Необичайното възраждане на антифашизма: руската инвазия в Украйна в българската „гражданска война на спомените“
The Unusual Revival of Antifascism: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine in the Bulgarian

Summary/Abstract: 1989 styled itself as a break with the socio-economic system of socialism, as well as with its progressive teleology. This is summed up by the paradigm of the ‘end of history’ which promised a break with the future, closing off the possibility of an alternative political organization except liberal democracy. The pre-determination of the future pushes the political antagonisms towards the past, exemplified by the revisionist debates such as „was there fascism in Bulgaria?“ that sprang up in the early 1990s. The past becomes the only terrain for the legitimate articulation of political enmity. The war in Ukraine reversed the process of displacement of the political; today all actors in the conflict reach precisely to political identifications and ideologies considered long buried to make sense of the conflict: those of fascism and anti-fascism. In this article, I examine the unusual revival of these political positions from the first half of the XX century after the supposed „end of history“. I relate them to the raging debates over two „neuralgic“ common sites of memory in Bulgaria, one spatial (the Soviet Army Monument), and one temporal (the Bulgarian national holiday). I outline the possible consequences of the rehistoricisation of the war. In contrast to Marx’s expectation of „the second time as farce“, the re-actualization of the anti-fascist discourse has the potential to trigger a tragedy that ends history in a very literal sense. The article is thus also an exercise testing our resources and capacities to make sense of the unthinkable.

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