Author(s): Kapka Todorova, Zlatko Enev

Today I read the following on Facebook — a typical Facebook post, written in typical Bulgarian:

Kapka Todorova, Bulgarian journalist based in Berlin:

Hundreds arrested and six officially executed — though the number of those killed in Iran since the end of the war may well be higher. Tehran has created a special prosecutor's office to monitor and track the population for “espionage.” The repressions are enormous, but not for the first time.

I’m sharing this for those who donned Iranian flags and called for the Iranians to be left to live under “their own rules,” since they supposedly had “their own culture,” and the women weren’t really being persecuted — and if they were, well, that was their struggle, and who knows what other such pearls of wisdom.

A note especially for the feminists who considered this a “minor issue”: When it comes to women in Iran — this regime isn’t just another dictatorship. It’s not just criminal toward its citizens. It’s not just a religious–military dictatorship. It’s not just a tyranny. It represents, ethically, a new low in human history. Women are the main enemy of this regime. I understand those who oppose any actions that lead to death — including military ones. But I can’t understand those who only remember they’re “opposed” when whipped into it by social media campaigns against Israel, and then forget all about being opposed and fall back to: “Leave them alone, that’s just their culture.”

Also worth noting — after a 24-hour internet blackout in Iran, “pro-democratic” outlets like the Scottish Independent, with 250,000 posts in defense of Iran, suddenly disappeared. Apparently the “editorial office” had been located in some bunker in Tehran. As I’ve said before — it’s frighteningly easy to become a useful idiot in this hybrid war.

And that’s when thoughts began to swarm in my head — thoughts I tried hard to suppress, to restrain. “What’s the point of another coffee-shop argument? What’s the use?”

I repeated this to myself many times — but nothing helped. I’m human. And nothing human is alien to me, no matter how maddening I find that wretched fact.

And here’s what came out:

Zlatko Enev, a person who writes in Bulgarian, also from Berlin:

I believe that from the very dawn of what we now call “humanity,” the primary mode of identification has always been that of “us versus them.” From the first semi-bipedal beings all the way to our present age of encroaching dual-brainhood, the unifying cry has remained the same: “Smash them — they’re not like us!”

But I refuse to align myself with such calls. I refuse to live by that kind of “logic.” I refuse to use that kind of language.

Pain is the most real thing in this world. And this becomes most obvious when it begins to be used as a weapon. The moment someone starts pointing fingers, he or she stops thinking about healing. The only thought is destruction and annihilation.

I refuse to accept that. Nothing is easier than pointing at something different from us — no matter how horrifying its visible form may seem — just to scream: “That must be destroyed!”

Especially when this is done by people like us — neck-deep in the guilt of our own inhumanity, blind to the abominations right under our noses, but quick to judge and condemn distant, foreign, and barely comprehensible “orders,” “cultures,” and “regimes.”

I don’t see much of a difference between Iran and Bulgaria, except that Bulgaria is small, insignificant, and incapable of committing truly large-scale evil — at least for the past hundred years or so. Otherwise, both societies appear to me equally inhumane, misogynistic, and closed off to anything or anyone beyond their own provincial, brutal, and murderous notions of “right” and “wrong.”

And the greater the tension, the greater the effort I must exert in order to give my thoughts some semblance of a bearable form — something other than the scream boiling up inside me:
“You, of all people, dare to judge? You, wretches among wretches? Why don’t you turn your gaze, just a little, toward your own damn backyard?”

But hush, heart! I sit down on my throat and keep typing — without even expecting much of a reaction — simply because the umbilical cord between me and this place was severed long ago.

I’ll say only this:

I believe there is another language.
Slower. Quieter. Perhaps more helpless.
But it does not need enemies in order to exist.
And I want to live in it.

The rest is your own business.

Berlin, June 2025