Modern dictatorships, the collapse of liberal democracy and the role of journalists in the fight against propaganda - commented on the air of the Bulgarian National Radio Assoc. Prof. Georgi Lozanov, philosopher and lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski".
"The danger of autocratic regimes was expressed quite clearly and professionally by Gideon Rahman with his book "The Age of Autocrats". There he prepared public opinion that a turn in history and liberal democracy was beginning, which after the Second World War, along the lines of Euro-Atlanticism, was defended on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but is now starting to give way more or less to autocratic regimes. Autocracy in its classic version is autocracy. But in the modern world it may not be exactly like that, but rather a conspiratorial group that controls all resources and networks of influence and through them generates great power. The whole thing is that autocracy is a type of dictatorship, and what is characteristic of dictatorship is that power is exercised by force, not by procedure, in a legal manner. Or at least a large part of the power goes beyond legal regulations and that is why it is a criminal power, he believes.
According to Lozanov, dictatorship is a huge crime against man and against humanity, because it is exercised with violence. "Of course, historically speaking, the forms and scales of this violence are different. What Rahman says about autocracies, especially in Europe and America, is that they are quite hybridly mixed with many democratic procedures. The point is that from a certain point on, the balance goes in the direction of autocracy, although for many years - 80 already, in the Euro-Atlantic world the established model, that of liberal democracy, has brought unprecedented well-being and individual freedom to people. But the battle between democracy and dictatorship never stops," he is categorical.
There are always strongly power-motivated figures who continue to want to conquer social systems and society in general. This is psychologically related to the will to power. And to human greed. Man is fundamentally an aggressive being. A being who is used to imposing himself through force. Civilizationally, this is mastered in one way or another, sublimated, but it never disappears, it is within human nature itself. In this regard, a huge civilizational turn was made by Christianity, which managed to direct relations between people into the orbit of love. Love for one's neighbor. Until then, one's neighbor, in general, was the other enemy, added Georgi Lozanov.
"Thanks to this, modern civilization has developed a lot, because a civilization of warring groups of people cannot achieve much. Along with this, processes are happening from below, and as Putin directly stated: the world order must be changed. Putin's regime undoubtedly has a leading role in this autocratic coup that they are trying to make. They call it a new world order, but in fact it is trying to return the old Soviet influence to Russia. Which is the old imperial influence. The same thing is happening, only when it was Soviet, it was masked with an ideology based on Marxism and Leninism, which has a decorative role. Ideologies, as Hannah Arendt says, are only alibis for terror. There may be all sorts of ideologies, but this terror, this aggression that erupts from below, needs ideology only as a disguise. The battle is always between democracy and dictatorship.", said Lozanov
"Rather, we should talk about values. There is no point in calling values ideology. I have long since given up on more complex values and stick to the simplest ones: you do not steal, you do not kill and you do not lie. If we go through our history of transition using this indicator, we will see that these values are quite poorly protected. It all comes down to this. The fight against dictatorships is a fight against people who want to steal, kill and lie. Dictatorship is always associated with a huge propaganda lie. And with cruelty. When you generate an awful lot of power for an awfully long time, the only way to protect it is with violence. Putin, for example, managed to secure himself power longer than he will live, explains Lozanov.
The two simplest democratic rules are: mandate of power and separation of powers. There was no doubt when Putin secured so much power, thanks to some tricks with Medvedev, that he would start killing. Russian society is the so-called "deep people" - by analogy with "deep state". The deep state turns the people into deep. And the deep people are those whose consciousness is completely processed by propaganda, he is categorical.
Here we come to the media problem. Autocracy is beginning to be imposed because such public conditions were created that huge groups of people were lied to that liberal democracy was not in their interest. Some took advantage of some forms of radicalization of liberal democracy, but this is "wood and iron", because liberalism and radicalization cannot exist. Liberalism is precisely about accepting every point of view, not radicalizing one of them."