You probably never heard of Georgi Dmitrov, but he was a backwoods model of everything the modern Klaus Schwab-WEF (World Economic Forum) is “offering” the world today, every bit as much as Marxist-Leninism was offering to Josef Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse-Tung.
In 1925 the communists of Bulgaria, under Dmitrov, blew up the St Nedalya Church in Sofia, killing 150 and wounding 500 more, including many women and children. A tremendous blast, the church was not open for services again until after the ruling Communists lost power in 1992 (when their patron USSR collapsed.)
But in ’25 that blast sent the Communists underground to became a guerilla movement in the back country.
And because of that bomb, Georgi Dmitrov became the most hated name in Bulgaria. Soooo…when the Germans were driven out in ’44 and the Red Army “rescued” in Bulgaria, who did Josef Stalin annoint to become the new leader of Bulgaria?…none other than Georgi Dmitrov.
This is one of the first lessons we learn about authoritarian ‘ism-based ideologies, and that is their “people-first” rhetoric is the first thing they jettison once power has been achieved. As we’ve seen in the 18 months Joe Biden has been in power, from dishonoring our soldiers and allies left abandoned in Afghanistan, to the thousands left to die in isolation due to Covid, we first noted this cynical and indifference-to-humanity strain as it defined the Soviet Union, rendering them helpless to undo their cock-ups even after Mikhail Gorbachev recognized them; the Berlin Wall collapsing, Chernobyl, and the general death-by-strangulation from their mountains of bureaucracies, we now know that once these ‘ism’s grab a nation’s leaders by the throat…they can’t let go.
Of course, Josef Stalin knew nothing of the science, nor the natural laws that dictated these end games. Neither did Mao, so today, the Chinese government cannot cure itself either. So as a gift to his dedication, in 1946 Josef Stalin decided that the man best suited to run the Party and the State in Bulgaria was also the most hated man in Bulgaria…Georgi Dmitrov. Instant failure.
Dmitrov died in 1949, after only three years in office, (Jimmy Carter lasted longer) but the Lenin-inspired cult of personality was going full bore in the authoritarian world, and his image was everywhere…and remained, all the way until 1992, when the communists fell from power with a thud. A great Lenin-copied mausoleum had even been erected directly across the plaza from the old royal residence of the Bulgarian kings, (1876-1944).
I walked past it 2-3 times a day when I was in town, but during the nearby Kosovo War in which Bulgaria served as an R&R center for UN troops, after attempts to blow it up by anti-Communists, the Bulgarian government finally blew it up in 1999. All that remained was that large platform. (There’s a nice park behind it, and a gallery and theatre, and just behind those trees my hotel, which I stayed in on every visit for close to 15 years.)
In all those years I never saw a single tourist standing in line to see Dmitrov’s remains.
There’s a clear lesson here, and no, it’s not that there will never be lines queued up to visit any memorial to Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or either Clinton, but that any fitting memorial to Donald Trump may never be allowed.
Just as we’ve seen with Robert E Lee, a truly fine man, memorials to Thomas Jefferson may also find themselves on the chopping block, and possibly even George Washington and Abraham Lincoln at least will find their histories re-defined.
But that will occur only once all memory of what they did and what they meant to American history as we now know it has been forgotten and there had been no generation-to-generation passing on of their meaning.
Mind you, making this happen isn’t hard. And that’s the scary part. All you have to do is separate the current living generations from any positive memories of those names, which here seems to be at least one, maybe two generations in process.
When the communists fell in that region; Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, all those people knew of “freedom” was through Radio Free Europe and bootleg rock music and later, television series such as “Dallas”. The only difference, and this is important, is that in the Soviet Union the people had been shorn from their history for over 70 years, 1917-1991, four (4) generations if you consider the average life span of a Russian to be much shorter than the West, while in eastern Europe their cut-off from history was only 45 years. And their churches were marginally more open.
Over there their average citizen’s idea of freedom was to be able to make more money “without the permission of the state”. Only they had no understanding of the underlying moral principles Adam Smith outlined about universal truths of liberty that had to accompany free market capitalism. In ’91 people in Ukraine who rushed up to speak with me had no idea (nor did I) that oligarchs waited on every street corner to serve them a rent-notice of their protection fees for the “license” to earn money on that street corner or store…just like the protection rackets of the Chicago and New York mobs of the Depression.
There were not then, nor are there now, “rights” involved.
They also did not know (nor did I, although I suspected) that there were much fewer genuinely empathetic would-be partner/investors in America anymore. They’d never even heard of Gordon Gekko, who had become the new “capitalism” design model of the 1980s, and why I left the corporate world in 1989. (Call me unethical if you will, but I had to “fire” many of my American clients who paid my travel expenses abroad once I realized their purposes was to steal the intellectual property of the people-with-ideas over there.)
This top-down world view has been Europe’s bane since the Middle Ages; that every good thing a lowly citizen received had to be as a gift from his or her lordships, the princes of the realms. Since WWII and the reorganization of Europe, the UN, then the EU, and now the WEF, NWO, or Davos Group are but extensions of that medieval thinking about rank and power. And the people are still Jacqueries.
I won’t bore you with ruminations about the tragedies that are still evolving in the rest of the world. We once had a Peace Corps, then sent rich do-gooders to places like Africa and Asia to work with villagers so that the do-gooders could feel better about themselves. I worked with UN contractors who developed stoves that could reduce deforestation in Saharan Africa only to be unable to turn their findings into processes since the UN owned their work product and was uninterested in disturbing the natural order of “how things are”. Purely academic exercises.
I can only summarize what Blaise Pascal lamented about “the lost” in the 17th Century, (my words), “then there are those who are lost, only don’t know they are not lost, so are not seeking to be found.”
Ronald Reagan understood this, and in his farewell address described America as that “shining city on the hill”, and that as long as we are still on that hill, shining, people everywhere will know there is still hope.
We are that other model.
(And in these pages I will continue to outline things we can do, and refuse to do, that can assist those people struggling to forge covenants with their own history. It’s a long process.)
