The NYT carried recently a decent article on the continuing
protests against the Socialist-backed government in Bulgaria (“After Political
Appointment in Bulgaria, Rage Boils Over”). Of course, it had the obligatory
quotes from participants and analysts. One participant stated the obvious: “If
you read the biography of Peevski, [the political appointee from the title, who
at 21 was once made head of Bulgaria’s biggest port, and a few weeks ago at 32
was put in charge of Bulgaria’s state security agency] he personifies all the
problems of Bulgaria” – summed up by an anti-corruption expert as “state
capture by oligarchs.” But Haralan Alexandrov, a social anthropologists who has
labored tirelessly to legitimize Bulgaria’s noveau riche elite and to present
them as victims of largely unjustified public bias, offered a different theory.
In his view, an important factor explaining the public antipathy against
Peevski is his physical resemblance to the caricatured “exploiter capitalists” presented
once in communist-era propaganda.
I have to say I have a different hypothesis partly
based on neuroscientific research. Watching and listening to someone with
Pevski’s boorishly aggressive persona speak would tend to provoke a visceral
reaction which is quite independent of old ideological stereotypes. But,
apparently, some social scientists have developed an immunity against this, and
a compensatory ability to spin abstracted causal explanations.
