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This chapter zooms in on some of the latest iterations of anti-communist memory politics in Bulgaria: the rushed and barely legal demolition of the Soviet Army monument in Sofia in 2023. The opponents of the monument framed the move as a long-due liberation from the last vestiges of an occupying force, and even likened the removal of the monument to the toppling of Confederate statues in the U.S. We explore a number of such instances of rhetorical sleight of hand which dress anti-communism in a decolonial garb and discuss the effects and consequences this has for left critique in Eastern Europe. Along the way, we also problematise whiteness in this discourse as fixed to the European identity claimed to be delivered from the ruins of the fall of the monument-coloniser. What we glean from this is a muscular liberal nationalism and civilisationism, indistinguishable from the conservative backlash against political equality which does not shy away from an overt rehabilitation of interwar fascism.

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Right-Wing Decoloniality? How Memory Wars Against Spectral Anti-Communism Reshape Decolonial Thought in Bulgaria

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Jana Tsoneva,
  • Veronika Stoyanova

摘要

This chapter zooms in on some of the latest iterations of anti-communist memory politics in Bulgaria: the rushed and barely legal demolition of the Soviet Army monument in Sofia in 2023. The opponents of the monument framed the move as a long-due liberation from the last vestiges of an occupying force, and even likened the removal of the monument to the toppling of Confederate statues in the U.S. We explore a number of such instances of rhetorical sleight of hand which dress anti-communism in a decolonial garb and discuss the effects and consequences this has for left critique in Eastern Europe. Along the way, we also problematise whiteness in this discourse as fixed to the European identity claimed to be delivered from the ruins of the fall of the monument-coloniser. What we glean from this is a muscular liberal nationalism and civilisationism, indistinguishable from the conservative backlash against political equality which does not shy away from an overt rehabilitation of interwar fascism.