a Balkan Caesar

"can't go back, Bob"

A few months ago the highly respected Scott Greer theorized the ascension of a Red Caesar in the States as a sort of natural progression for the ever-expanding Latino demographic, hailing mostly from countries where left-wing class critique has become intertwined with low-burning racial animus. His point was that the likelihood of a leftie Great Man arriving onto the scene is at least as high as (if not higher than) that of a based WASP crossing the proverbial Rubicon and slaying the dragon. It would seem that the meatgrinder of late modernity has spit out more Chavez type left-authoritarians than Bukeles.

It’s extremely likely that the next Red Caesar is going to crop up in an Eastern European backwater like Bulgaria, but the context is going to be so vastly different that the term itself will be rendered moot (though it’s highly probable that the dissident right will apply it regardless; hence my insistence on using it for the sake of comprehension). The Bulgarian right-wing is a sort of syncretist mix of statist leftism and social reaction. It portrays its opposition as a fascist germ that somehow survived disinfection only to be brought back as a weaponized flu by the “new nazis” of atlantic progressivism. That same opposition, the atlanticist mainstream, portrays the right as old-school brown shirts preparing for a March on Sofia. Everyone’s a fascist, Reaction(tm) prevails. Not quite.

In truth, both sides are essentially left-wingers. The right is a mutation of the only authentically Bulgarian political form — the quasi-collectivist agrarian movement that pits itself as opposition to city-dwelling proles, as well as traditional aristocracy. That’s BZNS, for those in the know. It’s a movement Mao’s been said to have studied extensively over the years and taken inspiration from. Perhaps his instinctual anti-sparrowism was borrowed from Stambolyiski. One can only hope.

Stambolyiski had a stint as prime-minister between 1919 and 1923 before being deposed in a coup d’etat on the 9th of June. The coup was led by a coalition of generals, the Military League. The League’s main point was the Stambolyiski was a Bolshevik threatening the constitutional order — a queer sort of accusation to level at someone whose gravest sins included imprisoning communists and crushing their organizations, with plans in place to effectively ban the country’s preeminent left-wing party — BKP (who later seized power and subjected the country to almost 5 decades of communist rule; an undoubtedly great success for the anti-communist armed forces, to be sure). The Military League, boasting future German fanboys like Hristo Lukov among its ranks, purported to oppose Stambolyiski’s “extra-legal, authoritarian rule” on the basis of its being left-wing. Stambolyiski’s words on the matter are clear: “We’ll deal with the Bolsheviks the Bolshevik way.” Meaning he intended to stomp them out of existence. BKP itself remained neutral during the coup, but in many parts of the country its activists entered the fray on the side of the Military League. It was a shit show. Traditionalist military leaders fighting purported communists alongside real communists. For the most part it was a means for two older, more established elite groups (the city-dwelling aristocracy and the fledgling city-dwelling left) to stave off an attempt at complete domination from a third group that had heretofore proven incapable of any meaningful political organization.

There was also the IMRO, a kinda-terrorist, kinda-not revolutionary movement based in Pirinska Macedonia that launched cross-border guerilla attacks into Greece and Serbia. The IMRO got dealt a shitty hand when notoriously Yugo enthusiastic Stambolyiski made his laughable attempt at forming a Bulgarian-led Balkan Federation with the Serbs in tow. The Serbs, having come out of WW1 as winners, weren’t having any of it and managed to negotiate huge concessions from Bulgaria during the talks that would eventually formalize in the form of the Treaty of Nis. It was open season for the Serbs as far as the IMRO was concerned, with Stambolyiski even allowing Serb border guards to cross into Bulgarian territory in the pursuit of “terrorists”. Hence why the IMRO joined the Military League in getting rid of Stambolyiski. Of all the groups in this clown show of a coup d’etat, the IMRO was the one whose arguments made the most sense. Theirs and the tsar’s, that is. Boris was and forever will be the only person with a functioning brain in all of Bulgaria’s interwar history. Shame he got merked for having too much of a brain.

