A scene that should not be possible

The scene takes place in Bulgaria, on national public television, in the country’s flagship history program — the equivalent, in local terms, of a BBC prime-time historical roundtable or a PBS flagship documentary panel. This is not fringe media. This is where the state presents its past to itself: calm voices, academic titles, the assurance that what is being said is responsible, vetted, respectable.

The topic is Bulgaria and the Second World War — specifically, the country’s alliance with Nazi Germany. The discussion is framed, as it almost always is, around pragmatism: limited options, difficult geography, hard choices, the familiar rhetoric of small states trapped between larger forces. Viewers know the drill. The language is safe, managerial, drained of blood.

Then one of the historians — a senior academic, an authority — remarks that it is unfortunate Hitler did not accept a proposal that might have altered the configuration of the Axis. History, he says, could have gone “differently.” Better, even. He adds, half-jokingly, that in such a case he would now be presenting his books not in the provincial cultural circuit of the defeated, but in cities that Bulgaria once occupied: Kavala, Thessaloniki, perhaps an Aegean island or two.

He is not interrupted. No one asks what exactly is being regretted. No one objects to the fantasy. The host nods and moves on.

This matters, so let’s be precise. The remark is not a slip. No provocation, no irony here. It is a statement of profit — calmly expressed, socially legible, morally unembarrassed. The logic is simple: we chose well, we lost unfairly, and history robbed us of our winnings. The fact that these “winnings” would have required the permanent entrenchment of a genocidal order does not enter the calculation. That is background noise.

To understand how abnormal this is, imagine — really imagine — the same scene elsewhere. A senior German historian on ARD or ZDF expressing regret that the war was lost because, otherwise, he’d now be launching books in Moscow. Or an Oxford historian on BBC Two lamenting that Britain missed a chance to profit from a more efficient imperial alignment with fascism. Careers would end within hours. Institutions would scramble. Apologies would follow, not because of etiquette, but because a basic moral boundary had been crossed.

Nothing of the sort happens here.

The absence of reaction is the point. The remark passes because it articulates something widely felt but rarely said so openly: that Bulgaria’s wartime choices are still evaluated primarily in terms of missed material advantage, not moral catastrophe. That collaboration is unfortunate only because it did not pay off enough. That the real tragedy was not what was done, but that the final balance sheet was disappointing.

This is not historical ignorance. I would say, much more that that it is historical character. A way of speaking — and thinking — in which violence becomes irrelevant once it fails to deliver lasting dividends. Where alliance with evil is retrospectively forgiven if it was “clever,” and only condemned because it turned out to be unprofitable.

What shocks is not the cynicism. It is the comfort with which it is expressed.

I will repeat: This is not a marginal voice. It is the mainstream, speaking to itself, without shame — because shame has long been removed from the vocabulary with which the past is discussed.

And that is where the problem begins.

How such a sentence becomes speakable

The important question is not why the sentence was uttered. People say all sorts of things on television. What requires explanation is why it passed without friction — why it did not register as a breach that needed correction, clarification, or distancing.

Television studios are sensitive environments. They are governed by unspoken thresholds: what can be said lightly, what requires hedging, what demands immediate qualification. That this remark crossed none of those thresholds tells us something precise. It obeyed a rule already in force. It followed a logic that everyone present recognized as legitimate.

That logic judges the past not by the nature of the choices made, but by their outcomes. In this framework, history is not a field of responsibility but a sequence of results. What matters is not with whom one aligned, but what one gained. The decisive distinction is not between right and wrong, but between success and failure. Victory absolves; defeat condemns.

Once this rule is accepted, moral language becomes optional. Collaboration ceases to be a problem if it promised tangible advantages. Occupation becomes regrettable only insofar as it was temporary. Defeat, not participation, is experienced as the true injustice. The past is retrospectively rearranged so that what happened appears not only unavoidable, but rational — even clever.

This way of speaking does not require explicit denial of violence or crimes. It merely relegates them to the background, where they lose explanatory force. They become “context,” “circumstances,” “the times.” What moves to the foreground is a different question altogether: did it work? If the answer is no, the problem lies with history’s unfairness, not with the choice itself.

Such reasoning is deeply reassuring. It allows societies to preserve a positive self-image without the discomfort of judgment. It converts moral failure into misfortune and responsibility into bad luck. The historian’s remark on television did not shock because it articulated this conversion openly, without embarrassment. It assumed — correctly — that the audience would understand.

In that sense, the sentence did not need to argue for its legitimacy. It presupposed it. And presuppositions of this kind do not arise overnight. They are the product of long habituation, of repeated narratives in which outcomes quietly replace choices as the primary unit of historical evaluation.

Once that shift has occurred, almost anything can be said — provided it is framed as regret over lost opportunity rather than reflection on committed acts.

