The "Petrokhan" case definitely has two sides - criminal and political. For both, there are undeniable facts so far, and whoever denies them is either blind or wants to be blind. In both, we must go as deep as possible, without pity and without considerations. We owe it to the memory of these 6 people, but most of all we owe it to ourselves.
This is what Lyuben Dilov-sin warned about on "Facebook".
There is also a third case, however, which I find the most important, and this is the chilling collapse of intra-community trust.
I am not talking about trust in institutions. There, alienation from the state is both historically inherited and instilled every day by its political exploitation. I'm talking about what we sometimes jokingly label with the expression "knowing what kind of engineer I am, I'm afraid to go to the doctor". We weren't so divided and denying each other during the early 90s, when the confrontation between communism and anti-communism was at its strongest. Undoubtedly, social networks and the total unhygienic invasion of publicity by people who just 20 years ago could not have had such a devastating impact on trust contributed a lot to this.
The other dramatically influencing factor is the political speech of the last 20 years.
You don't realize it today, but one day you will see it - the supposedly most intelligent and most educated part of society, through its political representation and specific expressiveness, has played an extremely destructive role in the last 10-15 years. The reason is the inability of this stratum to realize itself politically. After 2001, not only did it not achieve anything significant, but it also participated in most of the important steps for Bulgaria as an opposition and this led to its total disintegration. At every level - both personally and as a political representation. But the most serious damage is in interpersonal communication, in public language, in individual models. Having taken the position of "most democratic", "most liberal" and "most tolerant" by birth, they practically go berserk at any opinion different from theirs. On a daily basis, they denounce not only those who disagree with them politically, but also their own like-minded people, if they happen to have expressed a nuanced opinion.
I realized that the day they attacked the reasonable and very talented Ivan Landzhev, just because of a doubt he had expressed.
Many of these people are my friends. And they will continue to be.
I meet many of them every day, they are part of my "bubble" and I am inclined to forgive them everything, but I cannot help but note the ruin of society that they cause. We are not even talking about elementary respect for those who think differently. We are talking about absolute, organic intolerance. And where is this leading us, friends? To a civil war that will break out because of a "too left-wing budget", because of "judicial reform", because of some stupidity from the scumbag political agenda?! And the most astonishing thing is - just imagine - this is happening in the richest, most secure and most satisfied days of Bulgarians in their entire thousand-year history. The most promising both personally and socially. We make ourselves eternally dissatisfied, deeply unhappy and frustrated by often insignificant reasons.
The famous Vera Mutafchieva used to say that "the misfortune of Bulgarians is that we do not have hungry cemeteries". In other words, we have not experienced enough common tragedies,
that would unite us, make us trust each other, despite our differences. I know that there is no simple answer, nor a very clear reason. For example, the Spanish flu kills 80,000 Bulgarians, immediately after the end of the First World War, in which a total of 388,000 civilians and soldiers died, with civilians numbering nearly 300,000.
And this, with a total population of Bulgaria of 4.7 million at the time, almost one in five does this. Imagine if one in five died today?!!! And the most chilling thing for me is that we find very few traces of this tragedy in our collective memory. There are no songs, paintings, novels, an authentic account of what happened. A line slips in here and there, and the terrible facts are mostly found in the newspapers of that time (after all, my narrow specialty is the history of journalism). After that, the traces disappear.
Here are the "hungry cemeteries" that Vera Mutafchieva spoke of. One in five! But there are no traces. There is probably some collective psychological "repression" of the traumatic memory. Maybe. But only five years later, the fratricidal white and red terror broke out, which has marked our destinies to this day. For 30 years, tens of thousands of Bulgarians have been killing each other for political reasons...
I only know one thing. It all starts with reckless words, because "in the beginning was the word". And from the distrust of each other that these words engender.
Will the chilling case of "Petrohan" make us realize what we are becoming? Will the picture of what is currently happening in social networks and the media shock us? I am an optimist - this "shock" cannot fail to happen. The question is what will be the price we still have to pay.