The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier — Switchyard

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Highlights

Communism had always relied on teleology for its existence, but now the frontier had been closed. It ⤴️

Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore. Life is always transitory, a ceaseless metamorphosis, and when the possibility of change disappears, when the frontiers disappear and times turns cyclical, a process of decay inevitably sets in. ⤴️

privatizing, so to speak, their own state power. Behind the suave rhetoric of democracy and freedom, they were busily transferring public funds into their personal accounts, creating companies and mafia conglomerates. The highly repressive functions of the totalitarian machinery disappeared, but money was no worse an instrument of control, perhaps even a better one because more refined and insidious. ⤴️

lot of Bulgarians were certainly better off since “the changes,” or at least they could afford to buy more commodities and travel abroad as they wished, but they had become tired, more apathetic, less imaginative, their dreams smaller. Maybe that was the fate of any revolution: after the initial bang, there’s a natural period of calm, a dust-settling. ⤴️

There was an uncomfortable paradox though: the more life organized, the more it settled into a routine; the more affluent and peaceful society became, the better paved the roads and the fancier the cars, the more normal and orderly the days—I suppose the public ideals journalism indirectly fights for—the fewer possibilities glimmered on the horizon. As civilization tamed the wilderness—to use an antiquated and controversial but in this case perhaps not wholly irrelevant metaphor—something intangible was lost: a spirit, perhaps, or an aspiration it’s difficult to put my finger ⤴️

Maybe this is part of the ethos today. we are all tired, exhausted from having to work, having to hope one day we’ll afford a house or a commodity that every day seems farther away, with out nice roids and great health care and whaybjave you. we are trapped by the verybexostence of comfort.

how much do revolutions and socialism and all that depend on the hope not so much for political reform, but for a long sleep, a rest, a break?

Maybe I’m imagining this, but it seems that all of us—in Bulgaria, in the rest of Europe, in the United States—are lying sick in our beds while somebody is bringing us the same broth over and over again. ⤴️

a wheel that spins so fast that its spokes appear stationary or moving backwards even (the so-called wagon-wheel effect), the fast rate of transformation has come to feel like stasis. Hurtling toward a black hole, we seem to be endlessly stuck, horizonless, in the event horizon. ⤴️