Survival rebranded as intelligence

Once outcomes replace choices as the primary measure of the past, a further inversion follows almost automatically. Survival ceases to be a fact and becomes a credential. Endurance is no longer something that happened; it is something that proves merit. Those who made it through history with fewer visible losses are assumed to have been smarter, more adaptable, more realistic. Those who paid a higher price are quietly reclassified as foolish, rigid, or morally extravagant.

In this moral economy, intelligence is no longer tied to judgment, but to evasion. Cleverness means knowing when principles can be bent, postponed, or suspended altogether. The ability to slip through historical catastrophes without catastrophic consequences becomes a form of wisdom. The highest praise is reserved not for those who resisted, but for those who navigated pressure without “unnecessary” sacrifice.

This shift has a corrosive effect on the language of responsibility. If survival proves intelligence, then compromise proves maturity. If compromise proves maturity, then refusal begins to look childish. Moral hesitation is redescribed as naïveté. Integrity becomes a liability. Over time, the distinction between prudence and abdication collapses, and with it any stable sense of where responsibility begins.

What disappears first is shame. Shame presupposes an internalized standard that remains valid even when violated. But once outcomes become the only standard, there is nothing left to violate. Everything that happened can be justified retroactively, provided it did not end in total ruin. Even failure is softened: it was not the wrong choice, merely the unlucky one.

This posture is deeply flattering. It allows individuals and societies to see themselves as survivors in a hostile world rather than as agents who participated in shaping that world. It converts moral risk into a story of clever adaptation. And it does so without requiring overt lies. All that is needed is a quiet reordering of values, in which getting away with something counts as proof that it was worth doing.

At this point, history stops functioning as a space of judgment. It becomes a repertoire of anecdotes confirming that cunning pays and that responsibility is a luxury reserved for those who can afford to lose.

What never appears on the balance sheet

Every accounting system depends on what it refuses to count. Once history is evaluated primarily by outcomes, entire categories of consequence are quietly excluded. Territorial losses can be mapped, economic damage estimated, demographic shifts charted. What resists quantification — and therefore tends to disappear — are the effects that cannot be reduced to numbers: moral deformation, habituation to violence, the corrosion of judgment.

The most enduring cost of “clever” historical navigation is internal. A society that repeatedly explains its past through necessity and advantage trains itself to stop asking certain questions. Not what did we do, but did it work. Not who paid the price, but how badly did we suffer. Over time, this does more than distort memory; it reshapes instinct. Responsibility begins to feel excessive. Reflection starts to look indulgent. Moral hesitation is reclassified as weakness.

Violence, under these conditions, acquires a peculiar status. It is neither celebrated nor rejected. It is treated as a tool whose legitimacy depends entirely on efficiency. If it produces results, it is regrettable but understandable. If it fails, it becomes a mistake. The suffering of others enters the narrative only insofar as it complicates the story of success. When it cannot be denied, it is minimized, relativized, or displaced onto circumstances.

What makes this especially corrosive is that none of it requires explicit brutality. No one needs to praise crimes or deny them outright. It is enough to treat them as secondary. Silence does the work more effectively than denial. A past that is never fully confronted does not fade; it settles. It becomes background knowledge, absorbed without examination, reproduced without intent.

The balance sheet remains reassuringly positive, while the real losses accumulate elsewhere — in the erosion of empathy, in the normalization of force, in the quiet conviction that morality is negotiable. These are not costs that appear at the end of a war. They surface later, embedded in institutions, habits of speech, reflexes of obedience. And by the time they become visible, they are already difficult to imagine as avoidable.

The wartime rehearsal

If the Second World War mattered only as a moral failure, its relevance would be limited to memory and commemoration. What gives it lasting force is something more practical. It functioned as a rehearsal — a period in which techniques were tested, boundaries probed, and lessons learned about how far power can go without provoking resistance.

The crucial distinction established during the war was not between justice and injustice, but between acceptable and excessive force. Total annihilation drew attention; calibrated pressure did not. Violence could be administered quietly, bureaucratically, in stages. Rights could be withdrawn incrementally. Property could be seized before bodies were touched. Identity could be managed long before it was erased. What mattered was not restraint, but discretion.

Equally important was the accompanying narrative. Every measure was framed as temporary, defensive, or unavoidable. Language did the work that open brutality did not. Administrative orders replaced explicit threats. Legal forms replaced naked coercion. The state learned that it could impose far-reaching harm while continuing to describe itself as orderly, responsible, even humane — provided it stopped short of spectacular cruelty.

This was not improvisation. It was a learning process. Officials, institutions, and the public alike absorbed a simple but powerful lesson: violence need not be absolute to be effective, and moral outrage can be neutralized by procedure. Once absorbed, this lesson did not vanish with the end of the war. It remained available, ready to be applied under new conditions, against new targets.

