After the murder of Georgi Kuzev in Plovdiv, the temptation for the state is great - to point out a specific group, conduct inspections, hold meetings, produce statistics and finally announce that "measures have been taken". This is the easy part. The difficult part is to answer the question of why such signals can exist for years without being turned into real prevention.
“Blood and Honor“ is not a name that appeared yesterday. There is public data about the Plovdiv structure and the presence of the organization in the extreme nationalist environment from more than a decade ago. In an analysis by the Council for Electronic Media from 2014, the organization was described as an international neo-Nazi network, and Plovdiv was listed as a place with its presence. In 2013, a local publication also wrote about Plovdiv members of “Blood and Honor“ and their connections with other nationalist structures.
But there is another, more uncomfortable question: what will we do after the initial noise?
We can see inspections, reports, analyses and meetings. We can hear that the services are monitoring the extreme groups, that there is an exchange of information and that actions are being taken. And all this may be completely necessary. But if the result is limited to this, the state will simply have reported an activity.
We will wash our hands of the formula “we saw the problem, checked it and took measures“, without having answered the essential question: why do young people end up in an environment in which violence, humiliation, group aggression and ideological hatred can become acceptable behavior?
This is a much bigger problem. Not only “Blood and honor“. Not just the specific group. Not just extreme nationalism.
Because such an environment feeds on a vacuum – lack of family and school environment, social exclusion, a sense of meaninglessness, aggressive behavior patterns, internet communities that turn violence into an identity, and the absence of institutions that can notice the problem before it becomes a crime.
Historical experience shows that extreme nationalist environments in Bulgaria are not a new phenomenon. Research and institutional analyses have been paying attention to youth nationalism as a subculture and to organized extreme right-wing structures for years. Therefore, the state's reaction cannot be only police. Yes, the services must monitor organized structures. Yes, the prosecutor's office must investigate crimes. Yes, when there is evidence of an illegal organization, incitement to violence or a hate crime, there must be consequences.
But this is only one end of the the chain.
The other is to see what happens in schools, in families, in neighborhoods and on the Internet. How a child reaches the point where the group gives him more authority than the family, the school and the state. How violence becomes a way to prove strength. How "justice" is replaced by self-defense.
And most of all - why are we waiting for a corpse to start talking about the problem.
Because after such a tragedy it is always easy to say: “We will check the group“. It is much harder to say: “We will check why no one saw what was happening to these children“.
That is exactly where we will see whether the state has done its job. Not in the number of meetings. Not in the number of reports. Not in the number of inspections. But in whether in a year there will be less young people seeking identity in aggression, or just another official report that “measures have been taken“.