The moral of the story is that everyone involved was vaguely “““brown-red””” by modern reckoning. Stambolyiski viewed society as a collection of competing guilds (not classes!) and created his own Orange Guard to put down opposition. The IMRO is as the IMRO does and whenever it wasn’t fighting Bulgaria’s wars it was busy killing off politicians and engaging in petty banditism. The Military League installed Aleksandar Tsankov, a Mussolini enjoyer who based his party on the principles of Italian fascism and pushed for the nationalization of major sectors of the economy. He also died in Buenos Aires, which is a pretty good indicator in 20th century politics. A decade or so after that came the ratniks, who were nazbols with a penchant for anticapitalism. None of Bulgaria’s right-wingers were ever concerned with running a market economy, ensuring fair competition or upholding the main tenets of free trade. In fact, if you were to look for a characteristic that could conceivably separate left from right in Bulgarian politics, it would most likely be geopolitics. Macedonia in particular. Which pretty much makes it IMRO/Boris vs. everybody else, because both Tsankov and Stambolyiski upheld the Treaty of Nis as a means of avoiding international isolation. Though being isolated from the Serbs does sound like a pretty sweet deal, all things considered.

So what would a Bulgarian Caesar look like? He’d be unapologetically pro-reunification. That’s the main thing — national revitalization takes serious commitment. If your demographics are in the gutter (which they are), your population is indoctrinated by foreign ideology (which it is), and your country is being taken over by the empowered supranational managerial class of EU bureaucracy (which isn’t even a controversial thing to say anymore), you need a cause strong enough to make sensitive young men take it up as their own so that they may rebuild themselves in the process of chasing after a shared dream. And the dream of a reunified Bulgaria is more than ambitious enough. There is plenty of space to conquer, plenty of glory to be won. But there’s also going to be the minor detail of the movement being labelled communist. Bulgaria’s going to nationalize industry and end big foreign corpo concessions. Assets will be frozen and/or seized and Western businesses will either close shop on their own or be forced out. That’s the way things go. There will also be much populist talk — of “the people’s will”, a very common trope in modern Bulgarian history, and an end to imperialism/Western-backed fascism. It will sound as tiresome as your typical Putin speech where he inserts obnoxious Third-Worldisms to countersignal the West and shore up support from the Tatooine peoples of the Orient and Africa. In the end, this Caesar will glow red in the eyes of the world. Something most people tend to ignore is how decades under communist rule practically eradicated any semblance of non-communitarian thought. Where once you had generals like Drangov advocating for a warrior-based hierarchy where the only thing above the self is its duty to the Homeland, post-communist Bulgaria is a place where you don’t even have any positive terms for basic notions such as confidence. All of the words carry negative connotations, Bulgarians are a people lingustically disposed towards collectivism. Their language has been thoroughly carpetbombed by the multicultural Ottoman Empire and the anti-Russian noviop paradise of the USSR. We can’t even say ‘meatball’ in our own language, the word is Turkish.

There’s also a worse case scenario here worth noting. A sort of revival of old pan-Balkan sentiment that crosses ethnic/religious lines and brings us all together in a kumbaya federal state under the auspices of an alt-Three Seas in the name of fighting Russia. It will be zogged to the core, but it will also be your typical Eastern Euro stat-com story with antigenderism enshrined in the constitution and gypsies being forced into labor camps. A Yugoslavia 2.0 but with even more internal turmoil and much gayer implications. In any case, the international reaction to any serious effort at revitalizing either Bulgaria or the Balkans in general would most likely be met with talk of Red Caesars and communist ghosts. Fact of the matter is that the forms of the past remain depressingly persistent, but the individuals inhabiting them are much weaker, more dysgenic and stunted than those before. It’ll only get tougher from ehre on out. There’s no going back to the way things were, but it’s worth giving new age national vitalism a shot. Even if it means blowing up the post-Reagan economic order.