Seen this way, the war does not stand apart from what followed. It prepares it. It teaches a society how to reconcile coercion with self-respect, how to normalize exclusion without declaring it as such, and how to survive morally compromised actions without ever naming them as crimes.

From rehearsal to postwar ethnic engineering

What had been rehearsed during the war did not remain confined to it. The techniques tested under the pressure of alliance and occupation migrated intact into the postwar period, stripped of their original context and redeployed with new justifications. The continuity lies not in ideology but in method.

The wartime treatment of Jews provides the clearest template. Outside Bulgaria’s prewar borders, deportations proceeded with efficiency and minimal public disturbance. Inside them, a different regime operated: legal degradation, property seizure, forced labor, internal displacement — all carefully calibrated to stop short of mass killing. This distinction became decisive. The moral alibi was established early and proved extraordinarily durable: we did not go all the way. The absence of total extermination was allowed to eclipse everything else.

From that point on, dispossession could be reframed as protection, coercion as necessity, and administrative violence as restraint. Rights were not denied outright; they were suspended. Identity was not erased; it was managed. The sequence mattered. Take property first. Then mobility. Then legal standing. Each step could be justified on its own terms, each presented as temporary, each defended as preferable to something worse.

After 1945, when a new regime undertook large-scale projects of social and ethnic reordering, it did not need to invent a new moral grammar. It reused the existing one. Forced assimilation, surveillance, labor camps, internal exile, mass expulsions — all could be described as corrective rather than criminal, as modernization rather than repression. The familiar conditions were observed again: keep the violence procedural, keep it fragmented, keep it framed as care or prevention. Avoid spectacle. Avoid names.

Public resistance remained limited not because people were unaware, but because the framework was already legible. The population had learned to accept that “national interest” overrides individual rights, that suffering can be redistributed by administrative decision, and that moral evaluation begins only after outcomes are known. The war had normalized these assumptions. The postwar state merely systematized them.

This continuity does not collapse different regimes into a single moral blur. It identifies a more unsettling fact: methods travel more easily than beliefs. Once a society learns how to live with selective injustice — and to call it prudence — it does not unlearn that lesson when the flag changes. The rehearsal has already done its work.

Why this blocks democratic life

Democracy does not fail only when institutions are dismantled. More often, it never fully forms because the habits it requires have already been weakened. Courts may function, elections may take place, constitutions may be rewritten, but none of this compensates for a public trained to see responsibility as conditional and power as something that justifies itself after the fact.

The damage begins at the level of judgment. When history is habitually explained as a sequence of necessities, the very idea of choice becomes suspect. Decisions are no longer evaluated as decisions; they are dissolved into context, pressure, and circumstance. Accountability starts to feel artificial. Why insist on responsibility if everything was “forced”? Why demand standards if outcomes are what ultimately count? In this climate, legality survives, but judgment withers.

This produces a distinct civic posture. Citizens learn to adapt rather than confront. Power is assumed to operate according to rules inaccessible to ordinary people — rules best navigated through loyalty, proximity, or silence. Law becomes something to endure or circumvent, not invoke. Courts are respected as rituals, not trusted as limits. When abuses occur, the first instinct is not outrage but calculation: will this work, and for whom?

The wartime rehearsal matters here because it taught precisely this reflex. Major decisions were made elsewhere; their moral content was declared irrelevant; the only remaining task was to adjust. That reflex persists. It explains why appeals to principle sound naïve, why whistleblowers are treated as irritants, and why coercion — whether physical or administrative — is tolerated as long as it remains targeted and plausibly justified.

Under such conditions, democratic language survives largely as decoration. Words like rights, equality, and dignity continue to circulate, but they float free of consequence. When they collide with “national interest,” they yield without protest. What remains is a politics of spectatorship, where citizens are invited to admire clever maneuvers, tactical victories, and successful evasions — the same virtues once admired in history, now reenacted in real time.

This is not the collapse of democracy after a failed attempt. It is democracy prevented from consolidating in the first place. A society that prides itself on having navigated catastrophe through cunning finds it difficult to accept a system that demands something far more unsettling: the willingness to say, openly and without consolation, this was our choice, and we are answerable for it.

When success becomes innocence

The danger appears when this logic leaves the archive and enters the present tense. Not as a historical residue, but as a governing intuition. When outcomes replace legality as the primary test of conduct, power no longer needs to justify itself in advance. It can act first and explain later — or not at all — so long as the result can be framed as effective.

At that point, innocence is no longer tied to restraint. It is tied to success. Actions are not judged by whether they violated norms, but by whether they produced the desired effect. If they did, they are retroactively cleansed. If they did not, they are quietly reclassified as errors of execution. The moral line moves from what was done to whether it worked.

