Comment by Ivaylo Noyzi Tsvetkov:
First, I felt wrong that the possible protest energy in Bulgaria never comes from (my) philosophy faculty, as in Serbia. Secondly, I thought that the job of any philosophy faculty is not to organize protests - but also that humanitarian minds are forged there, from whose ranks some of the most awake and active students in interesting times like ours should emerge. Not to write intellectual letters to the leadership, like at Portland University recently, but young people who go out to the square and insist on their causes. From those Frenchmen in the 1950s (against the First Indochina War), through the next famous Frenchmen of 1968 in Paris, to the current Serbian students.
I don't count the vandalism of "Vazrazhdane", they are a pitiful party story - we are talking about civil protests that are self-organizing against the system itself. Serbian young men and women are not gathered by any pro-Russian (quasi)opposition, THEY are the opposition at the moment.
And basically they, although miraculously supported by other stratification layers such as agricultural producers, can "throw" enough forward in today's changed context and talk about "new Serbia".
Do we agree with the semi-democratic country we live in?
In this respect, we are not there at all. According to the current political situation (as an end result) we were not there - neither in 1990, nor in 2020, but especially in 2013, which is most painful for me. Not a single Bulgarian protest has achieved tectonic shifts and general changes, somewhat with the exception of the one from January 1997, which de facto ended communism seven years after its formal collapse.
In light of the Serbian students, this raises a serious question: Are we satisfied? Are we lulled? Where are the new young people who are nervous about the state-oligarchic system that rules and will obviously rule until the end of the Bulgarian world? Are all the problems really solved and is it better to just endure, just because the current situation does not suggest protests?
And more: do we understand what kind of tool and what is protest for? There is something rudimentary in the idea of it, ever since the French Revolution - that is, in our country the question is almost always whether we agree with the semi-democratic state in which we live and which sometimes (for example, like now) actively puts the protest to sleep in the style of "everything is fine, we have a government, we got it together".
However, the very nature of protest should dictate that legalized negligence leads us to yet another submission. This time, beautifully and otherworldly, from Trump and his tech-honchos, but also to the Bulgarian authorities, who hurried to bow to him.
The protest, in itself, is a sign and expression of at least relative dissatisfaction with some status quo. Or a paid or provoked attempt at something. It's hard for me to accept that Bulgarian young people are happy with the status quo. I rather think they are careful not to screw up their future, unlike the Serbians. Besides, there is no one to set them on fire anymore, which is the saddest thing in the whole story.
And here the question is whether we have a critical mass of young people who are angry and do not accept this "nothing". In my opinion, no. Perhaps because a significant portion of Bulgarian students became students in the second way.
Therefore: not only will Serbia not happen, but the very idea of protest seems to be absent from the Bulgarian mental software (if it ever existed at all). Look at the communist darkness - apart from the Goryans, there are no clear expressions of real dissent, except for the late hidden and intellectual, after Gorbachev.
Do we have a cause?
Have we had any protest energy at all, outside of the notorious historical rallies? The answer, alas, is no. And the reasons seem clear: unlike the Athenians (who rose up against Pericles at the end of the 5th century BC, and now regularly come out in a rage, even when it comes to reducing pensions), we have kept quiet and are not participating.
Non-participation is also a valid choice - perhaps the wiser one, who knows. Only there is one small problem - we do not fully understand that if we do not protest (but not "at the Face", but in the square), the authorities will always act "against", by default.
And here it is time to ask ourselves whether we even have the energy to protest - or is it all a beer for one lev and fifty from the supermarket, which until recently was around one lev.
The question is in the cause. Do we have one? Or are we helpless observers of everything we won't agree with?
Everything is blocked, shout the young Serbs. Without wanting to, they are right for us too.