNESCO [51]). Even post-Communist Bulgaria's supposed bastion of capitalism, the Bulgarian Chamber of Industry and Commerce (CRIB), is headed by a former secret policeman and intelligence officer, executive director Evgeni Ivanov.

A lot of other ex-Communists quickly, effortlessly, and quite profitably switched from the old "party line" to the new anti-Communist line of propaganda. In fact, quite a few former Communists have miraculously transformed themselves into today's fervent anti-Communists. (Orwell scorned analogous political hacks and chameleons in his own time with words of ridicule and contempt: "a bought mind is a spoiled mind" [52]). Many of the lower-echelon bureaucrats from the totalitarian era have inundated today's non-Communist and anti-Communist parties (like the currently governing GERB) and in some cases have even taken over their leaderships in the not so unreasonable expectation that the time has finally come for them to become politically successful, socially prominent, and materially prosperous. (53) One of them, the current Prime Minister Borisov followed the old-time political instincts of a former Communist and trainee of the Communist police academy, calling for the ex-Communist Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) to be banned. (54)

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Rossen V. Vassilev was a Bulgarian diplomat to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City in 1980-1988. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, in 2000. Dr. Vassilev has been teaching (more...)
 

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