This shift has immediate institutional consequences. Courts begin to look like obstacles rather than boundaries. Elections start to feel like interruptions. Law enforcement is praised not for restraint, but for loyalty. Emergency measures lose their temporariness and become a permanent mode of governance. Violence is redescribed — not as violence — but as restoration of order, as efficiency, as necessary friction in the machinery of stability.

What makes this especially corrosive is its familiarity. Nothing about it sounds revolutionary. It presents itself as realism. As impatience with formalities. As common sense tired of “procedures” that stand in the way of results. The language is managerial, not incendiary. It does not announce the suspension of norms; it reinterprets them until they no longer bind.

This is how democratic erosion proceeds without drama. Not through the rejection of values, but through their continual adjustment. Legality is not denied; it is postponed. Truth is not abolished; it is reweighted. Accountability is not attacked; it is made conditional. Each move is small, defensible, reversible — until the accumulation becomes unmistakable.

Seen in this light, the historical posture described earlier is no longer safely confined to the past or to a particular region. It is a live option, increasingly attractive in societies that have grown impatient with constraint. The lesson being relearned is an old one: if success absolves conduct, then power needs no conscience — only results.

Why democracies rot quietly

Democracies rarely collapse by announcing their abandonment of values. That kind of rupture is theatrical and therefore resistible. What happens instead is slower and far more effective: values are kept, but reinterpreted until they cease to restrain anyone who matters.

Emergency becomes the master category. It does not need to be invented; it only needs to be extended. Security, stability, continuity, national interest — each can be invoked to explain why ordinary limits no longer apply for now. The crucial word is always temporal. Measures are exceptional, provisional, regrettable. Yet the exception does not end. It settles. What was once justified as temporary becomes the normal operating condition.

In this environment, shame disappears before institutions do. Formal structures may remain intact — courts issue rulings, elections are held, laws are passed — but their moral force erodes. Decisions that would once have required justification are now defended by reference to effectiveness. The question quietly shifts from is this allowed? to did this work? Once that shift occurs, legality survives only as a technical obstacle to be managed.

What makes this process so difficult to confront is that it feels reasonable at every step. Each adjustment is small. Each reinterpretation can be defended as pragmatic. No single move appears decisive enough to justify resistance. Citizens are told to be patient, realistic, grown-up. And many comply, not because they agree, but because they have learned to distrust the language of principle.

By the time democratic erosion becomes visible, it is often misdiagnosed. Attention focuses on personalities, polarization, or misinformation, while the deeper transformation goes unnoticed: the normalization of the idea that power is innocent if it delivers results. At that point, democracy has not been overthrown. It has been outgrown — replaced by a system that still speaks its language, but no longer believes in its limits.

What history is for — and what it becomes

History is not there to flatter survivors. Nor is it meant to function as a psychological comfort zone, a place where nations reassure themselves that, whatever they did, it was necessary, understandable, or at least clever. Its only serious function is more austere and far more unsettling: to preserve the visibility of choice.

When history is treated as a record of outcomes, this function is lost. The past is reduced to a sequence of pressures and reactions, a chain of inevitabilities in which agency dissolves. In such a narrative, no one ever truly decides anything. Things simply happen. Responsibility becomes an afterthought, morality a retrospective embellishment. What remains is a form of storytelling that protects the present from judgment by draining the past of meaning.

This is the moment when history turns into folklore. Not in the sense of myth or legend, but in the more dangerous sense of moral anesthesia. Folklore explains everything without holding anyone accountable. It transforms violence into misfortune, collaboration into pragmatism, and coercion into adaptation. It allows societies to admire their own survival while remaining blind to the price at which it was achieved.

Once history has been reduced to this function, it begins to work against democracy rather than for it. A polity that cannot see its past as a sequence of choices cannot recognize its present as one either. Power ceases to appear as something that could have been exercised differently. Its actions are judged only by whether they succeed. Failure becomes the sole sin; success, the sole absolution.

This is why the erosion described throughout this essay does not announce itself as a crisis. It feels normal. It feels mature. It presents itself as realism finally shedding childish illusions about morality. But what is really being shed is restraint. What is being lost is the capacity to say: this line should not have been crossed, even if crossing it paid off.

A democracy that loses that capacity does not need to be overthrown. It will continue to hold elections, cite laws, invoke rights. What it will no longer do is believe that these things bind power when power finds them inconvenient. The language remains; the commitment evaporates.

History, properly understood, resists this evaporation. It insists that outcomes do not cancel choices, and that success does not retroactively cleanse conduct. When that insistence is abandoned, history does not disappear. It mutates. It becomes a manual for getting away with things.

And that is the point at which the past stops being about what happened, and starts quietly instructing the present on what is permissible next.